A comprehensive analysis of the current state of the world against widespread hopelessness. Pinker urges us to step back and appreciate modernity for what it truly is, rather than how it might appear.

This book often felt more like an extensive academic paper, with relevant references but burdened by name-dropping and lists that made some parts seem superficial.

Having read Hans Rosling's Factfulness, I must say that Enlightenment Now felt somewhat repetitive and less objective in presenting the author’s case.

My Notes

Introduction

Those who are governed by reason desire nothing for themselves which they do not also desire for the rest of humankind. — Baruch Spinoza

In his 1784 essay, Kant wrote that enlightenment consists of "humankind's emergence from its self-incurred immaturity" and its "lazy and cowardly" submission to the "dogmas and formulas" of religious or political authority.

Although there is no definite definition, the Enlightenment is conventionally placed in the late 18th century following the Scientific Revolution.

Thinkers of the Enlightenment sought understanding in human nature through reason, science, humanism and progress.

• Reason - going beyond irrational beliefs to reach a coherent understanding of our world
• Science - the refining reason to understand the world by escaping ignorance
• Humanism - stressing the well-being of individuals over the glory of groups
• Progress - the advancement of the world through science and humanism

The Enlightenment emphasized the importance of specialization for prosperity and wealth distribution. It also introduced the ideal of peace to escape bloody conflicts and wars for the first time in history. Kant proposed the establishment of democracies and international norms to regulate borders.

Entro, Evo, Info

Entropy, Evolution and Information are the three main ideas that explains the nature of progress.

• Entropy (Second Law of Thermodynamics) - a measure of the disorder or randomness in a system.
  • Emerged from 19th century physicist Ludwig Boltzmann.
  • Second Law of Thermodynamics: entropy increases in an isolated system (not interacting with its surroudings).
  • Life and happiness depends on a small amount of orderly arrangements of matter amid large number of possibilities.
  • Most arrangements found on Earth are of no use to our lives.
• Evolution - the process by which species undergo genetic changes over time.
  • Despite entropy, the universe is filled with objects and beings.
  • One reason is self-organization, allowing ordered zones to emerge.
  • Nature is a ware, and much of what captures our attention in the natural world is an arms race.
• Information - can be thought as a reduction in entropy by distinguishing an orderly system from random one.
  • Information is what gets accumulated in a genome in the course of evolution. 
  • The Axial Age was the period where agricultural and economic advances provided a burst of energy (+20,000 calories/person) that allowed civilizations to afford larger cities and reoriented of people's priorities from short-term survival to long-term harmony.
  • Bertolt Brecht: "Grub first, then ethics".

Energy channeled by knowledge is the elixir with which we stave off entropy, and advances in energy capture are advances in human destiny.

Enlightenment

If you had to choose a moment in history to be born, and you did not know ahead of time who you would be—you didn’t know whether you were going to be born into a wealthy family or a poor family, what country you’d be born in, whether you were going to be a man or a woman—if you had to choose blindly what moment you’d want to be born, you’d choose now. — Barack Obama, 2016 (similar to Rawls' Theory of Justice)

• Life: In 1800, the average life expectancy was around 30 years; in 2015 it was 71.4 years.
• Health: Sanitization, vaccination, antibiotics, and countless medical discoveries saved billions of lives.
• Sustenance: Famines were common in the past; today people live with more calories than needed.
  • Today 13% of people in underdeveloped countries are undernourished (vs 35% in 1970).
  • "In the mid-19th century, it took twenty five men a full day to harvest and thresh a ton of grain; today one person operating a combine harvester can do it in six minutes."
• Wealth: The rich are getting richer, but so are the poor.
  • The poorest people living today are far better off than the poorest people a century ago.
  • Paradox of value (Adam Smith): when an important good becomes plentiful, it costs far less than what people are willing to pay for it (e.g., a refrigerator).
  • This was made possible with science, institutions and technology.

We are led to forget the dominating misery of other times in part by the grace of literature, poetry, romance, and legend, which celebrate those who lived well and forget those who lived in the silence of poverty. The eras of misery have been mythologized and may even be remembered as golden ages of pastoral simplicity. They were not. — Nathan Rosenberg

• Inequality: Inequality is a natural consequence of the overall improvement of society.
  • An old joke from the Soviet Union: The two dirt-poor peasants Igor and Boris are just barely scratching a living out of their tiny plots of land. The only difference is that Boris has a goat and Igor doesn’t. Then a fairy appears to Igor one day and says, “I’ll grant you any wish.” And Igor says, “I wish that Boris’s goat should die.”
  • Harry Frankfurt (On Inequality, 2005) argues that inequality in itself is not morally problematic; what is problematic is poverty.
  • "From the point of view of morality, it is not important that everyone should have the same. What is morally important is that each should have enough."
  • The true goal of inequality is to raise the bottom, not lower the top, even if if in practice the top is lowered.
  • Inequality is not the same as poverty, and it is not a fundamental dimension of human flourishing
  • Some views are obviously correct, but Pinker seems to miss (or omit) a broader picture of empirical studies (e.g., Kuznets Curve).

All of us who prize greater economic equality would do well to remember that with the rarest of exceptions it was only ever brought forth in sorrow. Be careful what you wish for. — Walter Scheidel

• Environment: Environmental problems are solvable given the right knowledge.
  • Ecomodernism begins with the realization that some degree of solution is an inescapable consequence of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
  • Ecomodernism also acknowledges the benefits of the Industrial Revolution.
  • Production necessarily leads to an increase in entropy whether in pollution or waste.
  • In the long run, advancements in technology reduce the environmental impact of consumption by improving efficiency and enabling cleaner energy sources

It’s time to retire the morality play in which modern humans are a vile race of despoilers and plunderers who will hasten the apocalypse unless they undo the Industrial Revolution, renounce technology, and return to an ascetic harmony with nature.

• Peace: The default state of a nation was war; it is now peace.
  • One reason that explains the decline of war is that it became illegal over time.
  • Another is the theory of gentle commerce: countries with trade relationships are less likely to declare war on each other.

One can never use the word “fortunately” in connection with the killing of innocents, but the numbers in the 21st century are a fraction of those in earlier decades.

• Safety: Law enforcement along with the legitimacy of the government matters.
  • Hobbesian Trap: during the Age of Reason, zones of anarchy are always violent because in the absence of a government the threat of violence can be self-inflating.

Who will live and who will die are not inscribed in a Book of Life. They are affected by human knowledge and agency, as the world becomes more intelligible and life becomes more precious.

• Terrorism: Major dread but minor harm.
  • Terrorism is a distraction in our assessment of progress.
  • It is a by-product of the vast reach of the media.
  • Beware of the Availability Heuristic.
• Democracy: A good democracy allows people to pursue their lives in safety, protected from the violence of anarchy, and in freedom, protected from the violence of tyranny.
  • Humanity has long tried to find a pathway between violence of anarchy and violence of tyranny.
  • Karl Popper : democracy should be understood not as the answer to the question “Who should rule?” (namely, “The People”), but as a solution to the problem of how to dismiss bad leadership without bloodshed.
  • In a democracy, people have the freedom to complain without being punished or silenced.
• Knowledge: Literacy on the rise, illiteracy on the verge
  • Flynn Effect: average IQ scores increase over time (around 3 points every decade), likely thanks to education
  • More in Our World In Data
• Happiness: A bit of anxiety isn't bad.
  • Despite the Easterlin Paradox, happiness has been empirically tied to objective well-being.
  • Most people are quite happy, but it's still easier to think that others around are unhappy.
• Existential Threats: The narrative arguing that humankind is doomed has been there for centuries, but has never materialized.
  • Threats exist, but their likelihood is so tiny that it would be unwise to seriously worry about them.
• Reason: Opposing reason is, by definition, unreasonable.
  • Even if we are irrational, it does not prevent us from being rational.
  • Tragedy of the Belief Commons: what’s rational for every individual to believe (based on esteem) can be irrational for the society as a whole to act upon (based on reality).
  • A challenge of our era is how to foster an intellectual and political culture that is driven by reason rather than tribalism and mutual reaction.
• Science: People often point out its negative aspects (wars, weapons), but never do so with other fields.
  • Science is distinguished from reason by its focus on the intelligibility of the world and its reliance on evidence as the basis for understanding.
  • Both science and the humanities would benefit from mutual integration.
• Humanism: The goal of maximizing human flourishing.
  • Humanism does not invoke gods to ground morality, but it is not incompatible with religious institutions either.
  • Two erroneous ideas about morality: theistic morality and romantic morality.
  • Theistic morality: morality consists in obeying the dictates of a supernatural order, which determines one's fate in the afterlife.
  • Romantic morality: morality consists in the purity, authenticity, and greatness of an individual or a nation.
  • Plato’s Euthyphro: Socrates points out that if the gods have good reasons to deem certain acts moral, we can appeal to those reasons directly, skipping the middlemen.
  • Secularization Thesis: being atheist is a natural consequence of affluence and education.