I bet you are wondering about the title of this piece.
Has Blumner gone bonkers? Doesn’t she know that the world is on fire with authoritarianism on the rise, including in the United States? Hasn’t she seen the global climate change warnings and the consequences we are experiencing in real time? Doesn’t she know that Christian nationalism has largely taken over the Republican Party and that the Enlightenment values of freedom of inquiry, tolerance, and reason are being threatened from the political Right as well as—to a worrying extent—the political Left?
Yes, I know. It’s not pretty. Through a narrow lens of time, I agree that things look bleak.
But I was reminded of why optimism about the future matters in a recent interview with British physicist David Deutsch on the “Infinity of Advancement” in the online edition of Spiegel International.1 In it, he says that immense improvement in life came about for humanity once the Enlightenment arrived on the scene in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Why did that set of ideas have such a transformative and permanent effect? Deutsch says that the key is rational optimism.
It was optimism that made science take off. It’s very ingrained in our culture today that when something changes for the worse, people complain. Because they are convinced that the problem is soluble, and therefore that the situation can be improved again. That attitude is new. For most of history, people thought: “The world is bad and, usually, it’s getting worse.”
In other words, no longer did humans see themselves as mere pawns for the gods. They could bring logic and the scientific method to bear and actually fix things that were bad, wrong, or deadly. That is our inheritance, and a priceless one at that. We were given tools, not answers. But those tools, when properly deployed, transform human lives.
And what is at the core of this rational form of optimism? It is not a sunny disposition or a blithe sense that all will be well because we have some good people working on our problems. Rather, it’s an appreciation for how far we have come and how so much progress has been made. We have every reason to be optimistic, because there is evidence to support it. By almost every measure of human health and well-being, we are living in the best of times.
Appreciation and its close cousin, gratitude, are something we need a lot more of these days. But our gratitude is not for heaven-sent good fortune. It’s for the innumerable positive changes and advancements forged by science, technology, and a humanistic revolution in our thinking about the individual and human dignity that has led to a better life for virtually all people everywhere on our planet. It’s not perfect, not equal, and not free of misery or backwardness, but on balance—as compared with one hundred or even fifty years ago—today life is better. It’s way, way better.
Everyone should read Steven Pinker’s masterful work Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress and his brilliant response to the critics of the book in his long essay, “Enlightenment Wars: Some Reflection on ‘Enlightenment Now’ One Year Later.”2 This is how Pinker describes why it’s important for us to honestly crunch the numbers on human progress. It sounds very much like Deutsch’s description of the importance of rational optimism:
If you believe that all of humanity’s efforts to make the world a better place have failed—that all is vanity, the poor will always be with you, and the best-laid plans of mice and men always go awry—the appropriate response is stop throwing bad money after good and to enjoy life while you can. If you believe that things could not be worse, and all of our institutions are failing and beyond hope of reform, then the appropriate response is to burn the empire to the ground in the hope that anything that rises out of the ashes will be better than what we have now. Or to empower a strongman who promises “Only I can fix it” and seeks to make the declining country great again. But if applying reason and science to make people better off has succeeded in the past, however piecemeal and incompletely, the appropriate response is to deepen our understanding of the world and to improve and mobilize our institutions to make more people better off still.
There is a reason, as Pinker also notes in his essay, why President Barack Obama strongly defended the progress evident in the here and now at a commencement address to the graduating class of Howard University, a historically Black university:
If you had to choose one moment in history in which you could be born, and you didn’t know ahead of time who you were going to be–what nationality, what gender, what race, whether you’d be rich or poor, gay or straight, what faith you’d be born into–you wouldn’t choose 100 years ago. You wouldn’t choose the fifties, or the sixties, or the seventies. You’d choose right now.
Obama is right, of course, but his implication is that things are only better for groups that had been formerly discriminated against, such as women, people of color, and LGBTQ people. The fact is that White men should also choose the twenty-first century over the past. White men in the United States had an average life expectancy of 67.4 years in 1960, which rose to 68.0 in 1970. In 1990, it was up to 72.7, and in 2015, it reached 76.6 years. That uninterrupted progress has reversed somewhat in the past few years, but life expectancy for White men is still better today than in the 1990s.
American homes in 1950 averaged 983 square feet; by 2014, the size had nearly tripled to 2,657 square feet. Today, 91 percent of our homes are air-conditioned. Who would want to return to a world before we had smartphones, GPS, online streaming, airbags in cars, and modern medical advances?
Remember a time not long ago when to produce something that millions of people might read or see, you had to be in a position to buy ink by the barrelful or own a television station? Now everyone with WiFi has the potential reach of The New York Times, an unfathomable opportunity for self-expression.
And I’m willing to bet that a large percentage of White men (and everyone else for that matter) would not want to go back to a time when state criminal laws barred unmarried people from having sex—laws that were still on the books until 2003.
One of the reasons the demise of Roe v. Wade3 is such a devastating event in all our lives—for women and men—is that it resuscitates the bad old days when religious dogma imposed through state power dictated the trajectory of our lives. This anti-Enlightenment reassertion of religion will have unknown knock-on effects to come. We are infuriated because we’ve seen that scene play out in history throughout Christendom and in modern times, especially in Islamic states, and it never ends well.
But maintaining one’s optimism even in the face of such major setbacks is not only a better alternative to unyielding despair; it’s a rational act. Since the Enlightenment, when thinkers and writers such as Rene Descartes and John Locke asserted that we can use reason and science to better understand the natural world and humanity’s place within it, we have had the capability to improve our condition.
And then we did so in ways so startling and transformative that life today bears little semblance to the grueling and repressive existence of the past. We just need to keep working at these improvements. We live with no promise that things will get better, but we know—absolutely know—that they can, and it is within humanity’s power to do it.
To paraphrase Obama, I would not trade places with any of my forebears. Would you?
[1] Rafaela von Bredow and Johann Grolle, “Ignoring the Possibility of Progress Is a Sure Method of Destroying Ourselves,” Spiegel International, April 6, 2022. Available online at https://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/physiker-david-deutsch-es-gibt-eine-wahrheit-aber-wir-sind-unfaehig-sie-zu-erkennen-1649173594-a-670a7967-444d-426a-8df7-3c47dcdefc54.
[2] Steven Pinker, “Enlightenment Wars: Some Reflections on ‘Enlightenment Now,’ One Year Later,” Quillette, January 14, 2019. Available online at https://quillette.com/2019/01/14/enlightenment-wars-some-reflections-on-enlightenment-now-one-year-later/.
[3] 3. As of this writing, the U.S. Supreme Court has not ruled in Dobbs v. Jackson.
I bet you are wondering about the title of this piece. Has Blumner gone bonkers? Doesn’t she know that the world is on fire with authoritarianism on the rise, including in the United States? Hasn’t she seen the global climate change warnings and the consequences we are experiencing in real time? Doesn’t she know that …