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Pinker and progress

Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. New York: Viking, 2011. Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. New York: Viking, 2018

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Notes

  1. See Walter Scheidel, The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality From the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), p. 7.

  2. See Steven Weinberg, “Sokal’s Hoax,” New York Review of Books 8 August 1996: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1996/08/08/sokals-hoax/. The obscurantism that Sokal skewered is alive and well today. For an example taken at random, see the description of a “conversation” on “their collaborative work ‘The Hundreds’” between Lauren Berlant, a distinguished professor of English at the University of Chicago, and her collaborator-interlocutor, Kathleen Stewart of the University of Texas-Austin: “The Hundreds,” we are informed, “is a collaboration that speculates on writing, affect, politics, and attention to processes of worlding…. We will discuss using writing to imagine critique adequate to the generativity of ordinary objects and processes.” Flyer in the author’s possession; regrettably, the event took place at my own institution, the Graduate Center, CUNY. When I showed the flyer to a journalist friend, she thought it might be an April Fool’s Day joke due to the event’s proximity to that occasion.

  3. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978), p. 322.

  4. Cited in Stephen Mennell, The American Civilizing Process (Malden, MA: Polity, 2007), p. 129.

  5. Pinker, Better Angels, pp. 106–128.

  6. United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, Afghanistan-Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict, Annual Report 2017: https://unama.unmissions.org/afghanistan-10000-civilian-casualties-2017-un-report-suicide-attacks-and-ieds-caused-high-number. More generally, see John Tirman, The Deaths of Others: The Fate of Civilians in America’s Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

  7. James C. Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), pp. 22, 18.

  8. See Andrew Lawler, “The Battle Over Violence,” Science 18 May 2012; http://science.sciencemag.org/content/336/6083/829.full.

  9. Pinker, Better Angels, p. 193.

  10. See Pinker, Better Angels, pp. 190ff.; the quotation is from p. 193.

  11. Better Angels, p. 251.

  12. See Daniel Kahneman, Thinking—Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2011).

  13. See Jeffrey Alexander, “On the Social Construction of Moral Universals: The ‘Holocaust” From War Crime to Trauma Drama,” European Journal of Social Theory 5(1) (2002): 5–85; http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1368431002005001001.

  14. See quotation in Pinker, Enlightenment Now, p. 37, as well as his guest editorial in Wired, “Now Is the Best Time to Be Alive,” 12 October 2016: https://www.wired.com/2016/10/president-obama-guest-edits-wired-essay/.

  15. For an account of the negative health consequences of the adoption of an agricultural way of life, see Mark Nathan Cohen, Health and the Rise of Civilization (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).

  16. Hobbes, Leviathan, edited by Francis B. Randall (New York: Washington Square Press, 1964 [1651]), p. 85.

  17. Angus Maddison, Contours of the World Economy, 1–2030 AD: Essays in Macro-Economic History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 38.

  18. Jim Oeppen and James W. Vaupel, “Broken Limits to Life Expectancy?” Science 10 May 2002, Vol. 296 (5570): 1029–1031; http://science.sciencemag.org/content/296/5570/1029.full.

  19. James C. Riley, Rising Life Expectancy: A Global History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 1.

  20. See Anne Case and Angus Deaton, “Rising Mortality and Morbidity in Midlife Among White Non-Hispanic Americans in the twenty-first Century,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112(49) (December 8, 2015): 15081, http://www.pnas.org/content/112/49/15078.full.pdf.

  21. Shannon M. Monnat, “Deaths of Despair and Support for Trump in the 2016 Presidential Election,” The Pennsylvania State University Department of Agricultural Economics, Sociology, and Education Research Brief 12/ 04/16; http://aese.psu.edu/directory/smm67/Election16.pdf.

  22. See, e.g., Robert William Fogel, The Escape From Premature Hunger and Death, 1700–2010: Europe, America, and the Third World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), and Robert W. Fogel, Explaining Long-Term Trends in Health and Longevity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

  23. Pinker discusses the eradication of smallpox at Enlightenment Now, pp. 64–65.

  24. David Cutler and Grant Miller, “The Role of Public Health Improvements in Health Advances: The Twentieth-Century United States,” Demography 42(1) (December 2005): 1–22.

  25. See Deaton, The Great Escape, pp. 131–136.

  26. James Z. Lee and Wang Feng, One Quarter of Humanity: Malthusian Mythology and Chinese Realities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 36–37.

  27. Ingrid Chen, et al., “The Lancet Commission on Malaria Eradication,” The Lancet 391(10130): pp. 1556–1558, 21 April 2018; http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(18)30911-5/fulltext?{$trackingTag}.

  28. GBD 2016 Causes of Death Collaborators, “Global, Regional, and National Age-Sex Specific Mortality for 264 Causes of Death, 1980–2016: A Systematic Analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2016,” The Lancet 2017 (390): 1151–210; http://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lancet/PIIS0140-6736(17)32152-9.pdf.

  29. The general story is told in Massimo Livi-Bacci, A Concise History of World Population, 6th edition (Malden, MA: John Wiley & Sons, 2017).

  30. UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, “World Population Expected to Reach 9.7 Billion by 2050,” 29 July 2015; http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/news/population/2015-report.html.

  31. Marx and Engels, “The Communist Manifesto,” in Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1978), p. 477.

  32. Enlightenment Now, pp. 80–81.

  33. Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Economic Growth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), p. 2.

  34. Enlightenment Now, p. 85.

  35. Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism,and Progress (New York: Viking, 2018), p. 98.

  36. Pinker, Enlightenment Now, pp. 100–101.

  37. Pinker, Enlightenment Now, pp. 102.

  38. Quoted in John K. Wilson, “Why the Endowment Tax is Unconstitutional,” Inside Higher Education 16 January 2018; https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2018/01/16/tax-college-endowment-unconstitutionally-targets-institutions-opinion.

  39. See Martin Gilens, Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012).

  40. Steven Radelet, The Great Surge: The Ascent of the Developing World (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015).

  41. See Milanovic, Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), Figure 1.3, p. 31. It might also be said that then-Trump consigliere Steve Bannon helped his client ride these developments to power, arguing that “the globalists gutted the American working class and created a middle class in Asia.” Whether there is a causal connection between these two is not clear, but Trump and Bannon are not social scientists and hence not concerned with the answer to that question. Politically what mattered in the 2016 US presidential election was the stagnation of the incomes of those left behind by the forces of globalization.

  42. For a thoughtful analysis, see David Autor, “Why Are There Still So Many Jobs?: The History and Future of Workplace Automation,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 29(3) (Summer 2015): 3–30.

  43. Enlightenment Now, p. 152.

  44. Enlightenment Now, pp. 146–147.

  45. Enlightenment Now, p. 317.

  46. Enlightenment Now, p. 401.

  47. Sarah Bakewell, “Steven Pinker Continues to See the Glass Half Full,” New York Times Book Review 2 March 2018; https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/02/books/review/steven-pinker-enlightenment-now.html.

  48. The Economist, “A Future Perfect? Steven Pinker’s Case for Optimism,” 24 February 2018; https://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21737241-enlightenment-now-explains-why-doom-mongers-are-wrong-steven-pinkers-case-optimism.

  49. Nicholas Kristof, “Why 2017 Was the Best Year in Human History,” New York Times 6 January 2018; https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/06/opinion/sunday/2017-progress-illiteracy-poverty.html

  50. Nicholas Kristof, “Why 2017 May Be the Best Year Ever,” New York Times 21 January 2017; https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/21/opinion/sunday/why-2017-may-be-the-best-year-ever.html.

  51. Jennifer Szalai, “Steven Pinker Wants You to Know Humanity is Doing Just Fine. Just Don’t Ask About Individual Humans,” New York Times 28 February 2018; https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/28/books/review-enlightenment-now-steven-pinker.html.

  52. Patrick Sharkey, Uneasy Peace: The Great Crime Decline, the Renewal of City Life, and the Next War on Violence (New York: Norton, 2017), p. 8.

  53. Ibid., p. 58.

  54. Randolph Roth, American Homicide (Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2009), p. 38, Fig. 1.2.

  55. Roth, American Homicide, pp. 4–5, Figs. I.1 and I.2, and Pinker, Better Angels, p. 92, Fig. 3–10.

  56. John Gray, “Pinker is Wrong About Violence and War,” The Guardian 13 October 2015 (italics mine); https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/13/john-gray-steven-pinker-wrong-violence-war-declining.

  57. Pinker notes this oft-cited claim about the rise of indirect deaths in Better Angels, p. 317.

  58. Better Angels, pp. 299–300.

  59. Better Angels, p. 317.

  60. One example can be found in his discussion of whether or not new technologies are making people lonelier and less connected with one another. After reviewing studies by Riesman, Putnam, and others pointing to a decline in social contact, he sweeps them aside with the claim, “the data show it is false.” The data to which he refers come from Claude Fischer, Still Connected: Family and Friends in America Since 1970 (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2011). Fischer is a meticulous and insightful scholar, to be sure, but Pinker does not make clear why his data are better than those of Riesman, Putnam, et al.

  61. Andrew Lawler, “The Battle Over Violence,” Science 18 May 2012; http://science.sciencemag.org/content/336/6083/829.full.

  62. Michael Mann, “Have Wars and Violence Declined?” Theory & Society 47(1) (February 2018): 57.

  63. The encounter took place at the New School for Social Research in New York on March 27, 2012; see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1-kXmCgWT0.

  64. Mann, “Have Wars and Violence Declined?” p. 37.

  65. See Max Roser, “Our World in Data: War & Peace,” I5. War & Peace After 1945; https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace.

  66. Thomas E. Ricks, “Fighting Wars Past, Present and Future,” New York Times 28 May 2018; https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/25/books/review/army-of-none-paul-scharre.html.

  67. See Wikipedia List of Ongoing Armed Conflicts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ongoing_armed_conflicts and Max Roser, “Our World in Data: War & Peace”: https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace.

  68. See Humphrey, “Steven Pinker and the An Lushan Revolt,” 11 November 2011; http://bedejournal.blogspot.com/2011/11/steven-pinker-and-an-lushan-revolt.html.

  69. John Gray, “Unenlightened Thinking: Steven Pinker’s embarrassing new book is a feeble sermon for rattled liberals,” The New Statesman 22 February 2018; https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2018/02/unenlightened-thinking-steven-pinker-s-embarrassing-new-book-feeble-sermon.

  70. Alissa Quart, “If Americans Don’t Like the Word ‘Inequality’, Would Fairness Be Better?” The Guardian 5 February 2018 https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/feb/05/america-fairness-equality.

  71. Martin Pengelly, “Michael Wolff’s Explosive Book on Trump: The Key Revelations,” The Guardian 5 January 2018; https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jan/05/trump-book-highlights-michael-wolff-fire-fury. See also Trump’s bio on the “Superstars” webpage of WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment, the successor of the World Wrestling Federation), where Trump is a member of the Hall of Fame: http://www.wwe.com/superstars/donald-trump; and Jeffrey Toobin, “The National Enquirer’s Fervor for Trump,” The New Yorker 3 July 2017; https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/07/03/the-national-enquirers-fervor-for-trump.

  72. Branko Milanovic, “Playing Fair,” International Politics and Society 18 April 2018; http://www.ips-journal.eu/in-focus/capitalism-and-its-critique/article/show/playing-fair-2683/.

  73. Samuel Moyn, “Hype for the Best,” The New Republic 19 March 2018; https://newrepublic.com/article/147391/hype-best.

  74. Enlightenment Now, p. 119.

  75. For a comprehensive discussion of universal basic income, see Philippe van Parijs and Yannick Vanderborght, Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017).

  76. See Samuel Moyn, “How the Human Rights Movement Failed,” New York Times 23 April 2018; https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/23/opinion/human-rights-movement-failed.html.

  77. See Roser, “Our World in Data: Economic Inequality—The Gini Index,” https://ourworldindata.org/income-inequality. The graphic covers the period 1985–2016, where data are available, and one can request data and visualizations for whichever countries one wishes to examine.

  78. Milanovic, Global Inequality, pp. 118–123.

  79. Fogel, The Escape From Premature Hunger and Death, p. 40.

  80. Albert Hirschman, Shifting Involvements: Private Interest and Public Action (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002 [1982]), p. 46.

  81. “Steven Pinker Recommends Books to Make You an Optimist,” The Guardian 26 February 2018; https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/feb/26/further-reading-steven-pinker-books-to-make-you-an-optimist.

  82. Deaton, The Great Escape, p. 184. Marshall defined the social element of citizenship as including “the whole range from the right to a modicum of economic welfare and security to the right to share to the full in the social heritage and to live the life of a civilized being according to the standards prevailing in the society.” See Marshall, “Citizenship and Social Class,” in Class, Citizenship, and Social Development (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1964), p. 78.

  83. Angus Deaton, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), p. 9.

  84. David Leonhardt, “A Cockeyed Optimist: Angus Deaton’s ‘Great Escape,’” New York Times Book Review 19 December 2013; https://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/22/books/review/angus-deatons-great-escape.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.

  85. For an account of Taleb’s critique and Pinker’s response, see Zack Beauchamp, “This Fascinating Academic Debate Has Huge Implications for the Future of World Peace,” Vox 21 May 2015; https://www.vox.com/2015/5/21/8635369/pinker-taleb.

  86. Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York: Harper & Row, 1950 [1942]), p. 151.

  87. See https://www.positive.news/.

  88. David Bornstein and Tina Rosenberg, “When Reportage Turns to Cynicism,” New York Times 14 November 2016; https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/15/opinion/when-reportage-turns-to-cynicism.html.

  89. Bureau of Labor Statistics, unemployment data from the Current Population Survey: https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000.

  90. Moyn, “Pinker’s Misguided Optimism,” https://newrepublic.com/article/147391/hype-best.

  91. J. B. Bury, The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry into its Growth and Origin, with an introduction by Charles A. Beard (New York: Dover Publications, 1932).

  92. Founder’s Fund, What Happened to the Future?; http://foundersfund.com/the-future/.

  93. See Paul Scharre, Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War (New York: Norton, 2018).

  94. See P.W. Singer, Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the twenty-first Century (New York: Penguin, 2009).

  95. C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures, with an Introduction by Stefan Collini (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998 [1959]), p. 5.

  96. Steven Lukes and Nadia Urbinati, eds., Condorcet: Political Writings (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. xxiv, xl. The passages are from the Editor’s Introduction; the first is a quotation from the Sketch, whereas the second is from the editors.

  97. Immanuel Kant, “The Contest of Faculties,” in Hans Reiss, ed., Kant’s Political Writings, trans. H.B. Nisbet (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1970), p. 180.

  98. Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), p. 140.

  99. Claus Offe, “What, if Anything, May We Mean by ‘Progressive’ Politics Today?” in Rethinking Progress and Ensuring a Secure Future for All: What We Can Learn from the Crisis, Trends in Social Cohesion No. 22 (Strasbourg: Council of Europe, 2011).

  100. Steven Lukes, “The End of Progress?” unpublished manuscript in the author’s possession.

  101. See Herbert J. Gans, Deciding What’s News: A Study of CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Newsweek and Time (New York: Vintage, 1979).

  102. Dana Goodstein, “Why Campus Shootings Are So Shocking: Schools is the ‘Safest Place’ For a Child,” New York Times, 22 May 2018; https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/22/us/safe-school-shootings.html.

  103. “A Rigorous Scientific Look Into the ‘Fox News Effect’,” Forbes 21 July 2016; https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2016/07/21/a-rigorous-scientific-look-into-the-fox-news-effect/#4d7d54ec12ab.

  104. Enlightenment Now, p. 340.

  105. Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” p. 147.

  106. See Tom Nichols, The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).

  107. Kant, “An Answer to the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment?’” in Reiss, ed., Kant’s Political Writings, p. 54. Translation modified slightly (“self-imposed” rather than “self-incurred”).

Acknowledgments

Thanks to David Abraham and David Swartz for comments on an earlier version of this essay.

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    John Torpey

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Torpey, J. Pinker and progress. Theor Soc 47, 511–538 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-018-9320-z

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