In defense of progress

Pinker's book seems like stating the obvious. And yet, it seems clear that today's society values too much absolutes, and values less the dynamism of progress. Today, our social media world holds too many things to too high a standard. Standards which are aspirational at best, and really just unrealistic for us to live our life too. "... progress is not a utopia... there is room - indeed, an imperative - for us to strive to continue that progress" (p.326). This book puts together an impressive range of data and arguments to suggest that underlying long term progress is what is really happening, beneath the surface of our increasingly short term preoccupations.

For example, democracy is not the panacea but only the worst form of government except all the others (Churchill, p.205). Pinker writes "Karl Popper argued that democracy should be understood not as the answer to the question "Who should rule?" but as a solution to the problem of how to dismiss bad leadership without bloodshed". Perhaps, especially in the United States, our political system has been put on too much of a pedestal of striving for the ideal, when it's really a relatively efficient way of avoiding the worst of other alternatives. It's up to us to be more engaged to demand better leadership, we should not expect it.

Similarly, in his chapter on 'Quality of Life', the very opportunity to make choices is the ultimate form of progress, not the specific goods and services we covet (p.248).

One of the most insightful, and disturbing, chapters is on 'reason' where he references Dan Kahan's argument that certain beliefs have become symbols of cultural allegiance. People affirm or deny beliefs to express not what they know, but who they are (p.357). Climate change is one of the most glaring examples of this, particularly in the United States. People are sharing 'blue lies', lies told for the benefit of the in-group, to antagonize their opponents and encourage their supporters. Trump is clearly the most visible and powerful example of this. And proponents of reason and progress need to understand how to tackle this, rather than just amplify the same reasoned arguments (p.379).

And finally, "what then distinguishes science from other exercises of reason? The first is that the world is intelligible... The second ideal is that we must allow the world to tell us whether our ideas about it are correct." (p.393)

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To the enlightenment thinkers, extolling reason and championing progress, Pinker adds three modern ideas about the human condition and nature of progress:

Entropy - nature does not subjectively strive for disorder, but there are so many more ways to be disorderly than not. If you walk away from a sandcastle, it will not be there tomorrow. Humanity’s purpose is it deploy energy and knowledge to fight back the tide of entropy and carve out refuges of beneficial order.

Evolution - despite entropy, the universe is so large that there appear self-organized zones of order, which then replicate and evolve. Organisms as open systems capture energy from around them, in order to fight off entropy. Hence an ironclad requirement to suck energy out of the environment. Our cognitive, emotional and moral faculties are adapted to individual survival in an archaic environment, not universal thriving in a modern one.

Information - a reduction in entropy, accumulated in a genome, collected through a nervous system, now extended to our own Information Age of computation and control. Our ability to abstract and create help us organize our communities for the better.