It's Getting Better All The Time!

5 years ago, I greatly enjoyed Steven Pinker's book "The Better Angels of Our Nature", subtitled "Why Violence Has Declined", blogged here under the title "Good News! Good News!" So I was really psyched by the release of his follow up to that book: "Enlightenment Now", subtitled "The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress", February 13, 2018, 576 pages. The cover has a blurb by Bill Gates, "My new favorite book of all time". Gates has written a review of the book, if you want something a lot shorter than I'm guessing this review/summary will turn out to be.

Just published, here's an interview with Pinker on the book in the NY Times April 10, 2018.

As I started reading this book, I was not going to write one of my long review/summaries. I really felt like everybody should just GO READ THE BOOK! It is an easy and fun read! But as I continued to read, there were just so many succinct statements of things we all should know but don't know, or, rather, forget that we know, that I started highlighting. So here we go.

The book has 23 chapters in 3 parts: Part I, "Enlightenment", 3 chapters; Part II, "Progress", 17 chapters; and Part III, "Reason, Science, and Humanism", 3 chapters, 1 on each of the 3 topics listed. Like "Better Angels", the book is chock full of charts (75) showing bad things declining or good things increasing - with 1 exception.

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Part I has an introduction before Chapter 1. Pinker recounts how after giving a talk on "the commonplace among scientists that mental life consists of patterns of activity in the tissues of the brain", a student asks, sincerely, "Why should I live?" Here is part of Pinker's answer, which gives a good feel for his overall approach.

As a sentient being, you have the potential to flourish. You can refine your faculty of reason itself by learning and debating. You can seek explanations of the natural world through science, and insight into the human condition through the arts and humanities. You can make the most of your capacity for pleasure and satisfaction, which allowed your ancestors to thrive and thereby allowed you to exist. You can appreciate the beauty and richness of the natural and cultural world. As the heir to billions of years of life perpetuating itself, you can perpetuate life in turn. You have been endowed with a sense of sympathy — the ability to like, love, respect, help, and show kindness—and you can enjoy the gift of mutual benevolence with friends, family, and colleagues.

And because reason tells you that none of this is particular to you, you have the responsibility to provide to others what you expect for yourself. You can foster the welfare of other sentient beings by enhancing life, health, knowledge, freedom, abundance, safety, beauty, and peace. History shows that when we sympathize with others and apply our ingenuity to improving the human condition, we can make progress in doing so, and you can help to continue that progress.

"Human flourishing" is a touchstone throughout the book.

Chapter 2 has an interesting title: "Entro, Evo, Info" - referring to Entropy, Evolution, and Information. Entropy, the tendency of all things towards disorder ("shit happens"), always must increase, according to the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. This provides the background against which all activity, all striving, in the universe must work.

the ultimate purpose of life, mind, and human striving: to deploy energy and knowledge to fight back the tide of entropy and carve out refuges of beneficial order.

The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics only applies "in a closed system". Meanwhile

Organisms are open systems: they capture energy from the sun, food, or ocean vents to carve out temporary pockets of order in their bodies and nests while they dump heat and waste into the environment, increasing disorder in the world as a whole.

Evolution is the song and the story by which organisms, through natural selection, discover ever better ways to fight entropy. Information is how they store those better ways, both in the DNA of their genomes, and, in more advanced organisms such as humans, in their nervous systems, their minds.

Internal representations that reliably correlate with states of he world, and that participate in inferences that tend to derive true implications from true premises, may be called knowledge.

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language, which allowed them to coordinate their actions and to pool the fruits of their experience into the collections of skills and norms we call cultures.

Pinker emphasizes how these 3 forces are what is real, are what we really have to work with. As opposed to

disembodied forces like karma, fate, spiritual messages, cosmic justice, and other guarantors of the intuition that “everything happens for a reason.”

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misfortune may be no one’s fault.

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Not only does the universe not care about our desires, but in the natural course of events it will appear to thwart them, because there are so many more ways for things to go wrong than for them to go right.

In Chapter 3, "Counter-Enlightenment", Pinker talks about some of the things that oppose the Enlightment: left-and-right-wing ideologies; romanticism [which I think I may have encountered in some of my right-wing gunophile acquaintances], and finally, the Art Nazis.

A final alternative to Enlightenment humanism condemns its embrace of science. Following C. P. Snow, we can call it the Second Culture, the worldview of many literary intellectuals and cultural critics, as distinguished from the First Culture of science.

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They write as if the consumption of elite art is the ultimate moral good.

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The idea that the ultimate good is to use knowledge to enhance human welfare leaves people cold. Deep explanations of the universe, the planet, life, the brain? Unless they use magic, we don’t want to believe them! Saving the lives of billions, eradicating disease, feeding the hungry? Bo-ring. People extending their compassion to all of humankind? Not good enough — we want the laws of physics to care about us! Longevity, health, understanding, beauty, freedom, love? There’s got to be more to life than that.

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Part II, "Progress", starts with a great quote from my favorite president:

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

The 1st Chapter of this part is titled "Progressophobia", and follows Chapter 3 in exploring opposition to the Enlightenment and the goal of Progress. My old friend Professor Pangloss is mentioned. [I have downloaded most of Voltaire to my iPad, I may try to actually get around to reading "Candide".] We hear about "the Optimism Gap" - I'm OK, but everybody else sucks. My neighborhood is safe and prosperous, but everyone else's are varying degrees of shitholes [to quote our Dear Leader].

Pinker talks about "mental bugs", or cognitive biases or illusions (tagged in this blog as "cognitive illusions"), as we've met before in the work of Tversky and Kahneman, in particular the Availability heuristic. And, of course, the policies of most news media - "If it bleeds, it leads" don't help things at all.

Hah, I like this example.

The consequences of negative news are themselves negative. Far from being better informed, heavy newswatchers can become miscalibrated. They worry more about crime, even when rates are falling, and sometimes they part company with reality altogether: a 2016 poll found that a large majority of Americans follow news about ISIS closely, and 77 percent agreed that “Islamic militants operating in Syria and Iraq pose a serious threat to the existence or survival of the United States,” a belief that is nothing short of delusional.

Pinker's answer? Science! "The answer is to count."

A quantitative mindset, despite its nerdy aura, is in fact the morally enlightened one, because it treats every human life as having equal value rather than privileging the people who are closest to us or most photogenic.

Pinker talks about the U.N. Millennium Development Goals, most of which had been met by their target date of 2015. (They have been followed by the Sustainable Development Goals for the next 25 years.)

And here is a shocker: The world has made spectacular progress in every single measure of human well-being. Here is a second shocker: Almost no one knows about it.

Pinker lists 3 websites with data detailing this progress. They all look great, but HumanProgress does not have an RSS feed :-(

• Max Roser's Our World in Data
• Marian Tupy's HumanProgress
• Hans Rosling's Gapminder

Hah! I took the Gapminder test, and got a measly 54% correct!

The next 15 chapters detail the world's progress, with chart upon chart to back it up. This parallels "Better Angels", but with 5 more years of data. The chapters are:

1. Life
2. Health
3. Sustenance
4. Wealth
5. Inequality
6. The Environment
7. Peace
8. Safety
9. Terrorism
10. Democracy
11. Equal Rights
12. Knowledge
13. Quality of Life
14. Happiness
15. Existential Threats

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Chapter 9, "Inequality", was somewhat surprising. Pinker downplays the importance of inequality. He quotes philosopher Harry Frankfurt's 2015 book On Inequality:

“From the point of view of morality, it is not important everyone should have the same. What is morally important is that each should have enough.”

Here he questions a lot of the basis of "1% vs 99%" arguments - this seemed somewhat glib to me:

Readers commit the same fallacy when they read that “the top one percent in 2008” had incomes that were 50 percent higher than “the top one percent in 1988” and conclude that a bunch of rich people got half again richer. People move in and out of income brackets, shuffling the order, so we’re not necessarily talking about the same individuals. The same is true for “the bottom fifth” and every other statistical bin.

These comments hit home with regard to recent US politics:

The international and global Gini curves show that despite the anxiety about rising inequality within Western countries, inequality in the world is declining.

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Now, it’s true that the world’s poor have gotten richer in part at the expense of the American lower middle class, and if I were an American politician I would not publicly say that the tradeoff was worth it. But as citizens of the world considering humanity as a whole, we have to say that the tradeoff is worth it.

Take that, Trump voters! But he does counterbalance this outlook with yet another thing that we all forget:

globalization, may produce winners and losers in income, but in consumption it makes almost everyone a winner.

Yes, we are already in a post-scarcity economy, now we just need to work on the utopia part.

Pinker gives a nod to Universal Basic Income (UBI).

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In Chapter 10, "The Environment", Pinker also strays from the party line. 1st, here's a positive fact to be happy about:

the proportion of the Earth’s land set aside as national parks, wildlife reserves, and other protected areas has grown from 8.2 percent in 1990 to 14.8 percent in 2014—an area double the size of the United States. Marine conservation areas have grown as well, more than doubling during this period and now protecting more than 12 percent of the world’s oceans.

But, he appears not to be a fan of the ideas and arguments of Naomi Kline, whose 2014 "This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate" I described as "a clarion call to action". He starts off sarcastically paraphrasing her:

we should not treat the threat of climate change as a challenge to prevent climate change. No, we should treat it as an opportunity to abolish free markets, restructure the global economy, and remake our political system.

He then moves on to some flat-out criticisms, justified(?), of some of her stances:

In one of the more surreal episodes in the history of environmental politics, Klein joined the infamous David and Charles Koch, the billionaire oil industrialists and bankrollers of climate change denial, in helping to defeat a 2016 Washington state ballot initiative that would have implemented the country’s first carbon tax, the policy measure which almost every analyst endorses as a prerequisite to dealing with climate change. Why? Because the measure was “right-wing friendly,” and it did not “make the polluters pay, and put their immoral profits to work repairing the damage they have knowingly created.” In a 2015 interview Klein even opposed analyzing climate change quantitatively

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Blowing off quantitative analysis as “bean-counting” is not just anti-intellectual but works against “values, human rights, right and wrong.”

Pinker also invokes the Kusnets arc, which Kate Raworth (and Piketty?) describe as being "debunked" - search for Kuznets here.

Pinker is a proponent of nuclear energy (as am I), and is willing to consider climate engineering that is "moderate, responsive, and temporary".

Here is a FFTKAT: the chemical formula for coal is C137H97O9NS. Wow, lots of nasty carbon compared to our friends hydrogen and oxygen, and a nasty sulfur atom as well.

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Chapter 12, "Safety", was 1 of my favorites. So many charts showing how much unbelievably safer we are! I have been tweeting 1 of these every few days. Here's the latest:

I've been tagging them with #ItsGettingBetterAllTheTime and #TheFuture. The last few I've added #EnlightenmentNow (duh). Where appropriate, I also add #GovernmentRegulationSavesLives to troll my libertarian friends.

Here we encounter our 1 exception to bad things declining and good things increasing: deaths by poison (solid or liquid) started rising steeply in 1990, going from around 2-3 deaths/100,000 people/year to 12 or so - a 4-5x increase. Pinker was of course surprised by this exception - until he realized that this category mostly (98%) consists of drug overdoses. The Opioid Epidemic is indeed a step backward, in contrast so many other steps forward.

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Chapter 18, "Happiness" discusses, along with other topics, the current mental state of the US and the world.

Psychologists and psychiatrists have begun to sound the alarm against this “disease mongering,” “concept creep,” “selling sickness,” and “expanding empire of psychopathology.” In her 2013 article “Abnormal Is the New Normal,” the psychologist Robin Rosenberg noted that the latest version of the DSM could diagnose half the American population with a mental disorder over the course of their lives.

The expanding empire of psychopathology is a first-world problem, and in many ways is a sign of moral progress. Recognizing a person’s suffering, even with a diagnostic label, is a form of compassion, particularly when the suffering can be alleviated.

We are introduced to "Betteridge’s Law of Headlines: Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered with the word no." with reference to a study which asked “Is There an Epidemic of Child or Adolescent Depression?” Answer, no.

[Ha ha, the very next day, April 11, there was a headline on page 1 of the Living section of the Lexington Herald-Leader "Is there a child, teen mental health crisis in the US?" to an article by a syndicated, old-school, spare-the-rod-and-spoil-the-child family psychologist. He, of course, answered "yes". His evidence:

Today's child by age 16, is five to 10 times - depending on the source - more likely to experience a prolonged emotional crisis than was a child raised in the 1950s. For example,

OK, he's going to tell us about some of those studies, right? Wrong! Instead we get a worthless anecdote:

For example, I do not remember, nor have I ever run into a person my age who remembers a high school classmate committing suicide.

I will be writing a letter to the editor on this, reminding them that, particularly in matters of public health and science, data and evidence are what matter, not opinion and anecdotes.]

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Here's another FFTKAT from Chapter 19, "Existential Threats":

about 10 percent of electricity in the United States comes from dismantled nuclear warheads, mostly Soviet.

The final chapter of Part II is Chapter 20, "The Future of Progress". Guess what? It's getting better all the time!

The Enlightenment is working: for two and a half centuries, people have used knowledge to enhance human flourishing.

Except for Trump voters, of course, but Pinker shows that the demographics are in our favor. But it comes back to the same issue as ever - when will the young people start voting? Fingers quadruple-crossed that the #NeverAgain movement will get out young voters in 2018.

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Chapter 21 "Reason" opens with a tautology: "Opposing reason is, by definition, unreasonable." Postmodernism, ugh. Pinker quotes philosopher Thomas Nagel, in what seems to me to be a riff on the Liar's Paradox:

The claim “Everything is subjective” must be nonsense, for it would itself have to be either subjective or objective. But it can’t be objective, since in that case it would be false if true. And it can’t be subjective, because then it would not rule out any objective claim, including the claim that it is objectively false. There may be some subjectivists, perhaps styling themselves as pragmatists, who present subjectivism as applying even to itself. But then it does not call for a reply, since it is just a report of what the subjectivist finds it agreeable to say. If he also invites us to join him, we need not offer any reason for declining, since he has offered us no reason to accept.

The more you think about postmodernism and absolute relativism (oxymoron), you realize that they are, well, just silly.

From the most recondite deconstructionist to the most anti-intellectual purveyor of conspiracy theories and “alternative facts,” everyone recognizes the power of responses like “Why should I believe you?” or “Prove it” or “You’re full of crap.” Few would reply, “That’s right, there’s no reason to believe me,” or “Yes, I’m lying right now,” or “I agree, what I’m saying is bullshit.” It’s in the very nature of argument that people stake a claim to being right. As soon as they do, they have committed themselves to reason—and the listeners they are trying to convince can hold their feet to the fire of coherence and accuracy.

This is so relevant to modern times. Facts that impinge on political beliefs are negated, by both the left and the right (but of course the right is worse). Maintaining status and political correctness within your political tribe are more important to people's sense of self and worth than ascertaining facts and truth.

Given these payoffs, endorsing a belief that hasn’t passed muster with science and fact-checking isn’t so irrational after all—at least, not by the criterion of the immediate effects on the believer. The effects on the society and planet are another matter. The atmosphere doesn’t care what people think about it, and if it in fact warms by 4° Celsius, billions of people will suffer, no matter how many of them had been esteemed in their peer groups for holding the locally fashionable opinion on climate change along the way.

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preposterous beliefs are more effective signals of coalitional loyalty than reasonable ones

I have heard this last with reference to religious beliefs - it's easy to believe something reasonable, it takes real zealotry to believe something that is completely unbelievable.

Pinker references "legal scholar Dan Kahan:"

Kahan concludes that we are all actors in a 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).

Pinker talks about some other terms which are new to me:

• a blue lie is told for the benefit of an in-group (originally, fellow police officers) ...
• But since another part of the human mind keeps a person in touch with reality, as the counterevidence piles up the dissonance can mount until it becomes too much to bear and the opinion topples over, a phenomenon called the affective tipping point ...
• Most of us are deluded about our degree of understanding of the world, a bias called the Illusion of Explanatory Depth.

Ha ha, I wonder what libertarians have to say about this?

no developed country runs on right-wing libertarian principles, nor has any realistic vision of such a country ever been laid out.

I really liked this idea: that politics should be based more on sciencific principles.

A more rational approach to politics is to treat societies as ongoing experiments and open-mindedly learn the best practices, whichever part of the spectrum they come from.

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Reason tells us that political deliberation would be most fruitful if it treated governance more like scientific experimentation and less like an extreme-sports competition.

As disheartening as our fractious politics and even views of reality are, as would be expected, Pinker offers us some hope.

We are not in a post-truth era. Mendacity, truth-shading, conspiracy theories, extraordinary popular delusions, and the madness of crowds are as old as our species, but so is the conviction that some ideas are right and others are wrong.

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eight in 10 Americans have a positive view of political fact-checking.

This is an insight into yet another cognitive illusion/bias that can help us move forward. Recognizing cognitive biases helps us to compensate for them.

The discovery that political tribalism is the most insidious form of irrationality today is still fresh and mostly unknown.

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Chapter 22 is titled "Science"! Yes, science!

What, then, distinguishes science from other exercises of reason? It certainly isn’t “the scientific method,” a term that is taught to schoolchildren but that never passes the lips of a scientist. Scientists use whichever methods help them understand the world: drudgelike tabulation of data, experimental derring-do, flights of theoretical fancy, elegant mathematical modeling, kludgy computer simulation, sweeping verbal narrative. All the methods are pressed into the service of two ideals, and it is these ideals that advocates of science want to export to the rest of intellectual life.

The first is that the world is intelligible.

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The second ideal is that we must allow the world to tell us whether our ideas about it are correct.

Some bitter medicine for faith-based or magical thinking:

the findings of science imply that the belief systems of all the world’s traditional religions and cultures—their theories of the genesis of the world, life, humans, and societies—are factually mistaken.

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There is no such thing as fate, providence, karma, spells, curses, augury, divine retribution, or answered prayers

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Though the scientific facts do not by themselves dictate values, they certainly hem in the possibilities. By stripping ecclesiastical authority of its credibility on factual matters, they cast doubt on its claims to certitude in matters of morality.

Pinker is not a fan of most Second Culture analyses of science.

The result is like a report of a basketball game by a dance critic who is not allowed to say that the players are trying to throw the ball through the hoop.

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Resisters of scientific thinking often object that some things just can’t be quantified. Yet unless they are willing to speak only of issues that are black or white and to foreswear using the words more, less, better, and worse (and for that matter the suffix –er), they are making claims that are inherently quantitative. If they veto the possibility of putting numbers to them, they are saying, “Trust my intuition.” But if there’s one thing we know about cognition, it’s that people (including experts) are arrogantly overconfident about their intuition.

This was an interesting example of the value of quantification.

The political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan assembled a dataset of political resistance movements across the world between 1900 and 2006 and discovered that three-quarters of the nonviolent resistance movements succeeded, compared with only a third of the violent ones. Gandhi and King were right, but without data, you would never know it.

We encountered Dr. Chenoweth before here. I have their book "Why Civil Resistance Works" but have not read it yet.

Pinker discusses the disconnect between the science and humanities departments in modern universities. The humanities departments have been struggling for years, particularly as our universities (and educational systems as a whole) are being transformed into factories for producing corporate wage slaves. Pinker urges them to keep their focus on their very, very important subject matter, but to adopt scientific methods, rather than condemning them.

The humanities have yet to recover from the disaster of postmodernism, with its defiant obscurantism, self-refuting relativism, and suffocating political correctness. Many of its luminaries—Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Lacan, Derrida, the Critical Theorists—are morose cultural pessimists who declare that modernity is odious, all statements are paradoxical, works of art are tools of oppression, liberal democracy is the same as fascism, and Western civilization is circling the drain.

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A consilience with science offers the humanities many possibilities for new insight. Art, culture, and society are products of human brains. They originate in our faculties of perception, thought, and emotion, and they cumulate and spread through the epidemiological dynamics by which one person affects others. Shouldn’t we be curious to understand these connections? Both sides would win. The humanities would enjoy more of the explanatory depth of the sciences, and a forward-looking agenda that could attract ambitious young talent (not to mention appealing to deans and donors). The sciences could challenge their theories with the natural experiments and ecologically valid phenomena that have been so richly characterized by humanities scholars.

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The advent of data science applied to books, periodicals, correspondence, and musical scores has inaugurated an expansive new “digital humanities.” The possibilities for theory and discovery are limited only by the imagination, and include the origin and spread of ideas, networks of intellectual and artistic influence, the contours of historical memory, the waxing and waning of themes in literature, the universality or culture-specificity of archetypes and plots, and patterns of unofficial censorship and taboo.

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Chapter 23, the last, is titled "Humanism". Here is Pinker's definition:

The goal of maximizing human flourishing—life, health, happiness, freedom, knowledge, love, richness of experience—may be called humanism.

[sarcasm] I will lodge an official protest on behalf of my gunophile friends that he does not mention "lots of guns" in this statement of what defines human flourishing.[/sarcasm]

He references The Humanist Manifesto, 1st published in 1933, now on version III. In my very 1st blog post, I included a link to the principles of the Council of Secular Humanism - which was dead, I have refreshed. I think I like their verbiage a little better.

I enjoyed Pinker's discussion of "the Golden Rule and its precious-metallic variants". I had heard of the Silver Rule, but not "the Platinum Rule, “Do to others what they would have you do to them.”" I tweeted Pinker the Bronze Rule, which somehow I have been referencing lately, I'm not sure where it came from: "Don't Be An Asshole".

This was something really new: a defense of all of our basic (guilty) human pleasures, which have been under attack, what, forever, by various forms of asceticism and puritanism. I for 1 wish I would rewrite the damage 11 years of sin-based teaching I received in Catholic schools did to my mind.

The physical requirements that allow rational agents to exist in the material world are not abstract design specifications; they are implemented in the brain as wants, needs, emotions, pains, and pleasures. On average, and in the kind of environment in which our species was shaped, pleasurable experiences allowed our ancestors to survive and have viable children, and painful ones led to a dead end. That means that food, comfort, curiosity, beauty, stimulation, love, sex, and camaraderie are not shallow indulgences or hedonistic distractions. They are links in the causal chain that allowed minds to come into being. Unlike ascetic and puritanical regimes, humanistic ethics does not second-guess the intrinsic worth of people seeking comfort, pleasure, and fulfillment—if people didn’t seek them, there would be no people. At the same time, evolution guarantees that these desires will work at cross-purposes with each other and with those of other people. Much of what we call wisdom consists in balancing the conflicting desires within ourselves, and much of what we call morality and politics consists in balancing the conflicting desires among people.

This next statement I think reflects how far we have come in the last 50-100-200(?) years. Kind of an Occam's Razor argument.

Even when humanistic movements fortify their goals with the language of rights, the philosophical system justifying those rights must be “thin.” A viable moral philosophy for a cosmopolitan world cannot be constructed from layers of intricate argumentation or rest on deep metaphysical or religious convictions. It must draw on simple, transparent principles that everyone can understand and agree upon. The ideal of human flourishing—that it’s good for people to lead long, healthy, happy, rich, and stimulating lives—is just such a principle, since it is based on nothing more (and nothing less) than our common humanity.

These ideas all seem so easy, so self-evident, don't they? So what opposes them?

The idea that morality consists in the maximization of human flourishing clashes with two perennially seductive alternatives. The first is theistic morality: the idea that morality consists in obeying the dictates of a deity, which are enforced by supernatural reward and punishment in this world or in an afterlife. The second is romantic heroism: the idea that morality consists in the purity, authenticity, and greatness of an individual or a nation. Though romantic heroism was first articulated in the 19th century, it may be found in a family of newly influential movements, including authoritarian populism, neo-fascism, neo-reaction, and the alt-right.

Hah, reading the 2nd part above, I read "manly" instead of "newly". An insightful slip. I do indeed possess a Y chromosome, and, as such, grew up imagining heroism, valor, strife, slaying dragons, and rescuing maidens (who of course were greatly appreciative). Then, I became an adult, and having to actually be responsible and raise 4 children pushed these to a far back burner. I'm sure they were/are still going great guns in my subconscious.

Over the last few years I have occasionally engaged (for as long as I can stomach) with RWNJ/libertarian gunophiles, mostly on FaceBook. I have concluded that many of them are still immersed in fantasies of, with their incredibly fabulous and sexy gun collections, protecting white women, who will of course be so grateful, from the ravening, raping hordes of black-and-brown-skinned subhumans. So the curse of "romantic heroism" is still gumming up the works.

A final argument for humanism:

The Euthyphro argument puts the lie to the common claim that atheism consigns us to a moral relativism in which everyone can do his own thing. The claim gets it backwards. A humanistic morality rests on the universal bedrock of reason and human interests: it’s an inescapable feature of the human condition that we’re all better off if we help each other and refrain from hurting each other. For this reason many contemporary philosophers, including Nagel, Goldstein, Peter Singer, Peter Railton, Richard Boyd, David Brink, and Derek Parfit, are moral realists (the opposite of relativists), arguing that moral statements may be objectively true or false. It’s religion that is inherently relativistic. Given the absence of evidence, any belief in how many deities there are, who are their earthly prophets and messiahs, and what they demand of us can depend only on the parochial dogmas of one’s tribe.

Our new word for the day: necrometrician, presumably a statistician who studies the statistics of death.

So many inspirational thoughts, I will let Pinker conclude with the last 3 paragraphs of the book:

We will never have a perfect world, and it would be dangerous to seek one. But there is no limit to the betterments we can attain if we continue to apply knowledge to enhance human flourishing.

This heroic story is not just another myth. Myths are fictions, but this one is true—true to the best of our knowledge, which is the only truth we can have. We believe it because we have reasons to believe it. As we learn more, we can show which parts of the story continue to be true, and which ones false—as any of them might be, and any could become.

And the story belongs not to any tribe but to all of humanity—to any sentient creature with the power of reason and the urge to persist in its being. For it requires only the convictions that life is better than death, health is better than sickness, abundance is better than want, freedom is better than coercion, happiness is better than suffering, and knowledge is better than superstition and ignorance.

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There is so much good information and so much good news in this book. A few times, yes, the words "Polyanna" or "Pangloss" came to mind, but, that is kind of the point of the book. Given that there is a $B industry out there dedicated to spreading bad news, fear, and anger, a little tilt towards the side of good news is a welcome change.

It is an easy and fun read, please put it on your to-read list. Bill Gates will give you a free Microsoft product! (Just kidding).

You knew it would come sooner or later. Here it is. I love this band, which McCartney has been playing with for the last couple of decades.