For reasons I don’t really understand, Steve Pinker gets piled on when he claims, correctly, that humanity has made both material and moral progress in the last eight centuries or so. But there seems to be a group of miscreants who think that they’d be better off in the 13th century and were devout Christians, obeying religious dicta. This is not only wrong but stupid. If they returned to the times they tout, they’d most likely be living in filth, ridden with maladies, not be able to read or write, and, finally, would die at about 30 from a tooth abscess.
But they were religious! The absence of faith is the latest argument for the failure of modernity. Material progress and improvements in health, so it’s said, have left humanity only with that damn “god-shaped hole”. Despite our higher well being, it’s said, we are still bereft, yearning for a god. Although you can have your modernity and gods too, somehow these advocates of material regression think that the benefits of modernity have in fact produced that god-shaped hole by distorting our values, and we need to get back to Christianity (they never mention the other religions).
One of the biggest advocates of the god-shaped-hole (henceforth GSH) hypothesis is Paul Kingsnorth, an English writer who penned a dreadful article in the Free Press along the lines above, called “How the West lost its soul“. Kingsnorth argued that only religion (preferably Christianity, though he mentions others) can save us from the malaise caused by the lack of religion. The Enlightenment, he says, has failed, and so, lacking a morality that cannot exist without religion, we tack our way through life without spiritual mooring.
This is nonsense, as I argued here on October 13 (see also here). And now Steve Pinker and Marian L. Tupy (the latter described as “the founder and editor of HumanProgress.org, and a senior fellow at the Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity“) have taken Kingsnorth’s thesis apart, showing both the benefits of progress that came from the Enlightenment as well as the failure of religion to forge a workable morality. The resurgence of “Christian nationalism” in America, they argue, has only brought back the old morality that impeded progress.
You can read their piece by clicking below (if you subscribe, for it isn’t archived):
First, though, look how the Free Press‘s author Freya Sanders introduces the piece by Pinker and Tupy (henceforth P&T). The bolding is mine:
We write about this a lot here at The Free Press—about how phones have robbed kids of their childhoods and how young people think corporate jobs are pointless. Paul Kingsnorth argued earlier this year that when people in the West stopped going to church, “the vacuum was filled by the poison gas of consumer capitalism.” TikTok is warping our moral codes, and porn has ruined our sex lives. People are depressed, nihilistic, and increasingly illiterate.
What’s the answer? God, according to a lot of people. There has been a boom in religiosity across the West. We’ve published a lot about that, too—about how Americans are flocking to podcasts and apps that teach them about scripture; how young people are getting baptized in record numbers, or traveling to France to go on a pilgrimage; and how female Catholics are bringing back chapel veils because they want to connect to a “lost type of Catholicism.”
But in certain corners of the intellectual right, the idea that life was better in the good old days has intensified into a longing for—of all social orders—medieval Christendom. There are calls to replace American democracy with a monarchy. To make our laws and lawmakers more Christian. When Tucker Carlson says feudalism sounds good, you know things have gone too far!
So we’re glad to present the opposing view today, in the form of an essay by Steven Pinker and Marian L. Tupy—who believe that we are alive at the best possible time to be human: right now. And we don’t need the Bible to have a moral code, because we have a secular one that is the reason for all human flourishing: the set of ideas we refer to as Enlightenment ideals. They are the ideas America is built on. And they are written into the Constitution, right next to God.
America has always been a negotiation between reason and faith. Right now, the negotiation is fierce. We’re proud to publish arguments on both sides of it—including this thought-provoking essay. Don’t miss it.
This is disingenuous. Note that Sander says, “we’ve published a lot” about the “boom in religiosity” and the need for God. Indeed they have, but the P&T piece is really the only humanistic attack on religion that I’ve seen on the site. The fact is that the Free Press is always banging on about religion and its virtues (Bari Weiss is, a Jew who, I think, believes in a higher power), and I think they published this just to show that the venue does indeed publish a variety of opinions, thus being “objective”. (It also has some well known and eloquent authors) But so far it’s been about ten pro-religion articles to this single dissent, so I call that ratio slanted journalism.
But onward and upward, for this piece is a good palliative for all the Free Press‘s god-touting. P&T begin by describing how conservatism has brought us back longing for the good old days when Christianity ruled the West. They explicitly single out Kingsnorth’s article, for these two men have written a long rebuttal. In the introduction, they obliquely criticize the Free Press, too:
Of course, humanity has already tried monarchy and theocracy—during the Middle Ages—and sure enough, some of the new reactionaries are saying that those times were not so bad after all. Dreher writes admiringly: “In the mind of medieval Christendom, the spirit world and the material world penetrated each other. . . . Men construed reality in a way that empowered them to harmonize everything conceptually and find meaning amid the chaos.”
Other influential conservatives go further in justifying medieval hierarchies. On his eponymous show, Tucker Carlson recently declared: “Feudalism is so much better than what we have now. Because at least in feudalism, the leader is vested in the prosperity of the people he rules.”
And The Free Press recently showcased a full-strength expression of pre-Enlightenment nostalgia in an essay by Paul Kingsnorth called “How the West Lost Its Soul” (an excerpt of his book Against the Machine).
According to Kingsnorth, Western civilization has lost the sacred story that sustained it for 1,500 years: Christianity. The story begins with the Garden of Eden, where humanity chose knowledge over communion with God, which led to exile and suffering, though with a path to salvation through belief in a grisly human sacrifice and a miraculous resurrection. For centuries, “the mythic vision of medieval Christendom” offered people meaning and morality, writes Kingsnorth. But starting with the Enlightenment, and accelerating in the 1960s, it gave way to a “partial, empty, and over-rational humanism,” leaving societies spiritually adrift. With sustaining myths gone and no shared higher purpose, Westerners now live amid “ruins.”
The Free Press introduction captures the contrast starkly: “Conventional wisdom insists that technology has made life better,” whereas the abandonment of the religious story has left us with “a complete lack of meaning.”
I don’t want to reproduce huge portions of the article here, and since it’s not archived, you won’t be able to read it if you don’t subscribe (I suggest you do, if only for Nellie Bowle’s weekly “TGIF” column. Or perhaps judicious inquiry will yield a copy. But I am excerpting more than normal for those who can’t access the piece.
Here are the areas that P&T consider, with excerpts (indented) and perhaps a few words (mine flush left) on each.
Well being and morality. In a section called “knowledge is more meaningful than ignorance and superstition,” P&T argue that religion did not improve people’s well being in the old days, but simply justified bad stuff. They argue that humanism provides a better grounding for morality than does religion, and who would argue otherwise? After all, even religious people pick and choose their Biblical morality, implicitly assuming that things are good because God approves only of what is good, implying that the “good” pre-dates the pronouncements of God. Quotes (all indented):
It’s said that the best explanation for the good old days is a bad memory, and the historical amnesia of the romanticizers of medieval Christendom is near-complete. Among the blessings of modernity is an Everest of data about life in the past, painstakingly collected by economic historians from original sources over many decades. This quantitative scholarship circumvents fruitless back-and-forth about whether the Dark Ages were really all that dark: We can go to the numbers.
In this essay we will show how the reaction against modernity has it backward. Before the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and the resulting “Great Enrichment,” life in the West was characterized for most people not by meaning and morality but by ignorance, cruelty, and squalor. Today we are blessed not just with prosperity and its underappreciated gifts, but with a robust moral mission—one that is grounded in our best understanding of reality, and the indisputable goal of reducing suffering and improving flourishing. Meaning comes from reason and well-being, not scripture and salvation; from governance with the consent of the governed, not rule by kings and clergymen.
, , ,the popular canard among theoconservatives is that religion is the only conceivable source of morality, and so a secular society must be mired in selfishness, relativism, and nihilism. Kingsnorth, for example, favorably cites the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre’s diagnosis that the Enlightenment left us with a morality that, “loosed from theology,” consists of “nothing more than [an] individual’s personal judgment.”
The dismissal is breathtaking.
The Enlightenment project of grounding morality in reason and well-being left us with a coherent fabric of arguments against the brutality and injustice that had been ubiquitous in human history. These arguments became the foundation of civilized society
Barbarism and immorality. P&T show that “premodern Christianism was not moral, but barbaric.” Again, what rational person could doubt that?
In contrast to the Enlightenment’s exaltation of universal well-being, the morality of holy scriptures was dubious at best. The God of the Old Testament prescribed the death penalty for blasphemy, idolatry, homosexuality, adultery, disobedience, and working on the Sabbath, while finding nothing particularly wrong with slavery, rape, torture, mutilation, and genocide. Indeed, he commanded the Israelites to commit all of these against their enemies.
Whatever humane advances we might attribute to Jesus, his followers did not adopt them for an awfully long time. For some 1,400 years that separated Constantine’s embrace of Christianity in the early 4th century to the rise of the Enlightenment in the 18th, most Christians remained untroubled by slavery, the persecution of heretics, and brutal colonial conquest.
The point about the delay in adopting “Christian humane advances” is a good one. If Christianity causes moral improvement, why did it take millennia for this to get going?
“Health and prosperity are more meaningful than starvation and squalor”. Steve has argued this clearly in two books (Better Angels and Enlightenment Now), and surely Tupy—whose work I don’t know—has made similar claims. I’d love to ask people like Kingsnorth if they’d rather live in medieval Europe or in modern Scandinavia. If they accepted Rawls’s “veil of ignorance” and had to be embodied in a random person, they’d surely choose the latter.
Westerners have been complaining about how wealth causes moral decline for millennia. Few of the complainants have reflected on how it was wealth that gave them the luxury to complain about that wealth. Their contemporaries who died in childbirth, or whose lives were wracked with hunger, pain, and disease, were not as lucky. The vanquishing of early death, propelled not by prayer but knowledge, may be humanity’s greatest moral triumph.
Some numbers can shake us out of this spoiled complacency. (For sources, see our respective books Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know and Enlightenment Now.) In 1800, the European life expectancy was 33 years; today, it is 79 years—which means that we have been granted not just extra life, but an extra life. Much of that gift came from leaps in prosperity that spared the lives of children. Before the turn of the 20th century, a third to a half of European children perished before their 5th birthday. Today that fate befalls three-tenths of one percent. Even the poorest countries today lose a fraction of the children that Europe did until recently. If being spared the agony of losing a child is not “meaningful,” what is?
Children who survived often faced orphanhood, hunger, parasites, workhouses, and beatings. Famines, which could kill a quarter of the population, recurred around once a decade. Today, starvation in much of the world has given way to obesity. It is easy to condemn gluttony, but searching for life’s meaning is surely easier on a full stomach.
Christianity comes with antisemitism. P&T argue that the hegemony of Christianity both in older times and now is inevitably accompanied by a rise in antisemitism, for if you embrace “Christian values”, you perforce see Jews, who supposedly killed Christ and cannot get to heaven by accepting Jesus, as being “anti-moral.” This, too, appears to be the sentiments of modern Christian nationalists, but is dispelled by secular humanism:
[Yoram] Hazony said: “All the classical questions of: Why is the Old Testament in the Christian Bible? What are we supposed to get out of it? Do the Jews have any role in history at all, or was it just supposed to have ended?—all of those questions are on the table.” It’s notable that Kingsnorth, in his essay railing against modernity, consistently cites the Christian, never the “Judeo-Christian,” tradition.
America was founded on the secular Enlightenment principles of equality, rights, flourishing, and democratic governance. It’s no coincidence that Jews thrived here. Nor can it be a coincidence that a movement founded on parochial Christian theocracy would be accompanied by a recrudescence of the world’s oldest hatred.
In the end, I am both amazed and amused at people like Kingsnorth who long for the good old days when people embraced Christianity and thus were both moral and fulfilled. There were no god-shaped holes then. But, given a choice of living then and now, I’m sure that all the Christian luddites would choose to live now. As for the god-shaped hole, all I can say is that many people, including me, don’t have one. Our lives get meaning not from embracing Jesus, but from whatever we find fulfilling: friends, loved ones, and family, work, hobbies, and so on. True, some people will always glom onto faith because it’s so easy: all you have to do is go to a church and you get a preexisting set of beliefs, friends and supporters. But people like me simply can’t believe in god if there’s no evidence for god.
In their last section, called “Modernity is not a ruin”, P&T reprise their argument, and I’ll give a longer bit:
the 21st century, with all its woes, is a better time to live than any time before. Extreme poverty, child and maternal mortality, illiteracy, tyranny, violent crime, and war deaths are lower than in any previous century. The wealth that theoconservatives find so corrosive funds the education and leisure that allow individuals to contemplate meaning, whether it be in work, family, community, nature, science, sport, art, or yes, religion. Another gift of modernity is that people are not burned alive for their beliefs but allowed to hold whichever ones they find meaningful.
It’s sometimes claimed that for all these opportunities, people today are suffering from a new “crisis of meaning.” Here again we shouldn’t confuse nostalgia with fact. Illiterate medieval peasants left us with no records of how meaningful they thought their lives were. As the historian Eleanor Janega points out, they themselves thought they were living in a time of decline, and “they were rebelling constantly.”
When we ask people about their lives today, their own judgments belie any narrative of decadence and decay. Global surveys find that it’s the richest and freest countries, not the backward theocracies, in which people express the greatest satisfaction with their lives. Pathologies like homicide, incarceration, child mortality, educational mediocrity, and premature death are more common in the more religious countries and American states than the more secular ones.
People also express their conception of a better life by voting with their feet. In 2020, of the 281 million who moved to another country, 232 million of them sought a better life in high-income, increasingly secular countries, particularly in Europe and North America. Today’s reactionaries can’t have it both ways, asserting that the affluent secular West is a decadent ruin while fending off the millions of people from poorer and more religious countries who risk their lives to get in.
And if people voted with their hands and had a time machine, they’d surely set it for now instead of 1350.
What religionists, and I suppose many others, don’t understand is that Counter-Enlightenment forces have been trying to prevent the success of the Enlightenment since the beginning. Christianity is one of these, with its appeal to authority and submission rather than reason and facts. Marxism and its myrmidons is another with its complete rejection of the Bourgeois superstructure of Capitalism and its championing of relativity. Turning away from both of these would put us on the right course. Going back isn’t an option.
The Two Cultures
C. P. Snow
1959
Plus 100 for “myrmidons” 🔥
I think it needs to be emphasized that in Enlightenment Now! there is no Gnostic prison, no directed 🚩transformation🚩 of society. That would be an eschatological / Hermetic religious project that perfects humanity towards a final state of Wholeness or Oneness. But it is easy to map that onto what Pinker is laying out in that book. I think Christians especially pick that up on their radar, because they are attuned to *cult heresies and New Age religions.
Pinker has also said [total paraphrase here plus IMHO] the Enlightenment (or IMHO perhaps more accurately Scottish Enlightenment / Common Sense Realism ) is not some sort of perpetuum mobile but can recede at times – or make giant steps. Point being, someone needs to be preserving the flame – it won’t Enlighten by itself. And neither it nor humans are gods (see *above).
BTW in case nobody knows, Tucker Carlson is a good example of Woke Right – transgressing principles in principle – the modus operandi of … take a guess ….
Queer Theory.
Many such examples.
Why 1350? What about pre-christian Rome? That sounds like a fun time – baths, wine, chariot races, gladiator shows, conquests, glory, great architecture etc. And lots of gods! No holes there.
See “What have the Romans ever done for us?” for a further list.
Comment by Greg Mayer
While Gibbon and Monty Python have highlighted the good side of the Roman Empire, you’d really want to be a modestly-upper class Roman citizen to get the benefits. (Too upper class and someone would be gunning for you.) With a Rawlsian veil of ignorance, you wouldn’t want to live then– you might turn out to be a gladiatorial practice slave!
GCM
Yes but at least there were no god-shaped holes! Lots of gods to choose from.
Comment by Greg Mayer
Yes– gods galore!
GCM
Gotta love those Medieval practices. The Inquisition was a great time to be alive. I miss those heady days.
And what about those plagues, and complete lack of things like spectacles, or multiple pairs of trousers (read Pinker’s book for that one). Oh, those were the days!
The religious have a reason-shaped hole. Thoughtful religious people have quiet moments of doubt that are powerful and very disconcerting. Filling the GSH with a religion allows the gaping chasm of the reason-shaped hole to haunt them throughout their lives.
“Before the turn of the 20th century, a third to a half of European children perished before their 5th birthday.”
This is an astounding stat. Imagine you have a two year old and you throw a birthday party for her and her little mates. 20 kids total. But with medieval death rates, only 10 of those kids make it past 5. If you were close to those parents, you would have attended all of those funerals. Apparently this is something we need to return to???
Here in Iowa, every “pioneer cemetery” has 19th-century gravestones that simply read “Infant”, or even “Infants”(!). I can show you photos. Funerals for all of them? They didn’t even get names. Why bother making the investment?
Nope, I don’t want to go back to that “simpler time”.
In my wife’s genealogical research she found that it was not uncommon (in the 1800s) for there to be more than one child of the same Christian name in a family. A child might be named ‘George’ for example, only to die in infancy, and so a later baby boy would be named ‘George’ too.
The Enlightenment scholar Reimarus (pioneer of Biblical criticism) observed that in large towns, only a third of children reached the age of ten. He reasoned that whatever God’s designs were, it was unimportant to him that humans could understand revealed religion.
Every literate person has read about the death of children in famous families of the
past—Jefferson, Lincoln, Dickens, Longfellow, Darwin, Dvorak, Mahler—yet, inexplicably, few
connect the dots. Those who sentimentalize pre-modern life sure don’t.
Our host notes, “I’d love to ask people like Kingsnorth if they’d rather live in medieval Europe or in modern Scandinavia. If they accepted Rawls’s “veil of ignorance” and had to be embodied in a random person, they’d surely choose the latter.”
I think an underappreciated feature of the veil of ignorance is that a person chosen at random from among all people who lived between say 1000 and 2025 is very likely to have lived since 1750 with at least some of the benefits of Enlightenment values and the technology those values nurtured. The evidence that human life is better is that there is so much more human life. Not all the second-order effects of that are good, but it’s still good.
The expropriation of the Hebrew Bible was the second theft of fledgling Christianity–the other being Platonic and Neo-Platonic mysticism. I needed a citation the other day for ‘a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief.’ Thought it was the prophet Isaiah but paused to look it up online anyway. It was (Isaiah 53:3), according to the very first entry on the page–with an accompanying drawing of the crucified Jesus.
Too often, it seems to me, the thief comes to hate the victim of the larceny.
I expect the debate would be clearer if we discussed a “Comfort Shaped Hole”.
The hole might be filled by belief in god(s), or political beliefs, or ideological concerns – but in each case you might reasonably ask if the comfort provided was backed by reality or was just wishful thinking.
If God is real and happily reveals himself and his laws, then why in the world would anyone choose Christianity – among the last religions invented – to fill a “God-shaped hole”?
Evidently, God revealed himself to the Sumerians over 5000 years ago, and his name is An. He’s got dibs.
I don’t doubt that Pinker is right about things having grown immeasurably better. However, if you did have a time machine and could chose when you lived, that would include the future. Would you choose to live now or at some time in the future when all the improvements in life could be undone by some existential disaster?
Gareth, for what it’s worth, I would recommend reading David Deutsch on the human ability to solve problems. I can’t remember the exact name of the title, but it does have the word “infinity” in it. It might be The Beginning of Infinity..
While I’m complete agreement with Pinker’s overall claim; we really are living in Golden Age, at least in comparison to even the recent past, there’s a part of me that is very afraid for the future.
I can’t help thinking we’ve slipped. That at least some of hopefulness of the late 20th, women’s, gay, and civil rights, etc, have been eroded by the new hate. Wokeness and DEI have dialed back our progress on race and sex. While it might have been expected that the improvements in our rights would make it a more congenial place, instead I find myself in a land where 340 million people hate each other. We’ve known for decades that the climate was changing, that we are responsible and we knew what to about it. But we did nothing. In fact, it’s only gotten worse. Our political system is beyond repair; it was a clever idea and I value much of it (the first amendment is the crowning piece; it is why we have our rights and freedoms) but it was designed for a world that doesn’t exist anymore. So now we have governance in a race to the sewer. The old scourge of antisemitism has reared it’s head and another Auschwitz is on its way. It’s true that we are healthy and no longer living in squalor, but no one can deny that many of the benefits of the Golden Age- owning a home, affordable education and health care- are eroding at an alarming and, I fear, unstoppable rate.
This article could only have been written because things are slipping. I know a solution is to keep fighting.
I guess I’m saying, yeah Pinker’s right, we ARE living in a Golden Age, and I’m glad of it. And those people who think any part of life was better in the olden days are badly deluded. But this Age has fragility – soft under bellies- that we are severely testing and I’m afraid it is mortally wounded. The human species will last far longer than civilization. We are, after all, just naked monkeys who learned how to make fire.
I’m going to go have an ice cream. I don’t like being a misanthropic olde farte and with a spoon of chocolate ice cream, I can be a hopeful kid again. At least for a time.
That’s an extremely dark vision there, Ed — and you make good points – but I don’t share it.
I guess you’re at least as old as I am – 55 – so you’ll remember last century well.
And.. even without the data and evidence – just in our own lucky circles – life has improved. I was middle class in the 70s and 80s and we live in SUCH a better time now. Despite the protestations of the doomsayers.
Not only financially (and zoomers buy houses at the same rate we did, just a few years later which is prob explained by graduate school being the new university experience), but by other metrics.
Consider all the intellectual property (to wit: WEIT) which is free! All the music and books and movies and stuff that makes life worth living! Last century we had to PAY for all of that.
I feel you might be linking a bunch of legitimately negative things about today into a terrible looking mix – that might be not alligned with objective data.
best regards Ed,
D.A.
NYC
Ha! Yeah. You’re right, I’m being melodramatic. It isn’t really that out of control. It’s time to go anyway. I’ve had enough.
Riddle me this: PCC(E) alludes to it and he is correct – his mate Pinker gets a LOT of flack by just noticing and reporting trendlines and data. Most of them positive (you know his arguments. They are solid as best I can understand.)
He gets so much stick, actually, that he blocks comments on X I’ve noticed. He’s alluded to this in talks.
I don’t understand why…..
Thoughts?
D.A.
NYC
Dopamine and adrenaline.
X is a combat theater most often, and those thrilling and rewarding doses are highly psychologically addictive. Unfortunately, we have at least one generation thoroughly, and a goodly percentage of others, addicted to various platforms and their passive, uninquisitive charms.
I think it’s worse than it used to be. I got interested in the Israel-Palestine issue about a decade ago, and I learned a LOT from scholarly Twitter users who thought clearly and provided relevant references. I don’t see their contributions there anymore.
What I do see is a cesspool of drive-by shootings most often.
If Pinker is right, and that we have a lot to be grateful for in the modern world, the scaffolding supporting the worldview of the woke SJWs collapses. Theirs is a grievance culture, and they do not want to hear that things are pretty good.
Sentimentalizing the age of faith reminds me of a similar practice by the wokerati:
sentimentalizing pre-modern superstitions of indigenous populations, who famously lived “in harmony with nature” and wisely neglected to invent horrors such as the microscope, telescope, sternpost rudder, steam engine, antibiotics, etc. etc. etc. .
If Kingsnorth & co. were fully up on the land acknowledgement spirit, they would add First Nations animism to Christianity in their remedy list. Could that god-shaped hole be really a hole shaped for Raven the Trickster?
+1
And Jesus wept: Oh God i have seen so many examples of the horrendous suffering humans have to endure and i am torn about what to do; for on one hand i know that i could give them the knowledge as to how to make the technology to make the medicines and things that would improve their quality of life and lifespan but i have looked into the future and seen the problems which ever expanding human population could cause around the world in terms of degradation of habitats and biodiversity. Also knowing that you exist beyond the event horizon i realize you will be unable to terminate their lives before they suffer senile dementia and be unable to control their numbers even supernaturally so i am torn what to do.
And God replied, “Just try to give the impression that there is nothing they can do except pray and have faith. That will forestall them for a good many years and save my precious tropical rainforests etc , which i love dearly”
[ Maybe with a better organized civilization it would have been possible to avoid destruction of tropical rainforests etc and sustainable harvesting from them or indeed replanting degraded areas ]
Almost all known species are now extinct. Our species has had a good innings, and we have unique capabilities, but they include capabilities of hastening our own end. The dinosaurs (etc., etc.) had no choice in the matter. We do. We appear to not be choosing wisely.
No need for a Time Machine: The Democratic Republic of the Congo is 95% Christian at the present time.
The assertion by Tucker Carlson that “in feudalism, the leader is vested in the prosperity of the people he rules” is just one of these beyond stupid assertions that I would never think someone would utter with any seriousness.
“But onward and upward” – Churchill or Lewis?
Once you have read The Iliad and The Odyssey you will know why I vote for the Olympian pantheon of gods. Gods with human failings! Gods who descend to earth and mess with us all the time! Best of all, you worship by barbecuing a fat lamb. Why on earth would someone propose that a return to medieval Christianity is preferable?
It is very hard to disagree with Steve Pinker’s well documented improvement in lifestyles over the centuries.
Where I would want to push back, slightly, is that this might be more fragile than he thinks. There are two threats to continuing long term progress. Capitalism has become so bloated that its seams seem to be bursting under its gouty, gluttonous, internal pressures. Part of the current perception of living through bad times is the continuing cost of living crisis. People seem to be very accepting about inequality, as long as they see their own lives improving. Unfortunately, this seems to have stagnated, or is in reverse, while there are billionaires who could wipe out the national debt of significantly sized countries with the equivalent of the spare change in their back pockets. The cost of living crisis, I suspect, is why there is so much heightened political instability, and why people, bizarrely, think disrupters like Trump, and Farage, will upend the system in their favour. But of course right-wingers like Trump will only upend the system in their own favour. My guess is that Pinker will think that this crisis is a temporary hiccup in the general trend towards societal and cultural enlightenment and improvement. How this problem will play out is anyone’s guess, but in the great scheme of things he is probably right, even in the extreme case of a new American civil war, this would, one day, end and pass into history, by which time stability would have been restored.
For me, the greater obstacle to stability, and even our survival, in the very long-term, is nuclear proliferation. I’ve read that species should expect to live for about a million years. An intelligent, technologically advanced one, like ours, one would reasonably think, should be expected to survive much longer. To do so it must arguably avoid – at least a major – thermo-nuclear war, whether it happens by design or by accident. Here’s a quote from A C Grayling writing in 2006:
“Not only were they [nuclear weapons] used against the civilians of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but they have held the world to ransom since, and it is only a matter of time before such a weapon is used – experts on conflict say: at the minimum either by terrorists, or in a regional war in (for example) south or east Asia.”
Today the threat seems a lot more pressing, and potentially local, to those of us living in the west.
This very long-term perspective, which as a species of animal, I think, we should at least consider, leads to questions about human future evolution. I’m not sure Steve Pinker agrees, but I think there are reasons to think that our species is evolving by natural selection to be less warlike, and perhaps more placid. But now I’m at risk of going off topic.
There’s no way, no way a loving god has ever existed. No way, open your eyes people, the proof is right in front of your face.