What causes today’s popular skepticism of increasing human welfare?

Today’s Post

Last week we saw how Steven Pinker (‘Enlightenment Now”) identified three ways in which a current of pessimism flows through contemporary Western culture.

This week we will take a look at the remaining two.

Two More ‘Modes of Pessimism’

The ‘Wisdom of Pessimism’ – Pinker notes that throughout history, “pessimism has been equated with moral seriousness”.  This can be seen, for example, in the Hebrew prophets who “blended their social criticism with warnings of disaster”.  The best way to be perceived as a prophet, it seems, is to predict the worse, because there’s always something happening somewhere to confirm the prediction.

Pinker also notes that “Intellectuals know they can attain instant gravitas by pointing to an unsolved problem and theorizing that it is a symptom of a sick society.”  As we saw last week, the affluence of the Graham family (and many Evangelicals like them) is testimony to how financially successful this strategy can be.

Not that pessimism is all bad.   The fact that there are more of us concerned about harms that would have been overlooked in more callous times, itself contributes to the increase in human welfare which Norberg documents in such detail.  The danger that Pinker sees is that

“…as we care more about humanity, we’re apt to mistake the harms around us for signs of how low the world has sunk rather than how high our standards have risen”.

   The ‘high’ of Indignation – This last example comes not from Pinker but from recent studies in which brain activity was recorded under different stimuli.  In these studies, the researchers were able to identify which part of the brain ‘lit up’ with different activities.  They noted that when a person was shown information that made them indignant, the same part of the brain responded as when they ate chocolate.  It turns out that being indignant releases the same kind of endorphins, a substance which increases pleasure, as eating chocolate.  In a nutshell, indignation feels good.  As my old supervisor at the ‘Bomber Plant’ used to say, “Indignation is the balm that soothes the pain of inadequacy.”

These examples show the difficulty of developing the skill of using the neocortex brain as a mediator to the instinctual fears that we have inherited from our evolutional ancestors.  It’s not that the fears are necessarily inappropriate, but that an intellectual context, a ‘hermeneutic’ is needed to provide a compass for navigating them.

Teilhard believed that to the extent that we lose confidence in the future, we will be unable to  successfully navigate our evolution on its path of ‘rising complexity’ which leads to ‘greater consciousness’ and hence leads to ‘more completeness’.

The Next Post

This week we completed a brief summary of Steven Pinker’s insights, following Norberg and Teilhard, which address our seeming reluctance to acknowledge the fruits of human evolution.  In Pinker’s words (summarizing Norberg)

“The world has made spectacular progress in every single measure of human well-being”

   But, he goes on to note that

“Almost no one knows about it.”

   The fact that there clearly exists such a plethora of ‘fruits’ (as well documented by Norberg) at the same time that acknowledgement of them seems so scarce presents us with yet another ‘duality’.  When Teilhard focusses his lens on what he considers to be the risks to the continuation of evolution in the human, he rates such duality high on the list.

Next week we will address risks to this continuation and take another look at Teilhard’s concerns.