Today’s Post

Last week we took a first look at why pessimism over human progress (entitled ‘progressiphobai’ by Steven Pinker in his book, “Enlightenment Now”) seems so entrenched in the West, particularly among those comfortable, secure, educated individuals who are unable to project their personal well-being into optimism about their future.
This week, staying with Pinker, we will take a look at several reasons why such a fear of the future might be at the root of this ‘progressiphobia’.

Pinker’s  List

   Pinker identifies several phenomena at work in Western society that contribute to such a notable lack of trust in our future.

Ubiquity of News – We are immersed in news in a way which is truly unprecedented.  Thanks to technology, we receive it not only in ‘real time’ but in unprecedented volume.   As Pinker observes:

“Whether or not the world really is getting worse, the nature of news will interact with the nature of cognition to make us think that it is.”

     And not only does immediate news sell, negative news sells better than positive news, resulting in negative slant.  Pinker cites a survey showing a ‘negative count’ in the New York Times from 1945 to 2015, in which the use of negative terms in news articles shows a distinctive increase.

In addition to the financial desire to ‘sell’, the competition between paper and electronic media is also raising the stakes.

   While the result of such a plethora of information might be seen as simply leaving us ‘better informed’, it can also be seen as leaving us ‘miscalibrated’  For example, we worry more about crime even as crime rates are falling.  As Pinker points out, such information can “part company with reality altogether”.   He cites a 2016 American poll in which

“77% agreed that “Islamic militants operating in Syria …pose a serious threat to the existence and survival of the United States.””

  Pinker notes that such an opinion is not only an example of ‘miscalibration’, it is “nothing short of delusional”.

The Negativity Bias – As we have seen in the above examples, such pessimism isn’t just due to skepticism about the data, but suggests an ‘unpreparedness’ for the possibility that the human condition is improving.  This is sort of a ‘human original sin’, in which it is easier for humans to imagine a future in which their life is degraded by violence, illness, poverty, loss of loved ones or a nearly endless list of woes than it is to imagine it as uplifted, their lot improved, their relationships deepened, or their future brighter than their past.

One reason for such bias is the simple fact that our lower brains continue to stimulate us with the basic urges common to our ancestors, such as fight or flight, hunger, anger or other ‘base instincts’ so necessary for their survival.  Just because evolution has endowed us with a neocortex brain capable of rationally dealing with such instincts (“am I really threatened?”) doesn’t mean that the limbic and reptilian brains cease to function.

It also doesn’t mean that our skill of using the neocortex has reached maturity.  Teilhard notes that humanity is still in the early stages of its evolution, considering that if universal evolution was captured in a thousand pages, the appearance of the human would not occur until the bottom of the last page.  Just as he envisions the first, most primitive cell emerging in evolution “dripping in molecularity”, he also sees humanity still in a stage which is ‘dripping’ with ‘animality’, and very much influenced by the instinctual stimuli which served our ancestors so well.

The Illusions of Maturity – As Pinker sees it, we tend to “mistake the growing burdens of maturity, wage-earning and parenthood for a less innocent world”.  Along these same lines, as we age we also have a tendency to “mistake a decline in our faculties for a decline in the times”.  As the columnist Franklin Pierce Adams pointed out

“Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory.”

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 to confirm the prediction, somewhere.

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 tbat “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”.

Human Neurology – 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.  This suggests that indignation, a state of anger which the person feels is justified, can set off a reaction in the brain which is registered as ‘pleasure’.  It turns out that being indignant releases the same kind of endorphins 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.”

The Next Post

This week we completed a brief summary of Steven Pinker’s observations of our seeming reluctance to acknowledge the fruits of human evolution.  In Pinker’s words

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

   But, he goes on

“Almost no one knows about it.”

   The fact that there clearly exists such a plethora of ‘fruits’ (well documented by Norberg), at the same time that acknowledgement of them seems so scarce presents us with yet another ‘duality’.  When Teilhard addresses 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.