By Steven Pinker (2018)
Allan Lane, imprint of Penguin Books, 452 pages

Terror attacks, droughts and civil wars could easily make us depressed and it is easy to think that everything was better in the past.

Steven Pinker, evolutionary psychologist and professor of psychology at Harvard, is one of the voices that claim the opposite. He has already demonstrated how much less violent our world is in the book  Better Angels of our nature (2011).

In Enlightenment Now, the case for reason science, humanism and progress,  Pinker shows how the world has improved the last 200 years, how the ideals of the Enlightenment caused this progress, and how we can maintain our course for the future.

Overdramatic world view

Pinker argues that we should not have too much faith in the news. Media focus on negative events, we overestimate this and larger picture gets unnoticed. We are not as rational as we would like to be, and a combination of this, lack of information and different cognitive biases leads to an overdramatic world view.

The middle part of the book is a thorough account for how the world has improved in almost every possible way. Topics such as average life span, happiness, economic wealth, health access to food, medicine, war, inequality, peace, safety, education, gender equality, and democracy is given a separate chapter each. You could read these topics chronologically, but you could equally also read them in any order you like.
 
The share of people living in extreme poverty was about 90% not even 200 years ago. The percentage of people in extreme poverty has been dramatically reduced since then, the absolute number has been more than halved since the 1970s. Despite that the world population has increased from 3,7 billion to 7,3 billion! The share of people living in extreme poverty is now less than 10%!
Max Roser, economist at the University of Oxford and founder of Our World in Data, has been quoted saying that the news papers could have run the following headline:The number of people in extreme poverty has been reduced by 137 000 since yesterday! every day the last 25 years.

The impression that the world was a much better place is therefore not just a misunderstanding, but a fundamentally wrong view of the world.
There can be no question of which was the greatest era for culture; the answer has to be today, until it is superseded by tomorrow. 

Climate crisis

Even if Pinker wants to show how the world has moved forward and is much better today he does not trivialize the challenges we are facing with the climate crisis. He means that this crisis should be dealt with using the tools weve inherited from The Enlightenment. The climate crisis is a global problem we have never encountered before. An increase in greenhouse gases like carbondioxide and methane leads to increased ocean levels, more extreme weather, droughts some places and more flooding in other locations. Which in turn can lead to failed crops. National and international crisis follows. To stay within the 2-degree goal the amount of greenhouse gas has to be reduced to at least half within this century and by much more within the next.
 

Connection between energy production and progress

Today we get about 86% of our energy production from fossil fuels. The majority of our energy use goes to heavy industry, transportation, buildings and agriculture. Needless to say, ridding the world of fossil fuels a monumental task.

Energy channeled by knowledge is the elixir with which we stave off entropy, and advances in energy capture are advances in human destiny. 

Pinker makes a valid point when he claims that this is nothing we can fix just by recycling our garbage and eat organic food, which uses a much larger area of land mass than intensive agriculture. A main part of the climate crisis is that it is a tragedy of the commons. It is a global problem and needs to be solved globally. And not by reducing our use of energy. An often overlooked problem is that reducing poverty, increased education, better health care and all other fruits of progress requires vast amounts of energy. The solution of the climate crisis cannot therefore be cutting the use of energy to start with. Even if renewable energy sources have a certain potential they are simply not ready to replace fossil fuels just yet.

Nuclear power as the solution to the climate crisis

Nuclear power has no carbon footprint what so ever. Besides the process of building the power plant itself. The exhaust coming from nuclear power plants is pure water vapor. Nuclear power has had extremely few deaths and there is no pollution to speak of. Fossil fuels are responsible for approximately 1 million deaths per year. When you compare number of deaths by the different energy sources nuclear power is by far the safest!

Pinker basically shows how fossil energy production is far worse for human suffering, death, and the climate crisis than nuclear power is. Compared to fossil fuels this should be a no brainer. He concludes therefore that we should shut down coal plants and build a lot more nuclear plants. Not the other way around like a lot of countries like Germany, India and China does today.

Secular humanism

Towards the end of the book Pinker talks about reason, science and humanism and what threatens these values. He shows that when people of very different background sits down to make common rules they very often end up with a form of secular humanism. The most known examples are the American declaration of independence and the UN declaration of human rights. It is Pinkers opinion that a humanistic moral, that you get from UN declaration of Human Rights, should be the guiding moral for the development of society. And to be clear he does not imply atheistic humanism exclusively. All forms of liberal humanism whether it is in the cloak of a lutheran, muslim, or buddist is a part of this larger concept of humanism.

 

Warning of all forms of extremism

Pinker warns us about right wing extremism, left wing communist romantisism and Islamic extremism. All three political ideologies have millions of deaths on their conscience, and they struggle towards a eutopian world. Together with populism and nasjonalism they threaten to dismantle the stabile institutions weve had in place since world war two. 

Any jackass can kick down a barn, but it takes a carpenter to build one. 

Radical change is counter productive according to Pinker. We simply have to do more of what we are already doing. Pinker is probably more positively inclined, without being a naive dreamer.

Progress is not an automatic process and will not happen at the same rate all the time or in all places. But just like weve solved many other problems todays challenges will also be solved. As long as we cherish the values and ideals like reason, science and humanism.
 

Rating: 6/6

473 books left!

#StevenPinker #EnlightenmentNow #bokanmeldelse #bookreview #mementomori #climatechange

“This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war.” 

I recently reread the novel “All Quiet on the western Front” by Erich Maria Remarque, written in 1929. The author served in the german army and was wounded four times during the war.
The book tells the story of the german soldier Paul who enlists together with his friends at the start of World War One. One by one they get killed or maimed and we get a thorough understanding of the horrors of trench warfare. As well as the feeling of powerlessness these men felt. They had no say in the decision in going to war, yet they were the one dying. An entire generation of men were outright killed or maimed. Those who where lucky enough to survive were mentally destroyed during the Great War. In the beginning of the book Paul pictures the war as a boyish adventure almost. But he quickly changes as he gets more experience. Towards the end he is just clinging on to the hope that he might be lucky and survive. 

“Bombardment, barrage, curtain-fire, mines, gas, tanks, machine-guns, hand-grenades – words, words, but they hold the horror of the world.”

The difference between the front lines getting pounded by enemy artillery and the peaceful areas away from the front is astounding. When they are on leave they discribe the distant bombardment almost like a thunderstorm a few miles away. On leave there is a feeling of tranquility and peace. but at the same time a feeling of apprehension because the men knew they would soon be back in the hell hole of the front. Where it was simply a game of chance if you lived or died. 

The chaos of bombardment and charging across a muddy dead-mans-land filled with craters was on the other hand a other worldly experience. Suddendly a soldier could be blown to pieces and his remains splattered all  over his friends. 

“We see men living with their skulls blown open; we see soldiers run with their two feet cut off, they stagger on their splintered stumps into the next shell-hole; a lance-corporal crawls a mile and a half on his hands dragging his smashed knee after him; another goes to the dressing station and over his clasped hands bulge his intestines; we see men without mouths, without jaws, without faces we find one man who has held the artery of his arm in his teeth for two hours in order not to bleed to death (134).”

Why should you read a novel about the experiences of a soldier in WWI?
First of all it is always important to remind ourselves about the horrors of war. We have to do whatever we can to prevent anything like that to ever happen again. There are times war is necessary unfortunately, but we should try every other measure first. 

Secondly I think that knowing about WWI is extremely important because we can still feel its aftermath in Europe, not to mention the Middle East today. The Great War was supposed to be the war to end all wars, which it failed to do. But The Great War did end four empires and laid the foundations for the chaos of the Middle East today. The Russian Empire, the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, The Ottoman Empire and the German Empire were all dismantled as a result of the war. The Balfour Declaration in 1917 laid the foundations for the creation of Israel. 
 

If you would like to listen to a thorough and skillfully told podcast about history I would definitely reccommend Dan Carlins Hardcore History. He has a great series on WWI, which he has called A Blueprint for Armageddon. I cannot reccommend it enough. 

Horrific but a really good book! 
Rating: 6/6

474 books left!

#bokanmeldelse #bookreview #AllQuietOntheWesternFront #WWI #ErichMariaRemarque