Monthly Archives: October 2022

October 27, 2022 – The Causes of Disbelief in Human Evolution

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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.

 

October 20, 2022 – Why Be Pessimistic About Progress?

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Why should so many who profit from progress be so skeptical of it?

Today’s Post 

Last week we began a look at the pessimism that seems to oppose the insight that, as Johan Norberg documents, ‘the world is getting better’.

This week we will look at three of Steven Pinker’s five possible causes of this pessimism.

Modes of Pessimism

Steven Pinker outlines several ‘modes of pessimism’ In his book, “Enlightenment Now”.

   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, but negative news also 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.

Miscalibration – Further, 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’, but also “nothing short of delusional”.

The Negativity Bias– – As 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 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 made brighter than their past.

Effectively, lack of clarity about the past leads to an unpreparedness for the future.

But there’s also a biological factor at work.  One reason for such bias is the simple fact that our ‘lower’ reptilian and limbic brains continue to stimulate our modern neocortex brain 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 200,000 old skill of using the neocortex has reached maturity.  Teilhard notes that humanity is still in the early stages of its evolution. To put it into perspective, if universal evolution was captured in a thousand pages, the appearance of the human would not occur until the bottom three words of the last page.  Hence Teilhard sees humanity still in an evolutionary state very much influenced by the instinctual stimuli which served our ancestors so well.

The Next Post

This week we took note of the first three of Steven Pinker’s ‘modes of pessimism’ which illustrate the currents in contemporary society which reinforce the pessimism common in it.

Next week we will look the remaining two.

October 13, 2022 – With all This Progress, Why All The Pessimism?

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   Why should those who benefit the most from increasing global welfare be most suspicious of it?

Today’s Post

Last week we took a summary look at the statistical data on human progress as a measure of human evolution from Johan Norberg’s book, ‘Progress’, in which we outlined the ways in which evolution can be seen to continue its fourteen billion yea rise in the evolution of the human species.

In doing so, we also saw how such a worldview substantiates Teilhard’s insight that humans can be seen to continue to evolve along the same ‘axis of evolution’ that has been universally followed so far: that of increasing consciousness by way of increasing complexity.

We also noted that despite the sheer volume of data that Norberg provides, and Teilhard’s insight into the energy of evolution that rises within us, ‘conventional wisdom’, as catalogued by many contemporary polls, shows that nearly all those responding to polls are either unaware of this data or disagree with it.  Steven Pinker in his book, “Enlightenment Now”, noting this rising sap of pessimism, sees in it a sort of ‘progressophobia’, particularly strong in the West, that either ignores data such as that provided by Norberg, or rejects it outright.

This week we will take a closer look at this phenomenon.

A Quick Look At The History of Pessimism

Such ‘progressophobia’ isn’t a recent phenomenon. For example, pessimists have always been able to find a basis for their negativity in their sacred books.

Based on such readings, it’s not surprising that the founders of the great Sixteenth century Protestant Reformation had a very negative opinion of human nature.  Martin Luther, whose Protestant worldview took root in Europe following the Reformation, saw humans as “piles of manure, covered over by Christ”.  Calvin went him one better, seeing them as “total depravity”.  Freud piled on with his warnings against the core of the human person:  the “dangerous Id”.  Even today, authors such as Yuval Harari, “Sapiens”, can see consciousness, as found in the human person, as ‘an evolutionary mistake’.

The thinkers of the Enlightenment, a European intellectual movement of the late 17th and early18th centuries, on the other hand, emphasized the two major fruits of human evolution, reason and individualism, over tradition.  Such beliefs were in distinct contrast to those of the Reformation, as can be seen in the writings of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Jung, Heidegger, and Sartre.

With the Reformation, the basic positive message of Jesus became secondary to the need to understand humanity as ‘broken’, ‘fallen’ from some previous pristine state, and in need of a future divine intervention (the ‘second coming’) in which humans would be rescued from their ‘fallen’ nature directly by God.

Such recoil against the Enlightenment’s positive perception of human nature was only reinforced as Science began to see the human as an evolutionary phenomenon, progressing into the future without the need for divine intervention.

There seems to have been much profit in such dystopian predictions.   For example, with the death of the popular American evangelist, Billy Graham, his children have continued to benefit financially from prophesies of ever-increasing doom, clearly showing that ‘pessimism sells’ even to this day.

Such pessimism can also be seen today in results of polls.  Even actual, tangible, and supportable statistics, such as those showing a considerable plummet in the rate of violent crime and poverty, still leaves most Americans seeing their country “heading in the wrong direction”.  Canny populist politicians are quick to capitalize on such pessimism and are very successful at getting elected on platforms in which such an obviously depraved human condition must be closely controlled by strong men (and it’s always a man) such as themselves.

Further, as David Sanger notes in a recent New York Times article, political supporters, known more for their passion than their policy rigor, are ripe for exploitation.  “Make them pessimistic enough”, he is suggesting, “and you’ve got control”.

Progressophobia In Western Society

Steven Pinker (“Enlightenment Now”) notes that when Westerners are polled about their opinion of progress in society, a twofold perspective can be seen.  On an individual basis, individuals seem optimistic about their personal situation, and that of their immediate relationships (family, neighbors, friends), but pessimistic about society at large.  Pinker refers to this as the “Optimism Gap”:

“For two decades…when Europeans were asked by pollsters whether their own economic situation would get better or worse in the coming year, more of them said it would get better, but when they were asked about their country’s economic situation, more of them said it would get worse.”

  This is a puzzling phenomenon: comfortable, secure, educated individuals are unable to project their personal optimism onto their society.   Why should this be so?

The Next Post

This week we began to look at why, with all the data bubbling up in our ‘data-ocracy’ which shows the unprecedented improvement in global human welfare, so many of us fail to factor this information into their view of the world.

Next week we will look into several causes suggested by Steven Pinker in his book, “Enlightenment Now”

 

October 6, 2022 – Norberg and Teilhard: The Case for Optimism; The Danger of Pessimism

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   Why does ‘conventional wisdom’ resist the optimistic perspectives of Teilhard and Norberg?

Today’s Post

   Last week, we did a brief overview of the third of Johan Norberg’s nine metrics, ‘Poverty’, in which he quantifies the increasing evolutionary progress of the human species in terms of global welfare.  We also saw, once again, how the actual, measured data that he painstakingly accumulates resonates so clearly with the vision of the future that Teilhard de Chardin presents in his final book, “Man’s Place in Nature”.

We also saw how, as in Teilhard, the clear-eyed optimism that the data provides is not reflected in the ‘conventional wisdom’ prevalent in the West today.

This week, we take a last look at Norberg’s data which substantiates Teilhard’s audacious optimism but seems to be so poorly reflected today.

Taking Poverty As An Example…

   Norberg’s examples highlight the single, inescapable fact that while ‘conventional wisdom’ suggests that we are ‘going to the dogs’, the data of human evolution shows advancement on nearly every front.  In addition to the exponential improvement in critical facets of human welfare as painted with significant detail on Norberg’s nine ‘fronts’ of progress, we have also seen the ongoing failure of forecasts which use past data to predict a future filled with doom.

For example, in the characteristic of human evolution that we examined last week, “Poverty”, we come across a recent such forecast, made by the Chief Economist of the World Bank in 1997.  He asserted that

“Divergence in living standards is the dominant feature of modern economic history.  Periods when poor countries rapidly approach the rich were historically rare.”

   This suggests that the wealth gap between nations is not only a ‘fact of life’, but that it can be expected to grow, and that the resulting gap will increase poverty in poorer countries.

Norberg notes the fallacy of this forecast:

“But since then, that (the gap) is exactly what has happened.  Between 2000 and 2011, ninety percent of developing countries have grown faster than the US, and they have done it on average by three percent annually.  In just a decade, per capita income in the world’s low- and middle-income countries has doubled.”

   He goes on to note the significance of the day of March 28, 2012:

“It was the first day in modern history that developing countries were responsible for more than half of the global GDP.  Up from thirty-eight percent ten years earlier.”

   And the reason?

“If people have freedom and access to knowledge, technology and capital, there is no reason why they shouldn’t be able to produce as much as people anywhere else.   A country with a fifth of the world’s population should produce a fifth of its wealth.  That has not been the case for centuries, because many parts of the world were held back by oppression, colonialism, socialism, and protectionism.”

   And what’s changing?

 “But these have now diminished, and a revolution in transport and communication technology makes it easier to take advantage of a global division of labour and use of technologies and knowledge that it took other countries generations and vast sums of money to develop.”

   As Norberg sums it up:

“This has resulted in the greatest poverty reduction the world has ever seen.”

…What can we see?

   Teilhard has been accused of having a Western bias in his treatment of human evolution, even to the extent of being accused of racism, because he has simply recognized that

 “…from one end of the world to the other, all the peoples, to remain human or to become more so, are inexorably led to formulate the hopes and problems of the modern earth in the very same terms in which the West has formulated them.”

   With Norberg’s extensive documentation of just how quickly the world is now “formulating the hopes and problems of the modern world” in Western terms, we can see how Teilhard’s statement is less a cultural bias that the West is ‘superior’ to the East, than a testament to what happens when a seed falls upon a ground prepared to take it.  In human evolution, ideas must start somewhere; they don’t pop up simultaneously everywhere.  The nature of the ‘noosphere’, as Teilhard sees it and Norberg reports it, is that ideas propagate naturally when allowed.  The fact that these Western tactics and strategies have taken hold and prospered quicker in the East than they developed in the West is evidence that human potential is equal everywhere.

But the caveat must be stressed: “when allowed”.   As we have seen in Norberg’s examples, in those parts of the world, such as North Korea, where individuals are “not allowed”, progress has been slow, even negative in some cases.  For example, the anatomic stature of North Koreans has diminished in the past sixty years, compared to South Koreans, in which it has grown to nearly par with the West in the same time frame.  To a lesser extent, this phenomenon can be seen in the resultant loss of human stature of East Germany after its isolation from the West.

Norberg notes in several places, and concludes his book with, the observation that this optimistic history of recent trends in human evolution goes significantly against the grain of ‘conventional wisdom’.

He cites a survey by the Gapminder Foundation which illustrates this:

“In the United States, only five percent answered correctly that world poverty had been almost halved in the last twenty years.  Sixty-six percent thought it had almost doubled.  Since they could also answer that poverty had remained the same, a random guess would have yielded a third correct answers, so the responders performed significantly worse than a chimpanzee.”

   What can be the cause of such pessimistic opinions, now clearly seen to be contrary to objective data?  More significantly, how can such pessimism impede, or can even derail, the future of human evolution?

The Next Post

This week we unpacked Norberg’s data package of statistics on ‘Poverty’ to review the characteristics of human evolution that he saw underpinning the rapid progress, ‘knees in the curve’, that have been seen to occur in the past two of the estimated eight thousand human generations.

But we also noticed that such an optimistic perception of the human capacity for continued evolution is not shared by a large majority of those in the West that have benefited from it the most.  Why should this be true?  More to the point, how can such prevalent pessimism undermine the continuation of human evolution?

Next week we will look at this phenomenon and its roots in today’s Western culture.