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.