Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker.
Dr. Pinker is a Harvard faculty member, Professor of Cognitive Psychology - which means he studies the way the brain operates, not just what we do with it. The best thing about the book is that he is aware of virtually every recent study of human beings and social issues, and he always brings a very refreshing take to each problem. And he is, at the same time, incredibly literate, and he makes literature, movie and song references that are stellar. And, while avowedly progressive, he is middle of the road on liberal / conservative. He strikes a nice, informed balance.
He is tremendously optimistic about the potential for continuing our progress forward. He analyzes each of the major problems we are facing, he looks at the historical trends, at the actual data, and at the latest research - and gets your brain around his perspective.
I highly recommend this - if you are at all interested in the topics that I am engaged in, I predict you will also love this book. I would like to persuade everyone to read the book- but most of those who really should get some of this enlightenment would never even pick the thing up. There is no original research in here, but he fills you up with all manner of recent research on cognitive, social and political issues. The book is fact filled - and lots of new information and perspectives that I found fascinating. And you should too!
Check out the things which Bill Gates found interesting at his website, and then read mine as well. You will see that Bill and I have a very different focus on life!
Mine:
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Page 3 Meaning and Purpose
The question posed to the author was: “Given all of this, why should I live?”
Given that traditional religious beliefs about an immortal soul are undermined by our best science, why live? His answer:
In the very act of asking that question, you are seeking reasons for your convictions, and so you are committed to reason as the means to discover and justify what is important to you. And there are so many reasons to live!
As a sentient being, you have the potential to flourish. You can refine your faculty of reason itself by learning and debating. You can see explanations of the natural world through science, and insight into the human condition through the arts and humanities. You can make the most of your capacity for pleasure and satisfaction, which allowed your ancestors to thrive and thereby allowed you to exist. You can appreciate the beauty and richness of the natural and cultural world. As the heir to billions of years of life perpetuating itself, you can perpetuate life in turn. You have been endowed with a sense of sympathy –the ability to like, love, respect, help, and show kindness – and you can enjoy the gift of mutual benevolence with friends, family, and colleagues.
And because reason tells you that none of this is particular to you, you have the responsibility to provide to others would you expect for yourself. You can foster the welfare of others sentient beings by enhancing life, health, knowledge, freedom, abundance, safety, beauty, and peace. History shows that when we sympathize with others and apply our ingenuity to improving the human condition, we can make progress in doing so, and you can help to continue that progress.
-----------------------------
Page 11 Sympathy will prevail - I would prefer "empathy".
Given that we are equipped with the capacity to sympathize with others, nothing can prevent the circle of sympathy from expanding from the family and tribe to embrace all of humankind, particularly as reason goads us into realizing that there can be nothing uniquely deserving about ourselves or any of the groups to which we belong. We are forced into cosmopolitanism: accepting our citizenship in the world.
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Page 113 Inequality
Now that we have run through the history of inequality and seen the forces that push it around, we can evaluate the claim that the growing inequality of the past three decades means that the world is getting worse - that only the rich have prospered, while everyone else is stagnating or suffering. The rich certainly have prospered more than anyone else, perhaps more than they should have, but the claim about everyone else is not accurate, for a number of reasons.
Most obviously, it's false for the world as a whole: the majority of the human race has become much better off. The two-humped camel has become a one hump Dromedary; the elephant has a body the size of, well, and elephant; extreme poverty has plummeted and may disappear; and both International and global inequality coefficients are in decline. Now, it's true that the world's poor have gotten richer in part at the expense of the American lower-middle-class, and if I were an American politician I would not publicly say that the trade-off was worth it. But as citizens of the world considering humanity as a whole, we have to say that the trade-off is worth it.
----------------------------
P. 118 Some of Our Major Problems
Education, a major driver of economic mobility, is not keeping up with the demands of modern economies: tertiary education has soared in cost ( defying the inexpensification of almost every other good ), and in poor American neighborhoods, primary and secondary education are unconscionably substandard. Many parts of the American tax system are aggressive, and money buys too much political influence.
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P. 145 carbon pricing
You really want to read this - I thought I had understood carbon pricing - but this makes it very clear how it should work.
----------------------------
P. 205 Democracy - in a pragmatic nutshell
If neither voters nor elected leaders can be counted on to uphold the ideals of democracy, why should this form of government work so not-badly - the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried, as Churchill famously put it? In his 1945 book The Open Society and its Enemies, the philosopher Karl Popper argued that democracy should be understood not as the answer to the question “Who should rule? “ (namely, “The People”), but as a solution to the problem of how to dismiss bad leadership without bloodshed. The political scientist John Mueller brought this idea from a binary Judgement Day to continuous day-to-day feedback. Democracy, he suggests, is essentially based on giving people the freedom to complain: “It comes about when the people affected the agree not to use violence to replace the leadership, and the leadership leaves them free to try to dislodge it by any other means. “ He explains how this can work:
If citizens have the right to complain, to petition, to organize, to protest, to demonstrate, to strike, to threaten to emigrate or secede, to shout, to publish, to export their funds, to express a lack of confidence, and to wheedle in back corridors, government will tend to respond to the sounds of the shouters and the importunings of the wheedlers: that is, it will necessarily become responsive - pay attention - whether there are elections or not.
-------------
P 297 On the dangers of AI.
There is no law of complex systems that says that intelligent agents must turn into ruthless conquistadors. Indeed, we know of one highly advanced form of intelligence that evolved without this defect. They're called women.
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Page 405 - The FACTS for non violent resistance. One last one - one of the best insights in the book. If only we could persuade the Palestinians of this simple FACT.
Do multi-ethnic regions harbor ancient hatreds that can only be tamed by partitioning them into ethnic enclaves and cleansing the minorities from each one? Whenever ethnic neighbors go for each other's throats we read about it, but what about the neighborhoods that never make the news because they live in boring piece? What proportion of pairs of ethic neighbors coexist without violence? The answer is, most of them: 95% of the neighbors in the former Soviet Union, 99% of those in Africa.
Do campaigns of nonviolent resistance work? Many people believe that Gandhi and Martin Luther King just got lucky: their movements tugged at the heartstrings of enlightened democracies at opportune moments, but everywhere else, oppressed people need violence to get out from under a dictator's boot. The political scientist Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan assembled a dataset of political resistance movements across the world between 1900 and 2006 and discover that three-quarters of the nonviolent resistance movement compared to with only a third of the violent ones. Gandhi and King were right, but without data, you would never know it.
Though the urge to join a violent Insurgent or terrorist group may owe more to male bonding than to just-war theory, most of the combatants probably believe that if they want to bring about a better world, they have no choice but to kill people. What would happen if everyone knew that violent strategies were not just immoral but ineffectual? It's not that I think we should airdrop crates of Chenoweth and Stevens book into conflict zones. But leaders are radical groups are often highly educated (they just steal their frenzy from academic scribblers of a few years back), and even the cannon fodder often attend some college and absorb about the conventional wisdom about the need for violence. What would happen over the long run if a standard college curriculum devoted less attention to the writings of Karl Marx and Frantz Fanon and more to quantitative analysis of political violence?
-----
That's enough. You have probably not read this far anyway. Buy the book, get from your library. Whatever works. And let me know what you think.
As a sentient being, you have the potential to flourish. You can refine your faculty of reason itself by learning and debating. You can see explanations of the natural world through science, and insight into the human condition through the arts and humanities. You can make the most of your capacity for pleasure and satisfaction, which allowed your ancestors to thrive and thereby allowed you to exist. You can appreciate the beauty and richness of the natural and cultural world. As the heir to billions of years of life perpetuating itself, you can perpetuate life in turn. You have been endowed with a sense of sympathy –the ability to like, love, respect, help, and show kindness – and you can enjoy the gift of mutual benevolence with friends, family, and colleagues.
And because reason tells you that none of this is particular to you, you have the responsibility to provide to others would you expect for yourself. You can foster the welfare of others sentient beings by enhancing life, health, knowledge, freedom, abundance, safety, beauty, and peace. History shows that when we sympathize with others and apply our ingenuity to improving the human condition, we can make progress in doing so, and you can help to continue that progress.
-----------------------------
Page 11 Sympathy will prevail - I would prefer "empathy".
Given that we are equipped with the capacity to sympathize with others, nothing can prevent the circle of sympathy from expanding from the family and tribe to embrace all of humankind, particularly as reason goads us into realizing that there can be nothing uniquely deserving about ourselves or any of the groups to which we belong. We are forced into cosmopolitanism: accepting our citizenship in the world.
---------------
Page 113 Inequality
Now that we have run through the history of inequality and seen the forces that push it around, we can evaluate the claim that the growing inequality of the past three decades means that the world is getting worse - that only the rich have prospered, while everyone else is stagnating or suffering. The rich certainly have prospered more than anyone else, perhaps more than they should have, but the claim about everyone else is not accurate, for a number of reasons.
Most obviously, it's false for the world as a whole: the majority of the human race has become much better off. The two-humped camel has become a one hump Dromedary; the elephant has a body the size of, well, and elephant; extreme poverty has plummeted and may disappear; and both International and global inequality coefficients are in decline. Now, it's true that the world's poor have gotten richer in part at the expense of the American lower-middle-class, and if I were an American politician I would not publicly say that the trade-off was worth it. But as citizens of the world considering humanity as a whole, we have to say that the trade-off is worth it.
----------------------------
P. 118 Some of Our Major Problems
Education, a major driver of economic mobility, is not keeping up with the demands of modern economies: tertiary education has soared in cost ( defying the inexpensification of almost every other good ), and in poor American neighborhoods, primary and secondary education are unconscionably substandard. Many parts of the American tax system are aggressive, and money buys too much political influence.
------------------------
P. 145 carbon pricing
You really want to read this - I thought I had understood carbon pricing - but this makes it very clear how it should work.
----------------------------
P. 205 Democracy - in a pragmatic nutshell
If neither voters nor elected leaders can be counted on to uphold the ideals of democracy, why should this form of government work so not-badly - the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried, as Churchill famously put it? In his 1945 book The Open Society and its Enemies, the philosopher Karl Popper argued that democracy should be understood not as the answer to the question “Who should rule? “ (namely, “The People”), but as a solution to the problem of how to dismiss bad leadership without bloodshed. The political scientist John Mueller brought this idea from a binary Judgement Day to continuous day-to-day feedback. Democracy, he suggests, is essentially based on giving people the freedom to complain: “It comes about when the people affected the agree not to use violence to replace the leadership, and the leadership leaves them free to try to dislodge it by any other means. “ He explains how this can work:
If citizens have the right to complain, to petition, to organize, to protest, to demonstrate, to strike, to threaten to emigrate or secede, to shout, to publish, to export their funds, to express a lack of confidence, and to wheedle in back corridors, government will tend to respond to the sounds of the shouters and the importunings of the wheedlers: that is, it will necessarily become responsive - pay attention - whether there are elections or not.
-------------
P 297 On the dangers of AI.
There is no law of complex systems that says that intelligent agents must turn into ruthless conquistadors. Indeed, we know of one highly advanced form of intelligence that evolved without this defect. They're called women.
--------------
Page 405 - The FACTS for non violent resistance. One last one - one of the best insights in the book. If only we could persuade the Palestinians of this simple FACT.
Do multi-ethnic regions harbor ancient hatreds that can only be tamed by partitioning them into ethnic enclaves and cleansing the minorities from each one? Whenever ethnic neighbors go for each other's throats we read about it, but what about the neighborhoods that never make the news because they live in boring piece? What proportion of pairs of ethic neighbors coexist without violence? The answer is, most of them: 95% of the neighbors in the former Soviet Union, 99% of those in Africa.
Do campaigns of nonviolent resistance work? Many people believe that Gandhi and Martin Luther King just got lucky: their movements tugged at the heartstrings of enlightened democracies at opportune moments, but everywhere else, oppressed people need violence to get out from under a dictator's boot. The political scientist Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan assembled a dataset of political resistance movements across the world between 1900 and 2006 and discover that three-quarters of the nonviolent resistance movement compared to with only a third of the violent ones. Gandhi and King were right, but without data, you would never know it.
Though the urge to join a violent Insurgent or terrorist group may owe more to male bonding than to just-war theory, most of the combatants probably believe that if they want to bring about a better world, they have no choice but to kill people. What would happen if everyone knew that violent strategies were not just immoral but ineffectual? It's not that I think we should airdrop crates of Chenoweth and Stevens book into conflict zones. But leaders are radical groups are often highly educated (they just steal their frenzy from academic scribblers of a few years back), and even the cannon fodder often attend some college and absorb about the conventional wisdom about the need for violence. What would happen over the long run if a standard college curriculum devoted less attention to the writings of Karl Marx and Frantz Fanon and more to quantitative analysis of political violence?
-----
That's enough. You have probably not read this far anyway. Buy the book, get from your library. Whatever works. And let me know what you think.
