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"He encourages us to assume that progress is fragile, is not automatically improving and that we need to be active in defending our freedoms, our progress and the things we take for granted."

But would Pinker or Bill Gates disagree with that statement? I don't think so. Bill Gates is devoting his fortune to doing so, and is doing so very effectively.

And even if Pinker is wrong, I believe his message is much more likely to get people to defend freedoms and advance progress than Gray's would be: it's much easier to act if you believe that your actions will be effective.

Yes, I don't think that view was expressed in Gray's article about Pinker. But I imagine that there could be an implication that "if the data shows the world is improving, it always will do, progress happens one way and is always going up" which Gray takes issue to. Why act if everything is getting better anyhow?

Why act like the world isn't getting better if it actually is?

It is getting better for some people by some measures, and worse for others by other measures. What Pinker and Gates are attempting to impose is a tyranny of faux rationality--"an 800 pg book with sources up the wazoo say that the world is getting better, all these whiny poor folk must just be delusional".

> What Pinker and Gates are attempting to impose is a tyranny of faux rationality--"an 800 pg book with sources up the wazoo say that the world is getting better, all these whiny poor folk must just be delusional".

That is a pretty extreme reading of what Pinker and Gates are saying. I don't think they are saying that at all.

I still fail to see the problem at hand?

Would faux rationality that the world is getting better constantly not keep us in silent optimism, as opposed to - urm - violently keep fighting for it being made much worse?

What cruel bastard would even do such a thing, anyway?

Only very strong motivated reasoning would lead someone like Gates -- who would presumably consider himself 'rational' -- to take seriously a book written by an amateur historian in full-scale emeritus mode. Outside of his own field, Pinker's just a crank. He doesn't understand his sources, and isn't taken seriously by anyone that I've read so far who has the slightest interest in or understanding of historiography.

The source of Gates' wonky motivation can only be known to him (if he possesses enough self-awareness). We might guess that justification of the changes his corrupt dealings have been a part of (and made him in the process a leading megaconsumer) might have something to do with it.

It's getting better for some measures of 'better', and it's getting worse for others. It's also getting 'better' for some people, and less so for others. For example I contend life is either more or less the same or worse for a middle class family in the US in the past 40 years, and is fabulously better for the super-rich.

"I contend life is either more or less the same or worse for a middle class family in the US in the past 40 years"

Really? 40 years ago we didn't have the internet, didn't have videogames, had far far far fewer TV shows/movies/entertainment options. Worse health outcomes, though to a less significant degree I think. Far more access to education and educational content (you can effectively get the equivalent of a degree in almost anything, online, for free). More access to healthier foods.

Middle class families in the US have access to all of the above. Would most of them really go back to a time when they didn't?

Though I can't find a reference right now, I am pretty sure Pinker repeatedly and emphatically disavows any claim that progress will inevitably continue. There is no doubt we have to work for it.

Pinker's work is a rebuttal to people who want to paint the world as hopelessly bad right now.

The world gets better because people have been demonstrably trying to make it better. If the efforts of everyone trying to improve the world had come to naught then that would be an argument for lazy cynicism.

Pinker explicitly addresses this argument, both in Better Angels and in the free chapter of the new book linked from OP. Quote:

So you’re saying that we can all sit back and relax, that violence will just take care of itself.

Illogical, Captain. If you see that a pile of laundry has gone down, it does not mean the clothes washed themselves; it means someone washed the clothes. If a type of violence has gone down, then some change in the social, cultural, or material milieu has caused it to go down. If the conditions persist, violence could remain low or decline even further; if they don’t, it won’t. That makes it important to find out what the causes are, so we can try to intensify them and apply them more widely to ensure that the decline of violence continues.

As Pinker said in the video, progress is not a popular concept among academics anymore. This is the concept that underpins his book, which is glossed over in attempts to characterize it as "everything is good now" instead of "everything is getting better thanks to perpetual human progress".

Which leads to the obvious question of how can we maintain or advance this progress?

Dismissing the progress that was made also dismisses how the progress was made. And I fear many academics are not comfortable crediting the longer term ROI from industry and technology, and would rather obsess over pet political or social issues of the day and their own ideologies.

> One example: Torture was recently brought back in the leading liberal democracy of the world.

True, but a) highly controversially b) condemned by much of the rest of the world c) only allowed outside US territory and d) claimed to be legal only due to the allegations that it was carried out on people falling outside the protections of the Geneva Convention.

Compare to much of history, where torture was widespread, uncontroversial, and legally sanctioned.

I don't think Pinker's thesis that overall violence is decreasing dramatically can be disproved by counter-examples, any more than climate change can be doubted due to occasional colder days. For a solid rebuttal to Pinker I'd want to see disagreement with his extensive statistics, and I don't see much of that in Gray's article.

It'd be one thing if the use of torture was increasing over time across our society, or all societies.

But using "torture was recently brought back" as a data point to rebut an overall statistical decline makes no sense. It's like saying "Apple's stock price fell today, therefore people are wrong to say the economy is improving".

I watched the video of Pinker & Gates, and I confess my prejudice was 'two comfortably rich elitists pushing a centralized globalization agenda'. I'll read the book but with a large pinch of salt...

His books are an expanded version of his TED talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_viole...

What is "centralized globalization?" The top google result for this term is a paper talking about the Vatican; results quickly seem to become less relevant (for example, talking about "globalization, centralization, ...").

Think Davos cliques and The Fourth Industrial Revolution' by Schwab et al https://www.amazon.com/dp/1944835148?ref_=pe_870760_15088932... My comment was not necessarily a criticism, more an observation....

Thank you. I couldn't help but feel like Pinker is peddling feel-good nonsense to sell books, and give people hope to cling to.

Progress or betterment is entirely subjective, and when considering the human condition, relies on too many variables to even count. Of course, the variables the Pinker focuses on have gotten better overall.

The way I see it is a chaotic scatterplot that is trending slightly upwards towards "better." There are many local minima and maxima however, and I presume those ebbs and flows of prosperity and poverty can last 60 years at a time.

It's telling that one of the richest, most well off men on Earth is helping to peddle this narrative. It behooves those in positions of power and wealth to hoodwink the masses into being satisfied with their given stations. Research and statistics say the world is a better place than ever, put down your protest signs.

Bingo.

Please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.

Could you please not post unsubstantive rants to HN? Even if you're right, it's a quality-lowering comment genre. There's no point worth making here that can't be made thoughtfully, as indeed other users have been doing in this thread.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Pinker is much more nefarious (and you can know that by going to his talks, as I have, where he's more loose-tongued than in his books). He places such emphasis on the fact that the world is getting better as a rebuttal to "complainers" and political activists. The problem is not with his premise but with his conclusion. The world has been getting better (to the extent that it has) because people complain and are dissatisfied, and because they take political action to make the world better. The world has not been getting better on its own; people have made it better through political struggle.

There is a certain rather loud, rather fashionable kind of "activist" who are if not directly claiming that everything is awful, then strongly evoking symbolism and imagery to that effect. To fix this, they want to take broad, radical action, basically to affect revolution. This approach is indefensible given the actual state of the world, and these activists are either confused about the facts, or cynically manipulating their followers for personal power. If they get their way, things will get worse, quickly. These are the people Pinker is rebutting.

There is also a kind of activist that work towards fixing specific problems, including Gates, but certainly also a great many people of lesser means and public profile, and does indeed improve the world in the way you describe. I have no doubt that Pinker respects these.

Any examples of this kind of activist? Are they particularly common?

Sure. From the plebeians of ancient Rome, through the French revolutionaries and American abolitionists and feminists of the 19th century, to the feminist suffragists[1] of the early 20th century.

[1]: One of the things I always find hilarious is the constant refrain among conservatives is "well, the old generation was right but this one has gone too far!" despite the constant decline in the fervor of feminist activism for over a century now. :)

It's not just conservatives saying that, it is also people who have been feminists their whole lives:

https://areomagazine.com/2016/12/29/why-i-no-longer-identify...

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/am-i-a-bad-feminist/...

Yep, for centuries (millennia, actually) the pattern is the same. A social change movement is invariably viewed as having "gone too far", but in order to be perceived as reasonable, the critics invariably say that the previous generation was right. Don't get me wrong: movements certainly can and do go "too far"[1], but in about 100% of the cases, the political activism that has brought us where we are was viewed as having gone too far (the American revolution and the abolitionist movement included).

In general, conservatives (like Pinker) pretty much always get the history wrong (the facts, the interpretation, and usually both), while liberals are usually wrong about the future (and I say this as a radical leftist). That's why it's easy to poke fun at conservatives who write history (certainly those who, like Pinker, are not professional historians), while liberals are always surprised of the turn of events (for good or bad; when liberals -- including myself -- are optimistic I'm worried, and when they're pessimistic I know I can relax).

[1]: Feminists not so much; there's been a constant decline in the fervor feminist activism over the past century, but certainly, say, the French revolutionaries. Feminism has always been special for many understandable reasons. It is almost always the most timid form of social activism, yet almost always perceived as the most radical.

> Don't get me wrong: movements certainly can and do go "too far"[1], but in about 100% of the cases, the political activism that has brought us where we are was viewed as having gone too far (the American revolution and the abolitionist movement included).

Sure, by some. It's also true that in about 100% of cases where people have argued for legitimately bad social change (eugenics, communism, prohibition, etc.), those people (and their allies) cast their opponents as immoral and regressive.

It's like Carl Sagan said: "The fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."

Today on Twitter I saw a conservative arguing that people who deny the personhood of a fetus are like slaveowners who denied the personhood of slaves. As a radical leftist, I doubt you'd agree with that. But this person is just as convinced as you that they are the progressive on this issue.

So we need a better heuristic than "people arguing social change are probably right." Some are right, others are not.

Right, but the point that Pinker is missing that we are what we are because people fought to get us here -- the very same kind of people he dismisses.

Just a nitpick: communism has certainly not been "legitimately bad" everywhere. In my country (Israel), we have practiced communism (on a local scale, in the Kibbutzim) for much longer than the USSR (over 100 years now), and it's a more extreme form of communism (makes the USSR seem like a capitalist country by comparison), and while it has certainly not been an unqualified success (especially the communal raising of children), and it is certainly crumbling now (due to powerful external and internal pressures), it has been the complete opposite of failure. It has been entirely democratic for 100 years (with problems, but not unlike in any democratic system), and one of Israel's proudest achievements. So communism was an overall great success in Israel for a century.

When it come to history I find most political movements to be wrong on both facts and interpretation. Take women's suffrage in the US for example and the relation to shortage in conscription at the end of world war 1. Following liberal writing there exist no relation. According to those writing the right to vote came through demonstrating and women empowering themselves. True or false? Should we interpret it as a victory for self empowerment or as a result of lack of soldiers during the last year of the biggest war the world had seen (also called the war to end all wars)?

An other example: witch hunts. According to liberal writing those where all campaigns targeting the weak, poor and vulnerable in society. Historians points towards campaigns that transfered land and money from the accused families into the pocket of the church. True or false? Should we interpret it as men oppressing poor women or as a form plunder for profit by a religious institution that targeted those with something to take?

Personally I lean towards not trusting political movements when they write about history. Facts don't fit the nice narrative that is needed to gain mass adaption. Usually the truth is a bit from column A and column B and involve multiple events which together create an environment where famous historical facts happened. It is in the realization of those events and the interpretation that we can grasp what actually happened in the past and why.

> Should we interpret it as a victory for self empowerment or as a result of lack of soldiers during the last year of the biggest war the world had seen?

Clearly as the first. Women would not have gotten the vote without the suffrage movement, just as they didn't get it after the Civil War. However, the war had an effect on the timing, as is often the case with social change movements. They can go on for decades, and finally succeed when an external event forces the dominating powers' hands. No one would say that the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand was the cause of WWI. The alliance system was rigged to blow at the first spark, and that spark happened to be the assassination.

> Should we interpret it as men oppressing poor women or as a form plunder for profit by a religious institution that targeted those with something to take?

As medieval and early modern history was my focus in grad school, I must say that I have not seen the witch hunt described so simplistically by any professional historian that I've read, and they were relatively uncommon. Like most things in history, they were a result of a complex interaction of factors, but as is often the case, the powerful are rarely the victims of events of that sort, regardless of their complex causes.

> Personally I lean towards not trusting political movements when they write about history.

I wasn't talking about political writing but about scholarly or pseudo-scholarly works, and all writers have political leanings. Liberal writers tend to write history better than conservative ones.

One could as easily interpret that the abolishment movements relation with the civil war has about as much validity as the relation between the first world war and the suffrage movement. I am not saying you are wrong, but that political writers tend to disregard facts and make interpretations that fits their views regardless if they are left or right, usually to the detriment of the truth.

> I have not seen the witch hunt described so simplistically

Out of all writing I have read, only two books that I recall described the witch hunts as complex causes rather than a simplistic prosecution of defenseless women. I see it so often in political texts I usually tick of a mental box when i see it.

When it comes to plundering, history don't seem to often show that its the most powerful in society that becomes victims. They can employ armies to defend themselves or buy enough influence to not become a target. Usually those that are targeted is those with resources to defend but that relies on social constructs for defense.

But to go back to the claim about liberal writers, I can recommend a book called Debt: The First 5000 Years. The author was involved with the occupy movement so not sure if that defines him as a liberal writer or not. What I found interesting in that book (outside of the overall focus on debt) is the description of bridge gifts, slavery and veils, each having a very different interpretation to common liberal views. Since the author is a professor of anthropology he also supports those interpretations with facts that usually missing when those subjects are being discussed in a historical perspective.

> Liberal writers tend to write history better than conservative ones.

It is very possible that liberal writers lie less and tend to be less intentional dishonest than conservative ones. Its a very different claim that liberal writers are usually right and conservative writers usually wrong.

> but that political writers tend to disregard facts and make interpretations that fits their views regardless if they are left or right, usually to the detriment of the truth.

All writers are political (I would hope all people) and there are many brilliant historians, some writing analyses that would appear contradictory to their stated views (my best professor was like that).

> simplistic prosecution of defenseless women

I find that hard to believe, as women were abused on a much larger scale before, during and after the witch trials. Defenseless women make easy targets, but I find it hard to believe that any historian would consider that an explanation. Women are so marginalized from all positions of power and are completely at the mercy of their fathers, brothers or husbands, but let's try just a few for being witches to drive the point home!?

I have to just say I have enjoyed your posts in this thread immensely. Cheers.

Can you give some examples of prominent activists who want radical changes?

> This approach is indefensible given the actual state of the world, and these activists are either confused about the facts, or cynically manipulating their followers for personal power.

Except that, as any student of history knows, the current state of the world is what it is thanks almost entirely to people just like that (although historians generally view them in a better light than you do because of what they've achieved, despite always being presented by conservative forces in the same light as you view them).

My technophile bias is showing, but I'm not convinced that any, all, and every past and present student of history thinks that progress is due to violent/radical revolutionaries, and that they are/were the good guys (gals) - even if revolutions were necessary for change.

However, it's seems very evident that to extract even some minuscule progress from a conservative power structure a very strong anti-conservative force is usually a must, and that is usually not a moderate progressive force, but a very blunt radical one.

Again, however, that doesn't mean that the best course of action is a violent tabula rasa, even if things are currently shit.

But, it can be argued that a moderate force simply bounces back without much effect, but even the recent events of the last decade make that argument very unconvincing. (As big changes are easily usurped by blind populism, leaving no room to critical evaluation of possible policy proposals.)

> and that they are/were the good guys (gals) - even if revolutions were necessary for change.

While my training as a professional historian was cut short, I know enough to say that historians are very much trained not to judge or categorize people into good or bad. That has nothing to do with the fact that most social change has been achieved through political struggle.

> Again, however, that doesn't mean that the best course of action is a violent tabula rasa, even if things are currently shit.

I try not to prescribe a course of action based on the past. I note that Pinker's assessment is judgmental, i.e., he considers the main trend to be positive, yet at the same time he's judgmental against activists. My point is that you can't hold both views at once.

I don't think Pinker is against activists making the world better. But activists need to convince people that their ideas actually will improve things. Lots of activists have made the world better, but some have made it worse, despite having good intentions (see: eugenics, communism).

If you're trying to sell people on the idea that status quo institutions like capitalism are bad, you have to compare it to the alternatives. You can't just say "bad things happen under capitalism, therefore we need to do away with it." That's comparing capitalism vs. utopia, but utopia doesn't exist, for all kinds of practical reasons.

Pinker makes the case for what the world as we know it has achieved. An activist who thinks another system would be better has to convince people that their alternative will achieve more.

> An activist who thinks another system would be better has to convince people that their alternative will achieve more.

Not necessarily according to Pinker's cherry picked statistics. Plantation owners were not going to achieve more by freeing their slaves, at least according to their own accounting.

Sure, if someone else thinks other statistics are relevant, they can cite those. I agree that a plantation owner would probably have cited statistics that didn't capture the harms of the fact that they are enslaving people.

"The world" hasn't achieved anything on its own. People of precisely the kind Pinker dislikes and dismisses are those who have achieved those things for our world. They achieved it not by convincing others through theory, but through their strong beliefs. You're right, sometimes they failed miserably, but even those who've brought us to where we are today were ridiculed just as those who've failed.

I think you're not being charitable to Pinker here - he's not in my view "nefarious," and he's arguing his points in good faith.

That said, I agree with you. I read Better Angels in its entirety and thought parts of it were very convincing. Others were deeply, provably wrong to anyone who is a professional historian (for instance, he let a bunch of Harvard RA's loose on some non-peer reviewed books purporting to statistically describe fatalities in wars that are very poorly documented, then used this faulty data to draw huge, misguided conclusions, like WW1/WW2 being less damaging in aggregate than the An Lushan rebellion).

I actually really enjoy Pinker's writing style and he is clearly brilliant (as I learned when I tried to spar with him a bit in a Q&A and he casually parried what I thought was a devastating counter-example!)

But IMO his intelligence is actually his downfall when it comes to this particular argument. He's convinced himself that everything is getting better, and he is indeed very convincing on certain aspects of this point. The problem, as you say, is with the scale of his conclusions. Certain things like the use of the death penalty and rates of infant mortality really are going down, demonstrably. Other things, like the risk of massive destruction due to a stolen nuclear weapon or EMP or a Nick Bostrom-style evil AI, or even just a generalized societal decline due to economic inequality and environmental degradation, are almost certainly getting worse. Pinker is so self-assured as a writer and thinker that he runs the risk of giving us all a false sense of complacency and a license to ignore these very real problems.

Maybe he's arguing in good faith, but his conservative views are so deeply entrenched that even he fails to see how conservative he is. Such an extreme ideology that you yourself cannot distinguish from what you perceive to be neutral reasoning is the primary sign of a weak critical mind. I find Pinker to be one of the weakest public minds of our times for that reason, and for that I find him terribly boring. A writer who is so far behind the reader in understanding his own text makes the reading boring rather than interesting.

Could you expand on what do you mean conservative here?

Also, could you recommend some public minds whom you consider strong?

> Could you expand on what do you mean conservative here?

Someone who believes or acts towards (either consciously or not) the preservation of the current distribution of power in society and against changing it. Often extreme conservatives (though not Pinker) even desire to return the social order to some (almost always imagined) past.

> Also, could you recommend some public minds whom you consider strong?

Max Weber, Marc Bloch, Clifford Geertz, Erving Goffman. Strong does not necessarily mean "right". It means either having truly profound and interesting insight and/or the ability to apply critical thinking to yourself.

What problem do people in this conversation have distinguishing current state from current rate?

Complain that things are bad and fight to improve them? Sure. Complain that things are getting worse over time? It's false in a global sense, and in most specific senses too.

But this is precisely where Pinker is wrong. Political change is not meant to be a scientific study. It is a movement towards a goal based on values.

> Torture was recently brought back in the leading liberal democracy of the world.

Isn't this cherry-picking data? I don't see how the extent of torture could be said to be a valid measure of progress unless happening on a massive scale. Besides, on a global scale, I would not be too wrong in saying that torture has declined. During the investigation of 1993 Bombay blasts, the police didn't balk at interrogating and torturing even the suspect's relatives[1] who didn't have any role in the act. The probability of this happening again has certainly declined.

Picking a narrow trend doesn't refute the global one that the world is getting better in every aspect.

[1]: http://www.dnaindia.com/mumbai/report-convict-s-journal-alle...

People talked optimistically about the end of war in the early 20th century when it looked like war had gone the way of the dodo. The last major international conflict was a century earlier when the Powers deposed the second rise of Napoleon. There were a number of internal civil wars in the meantime mainly dealing with the transition from monoarchy to republics and the consolidation of related city states intomcountries. The early 20th century had much progress in industrialisation, invention and global trade.

Then WWI happened, following soon by WWII, partly based on a poor resolution of WWI. Then a 45 year Cold War with several close nuclear wars.

Thats why I am skeptical the concept of world war is really over.

None of the examples I got to read in this article are in any logical contradiction with the original enlightenment. It is shown that Locke didn't originally fully understand his own new school of thought - maybe because it's naive to think you fully understand a new idea when you're having it? It was attempted that 20th century atrocities happened as a direct result of enlightenment thinking.

I honestly grew tired of reading this very quickly. The sum of all words these philosophers said is not enlightenment. Reason means you don't frigging trust every frigging word of what people say, even if they said "don't trust every word of what people say". How is that not obvious?

What is John Gray's message here? I get he is trying to challenge Pinker's seemingly optimistic views, but I don't get what is the pattern he tries to convey by throwing all that sand into the gears of Pinker's progression thing?

Are we seriously giving up on seeing patterns here and insist in our mental image of the world as a white noise tv screen?

Thanks, that's a great link. There was some other research posted to HN recently on the claims about violent deaths too:

http://www.mn.uio.no/math/english/research/projects/focustat...

I think it's easy for the likes of HN readers, most probably sitting in their comfortable western strongholds to feel like we are bringing progress in the world with our fancy tech. I believe the reality feels very different to a lot of people in a lot of other places - where things as basic as even food or clean water might still be hard to come by - and it's kind of insulting for fussy old rich men living in comparative luxury to be telling these people otherwise.

Ya this resonates with me more. We are seeing the rolling back under the current US presidential administration of so many things we thought were done deals. Things like Bears Ears National Monument getting turned over to private corporations for uranium mining. And a thousand more issues just like that, of weighing the value of the priceless against the profitable. Or misdirection in the cause of various forms of human suffering away from the very people and institutions that caused it.

I think what a lot of people (especially modern day conservatives) don't realize is that this stuff requires never-ending vigilance. The natural tendency of human progress is towards authoritarianism and totalitarianism, and the eventual complete exploitation of people and resources.

Where some people today see a spoiled youth glued to their smartphones and spending all of their money on flatscreen TVs, I see a generation disenfranchised with literally no say in any aspect of their regulatory system. No say over how much money they make, no recourse when multinational corporate monopolies charge them excessively for education, health, even things as basic as untainted food. Earning a fraction of the income their parents had when adjusted for inflation.

So no, this is nothing even remotely close to the future we're capable of. We're just comfortable enough to miss the injustices being carried out against us and the planet, often in our own names.