Things Aren’t as Bad as They Seem (In the World)
I recently picked up a book called “Enlightenment Now” by Steven Pinker. The book analyzes our world today and where it stands in terms of the ideals of the Enlightenment movement in the 18th century: reason, science, humanism, and progress. Through it he argues that if we get out of our bubbles and look around, things are not as bad as they seem and that, on average, humans have it better than ever across the globe. Here are a few insights that stuck out to me while reading the book.
The author goes into depth about the concept of entropy, which scientifically is the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Entropy states that atoms and molecules move randomly throughout space or a substance, so particules are predisposed to take form in a shape or happening that doesn’t resemble anything meaningful or useful to us. Sand on a beach will not randomly form itself into a sand castle if untouched — there are only a small numbers of combination of particles that would lead to a sand castle shape, but trillions that lead to the sand just looking like a beach. More broadly, chaos is more likely than organization in the natural world. It takes effort from an animal or the natural environment to make something useful or organized, but there are many ways for things to go wrong, the slightest error or mistake can doom an entire system. This leads to a powerful perspective for me — not everything bad happens for a reason as the natural world is built for chaos, and the world is not out to get me or anyone else — shit happens.
Another insight I found to be powerful, somewhat related to entropy, is that poverty is the default state of people when they are born — so why do we blame people for being poor or disadvantaged? No one is born with clothes on their back, or a food in their stomach. Material possessions don’t just appear for people like they are living in a Sims game — clothes, food, and shelter have to be made and given to people. Wealth then, if defined as a state where someone has more than they need, is a concept that makes less sense than poverty. Why is it a common sentiment in society to blame poor people for being poor? It doesn’t make much sense and misses the bigger picture — namely, in my view, that the main forces that lead to poverty are lack of education and proper resource allocation (and physical disability, which there is not a great solution for outside of advanced science).
A third nugget I found to be enlightening is that the media and news drives a lot of the negativity and bad perceptions people form about the state of the world. The author lays out some graphs showing that positive sentinent (as measured by use of positive words and stories) within the news, has been on the steady decline for 50 years, having peaked in the 1960s. Why is this, besides that negative news drives viewership? A lot of it has to do with how frequent the news cycle is today, which is a cycle that occurs in minutes or hours instead of days and weeks. Bad things (a fire, weather disaster, or a murder) happen very quickly and have a definite beginning and end). Good things (someone building a house for the homeless or a cure for cancer being developed) tend to take longer, not have definitive progress updates, and only come to light when they’re finished. It’s no surprise, then, that quantity wise there is much more negative news than positive news. If there was a newspaper published only once every 50 years, it would talk about how human life expectancy has increased, not that the homicide rate in Detroit went up in November 2020.
The author of the book provides a helpful optimism about the world — look around, and you’ll see that things are better than ever for humans as a whole. Barack Obama had a quote that basically said “At birth if you were to be randomly assigned a place, social situation, gender, and time to be born into, you would want that time to be now”.
