Do Humankind’s Best Days Lie Ahead? Pinker and Ridley vs. de Botton and Gladwell: The Munk Debates, Edited by Rudyard Griffiths

Category: Non-Fiction;  Rating: 3 out of 5;  Tags: Progress, Civilization, Forecasting

The Munk Debates tackle issues of global public policy, like humanitarian aid, global warming, extreme poverty, and genocide.  This book is a transcript of a Munk debate held in Toronto in 2015.  Its topic was a bit of a departure from the usual, having a more philosophical focus.  The proposition was, Do Humankind’s Best Days Lie Ahead?, with Steven Pinker and Matt Ridley arguing for, and Alain de Botton and Malcolm Gladwell arguing against.

It’s a short book, easily read in a single sitting, so those interested can skip this review and head straight for the full transcript.

Pinker starts things off by pointing out the many areas in which humankind is better off than in the past: lifespans are longer, health is better, people are wealthier, war is less frequent, violent crime is falling, levels of freedom and education are increasing, and human rights have improved.  He argues that there is no reason for these trends to change; they are slow, stable, long-term improvements that will most likely continue.

de Botton counters that human frailty and flaws mean that progress is not inevitable; fixing the ills described by Pinker still leaves room for idiocy, angst, pain and death.

Ridley expands on the improvements mentioned by his debating partner, and shows that many forecasts of doom were wrong, from famine to bird flu, the hole in the ozone layer to deforestation.  He believes that innovation stimulated by globalization will continue to drive the positive trends of the past.

Malcolm Gladwell’s argument is based on the idea that great change leads to a change in the nature and degree of risk we face.  We didn’t used to have to worry that a hacker might shut down the electrical grid, or take control of our cars and drive them off the road.  Yes, there has been progress, and that will likely continue for some privileged groups, but humanity as a whole faces potentially devastating new risks.

After that, it’s a series of rebuttals and counter-arguments until the debate wraps up.  Before the debate, an audience survey had 71% for and 29% against the resolution; after the debate, it was 73% for and 27% against, giving the win to Pinker and Ridley.

In a debate, the participants are in it to win, not to arrive at consensus, but here the discourse was remarkably civil.  I found the arguments for the resolution to be effective, but the case against could have been stronger.  For example, yes, medical science has improved dramatically, but the threat of naturally evolved or genetically engineered super-bugs could cause a global pandemic.  Poverty has diminished, but high debt and poor regulation could cause another global financial crisis.  Famine has all but vanished, but population growth is putting increased pressure on the environment, and we don’t really know where the breaking point is.  Humans have a long history of finding somewhere nice, then ruining it through overpopulation and environmental degradation.

The debaters might also have considered the time span to which the resolution applies – it’s easy to believe that improvements will continue for the next ten years, but what about the next thousand?

The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World, by Simon Winchester

Any engineer can tell you the difference between accuracy and precision, and it is the history of precision, or its close relative, tolerance, with which Simon Winchester is concerned here.  The idea of precision manufacturing may have been born over 2000 years ago, when ancient Greek craftsmen built the geared Antikythera mechanism in an attempt to predict eclipses and the positions of heavenly bodies.  The concepts were sound, but the manufacturing technologies were not up to the task – they were too imprecise, and predictions produced by the mechanism would have had large errors.  The brilliant makers of the device must have wished for the ability to make the gears more exactly.

So began a journey toward ever greater precision in the manufacture of things.  Winchester starts each chapter of the book by indicating the level of tolerance achieved, beginning with one tenth of an inch (in the boring of cannon barrels in 1774).  Things progressed rapidly – measurements to within one millionth of an inch were achieved by 1859, using a very fine micrometer.  Today we deal with tolerances of a fraction of the wavelength of light (in the manufacture of electronic chips and in the design of LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory).

With Simon Winchester, you can count on an entertaining book, thoroughly researched, and filled with fascinating digressions (how else would I know, for example, that philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s remains are displayed in a cabinet at University College London?), and this is no exception.

An Illustrated Short History of Progress, by Ronald Wright

This is the book version of the 2004 CBC Massey lecture series.  Wright considers the questions posed by Paul Gauguin in his 1897 painting, “D’Ou Venons Nous?  Que Sommes Nous?  Ou Allons Nous?”

 

Wright’s answers to these questions are not very encouraging.  His review of the history of human progress leads him to conclude that we have at best a long history of ruthless violence, and at worst a history of genocide.  We are genetically predisposed to continue this behaviour, human nature is full of greed and violence, and the future, therefore, is pretty grim.

 

He backs up this conclusion with an erudite and entertaining, if sobering, review of human evolution, archeology, the development of culture, the evolution of weapons, and the destruction of other species and the environment.  One of the concepts Wright introduces is that of a “progress trap.”  For example, weapons are great; they help you catch game and fight off predators.  Improved weapons are even better, and increase your chance of survival.  But if weapons advance to the point that they threaten your survival, as nuclear weapons can, the innovation trap has been sprung.  Progress is good, but only to a point.  Becoming more efficient hunters allowed humanity to drive some prey species to extinction.  The invention of farming allowed us to escape from that trap, and initiated our transition to today’s worldwide civilization.

 

Wright is good at providing perspective, like the one that shows just how young our civilization is.  “No city or monument [of the ancient world] is much more than 5000 years old.  Only about seventy lifetimes…have been lived since civilization began.”  The paleolithic era began around 3 million years ago, and ended only 12,000 years ago.  Yet more people have lived in the age of civilization than in any other.

 

Civilization does not prevent violence, though.  Sophisticated societies have engaged in slaughter, from Aztec ritual sacrifices to the Inquisition bonfires.  However, Wright makes an error here.  Although he bemoans the 100 million or so people killed by war in the twentieth century, he fails to note that as a percentage of world population, death by violence has gone way down (see Progress, by Johan Norberg, reviewed here).  Two hundred years ago, the world held only a billion people or so, compared to 7.5 billion today.  All those extra people are living more closely together and competing for diminishing resources, yet managing to do so with a lower rate of violence.  It sounds frightening to say that “the number in abject poverty today is as great as all mankind in 1901,” but that ignores the enormous drop in the rate of extreme poverty during that time (see https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty/).

 

Wright wonders if civilization itself may be a progress trap.  Human-caused extinction, climate change, resource depletion, and environmental damage, if continued unchecked, will lead to the fall of civilization.  Perhaps we’ll return to a planet with a population of around a billion people, living in poverty, at risk of famine.  The risk is real, and the choices are clear, but humanity has a poor record of making good, long-term choices.  Instead, the record shows that we’re inclined to use up the available resources, destroy the local environment, and ignore the consequences until it’s too late.  As Jared Diamond said in his 2005 book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or to Succeed, “…societies often fail even to attempt to solve a problem once it has been perceived.”