Michael: In 1820, ninety percent of the world's population lived in extreme poverty. Ninety percent. Today, it's less than ten percent. So why does it feel like everything is falling apart? The answer isn't in the headlines; it's hardwired into our brains. Kevin: Whoa, hold on. Ninety percent down to ten? That can't be right. Every headline I see is about disaster, inequality, and crisis. It feels like we're on the brink of collapse, not in the middle of a miracle. Michael: And that's exactly the paradox we're diving into today. We're talking about the book Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by Steven Pinker. And it's no accident that Pinker, a renowned cognitive scientist at Harvard, is the one making this case. He argues the story of human progress is a story we are psychologically programmed to ignore. Kevin: A cognitive scientist writing a history book. That’s an interesting angle. I know the book was widely acclaimed, but also stirred up a ton of controversy for being, well, too optimistic. Michael: It's definitely polarizing. But Pinker’s argument is that this isn't about blind optimism. It's about having the courage to look at the data and confront our own biases. He calls the widespread aversion to the idea of progress 'Progressophobia.' Kevin: Progressophobia. I think I might have a chronic case of it. So where does this disconnect come from? Why are we so convinced the world is a dumpster fire when the data, as you say, tells a different story?

Michael: Pinker points to two powerful glitches in our mental software. The first is the Availability Heuristic. Our brains judge the frequency of an event by how easily we can recall examples of it. And what does the news serve us every single day? Kevin: Plane crashes, not safe landings. Terrorist attacks, not peaceful days. Scandals, not quiet competence. Things that happen, not things that don't. Michael: Exactly. Progress is a gradual, incremental process. It's the war that didn't happen, the famine that was averted, the millions of children who didn't die from preventable diseases. Those aren't headlines. A bridge collapsing is a story. A million bridges staying up is not. Kevin: That makes sense. The news is a stream of the worst things happening anywhere on the planet on any given day. It creates a completely skewed sample of reality. Michael: Precisely. And this is compounded by our second glitch: the Negativity Bias. Our minds are like Velcro for bad experiences and Teflon for good ones. We dwell on criticism, we fret about potential losses, but we quickly take good fortune for granted. Kevin: Oh, I know that feeling. You can get ten compliments and one insult, and what do you think about for the rest ofthe day? Michael: The insult, every time. Pinker cites a fascinating study that analyzed the emotional tone of the New York Times from 1945 to today. The finding? The news has become steadily, measurably more morose and gloomy over the decades, even as objective measures of human well-being have skyrocketed. Kevin: So our primary window to the world is tinted with a gray, gloomy filter. A great example of this is crime. I remember in the 90s and 2000s, everyone was convinced crime was out of control. Michael: A perfect case study. From 1992 through 2015, the violent crime rate in the United States was cut in half. It was a spectacular public safety achievement. Yet, for almost that entire period, polls showed that a huge majority of Americans—sometimes over 70 percent—believed that crime was increasing. Kevin: That's astonishing. The reality was the exact opposite of the public perception. We were living through a historic crime drop and thought we were in the middle of a crime wave. Michael: That's the power of Progressophobia. But Kevin, you brought up a good point earlier. Isn't this just ignoring real problems? What about climate change? What about the rise of authoritarianism? Is Pinker just a Pollyanna telling us to ignore the fires because the house has a new coat of paint? Kevin: Yeah, that's the charge, isn't it? That he's cherry-picking data to fit a narrative and dismissing legitimate fears about the future. Michael: Pinker's response is subtle. He's not saying problems don't exist. He's saying that the belief that problems are solvable is the very engine of progress. The Enlightenment mindset isn't about believing the world is perfect. It's about believing we can make it better by applying reason and science. And that belief is what feels so fragile. Kevin: It feels fragile. That’s a good way to put it. Like it could all just… fall apart. If progress is so real, why does it feel like we're constantly one step away from disaster?

Michael: Because we are. And Pinker grounds this feeling not in psychology, but in physics. Specifically, the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Kevin: Okay, you lost me. We're going from crime stats to college physics? Break this down for me. Michael: It's simpler than it sounds, and it's one of the most profound ideas in the book. The Second Law states that in any closed system, entropy—which is basically disorder, randomness, and decay—never decreases. It always increases. Kevin: So things naturally fall apart? Michael: Exactly. Think of a sandcastle on a beach. You spend hours arranging grains of sand into a highly ordered, complex structure. What happens if you just leave it alone? Kevin: The wind, the waves, a stray dog, a toddler… it's going to become a pile of sand again. There are a million ways for it to be a disordered pile of sand, but only a few ways for it to be a castle. Michael: That's entropy in a nutshell. And Pinker's breathtaking insight is that everything we value in life—our bodies, our families, our societies, our knowledge—is a sandcastle. It's a pocket of precious, improbable order in a universe that is constantly trying to grind it back down into disordered sand. Health is order; sickness is disorder. Peace is order; war is disorder. Wealth is order; poverty is disorder. Kevin: Wow. So progress isn't the default state of the world. The default state is chaos. Progress is the act of constantly, effortfully, building and maintaining these sandcastles against the cosmic tide. Michael: You've got it. And what's the tool we use to build them? Information. Knowledge. That's the antidote to entropy. Think about the Hadza hunter-gatherers in Tanzania. They live in a harsh environment, but they thrive by using immense amounts of knowledge—how to make poison arrows, how to find honey, which plants are edible, how to cook tubers to make them nutritious. They are using information to capture energy and create the order necessary for life. Kevin: So knowledge isn't just abstract. It's a physical force that counteracts decay. Science, then, is just our most powerful method for generating that anti-entropic information. Michael: That's the core of it. The Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment weren't just about new ideas; they were about creating a system to generate reliable knowledge that we could use to build better sandcastles—vaccines, sanitation, democracy, free markets. These are all triumphs of information over entropy. Kevin: That reframes everything. It means progress is never finished. The moment we stop applying knowledge and effort, the waves of entropy will just wash it all away. Michael: And that's why Pinker is so passionate about defending the institutions that generate and disseminate that knowledge. Which brings us to the real fight. What happens when people start arguing that sandcastles are unnatural, or that we should just let the tide have its way? Kevin: You mean, when people actively work against progress? Michael: Exactly. Pinker calls them the Counter-Enlightenments.

Kevin: Okay, so who are these enemies of progress? I assume he's not just talking about people who are ignorant. Michael: No, far from it. He argues the most potent threats come from sophisticated, and often well-meaning, ideologies that reject the core tenets of the Enlightenment: reason, science, and humanism. He points the finger in some controversial directions. Kevin: Let me guess, he's not a fan of religious fundamentalism. Michael: That's an easy one. When you subordinate reason to faith, you're rejecting the primary tool for understanding and improving the world. But he also critiques nationalism, which asks you to subordinate the well-being of all humanity to the glory of your tribe or nation. He quotes the morbid slogan, "Sweet and right it is to die for your country," and contrasts it with the humanist goal, which is that it's sweet and right to live. Kevin: That makes sense. But I've heard the biggest criticisms of the book come from his take on the political left. Michael: Yes, and this is where it gets spicy. He points to what he calls the "Second Culture"—literary intellectuals and cultural critics who often express a deep disdain for science. He uses the famous, vitriolic debate between the scientist C.P. Snow and the literary critic F.R. Leavis as a prime example. Snow argued that science was a moral imperative because it could feed the hungry and cure the sick. Leavis basically called him an uncultured brute for thinking that a high "standard of living" was a worthy goal. Kevin: So it's the idea that appreciating high art is morally superior to, say, developing a vaccine that saves millions of lives? Michael: In a nutshell. Pinker sees this as a dangerous form of elitism. He also critiques certain strains of the green movement that romanticize a "natural" state and oppose technological solutions, like GMOs or nuclear power, which he argues are essential for human flourishing and environmental protection. Kevin: And this is where he gets into trouble. Critics, especially from the left, argue he's creating a strawman. They'd say that they aren't against progress, they're against a narrow, capitalist, colonialist version of progress. They point out that the Enlightenment also gave us scientific racism and the tools for more efficient exploitation. Michael: That's the core of the counter-argument, and it's a valid point to raise. Pinker's defense, I think, would be that the Enlightenment also gave us the tools to correct those very errors. The idea of universal human rights, the scientific method that debunks racist pseudoscience, and the commitment to open debate are all Enlightenment products. He argues you can't use the failures of the Enlightenment to condemn the entire project, because the project itself is what allows us to identify and fix those failures. Kevin: It's a bit of a bootstrap argument. The system fixes itself using its own tools. Michael: It is. And he argues that the alternative—abandoning reason, science, and humanism in favor of dogma, tribalism, or romanticism—is a recipe for disaster. It's choosing to let the tide wash away the sandcastle because you don't like the shape of one of its turrets.

Kevin: So, let's try to pull this all together. The world is, by most objective measures, getting dramatically better. But our brains are wired with biases that make us blind to this slow, steady progress, and the news cycle amplifies our worst fears. Michael: Right. And this progress isn't magic or inevitable. It's a constant, uphill battle against entropy—the universe's natural slide into disorder. The only weapon we have in that fight is knowledge, or what Pinker calls "information." Kevin: And that knowledge is generated by the core ideals of the Enlightenment: reason, science, and a humanism that puts the well-being of individuals first. But those very ideals are under attack today, not just from ignorance, but from sophisticated ideologies on both the right and the left. Michael: That's the whole argument in a nutshell. It's a defense of our best tools for survival and flourishing. There's a quote from Immanuel Kant that Pinker uses, which was the motto of the Enlightenment: "Sapere aude!"—"Dare to understand!" Kevin: Dare to understand. It feels like Pinker is updating that for the 21st century. He's asking us to dare to understand the data, to have the courage to believe that progress is possible, and to have the wisdom to defend the very things that make it happen. Michael: Exactly. The final question he leaves us with isn't "Are things good enough?" but "How can we make them even better?" It’s a call to action, grounded in a realistic assessment of how far we've come. Kevin: It’s a challenging but ultimately hopeful message. What do you all think? Are you an optimist or a pessimist about the future? Has this changed your mind at all? Let us know your thoughts on our socials. We'd love to hear your perspective. Michael: This is Aibrary, signing off.