Enlightenment Now

by Steven Pinker

  No form of progress is inevitable, but the historical erosion of racism, sexism, and homophobia are more than a change in fashion. As we will see, it seems to be pushed along by the tide of modernity. In a cosmopolitan society, people rub shoulders, do business, and find themselves in the same boat with other kinds of people, and that tends to make them more sympathetic to one another.25 Also, as people are forced to justify the way they treat other people, rather than dominating them out of instinctive, religious, or historical inertia, any justification for prejudicial treatment will crumble under scrutiny.26 Racial segregation, male-only suffrage, and the criminalization of homosexuality are literally indefensible: people tried to defend them in their times, and they lost the argument.

  Figure 15-4: Rape and domestic violence, US, 1993–2014

  Sources: US Bureau of Justice Statistics, National Crime Victimization Survey, Victimization Analysis Tool, http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=nvat, with additional data provided by Jennifer Truman of BJS. The gray line represents “Intimate partner violence” with female victims. The arrows point to 2005, the last year plotted in fig. 7–13, and 2008, the last year plotted in fig. 7–10, of Pinker 2011.

  These forces can prevail over the long term even against the tug of populist backlash. The global momentum toward abolition of the death penalty (chapter 14), despite its perennial popular appeal, offers a lesson in the messy ways of progress. As indefensible or unworkable ideas fall by the wayside, they are removed from the pool of thinkable options, even among those who like to think that they think the unthinkable, and the political fringe is dragged forward despite itself. That’s why even in the most regressive political movement in recent American history there were no calls for reinstating Jim Crow laws, ending women’s suffrage, or recriminalizing homosexuality.

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  Racial and ethnic prejudice is declining not just in the West but worldwide. In 1950, almost half the world’s countries had laws that discriminated against ethnic or racial minorities (including, of course, the United States). By 2003 fewer than a fifth did, and they were outnumbered by countries with affirmative action policies that favored disadvantaged minorities.27 A huge 2008 survey by the World Public Opinion poll of twenty-one developed and developing nations found that in every one, large majorities of respondents (around 90 percent on average) say that it’s important for people of different races, ethnicities, and religions to be treated equally.28 Notwithstanding the habitual self-flagellation by Western intellectuals about Western racism, it’s non-Western countries that are the least tolerant. But even in India, the country at the bottom of the list, 59 percent of the respondents affirmed racial equality, and 76 percent affirmed religious equality.29

  With women’s rights, too, the progress is global. In 1900, women could vote in only one country, New Zealand. Today they can vote in every country in which men can vote but one, Vatican City. Women make up almost 40 percent of the labor force worldwide and more than a fifth of the members of national parliaments. The World Opinion Poll and Pew Global Attitudes Project have each found that more than 85 percent of their respondents believe in full equality for men and women, with rates ranging from 60 percent in India, to 88 percent in six Muslim-majority countries, to 98 percent in Mexico and the United Kingdom.30

  In 1993 the UN General Assembly adopted a Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women. Since then most countries have implemented laws and public-awareness campaigns to reduce rape, forced marriage, child marriage, genital mutilation, honor killings, domestic violence, and wartime atrocities. Though some of these measures are toothless, there are grounds for optimism over the long term. Global shaming campaigns, even when they start out as purely aspirational, have in the past led to dramatic reductions in slavery, dueling, whaling, foot-binding, piracy, privateering, chemical warfare, apartheid, and atmospheric nuclear testing.31 Female genital mutilation is an example: though still practiced in twenty-nine African countries (together with Indonesia, Iraq, India, Pakistan, and Yemen), a majority of both men and women in those countries believe it should stop, and over the past thirty years rates have fallen by a third.32 In 2016 the Pan-African Parliament, working with the UN Population Fund, endorsed a ban on the practice, together with child marriage.33

  Gay rights is another idea whose time has come. Homosexual acts used to be a criminal offense in almost every country in the world.34 The first arguments that behavior between consenting adults is no one else’s business were formulated during the Enlightenment by Montesquieu, Voltaire, Beccaria, and Bentham. A smattering of countries decriminalized homosexuality soon thereafter, and the number shot up with the gay rights revolution of the 1970s. Though homosexuality is still a crime in more than seventy countries (and a capital crime in eleven Islamic ones), and despite backsliding in Russia and several African countries, the global trend, encouraged by the UN and every human rights organization, continues toward liberalization.35 Figure 15-5 shows the time line: in the past six years, an additional eight countries have stricken homosexuality from their criminal codes.

  Figure 15-5: Decriminalization of homosexuality, 1791–2016

  Sources: Ottosson 2006, 2009. Dates for an additional sixteen countries were obtained from “LGBT Rights by Country or Territory,” Wikipedia, retrieved July 31, 2016. Dates for an additional thirty-six countries that currently allow homosexuality are not listed in either source. The arrow points to 2009, the last year plotted in fig. 7–23 of Pinker 2011.

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  The worldwide progress against racism, sexism, and homophobia, even with its bumpiness and setbacks, can feel like an overarching sweep. Martin Luther King Jr. famously quoted the abolitionist Theodore Parker’s image of an arc bending toward justice. Parker confessed that he could not complete the arc by sight but could “divine it by conscience.” Is there a more objective way of determining whether there is a historical arc toward justice, and if so, what bends it?

  One view of the moral arc is provided by the World Values Survey, which has polled 150,000 people in more than ninety-five countries containing almost 90 percent of the world’s population over a span of several decades. In his book Freedom Rising, the political scientist Christian Welzel (building on a collaboration with Ron Inglehart, Pippa Norris, and others) has proposed that the process of modernization has stimulated the rise of “emancipative values.”36 As societies shift from agrarian to industrial to informational, their citizens become less anxious about fending off enemies and other existential threats and more eager to express their ideals and to pursue opportunities in life. This shifts their values toward greater freedom for themselves and others. The transition is consistent with the psychologist Abraham Maslow’s theory of a hierarchy of needs from survival and safety to belonging, esteem, and self-actualization (and with Brecht’s “Grub first, then ethics”). People begin to prioritize freedom over security, diversity over uniformity, autonomy over authority, creativity over discipline, and individuality over conformity. Emancipative values may also be called liberal values, in the classical sense related to “liberty” and “liberation” (rather than the sense of political leftism).

  Welzel derived a way to capture a commitment to emancipative values in a single number, based on his discovery that the answers to a cluster of survey items tend to correlate across people, countries, and regions of the world with a common history and culture. The items embrace gender equality (whether people feel that women should have an equal right to jobs, political leadership, and a university education), personal choice (whether they feel that divorce, homosexuality, and abortion may be justified), political voice (whether they believe that people should be guaranteed freedom of speech and a say in government, communities, and the workplace), and childrearing philosophy (whether they feel that children should be encouraged to be obedient or independent and imaginative). The correlations among these items are far from perfect—abortion, in particular, divides people who agree on m
uch else—but they tend to go together and collectively predict many things about a country.

  Before we look at historical changes in values, we have to keep in mind that the passage of time doesn’t simply flip the pages of the calendar. As time goes by, people get older, and eventually they die and are replaced by a new generation. Any secular (in the sense of historical or long-term) change in human behavior, then, can take place for three reasons.37 The trend can be a Period Effect: a change in the times, the zeitgeist, or the national mood that lifts or lowers all the boats. It can be an Age (or Life Cycle) Effect: people change as they grow from mewling infant to whining schoolboy to sighing lover to round-bellied justice, and so on. Since there are booms and busts in a nation’s birthrate, the population average will automatically change with the changing proportion of young, middle-aged, and old people, even if the prevailing values at each age are the same. Finally, the trend can be a Cohort (or Generational) Effect: people born at a certain time may be stamped with traits they carry through their lives, and the average for the population will reflect the changing mixture of cohorts as one generation exits the stage and another enters. It’s impossible to disentangle the effects of age, period, and cohort perfectly, because as one period transitions into the next, each cohort gets older. But by measuring a trait across a population in several periods, and separating the data from the different cohorts in each one, one can make reasonable inferences about the three kinds of change.

  Let’s first look at the history of the most developed nations, such as those of North America, Western Europe, and Japan. Figure 15-6 shows the trajectory of emancipative values over a span of a century. It plots survey data collected from adults (ranging in age from eighteen to eighty-five), at two periods (1980 and 2005), representing cohorts born between 1895 and 1980. (American cohorts are commonly divided into the GI Generation, born between 1900 and 1924; the Silent Generation, 1925–45; the Baby Boomers, 1946–64; Generation X, 1965–79; and the Millennials, 1980–2000.) The cohorts are arranged along the horizontal axis by birth year; each of the two testing years is plotted on a line. (Data from 2011 to 2014, which extend the series to late Millennials born through 1996, are similar to those of 2005.)

  The graph displays a historical trend that is seldom appreciated in the hurly-burly of political debate: for all the talk about right-wing backlashes and angry white men, the values of Western countries have been getting steadily more liberal (which, as we will see, is one of the reasons those men are so angry).38 The line for 2005 is higher than the line for 1980 (showing that everyone got more liberal over time), and both curves rise from left to right (showing that younger generations in both periods were more liberal than older generations). The rises are substantial: about three-quarters of a standard deviation apiece for the twenty-five years of passing time and for each twenty-five-year generation. (The rises are also unappreciated: a 2016 Ipsos poll showed that in almost every developed country, people think their compatriots are more socially conservative than they really are.)39 A critical discovery displayed in the graph is that the liberalization does not reflect a growing bulge of liberal young people who will backslide into conservatism as they get older. If that were true, the two curves would sit side by side instead of one floating above the other, and a vertical line representing a given cohort would impale the 2005 curve at a lower value, reflecting conservative old age, rather than the higher value we see, reflecting the more liberal zeitgeist. Young people take their emancipative values with them as they age, a finding we’ll return to when we ponder the future of progress in chapter 20.40

  Figure 15-6: Liberal values across time and generations, developed countries, 1980–2005

  Source: Welzel 2013, fig. 4.1. World Values Survey data are from Australia, Canada, France, West Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States (each country weighted equally).

  The liberalization trends shown in figure 15-6 come from the Prius-driving, chai-sipping, kale-eating populations of post-industrial Western countries. What about the rest of humanity? Welzel grouped the ninety-five countries in the World Values Survey into ten zones with similar histories and cultures. He also took advantage of the absence of a life-cycle effect to extrapolate emancipative values backwards: the values of a sixty-year-old in 2000, adjusted for the effects of forty years of liberalization in his or her country as a whole, provide a good estimate of the values of a twenty-year-old in 1960. Figure 15-7 shows the trends in liberal values for the different parts of the world over a span of almost fifty years, combining the effects of the changing zeitgeist in each country (like the jump between curves in figure 15-6) with the changing cohorts (the rise along each curve).

  Figure 15-7: Liberal values across time (extrapolated), world’s culture zones, 1960–2006

  Source: World Values Survey, as analyzed in Welzel 2013, fig. 4.4, updated with data provided by Welzel. Emancipative value estimates for each country in each year are calculated for a hypothetical sample of a fixed age, based on each respondent’s birth cohort, the year of testing, and a country-specific period effect. The labels are geographic mnemonics for Welzel’s “culture zones” and do not literally apply to every country in a zone. I have renamed some of the zones: Protestant Western Europe corresponds to Welzel’s “Reformed West.” US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand = “New West.” Catholic & Southern Europe = “Old West.” Central & Eastern Europe = “Returned West.” East Asia = “Sinic East.” Former Yugoslavia & USSR = “Orthodox East.” South & Southeast Asia = “Indic East.” Countries in each zone are weighted equally.

  The graph, unsurprisingly, reveals that differences across the world’s culture zones are substantial. The Protestant countries of Western Europe, such as the Netherlands, Scandinavia, and the United Kingdom, are the world’s most liberal, followed by the United States and other wealthy English-speaking countries, then Catholic and Southern Europe, then the former Communist countries of central Europe. Latin America, the industrialized countries of East Asia, and the former republics of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia are more socially conservative, followed by South and Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. The world’s most illiberal region is the Islamic Middle East.

  What is surprising, though, is that in every part of the world, people have become more liberal. A lot more liberal: young Muslims in the Middle East, the world’s most conservative culture, have values today that are comparable to those of young people in Western Europe, the world’s most liberal culture, in the early 1960s. Though in every culture both the zeitgeist and the generations became more liberal, in some, like the Islamic Middle East, the liberalization was driven mainly by the generational turnover, and it played an obvious role in the Arab Spring.41

  Can we identify the causes that differentiate the world’s regions and liberalize them all over time? Many society-wide traits correlate with emancipative values, and—in a problem we encounter repeatedly—they tend to correlate with each other, a nuisance for social scientists who want to distinguish causation from correlation.42 Prosperity (measured as GDP per capita) correlates with emancipative values, presumably because as people become healthier and more secure they can experiment with liberalizing their societies. The data show that more liberal countries are also, on average, better educated, more urban, less fecund, less inbred (with fewer marriages among cousins), more peaceful, more democratic, less corrupt, and less crime- and coup-ridden.43 Their economies, now and in the past, tend to be built on networks of commerce rather than large plantations or the extraction of oil and minerals.

  Yet the single best predictor of emancipative values is the World Bank’s Knowledge Index, which combines per capita measures of education (adult literacy and enrollment in high schools and colleges), information access (telephones, computers, and Internet users), scientific and technological productivity (researchers, patents, and journal articles), and institutional integrity (rule of law, re
gulatory quality, and open economies).44 Welzel found that the Knowledge Index accounts for seventy percent of the variation in emancipative values across countries, making it a far better predictor than GDP.45 The statistical result vindicates a key insight of the Enlightenment: knowledge and sound institutions lead to moral progress.

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  Any tour of progress in rights must look at the most vulnerable sector of humanity, children, who cannot agitate for their own interests but depend upon the compassion of others. We’ve already seen that children the world over have become better off: they are less likely to enter the world motherless, die before their fifth birthday, or grow up stunted for lack of food. Here we’ll see that in addition to escaping these natural assaults, children are increasingly escaping human-made ones: they are safer than they were before, and likelier to enjoy a true childhood.