Are things getting better or worse? Steven Pinker, cognitive psychologist, linguist, and science popularizer, thinks they're getting better, so much so that in his new book, Enlightenment Now, he evinces impatience with the determinedly dower. Meanwhile, Samuel Moyn, reviewing Enlightenment Now, evinces impatience with Pinker's good cheer, which he thinks is too simple, too complacent, and too unenlightened. I think Moyn has the better of it, but maybe it's a case of me resembling my bête noire, Trump, who is famous for agreeing with whoever he heard from last.
Speaking of Trump, perhaps a point in Moyn's favor concerns how he (Trump) is president (and Mike Pence vice president) of a continental nation of well over 300 million people, whereas, at the time of our Revolution, a population of under four million included George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, James Madison &c. It seems we are not living through a golden age of political leadership. On the other hand, Hamilton was killed in a pistol duel fought against the sitting vice president, Aaron Burr, who suffered no legal consequences. On yet another hand, it's not as if gunfire in the streets is unheard of in America today. Earlier this week, here in Minneapolis, a security guard with a permit to carry a handgun was cut off on his commute by a school bus, so he made use of the slow-and-go traffic to get out of his car and shoot five times through the windshield of the bus, striking the driver in the arm and grazing his head--the only passenger, an 8-year-old, was not hit. Of course, Pinker might point out that the bus driver received medical care superior to what would have been available to any founding father. John Adams's daughter, Nabby, died of metastatic breast cancer after having lived through a primeval mastectomy performed without anesthesia, which hadn't yet been invented. According to Wikipedia:
The instruments used during the surgery consisted of a large fork with a pair of six-inch prongs sharpened to a needle point, a wooden-handled razor, a small oven filled with heated coals, and a thick iron spatula. . . .
Click on the link if you're actually curious about the use to which the surgeon put these instruments. Poor Nabby Adams soon died anyway, but on her death bed she would have been surprised to learn that in less than 150 years the possibility that humans would so despoil the earth's environment that it might no longer be able to sustain her kind, so that everyone would die, had become a distinct possibility.
My conclusion, with which I think Moyn might agree, is that we look for meaning in things and discover patterns and trends that explain something about how our minds work but nothing else. We think we're the measure of everything and that our history must be headed toward something, either Heaven or Hell, but it's really just one thing after another, good after bad and bad followed by good, enough of both so that the ruddy and the discouraged can both make a case and the considerable gray is mostly forgotten.
Also, people susceptible to road rage, which I think includes everyone with a driver's license, should not be allowed to carry around a loaded handgun. Just use your middle finger, it's less satisfying than shooting the guy but we like to think we have a civilization going here.
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