A Realistic Hope

Transcript

I’d like to tell you about a realistic hope.

I have been reading Stephen Pinker’s book Better Angels of Our Nature.

The other day I was watching one of his ted talks on Youtube and he concludes the speech with these notes, with these words I am about to read out to you now:

“We are born into a pitiless universe, facing steep odds against life-enabling order and in constant jeopardy of falling apart. We were shaped by a process that is ruthlessly competitive. We are made from crooked timber, vulnerable to illusions, self-centeredness and at times astounding stupidity.

Yet human nature has also been blessed with resources that open a space for a kind of redemption. We are endowed with the power to combine ideas recursively, to have thoughts about our thoughts. We have an instinct for language, allowing us to share the fruits of our ingenuity and experience. We are deepened with the capacity for sympathy, for pity, imagination, compassion, commiseration.

These endowments have found ways to magnify their own power. The scope of language has been augmented by the written, printed and electronic word.

Our circle of sympathy has been expanded by history, journalism and the narrative arts. And our puny rational faculties have been multiplied by the norms and institutions of reason, intellectual curiosity, open debate, skepticism of authority and dogma and the burden of proof to verify ideas by confronting them against reality.

As the spiral of recursive improvement gathers momentum, we eke out victories against the forces that grind us down, not least the darker parts of our own nature. We penetrate the mysteries of the cosmos, including life and mind. We live longer, suffer less, learn more, get smarter and enjoy more small pleasures and rich experiences. Fewer of us are killed, assaulted, enslaved, exploited or oppressed by the others.

From a few oases, the territories with peace and prosperity are growing and could someday encompass the globe. Much suffering remains and tremendous peril, but ideas on how to reduce them have been voiced, and an infinite number of others are yet to be conceived.

We will never have a perfect world, and it would be dangerous to seek one. But there’s no limit to the betterments we can attain if we continue to apply knowledge to enhance human flourishing.

This heroic story is not just another myth. Myths are fictions, but this one is true, true to the best of our knowledge, which is the only truth we can have. As we learn more, we can show which parts of the story continue to be true and which ones false, as any of them might be and any could become.

And this story belongs not to any tribe but to all of humanity,  to any sentient creature with the power of reason and the urge to persist in its being, for it requires only the convictions that life is better than death, health is better than sickness, abundance is better than want, freedom is better than coercion, happiness is better than suffering and knowledge is better than ignorance and superstition.”

Now its wonderful to think about those words, that’s the end of course.

Its very interesting if you talk to a lot of people they are under the impression that the world is getting worse not better.

You can read Pinker’s book or you can listen to his speeches and you can hear the data on the question and the conclusion is that life is very much getting better for people on earth, even despite all the problems that we have.

The numerous problems I should say.

We are figuring it out and each one of us is a part of that process, that skeptical process, the process of civilization.

All of these processes come together from individuals just like you making decisions trying to improve the world in your own little way and move forward coming up with ideas and implementing them to create a more peaceful world, a world with less suffering, a world where we can enjoy.

And it’s all true, its all backed up by data. Its serious, not just some pie in the sky hope.

This is the reality of the situation and as long as we apply our efforts and our careful thinking it appears this trend will continue.

What a wonderful world.