Maybe it’s because my aging eyes are failing me, but I’m beginning to see the brighter side of life, and not just my little life but Life. Optimism represents a phase change for me. During adolescence, I was sometimes so gloomy that my mom called me Eeyore. I wallowed in The Waste Land, 1984, Brave New World, and other dark classics. Movies about nuclear annihilation—Dr. Strangelove, On the Beach—had a pornographic appeal.
After I became a science journalist, I liked to harp on the limits of science, on all the goals that scientists will probably never attain. We won’t construct a “theory of everything,” explain the origin of the cosmos or of life, comprehend how electrochemical sputterings in our brains engender our protean minds. We won’t build warp-drive spaceships that will allow us to explore other solar systems and even other galaxies and hobnob with their alien inhabitants. I mocked the British biologist and Nobel laureate Peter Medawar for declaring, “To deride the hope of progress is the ultimate fatuity, the last word in poverty of spirit and meanness of mind.”
Now, perhaps because I’m a father and teacher (and hence, dare I say it, a role model), I’ve come to agree with Sir Peter, at least about social (as opposed to scientific) progress. Like anyone who tracks the news, I’m worried about the persistence of war and militarism, global warming and other threats to nature, extreme poverty and social injustice, AIDS and other diseases—you know the depressing list.
I certainly understand why pondering the future makes many people—young and old, liberal and conservative, male and female—so anxious. Pundits as diverse as the philosopher John Gray and the environmental activist Bill McKibben warn that humanity may descend into a nightmarish world of savage Malthusian wars over dwindling resources. I nonetheless now believe that pessimism about humanity’s future is wrong, both morally and empirically. Morally because pessimism can undermine our efforts to solve our social problems. Empirically because our history shows that these problems are far from insurmountable.
One of my classes—a kind of survey of Western thought, from Plato to Marx—recently presented me with the opportunity to make these points. Our readings included John F. Kennedy’s inauguration speech, in which he asked his fellow Americans to join him in the quest to end poverty, disease, tyranny, and war. I polled my students on whether they thought those four goals were reasonable, or merely utopian fantasies that politicians invoke in speeches but no one really does or should believe in. Everyone chose the utopian-fantasy option. So young, and so pessimistic! I spent the rest of the class trying to change their minds by presenting the following facts about our surging wealth, health, freedom, and peace.
For almost all of human history, only a minuscule elite—chiefs, kings, emperors and others at the top of their societies—lived in material comfort. The vast majority of humanity lived a hand-to-mouth existence, just a drought, flood, or insect infestation away from starvation. Average standards of living remained stagnant for the first millennium AD, and rose only slightly in the following 800 years. By 1800, per-capita income in Western Europe was slightly less than the average income today in Africa, the world’s poorest region.
Over the last two centuries, however, average standards of living have surged—first in Europe, cradle of the scientific and industrial revolutions, and then elsewhere—as a result of innovations in agriculture, transportation, communications, and other key industries. The world’s population has grown sixfold, and yet per-capita income has grown ninefold, contradicting the dire forecasts of Malthus and other prophets of doom. Today about one-fifth of the global population, or 1.4 billion people, scrapes by on less than $1.25 a day, the U.N.'s definition of “extreme poverty.” That number is shamefully high—especially considering the world’s enormous wealth—and yet as a percentage of total population it is extremely low compared with historical levels.
The economist Jeffrey Sachs—whose writings supplied me with the statistics above—argues that we can eradicate extreme poverty and the threat of starvation within a generation, if we have the will to do so. I heard a similar message at “Feeding the World,” a conference held last year in New York City. Agricultural experts from academe, industry, government, and nonprofits contended that we have the means to feed not only the nearly seven billion people alive today but also the nine billion expected to be alive by midcentury.
We’ve become much healthier as well as wealthier. By examining ancient skeletons, anthropologists have deduced that, for much of human history and prehistory, humans could expect to live only about 30 years. Average life spans actually dipped after the transition from the Paleolithic, when our ancestors lived as hunter-gatherers, to the Neolithic, when we started farming and settling down into villages. Many infants and mothers died during or shortly after birth.
But since the early 20th century, life spans have more than doubled, to a global average approaching 70 years, as a result of advances in the delivery and care of infants, improved treatment of water and sewage, better nutrition, vaccines, antibiotics, and other medical and public-health measures. According to statistics compiled by the Central Intelligence Agency, 32 countries now have a life expectancy above 80. (The United States, which spends much more on health care per capita than any other country, is not among that elite group, demonstrating that health does not require huge expenditures.)
Just as longevity and prosperity have surged in the past century, so has freedom. Over the last century, most nations have shifted away from monarchy and other forms of totalitarian rule and toward democracy. In 1900, 12 percent of humanity lived under democratic rule. That percentage rose to 31 percent by 1950. Today, according to the nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank Freedom House, almost two-thirds of the world’s population lives in societies that are either “free” (87 nations) or “partly free” (60 nations).
Freedom House defines a nation as “free” if it meets two criteria. First, it must “elect representatives who have a decisive impact on public policies and are accountable to the electorate.” Second, the country must allow “freedoms of expression and belief, associational and organizational rights, rule of law, and personal autonomy without interference from the state.”
People are “not free” in 48 countries, home to 35 percent of the global population. A single nation, the People’s Republic of China, accounts for more than half of that percentage. Global freedom has declined a bit recently, according to Freedom House, but even with that backsliding, more people—including women, racial and religious minorities, homosexuals, and other historically oppressed people—live more freely than at any previous time in history.
Finally—and contrary to the implication of daily news headlines about civil wars and insurgencies, drone strikes, terrorist attacks, and other acts of group violence—our era is quite peaceful by historical standards. Several new books—by the psychologist Steven Pinker, the political scientist Joshua Goldstein, and me—draw attention to this counterintuitive trend.
According to an analysis by the political scientist Milton Leitenberg, war killed almost four million people a year during the cataclysmic first half of the 20th century and almost a million a year during the second half. Keep in mind that during the same period, the global population quadrupled. Casualties have fallen even further over the last decade. Since 2000, annual combat casualties have averaged about 55,000—or 250,000 if you count civilians killed by war-related disease, famine, and exposure. Between 2000 and 2010, war killed fewer people than in any decade in the previous century.
And let us not forget that as recently as the late 1980s, humanity faced the threat of a global nuclear holocaust that could destroy not just the United States and its archrival, the U.S.S.R., but all life on earth. Then, incredibly, the Soviet Union dissolved, and the cold war ended peacefully. Apartheid ended in South Africa without significant violence, and democracy has spread elsewhere as well. The United States and Russia have been slashing their nuclear arsenals, and President Obama has kept his pledge to withdraw American troops from Iraq.
Yes, we still face enormous problems, and continued progress is by no means guaranteed. We may never eradicate poverty, disease, tyranny, and war, as JFK hoped. But given how far we’ve come toward creating a healthier, wealthier, freer, and more peaceful world, surely we can go much further. The liberal journalist and activist Norman Cousins liked to say, “We don’t know enough to be pessimists.” I’d go further than Cousins: We know enough to be optimists.
