Pinker's adversaries are coming from both the left and the right. I have read only some of their objections, not enough to see a clear pattern, but at first glance it seems leftists are more inclined to deny we have made any progress while those on the right will usually grant the progress while denying that all, if any, of the credit should go to any set of secular values. I can feel some sympathy for the latter position. To claim, though, that the human condition is no better now (a few say even worse) than it was during our hunter-gatherer days, or during ancient times, or during the Medieval age, strikes me as a kind of denialism akin to young-earth creationism.
Of course we haven't fixed everything yet. Pinker doesn't say we have, and he makes it perfectly clear that he has no intention of saying we have. We have not reached any kind of utopia, and I think we need to keep perfectly in our own minds that we never will. Because there is no free lunch. Never has been and never will be. This probably has something to do with the second law of thermodynamics, but whatever. Everything, good, bad, or neutral, has a cost. Some good things have only a trivial cost, but a trivial cost is still a cost, and somebody has to pay it. But there seem to be those who think that an imperfect solution is worse than no solution, that a problem should be left as is until we can fix it without creating any new problem. There are those, too, working on problems of particular concern to them, who care nothing and will do nothing about anybody else's problems until theirs are fixed. By some credible accounts I have read, some 19th-century feminists refused to work for passage of the 15th amendment, which guaranteed the vote to blacks, because it did not also guarantee the vote to women. Defenders of the exclusion argued that there was no hope of the amendment's being approved if it included women in its protection. That was obviously not how things should have been, but it was probably the way things actually were, and a solution that ignores reality is no solution at all. The nation certainly could have continued denying the vote to blacks until it was ready to allow women to vote, but I fail to see how anybody except white men would have benefited from that strategy.
There is an adage about the good being the enemy of the best. This expresses a fear that if we achieve something good, we will stop trying to achieve the best. It does happen, often because the good is affordable and the best is not. It can also be an excuse to reject the good, claiming that anything less than a perfect solution is an unacceptable solution. By this reasoning, black Americans were no better off after slavery was abolished because they still had to live under Jim Crow. At this point, somebody will object: Nobody is saying that. Very well. But neither is Pinker saying that the human condition is as good as it needs to be. He is saying only that it is better than it used to be.
Is he right? I don't have the resources to verify that data he offers in support of his thesis, but I have read some commentaries attempting to prove him wrong, and I'm not impressed with their counterarguments. If they know of any facts that falsify his thesis, they haven't produced them. They do go on about how some people still suffer, but is not a counterargument, because Pinker isn't claiming that nobody suffers any more.
One of his detractors did accuse him of confirmation bias. That can happen to the best of us, and I don't think Pinker would claim any immunity. But the adversary can't be done yet. He has to produce that data that Pinker either missed or disregarded and demonstrate how it falsifies his thesis, and I have yet to find anyone who has done that. It also seems very unlikely to me that they could. Some of his data could be wrong. Some of them probably are. But the suggestion that they are that wrong just isn't credible.
To begin with, nonexistent data can't prove anything. We can speculate all we want to about what they would prove if we had them, but until we get them, they're useless for anything but speculation. We have no choice but to work with the facts we know about. Pinker claims he used all the relevant data he could find. Maybe he did and maybe he didn't, but we don't have to take his word for it. We can make a reasonable guess about the likely impact of any data he might have omitted. My guess will assume the worked in good faith, that he did not intend to prove anything that his data clearly did not support, but we can also allow for the possibility that data he was unaware of could have been inconsistent with thesis.
In that case, if some facts he didn't know about would contradict his thesis, then he was a victim of some sampling error: The data he used were not actually representative of the phenomena he was trying to measure. This usually happens either because the sample size is insufficient or because the sample method causes a skewing in the distribution. The "Dewey Defeats Truman" headline happened because the polls were conducted only by telephone and, in 1948, a substantial number of Americans were still too poor to have telephones. Poor people were therefore underrepresented, and poor people tend to vote for Democrats.
There is no remedy for insufficient data except more data, but we can check the plausibility of the data being skewed for no other reason. Data from an insufficient sample can show a spurious correlation just by chance, and the smaller the sample, the more likely that is to happen. The correlation could also be real; the problem is just that we have no way knowing. Now let us do a thought experiment.
We have 100,000 urns filled with black and white marbles. Each urn has a label showing the date on which it was filled, and it can have anywhere from a few hundred to several hundred thousand marbles. We have no prior knowledge about the ratio of black to white marbles. Maybe each has a 50-50 mix, maybe each has a 20-80 mix, maybe the mixture varies from 10 percent black to 90 percent black. The hypothesis we want to check is that the mixture will show a correlation with the date on which the urn was filled. Statisticians have a method for figuring out how many samples we would need for a reliable test. I don't happen to know the method, but let's say for the sake of discussion that we have taken samples from 100 urns and that our resident statistician would say, "You need way more than that." Too bad. We can't get any more, at least not now. We'll have to do what we can with what we have.
So we check our samples and we do see a correlation: The older the turn, the higher the ratio of black to white marbles. And we notice something else. We happen to have more and better samples from the newer urns, and the correlation is strongest in those samples. If we accept the null hypothesis, we must think that the recent trend — fewer black marbles as time goes by — could be spurious, but even if real, cannot be extrapolated into the more distant past. But if that were so, we should expect the older samples to show a more random distribution of black to white ratios. Random error can produce spurious correlations, yes, but weak correlations, usually, not the strong correlation that appears in Pinker's data. It can happen. That is why we have to be skeptical about results based on small sample sizes. But skepticism is not rejection. Pinker's detractors have to argue that he got his results just by chance, and he could have, but I have yet to see any of the detractors present factual evidence for their claim that he did get his results just by chance.
The only historical facts we have available tell me that we have made progress, and that it has been substantial progress. The continuation of the progress is not inevitable. To maintain it or to prevents its reversal, we will have to keep doing whatever we did to get where we are. And what we did, according to Pinker, was implement the values of the Enlightenment. In my next essay, I will share some thoughts about why I agree with him.
(This page last updated on June 6, 2019.)