Now. Enlightenment. Again.

Introduction: The Role of History

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The motto of the Enlightenment is "Dare to know!" The basic necessity here is "freedom of expression," and the author explains Enlightenment through reason, science, humanism, and progress. Reason is uncompromising. If one's answer to "What should humans live for?" is rational, just, true, and believed by others, then it can be said that everything is entrusted to reason. Enlightenment thinkers rejected the view that God intervenes in human affairs, drawn by reason. Some Enlightenment thinkers, as deists, argued that God set the universe in motion and then left it to unfold according to natural laws. The author defines the Scientific Revolution as an "escape from ignorance" and "escape from fear." Enlightenment thinkers saw skepticism and open debate as the only "paradigm" through which the scientific method could achieve reliable knowledge. Humanism privileges the welfare of individual men, women, and babies, unaffected by tribe, race, nation, or religion, viewing existence as individual rather than collective. Individuals, being born with a sense of empathy, can extend empathy to all humanity. Enlightenment thinkers criticized the secular cruelty of their time and sought to eliminate the barbaric practices of civilization. As understanding of the world increased through science, reason expanded to a cosmopolitan scope, enabling intellectual and moral progress. Here, progress is not the force pushing humanity towards utopia. The author strongly argues that progress not based on humanism is not progress at all. While Enlightenment thinkers were great, they did not understand key concepts about human condition and progress that we know today, such as entropy, evolution, and information.

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Entropy, Evolution, Information

The first cornerstone for understanding the human condition is the concept of entropy or disorder, derived from the Second Law of Thermodynamics: "Entropy in an isolated system never decreases." Any random disturbance within the system or a strong external shock causes changes, leading to a more disordered state. Information can be thought of as the element that distinguishes an ordered, organized system from countless useless random ones where entropy decreases. Information accumulates in genomes during the evolution process and is collected through the nervous systems of living animals. The principles of information, computation, and control bridge the gap between the physical world of cause and effect and the psychological world of knowledge, intelligence, and purpose. The idea that thoughts can change the world is not mere rhetoric but a factual connection to the physical structure of the brain. Energy gained through knowledge acts as a tonic to resist entropy, thus improving the ability to gain energy directly correlates with improving human destiny. Misery is no one's fault; impersonal forces guarantee that "everything happens for a reason." Evolution has filled this world with malice. Natural selection is the competition among genes to manifest in the next generation, and the organisms we see today are descendants of winners in battles for mates, food, and dominance.

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Anti-Enlightenment

Since the 1960s, belief in modern institutions has collapsed, and by the 2010s, popular movements openly denied Enlightenment ideals. These movements praised tribalism over globalism, authoritarianism over democracy, and despised experts rather than respecting knowledge, longing for an idyllic past instead of hoping for a better future. Surprisingly, such anti-Enlightenment ideologies are widely spread among elites and intellectuals in the 21st century. The idea of using collective reason to expand prosperity and reduce suffering is treated as naive and outdated. Let's look at some prominent alternatives to anti-Enlightenment. First, religious faith. Accepting something based on faith means believing without proper reason, and belief in supernatural beings inherently conflicts with reason. Another view is that people are expendable in tribes, nations, religions, and countries. Patriotic slogans like "Dying for the fatherland is honorable" exemplify this. This anti-Enlightenment sentiment abounds across both left and right political spectrums. Another anti-Enlightenment idea is the declinism that Western civilization has steadily regressed over the past 200 years, lamenting the touch of technology like humans touching Prometheus's fire. Finally, there is the belief that materialism and consumerism are corroding human souls.

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Fear of Progress

The concept of progress, or the Enlightenment belief that understanding the world can improve the human condition, is explored. Most people reveal through surveys that "the world is getting worse." However, we can easily understand why people feel this way due to the daily news filled with war, terrorism, crime, pollution, and inequality. The nature of news tends to distort people's worldview. Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman named the psychological error causing this "availability heuristic bias," where people estimate the probability or frequency of an event based on how well specific instances are remembered. Frequent events leave stronger traces in memory, thus stronger memories generally indicate more frequent events. The availability heuristic is a frequent source of error in human reasoning. News addicts, rather than becoming wiser, may have their yardstick for gauging the world distorted. They worry that crime is worsening even when crime rates are falling, sometimes completely detached from reality. In a situation where journalistic habits and cognitive biases intertwine for the worst, the reliable way to assess the world's state is through numbers. The world has made remarkable progress in all aspects of human welfare, but hardly anyone knows it.

 

Life

The struggle to survive is a primal desire of living beings, and humans use creativity and ingenuity to avoid death for as long as possible. Looking at Max Roser's graph of life expectancy over centuries, from the 20th century onwards, the life expectancy graph sharply turns upward. As of 2020, it exceeds 70 years everywhere except Africa. Infant mortality rates have also drastically decreased, with the global average nearing zero. The best prediction of the outcome of our centuries-long battle with death comes from Stein's Law, which Davis revised to "What cannot go on forever usually lasts much longer than you think."

 

Health

For most of human history, the most powerful force of death was infectious disease, a nasty feature of evolution where small, fast-reproducing organisms harm us and spread through bacteria, insects, bodily excretions, etc. Infectious diseases have killed millions and wiped out civilizations, bringing sudden disasters to inhabitants. Chlorinated drinking water, doctors washing their hands, antiseptics, anesthesia, blood transfusions, and other medical advances have made fighting infectious diseases more effective. Science has made the greatest contributions, and knowledge is key. Deaton points out that small ideas and even the central Enlightenment idea that 'knowledge makes us better off' can suddenly emerge in areas where people have resigned to poor health and not considered that institutional and normative changes can improve health conditions.

 

Food

Evolution and entropy trouble us with traps like aging, childbirth, and pathogens, making us constantly need energy. Evolved varieties producing many times the yield of original crops, combined with modern irrigation, soil fertilization, and crop management techniques, have turned once famine-stricken countries into grain exporters almost overnight. Thanks to the Green Revolution, the world now produces the same amount of food on less than a third of the land. Data from the book shows that between 1961 and 2009, the area of land used for food cultivation increased by 12%, but yields increased by 300%. The ability to produce more food on less land not only combats hunger but also benefits the planet overall. Farmland, while idyllic in charm, biologically devastates forests and grasslands, becoming ecological deserts. In some parts of the world, farmland is shrinking, and temperate forests are returning. Like all progress, the Green Revolution faced attacks as soon as it began. Critics argue that cutting-edge agriculture consumes fossil fuels and groundwater, uses herbicides and pesticides, disrupts traditional farming, and is biologically unnatural, benefiting corporations. However, recent genetic engineering produces vitamin-rich, drought- and salt-resistant, pest- and disease-resistant crops that save labor in land fertilization and cultivation, though traditional environmentalist groups oppose genetically modified crops, calling them "genetic pollution" and a "mockery of nature."

 

Wealth

For most of human history, from 1 AD for a thousand years, the world did not become any wealthier. It took another 500 years for incomes to double. Some regions grew rapidly, but not through steady, gradual growth. Then, starting in the 19th century, incomes skyrocketed. Between 1820 and 1900, global income tripled. Fifty years later, it tripled again. It only took 25 years for another threefold increase, and another 33 years for another. Today, global GDP has increased almost 100 times since the Industrial Revolution began in 1820 and about 200 times since the Enlightenment started in the 18th century. This expansion of wealth is vastly underestimated because today's technological products were inaccessible at any price in the past. This great escape was made possible by applying science to improve material life, resulting in the emergence of the Enlightenment economy. The Enlightenment economy’s success depended on two innovations: the development of science and institutions that facilitated the smooth flow of goods, services, and ideas. The third innovation was a change in values. Commerce, once considered base and corrupt, began to be seen as moral and hopeful in 18th-century England and the Netherlands. The book presents various data, such as the reduction in the number of extremely poor people, showing how wealthy the world has become. The reasons for the world running smoothly today include, firstly, the fall of communism. The economic benefits of capitalism are so obvious that they require no numbers to see. Secondly, leadership changes. Thirdly, the end of the Cold War, and fourthly, globalization. Quantitative analysts investigating causes found that economic development is a major driver of human well-being.

 

Inequality

Economic inequality is a symbolic issue of the left, rising significantly since the 2007 subprime crisis. To understand inequality within the context of human progress, we must recognize that income inequality is not a fundamental determinant of human well-being and welfare. The problem is not inequality itself but the narrow perspective through which economic inequality is viewed. Confusing inequality with poverty is a fallacy, stemming from the zero-sum thinking that wealth, like the nutrients in a decaying carcass, is a finite resource that must be divided; thus, if someone has more, another must have less. However, as we have seen, wealth does not work this way. Since the Industrial Revolution, wealth has exponentially increased. This means that as the rich have become richer, the poor have also become wealthier. Despite concerns about rising inequality in Western countries, the global Gini coefficient curve suggests that inequality is decreasing worldwide. Critics who claim that modern capitalist societies are indifferent to the poor are unaware of how little was spent on poverty relief in pre-capitalist societies. Globalization and technological advancements have lifted many people out of poverty. Some in the lower-income brackets of developed countries have moved up the economic ladder, supporting the idea that inequality is decreasing. The world is less equal than it was in the past, but people around the globe are becoming wealthier in more diverse ways.

 

Environment

Like other issues, environmental problems can be solved with the right knowledge. The concept of environmental issues is not easily grasped because, from an individual’s perspective, the Earth seems limitless, and our impact appears negligible. However, from a scientific standpoint, the outlook has been pessimistic, giving rise to the environmental movement among romantic nature worshipers. By the 1970s, mainstream environmentalism had somewhat fused with a quasi-religious ideology, greenism. The starting point of greenism is representing the Earth as an innocent girl tainted by human greed. Like other apocalyptic movements, greenism is tinged with a misanthropic, pessimistic attitude. A new approach to environmentalism is known as eco-modernism or eco-pragmatism. Eco-modernism begins with recognizing that a certain level of pollution is an inevitable consequence of the second law of thermodynamics. When people use energy to create organized spaces within their bodies and homes, entropy in the outside environment increases through waste, pollution, and other forms of disorder. Humanity has never lived in harmony with the environment. On average, individuals in the primitive or agricultural eras had a greater impact on the Earth’s terrain than modern people do. Ecologically speaking, the term "natural food" is a misnomer since agriculture itself is an artificial product. One key to environmental protection is decoupling productivity from resource use. Humans can now derive more benefits from fewer materials and less energy, a process aided by dematerialization. Dematerialization refers to the technological innovation where all physical products are stored as digital information due to the digital revolution. The current environmental movement has been severely distorted in the name of morality and sacrifice. In the past, efforts were made to make poor countries wealthier, but now, efforts aim to make rich countries poorer. While agreeing that environmental issues are moral issues, moral preaching is often ineffective. Demonizing fossil fuel companies that sell us necessary energy or expressing our virtues through ostentatious sacrifices might feel good, but such self-righteousness will not prevent destructive climate change. The Enlightenment approach to climate change focuses on minimizing greenhouse gas emissions while maximizing energy production. Just as we have solved various problems through sustained efforts in social prosperity, wise market regulation, global governance, and investment in science and technology, we can solve this issue as well.

 

Peace

The possibility of reduced violence was doubted due to availability heuristic bias and negativity bias. These biases also hastily conclude that any reduction is temporary and that we will revert to previous levels. However, examining various data shows that war and war-related deaths have decreased over time. Additionally, conscription rates, the size of armies, and military expenditures as a percentage of GDP have all decreased over recent decades. The most crucial factor in war is the human mind, which is changing. Especially as international trade has increased, it has diminished the allure of war. Quantitative analysis shows that, other conditions being equal, countries with close trade relationships are less likely to go to war. Data also indicate that democratic nations are less likely to engage in military conflicts with each other. Inventions such as UN peacekeeping forces, international law, and international norms serve as tools for building a world where all powers exercise war restraint.

 

Safety

Humanity has significantly reduced deaths from all kinds of injuries compared to the past. First, deaths from homicides have significantly declined. The birth of centralized states and their efforts to establish the rule of law, along with integration into commercial societies, have decreased violence rates. Graphs presented by the author show that, in the U.S., homicide rates significantly fell even when income inequality widened, indicating that inequality and homicide rates are unrelated. Moreover, homicides are highly concentrated in specific areas. The most dangerous countries, such as Honduras, Venezuela, El Salvador, Jamaica, Lesotho, and South Africa, have homicide rates hundreds of times higher than the safest countries. This pattern continues fractally downwards: within countries, most homicides occur in a few cities, within cities in a few neighborhoods, and within neighborhoods on a few streets. Government measures (law enforcement) have dramatically reduced homicide rates even in the world's murder capital, San Pedro Sula, by 62% in just two years. Effective law enforcement, victim protection, swift and fair trials, appropriate punishment, and humane incarceration facilities all play a crucial role in continually reducing lethal violence. The most effective strategy among these is focused deterrence, which involves identifying 'hot spots' through real-time data collection in crime-ridden neighborhoods and focusing efforts there. The author also argues that deaths from traffic accidents have steadily declined. The causes of these changes cannot be attributed to a single factor but are the result of contributions from engineers, consumers, entrepreneurs, and government officials. As our understanding of the world deepens and the value of life becomes more precious, it will become clearer.

 

Terrorism

Terrorism is a unique threat because it combines great fear with small harm. The author states he would not include terrorism trends as examples of progress and argues that terrorism distorts the proper assessment of progress. Despite causing relatively minimal harm compared to other risks, terrorism induces massive chaos and hysteria because it is designed to have such an effect. Modern terrorism is a byproduct of the broader reach of the media. Their targets are innocent people, especially those in situations readers can easily imagine themselves in. The media take the bait and heavily report on the heinous crimes, triggering the availability heuristic, making people feel terrified regardless of the actual scale of the threat. While it might be challenging to reduce the already low number of terrorism casualties to zero, we can remember that the fear of terrorism is not a signal of how dangerous our society is but rather a sign of how safe it has become.

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Democracy

Disorder is more deadly than tyranny. Most mass killings occur not as a result of wielded power but as a consequence of power collapse. A democratic government can be described as a form of government that prevents people from preying on each other while forcing rulers to exercise just the right amount of power to avoid preying on the people. A good democratic government ensures that people can live safely, protected from the violence of anarchy, enjoy freedom, and be safeguarded from the violence of dictators. Democracy leads to higher economic growth rates, a decrease in wars and mass killings, healthier and better-educated citizens, and virtually eradicates famine. If the world has become more democratic over time, that world has progressed. Contrary to the widespread belief that elections are the essence of democracy, elections are merely one mechanism through which governments provide democracy to their citizens, and they are not always constructive. When elections turn into competitions among ambitious dictators, the greatest fear of rival factions is that the opposing side will win the election and use the power of the vote to threaten one another.

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Equal Rights

The history of expanding equal rights is a particularly stirring chapter in the narrative of human progress. The rights of minority races, women, and homosexuals have steadily advanced, recently achieving significant historical milestones. We witnessed the first African-American president of the United States completing his second term (Barack Obama). Data on racial discrimination, gender discrimination, and homophobia in the United States show that these issues are much less prevalent now than in the latter half of the 1900s. People worldwide are becoming increasingly liberal. Young Muslims in the Middle East, one of the most conservative cultural regions, hold values similar to those of young Western Europeans in the early 1960s, one of the most liberal cultural regions. Betzel discovered that the knowledge index explains 70% of the variance in the emancipative value index across countries, making it a much more accurate predictor than GDP. These statistical results validate the Enlightenment insight that knowledge and good institutions lead to moral progress. To properly understand the progress of human rights, we must look at the most vulnerable members of humanity—children. We can already see improvements in the lives of children worldwide. Various statistics on child labor, school violence, and sexual and physical abuse of children show that children’s rights have also progressed.

 

Knowledge

Research analyzing the relationship between education level and wealth over time, while controlling for other factors, shows that investment in education genuinely makes a country wealthier, provided the education is secular and rational. Until the 20th century, Spain had the slowest economic development among Western countries. Although education levels were high, the Catholic Church controlled education, and children could only learn the Apostles' Creed, catechism, and a few basic skills orally. Good education today makes a country more democratic and peaceful in the future. Educated people value imagination, independence, and freedom of expression. They are more likely to vote, volunteer, express political views, and participate in civic organizations such as unions, political parties, religious groups, and community organizations. Educated people are also more likely to trust other citizens, an essential ingredient of valuable social capital. This trust enables people to confidently make contracts, invest, and obey the law without fear of being deceived.

 

Quality of Life

Our lives are improving beyond the standard economic measures of longevity and wealth. While many may not favor strawberries and cream or might give up aesthetic experiences or the scent of nature for other possibilities, the ultimate form of progress might be creating a world where people can freely choose from a buffet of aesthetic, intellectual, social, cultural, and natural pleasures to enrich their lives. The resources technology provides to enhance our lives include not only time but also light. Light, a metaphor for superior intelligence and worthwhile pursuits, empowers us significantly. By reclaiming the night with human-made light, we can read, move around, see others' faces, and interact with our environment in new ways. Although people complain about being incredibly busy, data show that we all have more leisure time.

 

Happiness

Within a country, wealthier people are happier, but when comparing different countries, wealthier nations are not necessarily happier than poorer ones. Additionally, over time, people do not seem to become happier as their country becomes wealthier. This phenomenon is known as the Easterlin Paradox and can be explained by two psychological theories. According to the hedonic treadmill theory, people adapt to changes in wealth just as our eyes adjust to light and darkness, reverting to an innate baseline. The social comparison theory suggests that people’s happiness is determined by how well they are doing relative to others. Therefore, even if a whole nation becomes wealthier, no one becomes happier. In fact, as national inequality increases, people may become unhappier even as they become wealthier. However, another study shows that the Easterlin Paradox does not exist, indicating that happiness increases precisely with income. Just as an individual’s happiness increases when their income rises relative to others, national happiness increases as the country’s income grows. This casts doubt on the notion that people are happy or unhappy only when comparing themselves to others. Absolute income, rather than relative income, is the most significant factor influencing happiness. Knowing that nations become wealthier over time, we can infer that humanity becomes happier over time. Warnings about rampant loneliness, suicide, depression, and anxiety are not factual. Studies and data show that Millennials appear better off, happier, and mentally healthier than their worried parents.

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Existential Threats

The four horsemen of the modern apocalypse in the past half-century were overpopulation, resource depletion, environmental pollution, and nuclear war. Recently, a more unique set of threats has joined these ranks, including nanomachines that could annihilate us, robots that could enslave us, and artificial intelligence that could turn humans into raw materials or fuel. Some threats are mere fiction created by cultural and historical pessimism, while others are real dangers that we will address as solvable problems rather than awaiting inevitable disasters. Some risks threatening humanity are either exaggerated or highly improbable, but one is quite real: nuclear war. The fear of nuclear conflict led the frightened U.S. to build larger and more numerous bombs to deter the Soviet Union. Even Eugene Rabinowitch, who devised the Doomsday Clock, regretted the strategy he had adopted. In trying to awaken reason through fear, scientists plunged many people into desperate terror and blind hatred. Our path forward is already laid out: if we continue to dismantle nuclear warheads swiftly, remove hair-trigger alerts, and guarantee not to use them first, and if the trend of decreasing inter-state wars continues, we may see a small, safe arsenal existing solely for mutual deterrence by the latter half of this century. As we step down the ladder, the risk will gradually diminish until it eventually aligns with other factors threatening our species’ survival.

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Progress and the Future

Let's examine the claim that progress is ongoing. The scientific revolution and the Enlightenment initiated a process of using knowledge to improve the human condition. Two centuries later, we can say this process has been successful. We have seen over 70 graphs proving the hope for progress as we observed the world's improvement. While not every graph line can point upward, many do. Even better, progress begets further progress. Wealthy nations continuously improve by better protecting the environment, catching criminals, and strengthening social safety nets. This optimistic outlook is not a naive illusion or mere wishful thinking. It is a future grounded in historical reality, supported by cold, hard facts. A political movement threatens human progress by undermining the foundations of Enlightenment: populism, or more precisely, authoritarian populism, is an anti-Enlightenment movement on the rise. The driving force of populism seems to be cultural backlash. Avoiding unnecessary polarization through rhetoric, symbolism, and identity politics will help attract or, at least, not alienate those unsure of their stance. The philosopher’s privilege of freedom includes the liberty to ruin one's life. Liberal democracy can progress but only against the constant backdrop of patchwork compromises and relentless improvements.

 

Reason

Rejecting reason is, by definition, irrational. People generally respect beliefs, meaning the state of mind in which something is accepted as true without rational justification. Postmodernism teaches that reason is an excuse for wielding power, truth is socially constructed, and all statements are caught in a web of self-reference, resulting in paradox. These claims have a fatal flaw: they deny the possibility of any rational basis for such positions. No Enlightenment thinker claimed humans are consistently rational. They argued that we should strive to be rational and, to do so, must suppress the errors and dogmas that captivate us. Even in the 21st century, irrational thinkers exist. A common view explaining mass irrationality points to ignorance—poor education systems, scientific illiteracy, entrenched cognitive biases, and vulnerability to a corrupt culture. The most significant threat to reason today is political polarization. Our era's challenge is cultivating a knowledge culture and political culture driven by reason. People can be entirely rational when issues are not politicized, and in many aspects, the world today is far more rational than in the past. To make public discourse more rational, we must depoliticize issues as much as possible. When discussing social issues, one should respond based on recent analysis rather than reflexively aligning with left- or right-wing positions according to one's inclinations.

 

Science

Science sheds new light on the human condition. The great thinkers of antiquity, the Age of Reason, and the Enlightenment were born too early to know the concepts that deeply influence morality and meaning today, such as entropy, evolution, information, game theory, and artificial intelligence. The issues they introduced have been greatly enriched by these concepts and are being explored with precision tools like 3D imaging of brain activity and big data mining tracking the spread of ideas. The author discusses instances in U.S. politics where science has been opposed, citing the George W. Bush administration's encouragement of creationism in education as a notable example. Science is increasingly and beneficially ingrained in our material, moral, and intellectual lives. However, many cultural institutions promote a snobbish indifference towards science, which often evolves into contempt. The greatest benefit of steadily striving to understand the true value of science is that everyone can think more scientifically. People who reject scientific thinking often voice opposition by claiming that some things cannot be quantified. However, unless one is willing to abandon binary thinking and engage in more nuanced discussions using terms like more, less, better, worse, everyone essentially makes quantitative claims. One of the most significant contributions modern science can make is to achieve deeper integration with its academic partner, the humanities. The integration of science with the humanities can greatly enrich the possibilities for new insights. Art, culture, and society stem from the human brain. They arise from our abilities to perceive, think, and feel, and accumulate and spread through dynamic interactions from one person to another.

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Fin : Humanism

Science alone is insufficient to achieve progress. While possessing correct knowledge means that anything not forbidden by the laws of nature can be accomplished, therein lies the problem. "Anything" truly means anything. We can call the goal of maximizing human flourishing—life, health, happiness, freedom, knowledge, love, and rich experiences—humanism. It is humanism that judges what we aim to achieve with human knowledge. The goals of the humanist movement have been declared three times since 1933. The Third Humanist Manifesto, issued in 2003, states:

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1. The knowledge of the world is a result of observation, experimentation, and rational analysis.

2. Humans are part of nature and have evolved through a process without any guiding direction.

3. Ethical values are derived from human needs and interests as tested by experience.

4. The fulfillment of life comes from personal participation in the service of humane ideals.

5. Humans are inherently social and find meaning in relationships.

6. Beneficial actions for society maximize individual happiness.

 

Humanism strongly opposes two belief systems: first, theistic morality, and second, the ideologies behind authoritarianism, nationalism, populism, reactionary thought, and fascism. We will never achieve a perfect world, and pursuing such a world is dangerous. However, if we continue to use knowledge to promote human flourishing, there will be no limit to ways in which the world can be improved. Mythology, though fictitious, is based on the best knowledge we have and the one truth we can obtain. We believe in that truth because we have reasons to do so. Furthermore, that story belongs to all of humanity and to all beings with the capacity for perception who advocate for the power and existence of reason.

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Fin.