LOOKING to the FUTURE

What will the next 100 years bring? Our collective future is actually pretty bright.

- Steven Pinker

When we look beyond the headlines to the trend lines, we find that humanity overall is healthier, richer, longer-lived, better fed, better educated, and safer from war, murder, and accidents than in decades and centuries past.

Having documented these changes in two books, I’m often asked whether I “believe in progress.” The answer is no. Like the humorist Fran Lebowitz, I don’t believe in anything you have to believe in.

Although many measures of human well-being, when plotted over time, show a gratifying increase (though not always or everywhere), it’s not because of some force or dialectic or evolutionary law that lifts us ever upward. On the contrary, nature has no regard for our well-being, and often, as with pandemics and natural disasters, it looks as if it’s trying to grind us down.

“Progress” is shorthand for a set of pushbacks and victories wrung out of an unforgiving universe. It is a phenomenon that needs to be explained.

The explanation is rationality. When humans set themselves the goal of improving the welfare of their fellow beings (as opposed to other dubious pursuits such as glory or redemption), and they apply their ingenuity in institutions that pool it with others’, they occasionally succeed. When they retain the successes and take note of the failures, the benefits can accumulate, and we call the big picture “progress.”

Here are four areas of great progress we have made together. With this in mind, perhaps the future isn’t as dire as doomsayers might imagine. In fact, we have much to hope for as we look to the future.

We live longer.