Archive for July, 2009

Last night I had a lengthy debate with my very intelligent friend Robert after a concert. Our debate swirled around whether humans are making progress or whether we are creating a greater probability that we will destroy ourselves and our planet. I am a naive, heedless optimist and he is a depressing, Gulliver pessimist. I find it interesting that two people can view the world with such different colors painted over their lenses.

I believe that humans are becoming more intelligent, more educated, more moral, less violent, and more human. By more human, I mean that we have more leisure time to consume and to create art, politics, music, literature, etc. We also have more and more leisure time to help other humans or to heal the environment, as evidenced by the enormous number of NGOs and donors who fund them. Free trade and technological development are two primary factors that have allowed humans to escape the cruelties and monotony of the non-industrialized life and to become “more human.”

My friend and others who think as him (a significant portion of Prof. Freyfogle’s Individualism & its Critics class), often romanticize the non-industrialized, agrarian, hunter-gatherer world. I always find it curious that when I hear that romanticization and the denunciation of the industrialized world that it always comes from someone who lives in the industrialized world, but who visits nature. They visit nature during their leisure time as a vacation, but I have not yet met one who has had the courage to abandon civilized society to live an entire life on an isolated farm or in a forest with hunter-gatherer opportunities. A quick Google search reveals many such opportunities.

Regardless, the answer to the question asked in the title of this post is not obvious, even to a naive, heedless optimist. The amount of evil in the world is decreasing as humans become more educated and more connected through technology and the radii of our circles of empathy expand. Our humanity might be increasing, but the technologies of destruction that we develop are also increasing.

The equation would look something like this: (Proportion of Evil in the World) x (Ability of Existing Technology to Destroy Humanity) = Probability that Humans will Commit Mass Suicide. The existing technology could be nuclear power plants, nuclear bombs, the factors that cause global warming, a killer virus, or anything else. Therefore, the probability of mass suicide might be increasing. This equation serves as a general comment and also as a slight critique of Pinker’s presentation below.

I have posted two TED videos below that support my argument and I invite him to share material that supports his views. I maintain my optimism in the face of the arguments presented by Robert and myself. My thoughts on this subject are not well organized or articulated, but I am mostly curious what y’all think.