PORTLAND, Maine — Do you miss the good old days? Those times when life was easier, more rewarding and, well, just plain better? If so, Steven Pinker has something to say: you are wrong, wrong, wrong.
Pinker, a best-selling author and professor of psychology at Harvard, has written a book called “Enlightenment Now” in which he makes the case that, by just about any measure, life for humans has gotten dramatically better in the last three hundred years—and in the last three decades. He took a deep dive into the data and concluded that fewer people are dying in wars, fewer are suffering from crime, more are being lifted out of poverty, more are getting education and health care, and the list goes on.
Now here’s the crucial point. Pinker is not arguing that life is great today—but he is saying that it’s better. Humans have made progress, and in some cases enormous progress. He backs up the idea with a quotation from another writer: “Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory.”
Nostalgia for a past that never quite existed is, Pinker says, a very human characteristic. But watch our interview with him and you might reach a slightly different conclusion—that these are the good old days.