1. Becoming Better Angels
Long Live Australians!
Did you know that Australian men have the third highest life expectancy in the world at 80.5 years and women have the sixth highest at 84.6 years? Did you know that Australia has an ageing population because of decreased fertility rates and increased life expectancy? The median age, the age at which half the population is older and half younger, has increased from 34 years in 1995 to 37 years at 2015.
In Cleveland we are particularly conscious of this because we have an older population than Queensland and Australia. At the 2016 Census, 33.7% of its population was over 60, compared to 20.7% of Queensland’s population being over 60 and 22.4% of Autralians. Our over 80 population was more than twice the percentage of Queensland’s.
We should all want to live to 120
Despite wanting to live longer, some people ask – why should I want to live longer? To me the answer is clear. Not only because you can, but because you can grow and thrive all your life. We should want to live longer because the world is getting better. We have more opportunities, less violence, less poverty. And we’re smarter than we ever have been.
That’s what is brought out brilliantly by Steven Pinker in his inspirational books The Better Angels of Our Nature and Enlightenment Now. Among many accolades, he is one of Time magazine’s The 100 Most Influential People in the World Today.
Be Optimistic
We all want to live longer and see the world improve. It’s in our nature to be optimistic. But perversely, when we’re asked whether the world is getting better, we respond as pessimists, especially as we get older: kids are ruder, everything’s more expensive and not as good and nobody speaks proper English! Most people see the world as deteriorating because of this bleak attitude. We don’t celebrate our longevity as much as we should.
What on earth is Steven Pinker thinking when he says we’re improving?
It is Pinker’s genius to point out to us all how in myriad ways our lives are better now than ever before. He describes the world progressing at a rapid rate.
The Good News
His book The Better Angels of our Nature is a story of the diminution of violence through our last 5000 years and particularly since the Enlightenment of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries which brought us reason, science, humanism and progress. We are probably now living in the most peaceful time ever.
Here are some of Pinker’s extraordinary data and analyses.
War Both battle deaths and the geography of war have reduced dramatically since the 1951 peak of 22 battle deaths per 100,000 people per year to 1.5 in 2015. This reduction has occurred in spite of the Syria war.
Genocide(“one-sided conflict”) The peak of 49 genocide deaths per 100,000 people per year in 1972 has fallen to 0 in 2006.
Homicide Between the late Middle Ages and the 20thcentury European countries saw a ten-to-fiftyfold decline in their rates of homicide. Today when many more people die in homicide than in war, homicides have fallen in the US from a peak of 9.5 deaths per 100,000 in 1992 to about 5 in 2015. In fact among the 88 countries with reliable data, 67 have shown a decline in the past 15 years. Australia’s national homicide monitoring program shows that in 2013/14 we had 1 death per 100,000 people: the lowest since the start of monitoring in 1989.
DemocracyUniversity of Maryland researchers assigned a score of -10 to 10 to every country for every year from 1800 to 2015 on a democracy versus autocracy scale, added them up and graphed the sum for the whole world. (What a job!) The graph shows a constant rise from -7 in 1800 to 2 in 1920, then a couple of falls in 1940 and 1980 and then a sharp rise to 4 in 2015.
Rising IQ Rationality and reason have been increasing across the globe for at least 100 years. James R Flynn describes the continuous rise in IQ scores, on average 3 points per decade, (over 30 points higher) since the early 1900s. Of course some of this comes from better education systems, some from teaching children to think critically and some comes from children having to work through a much more complex world requiring them to learn more, faster.
The Nation State
Using rational thinking and reason we can quickly debunk extreme and violent ideas which lead to war, terrorism, violence and homicide.With the arrival of organized nations with borders, laws to govern their populations under the same laws and rules, and with organized economies, armies and police forces, the old ways of “might is right” and warlords deciding when and where to fight disappeared. Along with parliaments and courts came universal education, courts of law administering justice and the abolition of slavery.
Arrival of Human Rights
Pinker discusses rights in terms ofwritings on civil rights, women’s rights, children’s rights, gay rights (and animal rights). The increasing documentation of these rights since the 1950s indicates that violence in our personal lives has plunged because of a dramatic fall in attitudes that tolerate or glorify violence.
But it’s also true that the very concept of human rights is a relatively young concept. The US first wrote the most important human rights document in 1776 in The Declaration of Independence. But it wasn’t implemented in government actions until Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 Gettysburg address “We hold these rights to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”. And it was only on 10 December 1948 that the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which now sets the fundamentals we live by. From this, many countries including Australia have developed welfare states with social welfare safety nets and extensive health care systems. How far we’ve come in a mere 150 years.
How do we grow?
Pinker’s four ‘angels’ that move us from violence into co-operation and altruism are empathy, self-control, the moral sense and reason. I think we are all familiar with all of these. Now we need to raise them up and use them!
We live in an increasingly enlightened and hopeful world. I share Pinker’s expectations and his hope for ever-accelerating improvements in our world through reason, science, humanism and progress. These are historical processes and ideas from which we have benefitted and from which we can accelerate ourselves now. How?
Don’t be an uncritical reader of bad news. Admire the increasingly friendly and exciting world emerging with our increasing longevity and supportive health care system. Read Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature. And involve yourself in your community. Grow humanism in the world through your village. Bring the big idea home.
This self-fulfillment of continual growing and thriving through a long life is uniquely available to you now. Barack Obama said in 2016 “If you had to choose a moment in history to be born….if you had to choose blindly what moment you’d want to be born, you’d choose now”.