Enlightenment Now

Kelly suggests that because of the social embeddedness of technology, the destructive power of a solitary individual has in fact not increased over time: The more sophisticated and powerful a technology, the more people are needed to weaponize it. And the more people needed to weaponize it, the more societal controls work to defuse, or soften, or p

Terrorism is a unique hazard because it combines major dread with minor harm. I will not count trends in terrorism as an example of progress, since they don’t show the long-term decline we’ve seen for disease, hunger, poverty, war, violent crime, and accidents. But I will show that terrorism is a distraction in our assessment of progress, and, in a

Though humanism is the moral code that people will converge upon when they are rational, culturally diverse, and need to get along, it is by no means a vapid or saccharine lowest common denominator. The idea that morality consists in the maximization of human flourishing clashes with two perennially seductive alternatives. The first is theistic mor

The idea that the ultimate good is to use knowledge to enhance human welfare leaves people cold. Deep explanations of the universe, the planet, life, the brain? Unless they use magic, we don’t want to believe them! Saving the lives of billions, eradicating disease, feeding the hungry? Bo-ring. People extending their compassion to all of humankind?

The almost 5,000 pedestrians killed in 2014 is still a shocking toll (just compare it with the 44 killed by terrorists to much greater publicity), but it’s better than the 15,500 who were mowed down in 1937, when the country had two-fifths as many people and far fewer cars. And the biggest salvation is to come. Within a decade of this writing, most

as Brand has pointed out (chapter 7), “natural farming” is a contradiction in terms. Whenever he hears the words natural food, he is tempted to rail: No product of agriculture is the slightest bit natural to an ecologist! You take a nice complex ecosystem, chop it into rectangles, clear it to the ground, and hammer it into perpetual early successio

A typical firefighter will see just one burning building every other year.

We are wired for nostalgia: in human memory, time heals most wounds. Two other illusions mislead us into thinking that things ain’t what they used to be: we mistake the growing burdens of maturity and parenthood for a less innocent world, and we mistake a decline in our own faculties for a decline in the times.25 As the columnist Franklin Pierce Ad

Having billions of people decide how best to conserve, given their values and the information conveyed by prices, is bound to be more efficient and humane than having government analysts try to divine the optimal mixture from their desks. The potters don’t have to hide their kilns from the Carbon Police; they can do their part in saving the planet