In his recent book Enlightenment Now, your former MIT colleague Steven Pinker argues that life has gotten better and better, morally and materially, and he scolds other intellectuals for knocking western civilization. What's your view of his perspective?
Chomsky Answer: I don’t find these broad-brush observations very helpful or informative. The devil is in the details.
There is work on these matters that seems to me much more compelling. In his very important study on the rise and fall of American growth, Robert Gordon observes that there was virtually no economic growth for millennia until 1770, slow growth for another century, and then a “special century” until 1970, dependent largely on specific inventions. Since the 1970s the picture is much more mixed: in the US, with actual decline in real wages for non-supervisory workers over 40 years and even increased death rates in recent years. These are among the features of the neoliberal era that have led to the rise of the kind of “morbid symptoms” that Gramsci warned about from Mussolini’s prison cell, as we see all too clearly in the western world today. Elsewhere we find different patterns. Thus Russia suffered severe economic decline and demographic collapse when market reforms were introduced in the ‘90s. China has been different again. As Amartya Sen has shown, Maoist China saved about 100 million people – not a small number – as compared with democratic capitalist India from independence to 1980, not from “enlightenment” in the usual sense, but from rural health programs and other reforms. And since then it has undergone spectacular growth and provided the bulk of the reduction in global poverty, in a society that’s not a model of enlightened values. Nazi Germany experienced very rapid growth in the ‘30s, not a triumph of enlightenment. There are numerous other complexities that are of major significance, but that disappear in unanalyzed statistical tables.
As for “moral growth,” there are even greater complexities. The American Revolution introduced the novel and important idea (put aside the fact) that “we the people” should take control of our fate –- and at the same time developed the most vicious system of slavery in human history, the foundation of much of US-British wealth and economic development. Or take Germany again. In the 1920s, it was at the peak of western civilization in the arts, the sciences and mathematics, and even political development, regarded as a model of democracy. Ten years later it was descending to the depths of human savagery. A decade later it was recovering what had been lost.
As for the Enlightenment and modern science, no serious analyst can question their major achievements – or overlook their role in the age of discovery that brought untold horrors to much of the world, devastating the Western Hemisphere and Africa, crushing the leading world centers of civilization in India and China.
With all that, a good case can be made I think that moral horizons are, overall, slowly widening, including recent years, when the activism of the ‘60s has had a considerable civilizing effect in many areas.[1]
[1] Horgan, John. “Noam Chomsky Calls Trump and Republican Allies ‘Criminally Insane.’” Scientific American Blog Network, 3 Nov. 2018, blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/noam-chomsky-calls-trump-and-republican-allies-criminally-insane/.
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