Is progress always good? A response to Steven Pinker
Meaning and purpose in the age of technology.
Written by Noah Carl and Bo Winegard.
In a recent podcast discussion between Steven Pinker and the Triggernometry hosts, Konstantin Kisin and Francis Foster, the following exchange took place:
Kisin: People talk about a crisis of meaning and a crisis of purpose. Do you recognise that as a thing that exists?
Pinker: I recognise that people say that. I have argued, admittedly not terribly successfully, that there are enormous opportunities for meaning and purpose, namely improving human well-being on a global scale. If we made people richer and healthier and longer-lived, with better experiences, more knowledgeable, safer, less likely to get killed in wars and genocides and street crime, what’s so meaningless about that? …
Kisin: If people are getting richer and safer, and yet they feel like they’re drifting more and they’re more alienated and they’re less connected to others … wouldn’t that be evidence for the fact that, perhaps, the human condition is incapable of simply enjoying constant improvement and needs some kind of struggle and fight or whatever that might be?
Pinker: It is true that we tend to pocket our gains and fail to appreciate them … If people struggle for a worthy cause, a noble crusade, a holy war and they die in the millions, well so much the worse for feeling that you’re part of a holy crusade. We’re better off with a little bit of anomie and alienation.
When Pinker is subsequently pressed on whether people become nihilistic when they lack a sense of purpose, he does concede “there’s some of that”. Yet he maintains that people can find a great deal of purpose in “improving the state of the country and improving the state of the world”.
While we have great respect for Pinker, we find his answers to the Triggernometry hosts’ questions unsatisfying. This isn’t because we believe there currently is a “crisis of meaning” in the West. Such talk is overblown. After all, the countries of Western Europe and the Anglosphere have the highest levels of happiness and life satisfaction as measured in surveys. Meanwhile, suicide rates have fallen or remained stable over the last few decades. The spike in mortality caused by “deaths of despair” is largely confined to the US, as evidenced by the growing gap in life expectancy between the US and other major Western economies.
Rather, we find Pinker’s answers unsatisfying because they seem to be based on an unrealistic model of human nature (which is surprising given Pinker’s obvious expertise in that domain). In short, it cannot be taken for granted that economic growth and technological progress will continue to raise human well-being in perpetuity. And it is far from implausible that a crisis of meaning could arise in the not-so-distant future, owing to technological developments that are already underway.
