 From time to time, we all ask some deep questions. Why is the world filled with woe? How can we make it better? How can we give meaning and purpose to our lives? As imponderable as these questions may seem, many people have answers to them. For example, morality is dictated by God in holy scriptures. When everyone obeys his laws, the world will be perfect. Problems are the fault of evil people who must be shamed, punished and defeated. Our tribe should claim its rightful greatness under the control of a strong leader who embodies its authentic virtue. In the past, we lived in a state of order and harmony until alien forces brought on decadence and degeneration. We must restore the society to its golden age. Well, what about the rest of us? In my forthcoming book, Enlightenment Now, I argue that there is an alternative system of beliefs and values first articulated by these people, the thinkers of the Enlightenment of the 18th century, namely that we can use knowledge to enhance human flourishing. Now, many people embrace the ideals of the Enlightenment without being able to name or describe them. As a result, they've faded into the background. They become the status quo, the establishment. Other ideologies have passionate advocates, and I suggest that Enlightenment ideals too need a positive defense and an explicit commitment, and that is what I have tried to do. The Enlightenment centers on four themes, reason, science, humanism and progress. Let me say a few words about each. It all begins with reason. Reason is non-negotiable. As soon as you try to provide reasons why we should trust anything other than reason, as soon as you try to argue why you're right or why other people should believe you, that you're not lying or full of crap, you've lost your argument because you're appealing to reason. Now, human beings on their own are not particularly reasonable. My own professional specialty, Cognitive Psychology, has shown that we are likely to generalize from anecdotes to reason from stereotypes. We all seek evidence that confirms our beliefs and ignore evidence that disconfirms them, and we're overconfident about our knowledge, our wisdom and our rectitude. But people are capable of reason if they establish certain norms and institutions. Free speech, open debate and criticism, logical analysis, fact-checking and empirical testing, which brings me to the second Enlightenment value, science. Science is based on the conviction that the world is intelligible, that we can understand the world by formulating hypotheses and testing them against reality. Science has shown itself to be the most reliable way of understanding the world, including ourselves. A major theme of the Enlightenment was that there can be a science of human nature and that beliefs about society are testable just like any other beliefs about reality. The third Enlightenment ideal is humanism, the idea that the ultimate moral purpose is to reduce the suffering and enhance the flourishing of human beings and other sentient creatures. Well, that might sound obvious enough. Who could be against human flourishing? And the answer is lots of people. There are alternatives to humanism, that the ultimate good is to enhance the glory of the tribe, the nation, the race, the class or the faith, to obey the dictates of the divinity and pressure others to do the same, to achieve feats of heroic greatness, to advance some mystical dialectic or struggle or pursuit of the utopian age. Humanism is feasible because people are endowed with a sense of sympathy and a concern with the welfare of others. By default, our circle of sympathy is rather puny. We tend to feel the pain only of our blood relatives, our allies, our friends and cute little fuzzy baby animals. But our circle of sympathy can be expanded through the forces of cosmopolitanism, education, journalism, art, mobility and reason, the realization that I can't convince you that I'm special just because I'm me and you're not and hope for you to take me seriously. The final enlightenment idea is progress, that if we apply knowledge and sympathy to reduce suffering and enhance flourishing, we can gradually succeed. So how do that enlightenment thing work out 250 years later? If you ask most intellectuals and journalists, the answer is not very well. Because I've discovered that intellectuals hate progress. And intellectuals who call themselves progressive really hate progress. If you think that we can solve problems, I have been told, then you have a blind faith and a quasi-religious belief in the outmoded superstition of the false promise of the myth of the onward march of inevitable progress. You are a cheerleader for vulgar American can-do-ism with the raw-raw spirit of boardroom ideology, Silicon Valley and the Chamber of Commerce. You are a practitioner of wig history, a naive optimist, a Pollyanna, and of course a pangloss like the Voltaire character who declared all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Well, in fact, progress is not a matter of faith, it's not a matter of having a sunny versus a morose temperament. It is an empirical hypothesis. Human well-being can be measured. Life, health, sustenance, prosperity, peace, freedom, safety, knowledge, leisure, even happiness. If they have increased over time, I submit, that is progress. Well, let's look at the record. Starting with the most precious resource of all, life itself. For most of human history, life expectancy at birth was pinned to about 30 years. But starting with the discovery of sanitation, public health, vaccination, antibiotics, other advances in medicine and public health, life expectancy at birth has increased in Europe from a little bit more than 30 to 80 years. Similar trajectory can be seen in the Americas. Asia had a later start, but it has almost caught up. And here we see Africa closing the gap. This line shows the trajectory for the world as a whole. And this graph shows a general pattern in human progress, namely that 250 years ago pretty much everyone was wretched. European and American countries were the first to make the great escape from universal poverty and early death, but the trajectory has been duplicated in other parts of the world and Asia and Africa are rapidly advancing. For most of human history, the greatest contributor to early death was child mortality. Even in the wealthy countries of Western Europe, in the 18th century, about one third of children did not make it to their fifth birthday. But countries like Sweden managed to bring the child mortality rate down to far less than 1%, followed by countries in North America, Canada, Asian countries like South Korea, Latin American countries like Chile, and most recently Sub-Saharan African countries like Ethiopia, which has brought its rate of child mortality down in just a few decades from 30% to 6%. Still too high, but the progress continues. For most of human history, famine was one of the horsemen of the apocalypse, and catastrophic famines could strike any part of the world. But since the 19th century, famines have been decimated. Today, they take place only in the most remote and war-torn corners of the world. Prosperity. Until the industrial revolution of the 19th century, pretty much the entire world was poor, and there was very little sustained economic growth. But starting with the industrial revolution, there was exponential growth in wealth. First in Europe, such as the UK, US, South Korea has rapidly been catching up. Here we have Latin American country, Chile, China, and India. Here we have the graph for the world as a whole. As a result of this increase in global prosperity, we see not just the proceeds going to the rich, but a dramatic reduction in extreme poverty, defined by the World Bank as $1.90 per person per day. They bear minimum necessary to feed one's self and one's family. In 1820, 90% of the world met the definition of extreme poverty. Today, that figure is less than 10%, and the World Bank has set the goal of eliminating extreme poverty everywhere on Earth by the 2030s. So may we live to see the day. As a result, international inequality, differences between countries have been declining. Initially, with the industrial revolution, as the first few countries escaped from universal poverty, they were bound to open up a gap, but that gap has been decreasing as poor countries have been getting richer faster than rich countries are getting richer. Within rich countries, of course, inequality has been increasing, but that does not mean that poverty has been increasing. Quite the contrary. In the United States, for example, in 1960, about a third of the population met at least one definition for falling below the poverty line, but thanks to social transfers, disposable income, that is income after taxes and transfers, has reduced the poverty rate to about 6%, and when poverty is measured in terms of consumption, what people can afford to buy has gone from 30% to 3%. Peace. For most of human history, war was the natural state of relations between countries, and peace was a mere respite between wars. We can see that in this graph, which shows the percentage of years in which the great powers of the day were at war with each other, and what it shows is that in the 1600s, the great powers were pretty much always at war. By the 20th century, they were virtually never at war. The last war between two great powers pitted the United States against China in Korea in 1953. If we zoom in on the post-war period and look at the rate of deaths in wars of all kinds, not just great powers, but all countries, we see there's something of a roller coaster with peaks for the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the Iran-Iraq War, but the trajectory is decidedly downwards, and today there's about one-twentieth the chance of dying in war that there was in the 1950s. Freedom and rights. Despite some conspicuous and horrifying backsliding in Russia, Turkey, Venezuela, and some other countries, the overall trajectory for democracy is upward. As recently as the 1970s, the world had only 31 democracies. Today it has more than 100. A majority of countries are more democratic than autocratic. A majority of people live in democratic countries. The world has never been more democratic than autocratic, despite the obvious character examples. Governments have been constrained in the brutality that they can visit on their citizens. Here we have a graph for abolition of the death penalty from 1860 to the present. About three countries a year abolish the death penalty. If the current trend continues, no guarantee that it will, the death penalty will vanish off the face of the earth sometime in the 2020s. Similarly, country after country is almost homosexuality. We read about the exceptions, but the overall trend is toward tolerance. Child labour. In 1860, about a third of British children were set to work in farms and factories. That was quickly brought down in England and in the United States. Similar trajectory in Italy. And thanks to the efforts of Kailash Satyati, who I believe is here this week, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, in child labour globally, that one hopes will continue. Violent crime. In the Middle Ages, the rate of homicide was about 35 per 100,000 per year. Western European countries, like England and Netherlands and Belgium, have brought that down to about one, a 35-fold reduction. That tends to happen whenever the rule of law replaces the code of vendetta in a frontier region. We see the trajectory in Italy, in New England, starting with colonial times. The American Wild West of the cowboy movies had high rates of violence until it was brought down. And even countries where violence persists, such as Mexico, notorious for the gang violence, actually brought the rate of homicide down compared to levels in the 1930s. If we zoom in on the last 50 years, we see the United States, where most violent Western democracy has managed to cut its murder rate in half. Here we have an estimate for the world as a whole. The rate of homicide globally has been brought down by about 30%. The World Health Organization has set a goal of reducing it by 50% in another 30 years, a goal that's entirely feasible. It's not just homicide that's been in decline. In the United States, there's been a decline in violence against women in the household, domestic violence, and a decrease in rape, approximately a 75% decline since the 1970s. Indeed, we've become safer in all ways thanks to improvements in regulation and technology. Our chance of dying in a car accident has been reduced by 96% from the 1920s. We're 88% less likely to be mowed down on the sidewalk. 99% less likely to die in a plane crash. 95% less likely to die in an accident on the job. Far less likely to die in an earthquake, a flood, a famine, a wildfire, or other so-called acts of God. What about the ultimate act of God, the proverbial bolt from the blue? Well, Americans are 96% less likely to be killed by a bolt of lightning. Knowledge. In the early modern period, about one out of every six Europeans could read or write, and then Netherlands and England achieved universal literacy, followed by Germany, Italy, the United States. Increasingly, Latin American countries like Chile. Here we see Mexico. Here's the trajectory for the world as a whole. About 75% of the world is literate, and the illiterate people are generally in their 60s and 70s. The world is on track to achieve universal literacy. Girls too. And believe it or not, this may be the most incredible statistic in the whole group. We've been getting smarter. Hard as it may be to believe, but in a phenomenon known as the Flynn effect, IQ has been increasing by three points a decade for a century, and so in every region of the world, so IQ now are 30 points higher than they were a century ago. Does this improve all this economic and educational improvement actually affect our quality of life? Well, by many measures it does. In 1870, Europeans and Americans worked more than 60 hours a week. Today they work less than 40 hours. Thanks to the penetration of running water, electricity, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, dishwashers, stoves, and microwaves and so-called labor-saving devices, the amount of time that we lose to housework has fallen from more than 60 hours a week to 20 hours a week, and by we disproportionately women. As a result of fewer working hours and less hours wasted on housework, leisure time has increased, both for men and for women. The reason that it has not increased as much for women is that women now spend more time with their children. In fact, a single woman or a working woman today spends more time with her children than a stay-at-home married mom spent in the idyllic 1950s. Well, does any of this affect happiness? Does money buy happiness? And the answer is yes. This graph shows the regression line for nations GDP per capita. Sorry, self-rated happiness of citizens as a function of the GDP per capita of their countries. And you can see that richer countries on average have happier citizens. Each one of these arrows shows the similar regression line for the citizens within a country. So richer countries are happier, richer people within each country are happier. As the world gets richer, its people are expected to get happier. Well, how is the fact of human progress reflected in the news? This graph shows the results of an algorithm called sentiment mining and assesses the degree of optimism or pessimism in news stories. And as you can see that the New York Times over this period of increasing human welfare has gotten more and more morose. The same is true of a sample of the world's papers. So why do people deny progress? Part of the answer comes from a psychological quirk called the availability heuristic that humans assess risk according to how easily they can recall examples from memory. Now, if you consider the way the news works, news is about stuff that happens, not about stuff that doesn't happen. You never see a reporter saying, here I am reporting live from a country that's not at war or a city that has not suffered a terrorist attack or a school that has not been shot up. If you combine the nature of the news with the nature of cognition, you get the impression that the world is getting more dangerous and always has been. There's also a psychological phenomenon called the negativity bias that bad is stronger than good. We think about and feel bad events more than good ones. Well, you might ask, isn't it good to be pessimistic? Shouldn't we be raking the muck and afflicting the comfortable and speaking truth to power? The answer is no, it's good to be accurate. Of course, it's essential to become aware of suffering and injustice when they occur, but we also have to be aware of how they can be reduced. There are dangers of thoughtless pessimism. First of all, fatalism. Why waste time and money on a hopeless cause? Why throw money down a rat hole if it's not going to lead to improvement? And radicalism. If the world is a flaming dumpster that only invites the sentiment that we should smash the machine, drain the swamp, burn the empire to the ground, or listen to people who can say, I can fix it. Is progress inevitable? And the answer is of course not. Solutions create new problems which have to be solved in their turn. And we can always be blindsided by nasty surprises, such as the World Wars, the 1960s crime boom, AIDS in Africa, and the opioid epidemic in the United States today. And of course, we face severe global challenges like climate change and nuclear weapons, which are unsolved, but I think the attitude we should take is that they are solvable through decarbonization and denuclearization. Processes that have begun, this graph shows how much carbon the UK had to emit per dollar of GDP. Starting with the Industrial Revolution and massive coal burning, more and more carbon had to be burned to achieve a dollar of wealth, but with the replacement of coal by oil, then gas, then nuclear renewables that has come down. The United States follows similar trajectory. China has turned the corner, as has India and the world as a whole. Now, of course, these have to go to zero, and we're a long way from zero, but the trajectory shows that it is not impossible. Likewise, when it comes to nuclear weapons, few people realize that the size of the world's nuclear arsenal has been reduced by 85% since the Cold War. Again, we'd like to bring this down to zero. We're a long way from there, but the trajectory shows that it is not impossible. The final question. Does the Enlightenment go against human nature? Is humanism arid or tepid or flattened? Is the conquest of disease, famine, poverty, violence, and ignorance boring? Do people need to believe in magic, a father in the sky, a strong chief to protect the tribe, myths of heroic ancestors? I don't think so. Secular liberal democracies are the happiest and healthiest places on Earth, probably in the history of our species, and the top choice of people who vote with their feet. And I dare say, applying knowledge and sympathy to enhance human flourishing is heroic, glorious, and spiritual. Thank you very much. Thank you.