It was a pleasure to welcome Dr. Hale, my Enlightenment pinch-hitter next week while I'm away for the COVID-delayed Baseball in Literature and Culture conference, to zoom class last night. He's a Kantian and a master carpenter, and a master teacher too.
He zeroed right in on what I think the class agreed is the chief limitation of Steven Pinker's statistical sunniness: it omits the felt human experience of injustice and deprivation, which numbers alone can never convey. Stats about declining homicide rates are no consolation to the mom who's lost a son to random police violence. Indoor plumbing and cell phones are great, and we should indeed be grateful to live in an age of medical science; but as John Dewey said, our time is now.
Well, what he actually said was: “We always live at the time we live and not at some other time, and only by extracting at each present time the full meaning of each present experience are we prepared for doing the same thing in the future.” Comparisons with another era don't compensate for perceived inequity, unfairness, and maldistribution of resources and opportunities in the present.
And while I do share Pinker's "conditional optimism" (though I call it pragmatic meliorism) I also have to note the ominous doomsday cloud that's been stalled for a while at just before midnight. "Continued corruption of the information ecosphere on which democracy and public decision making depend has heightened the nuclear and climate threats." So the conditions of our optimism are steep. We have miles to go before we sleep easy, with respect to justice, climate, and peace.
But as I heard myself unexpectedly invoking the upbeat mood of Bill Clinton's theme song, we also must not stop thinking about tomorrow. It'll soon be here.
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