The best time to live

We, as a species, we have made progress in just about any dimension in which you could measure human wellbeing. We live longer, we are felled by fewer diseases, our children live longer, women are less likely to die in childbirth, more of us are literate, more of us are educated. Our lives are safer, we’re less likely to be murdered, to die in a car crash, a plane crash, a occupational accident. Less likely to be burned to death, to drown. Even less likely to be struck by a bolt of lightning. We are less likely to die in war.

Wars have been declining in number and intensity, and far fewer people are killed today in war than in the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s. We have more leisure time, we have, thanks to the growth of labour saving devices, and electricity, running water, and a reduction in the work week. We have more time to enjoy ourselves, we have more opportunities to sample culture through the availability of culture through electronic media, and on average we’re getting happier - not everyone, everywhere, but in a majority countries in which happiness has been measured over time, there have been increases.

You can easily get the impression that the world is getting worse if you base your impressions on the news because as long as rates of violence and other catastrophes haven’t fallen to zero, they’ll always take place somewhere or other on the globe, the news will cover them and so it might appear that we’re not getting any better or even stagnating. But when you aggregate the places say that are not at war together with the ones that are at war, the cities that have not been subject to terrorist attacks, as well as the ones that that are, you see that the degree of danger has been in decline, as has the degree of poverty, oppression, and other kinds of human misery.

I identify the most overarching cause of progress as: the values of the Enlightenment - the idea that we apply reason to understanding our condition rather than superstition or dogma or intuition; Science - the increased mastery over the understanding of the world by formulating hypotheses and testing them against reality; and humanism - the prioritising of human wellbeing as the ultimate moral good, as opposed to spreading the faith, as opposed to enhancing the glory of the nation, the tribe, the race or the faith.

Progress, of course, is not inevitable, there’s no law of the universe that says that things must get better. In fact, the laws of the universe don’t care about our welfare and they’re bound to make things worse left to their own devices. But human ingenuity, capturing energy, and applying knowledge can solve problems as they arise. Solutions bring on new problems which have to be solved in their turn. But it’s thanks to the cumulative retention of policies that have made us better off that progress takes place. It can be threatened if we don’t dedicate ourselves to applying knowledge to enhancing human flourishing.