Last year, there were only 12 wars in the world and only 10 percent of the population lived in poverty.
Do you also think that it was better before? Do you believe that generations of our predecessors ate black caviar with eco-friendly wooden spoons and led a healthy patriarchal lifestyle in harmony with nature and ourselves?
Nothing like this! It was exactly the opposite, says American psychologist Stephen Pinker, a professor at Harvard University. In 2004, Time magazine included him in the list of the 100 most outstanding scientists and thinkers in the world.
Rather than comparing the "tales of antiquity" with the "horrors" of life in the modern spiritless world, Pinker decided to rely on statistics and scientific data.
- We constantly read that the world is swept by a wave of violence and terrorism, that the gap between rich and poor is growing, and the new generation is dumber than the previous ones, but the numbers say the opposite! - says the professor. - In 2017, there were 12 full-scale military conflicts in the world, 60 authoritarian regimes, 10 percent of the world's population lived in extreme poverty, and the countries of the nuclear club had more than 10,000 nuclear weapons in their arsenals - enough to destroy the planet several times. It seems that there is nowhere worse. But everything is learned by comparison. If we look back 30 years, it turns out that in 1987 23 wars were unleashed on the planet, 85 countries were ruled by dictators, and the poor made up 37% of the world's population. Yes, and add 60,000 nuclear bombs here for a complete picture. The world was hardly safer then.
Illiteracy has been practically eliminated in the world. For example, in the 17th century, only 15 percent of Europeans could read and write. However, you should not get into such a distant historical jungle: back in 1950, 64% of the world's inhabitants were illiterate! The average life expectancy only 100 years ago did not exceed 40 years. Today in developed countries it is approaching 80 years.
As for criminality, here people have generally made phenomenal progress. Contrary to the myths about harmony and idyll, our ancestors were very aggressive people. Lawrence Keely, a professor of archeology at the University of Illinois, studying the level of cruelty among modern tribes leading a traditional hunter-gatherer lifestyle, received amazing data: 60 percent of the men among the Jivaro Indians (living in isolation from the world in the jungles of Peru and Ecuador) die during military conflicts. And among the Papuans from the Huli tribe (they are only in 7th place in the bloodlust rating), the level of combat losses among men exceeds 20 percent. Similar indicators are obtained by the analysis of the bone remains of ancient people in burials around the world. It is not such a rare case when 20-50 percent of male skeletons in burial grounds have traces of injuries caused by weapons.
“The level of violence in prehistoric times was much higher,” says Keely. - Tribal clashes were about 20 times bloodier than the wars of the twentieth century. If the death rate during World War II had been the same as in the days of hunter-gatherers, then not 100 million people would die, but about 2 billion!
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All this mathematics, according to Pinker, gives people the opportunity to look to the future with optimism, since humanity, despite everything, is moving in the right direction.
YAROSLAV KOROBATOV
