Sometimes people just get it wrong.
Pinker
10/14/19
Stephen Pinker writes books. He bases them all on facts.
He quotes graphs, trends, police data, world health statistics and has come to the rosy conclusion that as a species humanity is now on the road to great improvements.
Just because we have no large scale wars going on, no plagues that wipe out millions in short order, no millions of displaced persons wandering out of their destroyed homelands, ( maybe thousands today doing that) we should rejoice.
He deplores how the media makes us so downcast with the policy “ If it bleeds it leads” in news presentation.
I say that he has a pair of rose colored glasses on and I can quote some statistics that show we are not improving over all.
As the Chinese and Indian populations grow and become a bit richer through government control, so does their air become unbreathable due to their rampant industrialization.
As more and more Americans drive around in wasteful fuel burning trucks and SUV’s hauling nothing more than the groceries from far off countries, so does the air temperature rise over the planet.
As we buy more “stuff” in the vain race to become more content, so do the oceans slowly die.
How can any Harvard educated man or woman talk about improving homicide statistics when the polar bears are starving and raiding garbage dumps in the Arctic Circle towns?
Mr. Pinker is not looking at the real problems of our world, but the superficial tales of human interaction.
It is like that old saying “ he is rearranging the chairs on the Titanic.”
As we temporarily improve our food supply by growing huge amounts of corn and soy beans, we are at the same time washing away our topsoil with one crop emphasis and poisoning our bees and insects with fertilizers and pesticides.
We have a huge garbage gyre rotating in the ocean, fish with bellies full of plastics and nets wound around whales.
We spend millions to influence people to buy more stuff, but squash any efforts to provide birth control to people who are not able and prepared to have children.
What happens when the food and water tuns out due to droughts and poor soil?
What happens when there are such large disparities in income and living standards?
We have riots in the streets and government suppression.
We have more wars from dictators who are let loose to massacre their so called enemies and destroy cities.
Mr. Pinker is blaming the media once again for depressing us. We should be depressed, and that conclusion is fact based.
Thirty years ago a scientist started keeping track of how early a bird showed up in the northern hemisphere to lay eggs.
These birds depended on the supply of insects to feed and raise their chicks.
He noticed that the arrival dates kept getting earlier and earlier.
Why? Because the insect supply kept hatching out earlier every year.
Why ? Because the temperatures were getting warmer in the Arctic every year.
Since then we have charted the warming of the atmosphere with numerous studies, watched the glaciers melt away, watched the huge ice shelf break away from the Antarctic land mass, watched the North Pole become accessible by open water in the summer and have done relatively little to reverse this warming trend.
So- in twelve short years we will arrive at a point where we will not be able to do anything about the total warming trend of the planet, and Mr. Pinker will be writing on the scarcity of cheerfulness in the world’s populations.