Transcript of a 2015 debate in Toronto, Pinker and Ridley for the 'yes' and de Botton and Gladwell for the 'no', plus pre-debate interviews with each of the four and post-debate commentary. A topic that I wonder about from time to time, usually figuring the probabilities lie more with 'yes' than 'no' (as did some 70 per cent of the audience, both before and after the debate).
Certainly a well qualified and interest quartet to conduct the discussion (I hadn't come across Ridley before but the other three are obviously well known to me).
Pinker and Ridley, though coming at it from different backgrounds, both press the point about the material progress that humankind has made on any number of dimensions - Pinker enumerates ten pretty fundamental ones: life itself (lifespan), health, prosperity, peace, safety, freedom, knowledge, human rights, gender equity and intelligence - and what they say is the likelihood that this will only continue.
De Botton, who I often find irritating, presses what I found the least compelling of the positions, arguing 'humanistically' for both a resistance to the impossible pursuit of perfection (not actually the point of this debate) and for an idea of the purpose of human life that is more about happiness and spiritual fulfilment than material progress; I felt that he was both missing the point and glossing glibly (and in an aggravatingly privileged way) over the real improvement in people's lives that has resulted from the many technological, medical and cultural (attitudinal) advances of the period since say the industrial revolution.
Gladwell is much more plausible in arguing that the greater complexity and interconnectedness of modern life has dramatically increased the risk of a catastrophic event (either of the kind enabled by those same advances such as climate change or nuclear event or facilitated by that connectedness such as global pandemic or mass internet failure, none of which are even probably particularly 'black swan' in nature, even if historically unprecedented).
It didn't change my mind, but a good and thought provoking read.
Certainly a well qualified and interest quartet to conduct the discussion (I hadn't come across Ridley before but the other three are obviously well known to me).
Pinker and Ridley, though coming at it from different backgrounds, both press the point about the material progress that humankind has made on any number of dimensions - Pinker enumerates ten pretty fundamental ones: life itself (lifespan), health, prosperity, peace, safety, freedom, knowledge, human rights, gender equity and intelligence - and what they say is the likelihood that this will only continue.
De Botton, who I often find irritating, presses what I found the least compelling of the positions, arguing 'humanistically' for both a resistance to the impossible pursuit of perfection (not actually the point of this debate) and for an idea of the purpose of human life that is more about happiness and spiritual fulfilment than material progress; I felt that he was both missing the point and glossing glibly (and in an aggravatingly privileged way) over the real improvement in people's lives that has resulted from the many technological, medical and cultural (attitudinal) advances of the period since say the industrial revolution.
Gladwell is much more plausible in arguing that the greater complexity and interconnectedness of modern life has dramatically increased the risk of a catastrophic event (either of the kind enabled by those same advances such as climate change or nuclear event or facilitated by that connectedness such as global pandemic or mass internet failure, none of which are even probably particularly 'black swan' in nature, even if historically unprecedented).
It didn't change my mind, but a good and thought provoking read.
