New Optimists
= refers to thinkers such as Steven Pinker and Hans Rosling, "who emphasize the progress humanity has made in recent centuries and argue that the world is becoming a better place due to factors such as technological advancements, increased education, and improved healthcare".
Description
Jascon Hickel:
"After the global financial crisis in 2008, political discourse across North America and Europe began to shift. The recession had left a trail of destruction in its wake: home foreclosures, joblessness and collapsing wages were exacerbated by brutal austerity measures and deep cuts to social spending. People were hurting and angry, and their anger was exacerbated by the knowledge that taxpayer money was being pumped out of public coffers to prop up the very banks whose reckless corruption had caused the whole mess. The unfairness was too much to bear. Protest movements like Occupy and the Indignados swept through major cities in the years that followed, drawing attention to the problem of inequality. Thomas Piketty’s treatise on this issue – Capital in the 21st Century – became an instant bestseller after its publication in 2013. And Oxfam drove the point home with its now-famous claim that the richest one per cent had captured more of the world’s wealth than the rest of the human population combined.
All of this amounted to an unprecedented attack on the prevailing neoliberal consensus, and in some cases on capitalism itself, which was left with its legitimacy at historic lows. Leftwing politicians like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Jeremy Corbyn began to step into the breach, promising to confront inequalities head-on, and their ideas became popular to an extent no-one would have predicted just a few years prior.
At the same time, a backlash was building. A prominent group of billionaires, pundits and commentators began to rally around a new narrative. This doom and gloom is all wrong, they said: zoom out just a bit and take a moment to appreciate the fact that human progress is, in fact, accelerating. There have been dramatic improvements in indicators such as life expectancy and infant mortality, impressive reductions in the prevalence of disease, and – most importantly – global poverty is disappearing at a rapid rate; poor countries are catching up with rich ones. Things have never been better.
Before long, this good-news narrative was appearing all over the place, drawing initially on content from the late pop-academic Hans Rosling, who was becoming famous for his slick, glitzy presentations with graphs all moving impressively in the right direction. Rosling’s graphs – created by Gapminder, a Swedish non-profit that ‘fights misconceptions about global development’ – quickly spread across the internet, and Gapminder’s model was soon replicated by a second group, Max Roser’s Our World in Data, which condenses historical data trends into simple, colourful images for easy circulation on social media.
The online platforms Vox and Buzzfeed became major conduits for these optimistic infographics, pumping out countless articles with headlines such as ‘23 charts and maps that show the world is getting much, much better’, and ‘9 reasons the world is getting better all the time’. Columnist Nicholas Kristof began repeating this narrative in the pages of The New York Times, with articles like ‘2016 was the best year in the history of humanity’. And in 2018 Steven Pinker published the bestselling Enlightenment Now, a book-length Buzzfeed article with graphs stacked up in support of a grand meta-narrative of progress. A linguist by profession, Pinker has made a name for himself in recent years – notably through his much-viewed TED talks – as a commentator on world-historical trends, and now stands as a leading figure of the ideological movement that has come to be known as New Optimism.
Advert
University of Edinburgh Agricultural Science and Economics undergraduate programmes The best of all possible worlds There’s nothing wrong with celebrating progress. Humanity has made some extraordinary gains in recent history that deserve our attention. But that’s not really what New Optimism is about. The movement’s core argument isn’t just that things have improved, but rather that the progress we’ve seen has been fuelled by the spread of capitalism around the world. As Pinker puts it: ‘Industrial capitalism launched the Great Escape from universal poverty in the 19th century and is rescuing the rest of humankind in a Great Convergence in the 21st.’ Some prominent voices within the movement take this further, and argue that it’s not just capitalism that we have to thank, but specifically the neoliberal variety that has dominated the world economy since the 1980s.
At this rate, it will take about 200 years to get everyone above the poverty line of $7.40 per day It should come as little surprise, then, that the New Optimist narrative has attracted the attention of well-heeled funders. And it enjoys significant support from one person in particular: Bill Gates. Our World in Data is funded by the Gates Foundation; Gapminder lists Gates as one of its biggest donors; as for Vox and Buzzfeed, Gates is a major investor in both. Indeed, Vox has been pulled up by FAIR, a US media watchdog, for functioning as a sort of propaganda arm for Gates and Microsoft. But Gates isn’t the only one who has tapped into the power of this story. The Koch brothers – billionaire oil barons known for promoting climate denialism and extreme market deregulation – have thrown their hats in too, bankrolling media sites like Reason and Human Progress, a project of the libertarian Cato Institute, whose writers promote New Optimism as part of a nakedly rightwing agenda.
It’s a powerful story. In today’s political climate, New Optimism is routinely weaponized by those who seek to defend an economic model that has otherwise been haemorrhaging credibility. It has become a kind of last-ditch battle cry for the status quo.
New Optimists are careful to present themselves as rational and scientific: all they’re doing is ‘sticking to the facts’, as Roser likes to say. And you can’t argue with facts. This sentiment appears on the cover of Hans Rosling’s 2018 book, published posthumously as Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think. To highlight this stance, some have taken to calling themselves Rational Optimists, borrowing the title of the manifesto from British aristocrat and entrepreneur Matt Ridley. The idea is that if you’re a rational person, you have to admit that free-market capitalism is serving humanity beautifully, and we need to stick with it. To believe anything else is ideology." (https://newint.org/features/2019/07/01/long-read-progress-and-its-discontents?)
Discussion
The Critique
Jason Hickel:
"And yet, despite their insistence on ‘reason’, the New Optimists are often strikingly uninterested in the nuances of the historical evidence they invoke. In their hands, the story of human progress has been distorted into a cartoonishly simple narrative wherein capitalism is responsible for virtually everything good that has happened in modern history and nothing bad. The fact that the most important gains in human welfare have been won by labour unions and social movements, enabled by publicly funded research and secured by public healthcare and education systems, almost always in the face of determined and even violent resistance from the capitalist class, is never acknowledged. Egregious disparities in social indicators between classes and nations are papered over in favour of aggregate trends. And the decidedly regressive sides of capitalism – colonization, genocide, plantation slavery, oil wars, regular attacks on workers’ rights and welfare systems, and, perhaps most damningly, climate change and ecological breakdown – are either downplayed or ignored altogether.
Not surprisingly, New Optimists have come under fire from scientists and historians many times for their selective use of evidence. For people who stake such a vocal claim to science, they can be remarkably unscientific – sacrificing robust analysis for the sake of political expedience. And nowhere is this tendency more apparent than when it comes to the centrepiece of the New Optimist narrative: the story of global poverty."
(https://newint.org/features/2019/07/01/long-read-progress-and-its-discontents?)
More information
- Gray, J. (2015). John Gray: Steven Pinker is wrong about violence and war | Society books | The Guardian
- Runciman, D. (2011). “The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker – review.” The Guardian.
- Taleb, N. N. (2015). The Decline of Violent Conflicts: What Do The Data Really Say?
- Monbiot, G.. You can deny environmental calamity – until you check the facts | George Monbiot | The Guardian [4]; Politics Deniers – George Monbiot [5]
- Hedges, C. (2014). The Myth of Human Progress and the Collapse of Complex Societies - Truthdig
- Hickel, J. (2019). Bill Gates says poverty is decreasing. He couldn’t be more wrong | Jason Hickel | The Guardian [7]; Global inequality: Do we really live in a one-hump world? — Jason Hickel
- Moyn, S. (2018). Hype for the Best: Why does Steven Pinker insist that human life is on the up?
- Stewart, T. (2021). Why ‘Factfulness’ Cannot Save Us, Current Affairs
- Salisbury, A. (2020). New Optimism Ignores Our Potential for Catastrophe, Palladium
- Paulsen, R. (2019). Why You Shouldn’t Listen to Self-Serving Optimists Like Hans Rosling and Steven Pinker - In These Times [11]