Zoom Out, and You’ll See People Are Improving

Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker is Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and the author of "The Better Angels of Our Nature."

Updated May 31, 2016, 6:00 PM

James Flynn’s eponymous effect — a worldwide rise in IQ scores — shows that in one important sense, people have been getting smarter, not dumber, over time. The increase is not in raw brainpower, nor in crystallized skills like arithmetic or vocabulary, but in abstract reasoning: the ability to ignore appearances and reckon in formal categories. Flynn attributes the effect to the spread of education and the trickling down of scientific and analytical concepts into everyday discourse.

In a culture that seems to be getting dumb and dumber, this claim needs a sanity check. Can we see the fruits of superior reasoning in the world around us? The answer is yes.

We are living in a period of extraordinary intellectual accomplishment.

In recent decades the sciences have made vertiginous leaps in understanding, while technology has given us secular miracles like smartphones, genome scans and stunning photographs of outer planets and distant galaxies. No historian with a long view could miss the fact that we are living in a period of extraordinary intellectual accomplishment.

Nor is our newfound sophistication confined to science. It’s easy to focus on the idiocies of the present and forget those of the past. But a century ago our greatest writers extolled the beauty and holiness of war. Heroes like Theodore Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Woodrow Wilson avowed racist beliefs that today would make people’s flesh crawl. Women were barred from juries in rape trials because supposedly they would be embarrassed by the testimony. Homosexuality was a felony. At various times, contraception, anesthesia, vaccination, life insurance and blood transfusion were considered immoral.

Ideals that today’s educated people take for granted — equal rights, free speech, and the primacy of human life over tradition, tribal loyalty and intuitions about purity — are radical breaks with the sensibilities of the past. These too are gifts of a widening application of reason.

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Topics: Culture, psychology

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