Journalists think reporting good news is propaganda or PR, says Harvard professor Steven Pinker

It is a terrible time to be an optimist. But Steven Pinker, a Harvard professor and cognitive psychologist, can’t help it. Not too long ago, when this Canadian-American decided to set aside newspapers and look at quantitative trends, he realised that our lives are much healthier, wealthier and freer than before. So, even as the world celebrated doomsayers, Pinker used hard data and unacademic prose in his latest book ‘Enlightenment Now: The Case for Science, Reason, Humanism and Progress’ to give us a sunny view of humanity’s progress.He tells Sharmila Ganesan Ram that Indians are actually more optimistic than people in wealthier nations.
Why do we like to say and believe that the world is going to hell in a handcart?
Most people, in fact, are optimistic about their own lives — while saying that the world is getting worse. That must be because they get their view of the world from news. News is about what happens, like wars, epidemics, and terrorist attacks, not about what doesn’t happen, like peace, health, and safety. No matter how many regions of the world are at peace, as long as wars and murders and diseases continue to exist, there will always be enough of them to fill the news, and people’s perception will be disconnected from reality. Only by looking at data — which count up all the events, all the countries, all the lives — can you get a true sense of the direction of the world.
Is the media responsible for shaping the doomsayer narrative?
Together with the inherent nature of news, which focuses on events rather than trends, many journalists believe that it’s their mission to highlight disasters and crises and corruption, and that reporting what goes right is selling out — it’s government propaganda, they tell me, or corporate public relations. And, they say, it’s important to present a distorted picture of the world (they don’t put it quite that way) to prevent people from becoming complacent. I think this is nonsense. An accurate understanding of the world has to include an awareness of problems, of course, but it also has to include an awareness of solutions, or else people will become cynical and fatalistic, figuring that the world just gets worse and worse no matter what people do, so we might as well enjoy ourselves while we can.
Does the world romanticise the past too much? Any such romantic claims in particular that you are tired of hearing?
Yes, the brain is wired for nostalgia: with the passage of time, we forget how bad the bad events in our past were. And yes, I am tired about hearing how past decades were better. The 1980s, for example, were a decade when Eastern Europe, East Asia, and Latin America were ruled by dictatorships, when wars raged throughout Africa, Central America, and the Middle East (including a war between Iran and Iraq that killed more than half a million people), an epidemic of AIDS, homosexuality illegal in most countries, far higher rates of murder and rape in most countries… I could go on.
In the age of Trump, what prompted you to write a happy book?
The section on Trump is far from happy, nor are the discussions of climate change and the risk of nuclear war. Understanding human progress is not a question of being “happy” or “sad.” It’s a question of knowing the facts. The facts are that we’re living longer, safer, better educated, and more peaceful lives. These facts do not mean that the world is free of problems, but they do suggest that problems can be solved if we try to solve them.
Why should a developing country like India — with all its well-documented problems — believe that it is better off now or even that things will get better for that matter?
Actually, Indians, on average, do believe that things are getting better: 74% of them, according to a recent Ipsos-MORI poll. Indians are more optimistic than people in wealthy Western countries like those in Europe, North America, and Oceania.
Did the writing of the book throw up insights into India that surprised you?
Data from India is discussed in more than forty places in the book, which document many areas in which it has progressed since Independence, including reductions in war deaths, famine deaths, extreme poverty, and illiteracy. I was surprised to learn that the per-capita income in India today is the same as that of Sweden in 1920, though it has a hundred times as many people. I was also surprised to see that Indians are among the world’s least tolerant people: compared to other countries, people in India are less likely to say that it’s important for people of different races, ethnicities, and religions to be treated equally, and to endorse full equality for men and women. Still, a majority of Indians endorse these ideas — just smaller minorities than in other countries.
Steven Pinker will be speaking at the Times Litfest which will be held in Mumbai’s Mehboob Studios from December 14 to 16