I came across an older post from David Bentley Hart chiming in about Steven Pinker's pollyannaish views on the Western Enlightenment. This post was a response to Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature, although his follow-up book is in a similar vein.
Pinker obviously believes we live in better times, and in many regards he is correct. I am very happy that my dentist has novocaine or that I am not a slave to anyone but my mind parasites.
So while we cheerlead for Enlightenment ideas that made us seemingly more civil and advanced, maybe consideration is needed towards our simplistic notions around civility and progress.
Hart notes, “It is perfectly fair for Pinker to call attention to the many brutal features of much of medieval life, but one would have more confidence in his evenhandedness if he acknowledged at least a few of the moral goods that medieval society achieved despite its material privations.”
And that's one good point: our ancestors achieved much (morally and socially) considering how little they had at their disposal.
When it comes to violent deaths, there are fewer when comparing the past to today as a percentage of global population. Nevertheless, it is also about how we statistically view it. “Population sample sizes can vary by billions, but a single life remains a static sum, so the smaller the sample the larger the percentage each life represents. Obviously, though, a remote Inuit village of one hundred souls where someone gets killed in a fistfight is not twice as violent as a nation of 200 million that exterminates one million of its citizens” (Hart).
In absolute numbers around the count of human massacre, we aren't doing that well. Let's recall how bloody the 20th century was.
Lest we forget, while the gang of Bacon, Descartes, and Kant get much of the credit, “The scientific revolution of the seventeenth century is the direct outgrowth of cosmological speculations in what we currently label the High Middle Ages — built upon the Christian theological insight that the universe God created must make sense” (Warren).
But now we lack those Christian insights that once augmented the moral underpinnings to the scientific revolution. Western Enlightenment “reason” will only get you so far. As Thomas Merton once said, “the intellect is only theoretically independent of desire and appetite in ordinary, actual practice.”
As with any meta-narrative, the shortcomings often come more with omission than commission. We can all point to the material prosperity that has ensued over the last couple centuries, but we should also not forget how our new era brought on many murderous secular ideologies, destructive and addictive technologies, and the continuing lapse of hard virtues.
We are probably better in some ways, but not as great as we'd like to believe. Perhaps that's partly due to the fact we have lost some of the depth that would have given us better standards to see that.