an introduction
He is Stephen Bunker, a Canadian-American psychologist, and a fierce defender of the idea that the "world is progressing for the better" against what he describes as "reactionaries" of intellectuals, intellectuals and academics who have a position contrary to this view, while Bunker is an intellectual loved by the strongest and most prestigious groups of society. As his work provides the rationale for many of the world's elite to continue practices that endanger humanity, the author of this article, Jeremy Lint, seeks to respond to it as he described. This view is best illustrated in his book Enlightenment Now: On Logic, Science, Humanism and Progress. “The world is moving forward,” Bunker says, but the writer asks here: “He is advancing for whom?” They attempted to liberate the concept of progress, relatively new and formulated, by taking it among other frameworks, to take away and dismantle the connotations it gained, far from what he called the "deceptive arguments of Stephen Bunker", through Stephen Bunker's own weapon: numbers, statistics and graphs.
Text of the report
It is time for progressives to retrieve the message of "progress." Stephen Bunker tries to capture a great idea with which he has no right, by deceptively restricting the concept of advancing free-market economies and the values of centrist parties.
In his book Enlightenment Now: On Logic, Science, Humanism and Progress, published earlier this year, Stephen Bunker argues that mankind has never had all these resources thanks to values attributed to 18th-century European enlightenment. Bunker blames those who are preoccupied with the circumstances of the present world as pessimistic people who do nothing but incite closed-down reactionaries, and glorifies the dominant neoliberal, technocratic approach to solving the world's problems as the only one that has succeeded in the past and that will continue to lead mankind on the road to victory in the present.
His book provoked strong reactions, both positive and negative. On the positive side, Bill Gates considered Enlightenment Now his all-time favorite. On the negative side, Bunker has been widely criticized by a group of prominent thinkers. For example, John Gray in the New Statesman describes the book as "embarrassing" and "weak." David Bell, in an article on The Nation, says Bunker's book is "dogmatic and offers a simplistic and overly optimistic view of human history." George Monbiot in The Guardian deplores this "shallow culture." "The justification paid," he said, which insults "the principles of enlightenment that Bunker claims to be fighting for."
In light of all this, you may wonder: What is left to add? Since I have read his book carefully, I think it is necessary to hold Bunker accountable for some of the serious misunderstandings he makes. As a result, Bunker is a beloved intellectual of the world's most powerful groups. He spoke to the world elite this year at the World Economic Forum in Davos about the dangers of what he calls "political correctness." He was named one of the 100 most influential figures in the world. Time Magazine. Since his work provides the rationale for many of the world's elite to continue practices that endanger mankind, we must confront it with a rigorous and detailed response.
I agree with much of Bunker. His book, filled with 75 diagrams, provides compelling evidence of centuries of progress in many areas that should concern us all: a sharp decline in violence of all kinds, offset by dramatic increases in health, longevity, education and human rights. It is precisely the narrative of Bunker that makes the flaws in his argument extremely dangerous. These flaws are hidden under such a weak layer of data and rhetoric that needs to be carefully detected. That is why my response to Bunker will proceed from his own ground: I will do the same in each section, and I make my argument based on factual data represented in the graph.
This debate is especially necessary because progress, in my view, is one of the most important concepts of this age. I see myself, in a common way, as a progressive person. Progress is what I and the others on the banks care about with passion. Rather than relinquish this idea to a group of neoliberal technocrats who make up Bunker's core audience, I think we should preserve it, celebrate it wherever it is, understand its real issues and, most importantly, ensure that it continues in a form that future generations on this earth can Enjoy it. I hope this article will help to do this.
Transgression
As Bunker was about to finalize his draft, there were 15,000 scientists from 184 countries giving a stern warning to humanity. Given our excessive consumption of the world's resources, scientists declared that we are facing a "catastrophic and widespread loss of biodiversity" and warned that time is running out and "soon it will be too late to redress this disappointing path."
The warning contained nine elaborate graphs and a carefully researched and analyzed analysis showing that, in many ways, the human impact on biological systems was increasing at an irresponsible pace. Three of these disturbing graphs are shown here: high CO2 emissions, a decrease in available freshwater, an increase in the number of unsuitable areas (death ranges) of the oceans, as a result of runoff of industrial fertilizers.
This warning was not the first of its kind. Twenty-five years earlier, in 1992, 1,700 scientists (including the majority of Nobel laureates) issued a similar warning to the ruling leaders around the world, calling for recognition of the fragile state of the Earth, and the emergence of a new ethic of our understanding of the principle of “we are all The boat itself. " Current charts glaringly illustrate how little the world's attention has been to this warning since 1992.
Overall, these graphs illustrate ecological overruns: the fact that our civilization is exploiting Earth's resources faster than the time it takes for resources to regenerate. Overruns are especially dangerous because the feedback loops are relatively slow: if your current bank account balance is close to zero, you know that the consequences will be dire if you keep writing checks. On a broader scale, it is as if our civilization continues to take bank loans in order to provide funds to the account, and then claim that the source of these funds is a monthly income and we celebrate the continuous "progress". In order to finally run out of money, the game ends.
Bunker claims his respect for science, but he brazenly ignores fifteen thousand scientists who give desperate warnings to humanity. Instead, he uses a rhetorical, blatant rhetoric that dictates those concerned with man's environmental penetration as a “quasi-religious ideology… condemned by anti-humanity and hatred, indifference to famines, sent in futile fantasies of a deserted planet, Nazi equality of human beings with insects, and pathogens, Two of the most extreme examples are used in making a scarecrow that supports his comic description.There are issues worthy of discussion on the topic of civilization and sustainability, but dealing with such a serious subject with emotionally charged speech is morally unjustifiable and astonishing evidence of the claim. And Nbiot that Pinker "offends the principles of the Enlightenment, which he claims he argues about."
When Bunker takes the matter seriously, he promotes the principle of “environmental modernity” as the solution: a neoliberal technocratic belief that a combination of market-based solutions and technological reforms will magically solve all environmental problems. However, this approach does not take into account the structural factors causing human changes in the environment, in the sense of a growth-based global economy that relies on the continuous monetization of natural resources and human activity. Without changing this structure, inevitability is inevitable. Multinational corporations, which nowadays build sixty-nine of the world's top 100 economies, are driven by increased short-term shareholder value, regardless of the long-term impact on humanity. With the decline in freshwater resources, for example, they want to buy what is left of them, sell them in plastic bottles for fast consumption or process them in sugary drinks, and push billions in developing countries into obesity through advanced marketing. In fact, until civilization itself collapses, increased environmental disasters are likely to boost the GDP of developed countries even as less developed regions suffer dire consequences.
Apply for whom?
This question will take us to another key topic in Bunker's narrative of progress: who really enjoys that progress? Bunker devotes much of his book to charts showing global progress in the quality of human life as a whole. However, some of his omissions and mistakes he made on this subject were very clear.
At one point, Bunker explains that "despite the root of the word," humanism "does not exclude animal prosperity, but this book focuses on the well-being of the human race." No wonder, because any non-human animal may not agree that the last 60 years have been a period of prosperity. Indeed, while global GDP has increased 22-fold since 1970, the scale of death of the creatures with which we share the earth has widened. As shown in Figure 2, human advances in material consumption have come at the expense of a 58% decrease in vertebrates, including a shocking 81% reduction of animals in freshwater systems. For every five birds or five fish that lived in a river or lake in 1970, there is now only one.
But we do not need to look outside the human race from Bunker's selective standpoint of progress. He is pleased to tell us that "racial violence against African Americans has declined in the 20th century, and has fallen further since then." What he refuses to report is the dramatic increase in incarceration rates of African Americans over the same period (Figure 3). An African-American man is now six times more likely to be arrested than a white man, resulting in an unfortunate statistic that indicates that one in three African-American men is currently expected to be arrested in his lifetime. The shocking conclusion is that racist violence against African Americans has never subsided, as Bunker suggests. Instead, this racism has become institutionalized in US national politics in what is known as the “transition from schools to prisons”.
Does the rising tide raise all boats?
This brings us to one of the critical errors in Steven Bunker's overall analysis. By analyzing his numbers in an insightful way, he undoubtedly promotes one of the great neoliberal myths of the past several decades: “The rising tide lifts all boats,” a term he shamelessly exploits himself as he reaps the benefits of inequality. This was the argument used by the early instigators of neoliberal non-interventionist economies, such as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, to cut taxes on the wealthy, privatize industries, and cut public services to boost economic growth.
Bunker raises two key points here: First, he argues that "income inequality is not a key factor in well-being," citing recent research that suggests people are comfortable with the differential rewards they receive based on their effort and skill. Yet, as Denker himself admits, humans still have a strong tendency for equity. They want to feel that if they work hard, they can be successful based on what they do, not on the family they were born to or what happens to be their skin color. More equal societies are also healthier, which is clearly missing in the current economic model, where the gap between rich and poor has become so vast that the world's six richest men (including Bill Gates, Bunker's dear friend) now have as much wealth as half Earth population.
Bunker's failure in his second point may be the controversy of the rising tide, which is expanding its reach to the global economy. Here, Bunker tells the story of how Branko Milanovich, a former World Bank economist, analyzed percentage income gains worldwide over the 20-year period 1988-2008, and discovered something that became widely known as "elephant chart". Because it looks like an elephant with a hose. Contrary to popular belief about growing inequality in the world, this chart seems to show that while the top 1% actually achieved more than their fair share of income, the lowest percentages of the world population achieved the same amount. The middle classes in rich countries seem to have missed the benefit.
However, this graph is actually meaningless because it calculates growth rates as a percentage of widely varying income levels. Compare an executive at Silicon Valley earns $ 200,000 a year with one of the three billion people currently living on $ 2.50 a day or less. If an executive gets a 10% wage increase, she can use $ 20,000 to buy a new little car for her teenage daughter. In the meantime, the same 10% increase would add, at most, 25 cents to 25% for each of the three billion. In chart 4, Oxfam economist Majid Jamal al-Din shows that the original "elephant drawing" (blue line) contrasts with disparities in absolute income levels (green line). The stark difference.
The "Elephant Chart" elegantly conceals the fact that the richest 1% have experienced absolute growth by about 65 times the income of the poorest half of the world's population. In fact, inequality is not declining at all, but rising rapidly in the other direction. According to Jamaleddine's calculations, at the current rate, it will take more than 250 years for the incomes of the poorest 10 percent to reach only the world average income of $ 11 a day. By then, at the current consumption rate of rich countries, it is safe to say that there is nothing left for them to spend what they earn. In fact, the “rising tide” of some is barely worth the drops of the billions others have.
The true measure of progress
One of the pillars of Bunker's book is the explosive rise in income and wealth the world has experienced in the past two centuries. If we borrow the words of economist Angus Dayton, we will call it the "great escape" from the historical burdens of human suffering, and a chart (Figure 5, left) shows the rise in per capita GDP, which seems to say everything. How can any reasonable person refute this evidence of progress?
There is no doubt that the world has witnessed a shift in material well-being in the past 200 years, and Bunker documents this in detail, from increased availability of clothing, food and transport, to a seemingly significant global decline in the cost of artificial light. However, there is a point at which rising economic activity begins to break away from luxury. In fact, GDP measures only the rate at which society transforms nature and human activities into a monetary economy, regardless of the quality of life it produces. Anything that causes economic activity of any kind, good or bad, is added to GDP. For example, an oil spill increases GDP because of the cost of cleaning it: the larger the spill, the better the GDP.
This divergence is tragic in everyday life around the world, and is harshly concealed in global statistics on rising GDP when strong corporate and political interests destroy the lives of the weak in the name of economic "progress." A recent report in the Guardian explains how indigenous people living on the banks of the Zingo River in the Amazon rainforest have been forced to leave their land to make way for the Belo Monte hydroelectric complex in Altamira, Brazil. "I didn't need the money to live happy. My whole house was normal ... I had a piece of land where I planted a little bit of everything, all kinds of fruit trees. I was fishing, making manioc flour. .. I raised my three daughters proud of what I was. " Now, he and his family live among drug traffickers behind banned windows in Brazil's most violent city, receiving a government pension, leaving him about 50 cents a day to feed himself, his wife, daughter and grandson, after covering rent and electricity. Meanwhile, as a result of his family's forced entry into the monetary economy, Brazil's GDP must have risen.
Bunker recognizes the grossness of GDP as a measure, but uses it frequently in his book, because he claims that "it is linked to all indications of human prosperity." But this is the opposite of what was discovered when economists adjusted GDP to include other key factors affecting human prosperity. Another prestigious alternative measure, the Real Progress Index (GPI), reduces GDP by negative environmental factors such as the cost of pollution, loss of major forests and soil quality, and social factors such as the cost of crime and mobility. The scale of positive factors missing increases GDP such as housework, volunteer work and higher education. Sixty years of the historical real progress indicator have been measured for many countries around the world, and the results refute the claim that GDP is tied to welfare resoundingly. In fact, as shown by the purple line in Figure 5 (right), it turns out that global real progress has peaked in 1978 and has fallen consistently since.
What has improved global health?
One of Bunker's most important themes is the definite improvement in public health and longevity that the world enjoyed in the last century. Is a powerful story moving emotions; life expectancy worldwide has doubled over the last century. Infant mortality is everywhere less than in the past. Improvements in medical knowledge and personal hygiene have saved millions of lives. Bunker appropriately quotes economist Stephen Radelet that these improvements "rank highest in achievements in human history".
So what is the fundamental reason behind this great achievement? Bunker combines what they see as the twin engines of progress: GDP growth and increased knowledge. Economic growth, for him, is a direct result of global capitalism. "Although intellectuals may spit their mouth into surprise when reading a defense of capitalism," he says with his usual exaggerated statement, "its economic benefits are so obvious that they need no proof of numbers." A form called the Preston Curve, from a paper by Samuel Preston published in 1975, shows a relationship between GDP and life expectancy that has become the basis of the developmental economy. “Gross GDP per capita is associated with longevity, health and nutrition,” says Bunker. While paying lip service to the scientific principle of “correlation does not require causation,” it clearly emphasizes causality, claiming that “economic development emerges as a major driver of human well-being” and then concludes with a joke from the dean of the university, with a presentation by Maard, by choosing between money or Fame or wisdom. The brigadier chooses wisdom but regrets it. "I should have taken the money," he muttered.
It would have been better for Bunker to think more deeply about the relationship between causality and causality in this very important subject. In fact, this is what a recent paper by Wolfgang Lutz and Andel Kepid, entitled "In Health and Education: Redrawing the Preston Curve," does. The original Preston curve came with an anomaly: the relationship between GDP and life expectancy does not remain constant.Instead, each measured period moves upward, showing a higher average life expectancy for any given GDP (Fig. 6, left). Preston and his followers, including Bunker, made this clear by arguing that advances in medicine and health care should improve things in all areas.
But Lutz and Cupid used sophisticated multi-level regression models to analyze how closely education and life expectancy are closely related to GDP. They found that the average educational level of a country was much better evidence of life expectancy than GDP and eliminated anomalies in the Preston curve (figure 6, right). The relationship with GDP was false. In fact, their model suggests that GDP and health are ultimately driven by the amount of children being educated. These results have enormous implications for development priorities in national and global policy. For decades, the neoliberal slogan, based on the Preston curve, has dominated mainstream thinking, raising the country's GDP, and health benefits will follow. Both Lutz and Cupid make it clear that the most effective policy is to invest in education for children, with all the benefits of the quality of life it will bring.
Bunker's joke is over. In fact, over the past few decades, the Commodore chose money. Now he can look at the data and mumble: "I had to take wisdom."
False equations, false divisions
As we are increasingly seeing, many of Bunker's mistakes arise from the fact that it confuses two different engines in the last few centuries: improvements in many aspects of human experience, and the rise of neoliberal capitalism of non-interventionism, Laissez-fair. Whether it's because of his inference or a misguided strategy, the result is the same. Most readers will take a firm impression that free market capitalism is the main driver of human progress.
Bunker himself mentioned the importance of avoiding this type of confusion. "Progress," he says, "is not to accept every change as a partial change from a huge package ... but to dismantle the characteristics of the social process as much as possible to maximize human benefits while minimizing damage." If he took his advice more seriously!
Instead, his book is adorned with an infinite stream of false equations and false binaries that lead the reader to conclude that progress and capitalism are part of the same package. One of the best solutions is to create the wrong parity between right-wing extremism and the leftist progressive movement. It tells us that the reactionary factions on which Donald Trump's presidency was based were driven by a narrative shared by many of its strongest opponents, that the institutions of modernity have failed and that every aspect of life is in deep crisis. Best". He even goes so far as to implicate Bernie Sanders in the 2016 election disaster: “The right and the left of the political spectrum,” he says, “indignant because of economic inequality for various reasons, which twist until they meet each other. Election of the most extreme American president lately. "
The political model of Bunker lies in the belief that progress can only come from the middle ground of many in the Democratic Party. He consecrates the existence of a false right-to-left antagonist based on a version of 20th-century politics that has been forgotten for more than a generation. The "left", he writes, "lagged behind because of his contempt for the market and his romance with Marxism." It compares "industrial capitalism," which saved humanity from global poverty and communism, "brought famines of global terrorism, cleansing, concentration camps, genocide, Chernobyl, major revolutionary wars, and poverty like North Korea before it collapsed elsewhere because of its contradictions." Own interior. "
By drawing this scene in black and white, and these Manichean features of the benevolence of capitalism versus communist evil, Bunker misses seeing complex and evolving models of a hopeful future, built over decades by a wide range of progressive thinkers. New views from the traditional left to the right avoid this pseudo-banking division. Instead, they explore the possibilities of replacing a system that offers greater possibilities of equity, sustainability and human prosperity with a devastating global economic system. In short, a model of continuous progress in the twenty-first century.
Since the maqam narrows the mention of thought leaders in the progressive movement, a diagram of this kind of thinking is shown in Chart 7. It presents an integrated model of the economy, called the "Donut Economy", which was developed by leading economist Kate Rowworth. The inner circle, called a social institution, represents the minimum basic life requirements, such as food, water and housing, required for the possibility of a healthy life. The outer ring, called the “ecological roof”, represents the boundaries of systems that give life to the Earth, such as a stable climate and healthy oceans, within which we must remain for sustainable well-being for these future generations. The red areas within the ring show the current lack of basic needs for the world's population; The goal of humanity, in this paradigm, is to develop policies that bring us to the safe and just space of "donuts" between the two rings.
Roworth, along with many others who are passionately interested in human progress in the future, focuses his effort, not on the sterile kind and dichotomies promoted by Bunker, but on developing new ways to build a future that is for the benefit of all on the basis of a prosperous and sustainable land.
Progress occurs because ... Progressives!
This brings us to the final chart, which is actually one of Bunker's own fees. The decline in recent years of online searches for sexual and racial jokes shows. In addition to other statistics, this guide is used as evidence in his argument that, contrary to what we have read in the daily headlines, past reactionary ideas based on gender, race and sexual orientation are in fact decreasing. He attributes this in large part to "benign taboos about racism and sexism that have become self-evident".
May we ask ourselves how this progress happened? As Bunker himself states, we cannot assume that this kind of moral progress has taken place on its own. “If you see that a pile of laundry has shrunk, it doesn't mean that the clothes have washed themselves, it means that someone has washed the clothes,” he says. “If some kind of violence drops, some change in the social, cultural or physical environment has led to This is why it is important to know its causes, so that we intensify it and apply it more widely. "
Looking back on history, Bunker realizes that the changes in ethical standards came because progressive minds separated from the normative frameworks of their societies and applied new ethics based on a higher level of ethics, and then undertook to educate people, until the next generation grew up to adopt a new moral baseline. "Global defamation campaigns," he explains, "even when it started purely ambitious, led in the past to a huge decline in slavery, fencing, whaling, nerve-footing, piracy, authoritarian piracy, chemical warfare, apartheid, and atmospheric nuclear testing."
It is difficult to understand how the same person who wrote these words could turn the tide of abuse against those who vilify them as "political correctness police, social justice warriors" trapped in "identity politics", let alone hate the environmental movement "subject to human interests to a transcendental entity," environmental system". Bunker seems to regard all moral development from prehistoric times to the present day as "progress", but any pressure to turn society further along with his moral arc is a curse.
This is the great irony of Bunker's book. In writing a song of historical progress, he takes a very conservative attitude towards those who want to continue it. It is as if he sees himself at the top of the mountain, holding a sign that reads: "All progress stops here, unless on my terms."
In fact, many of the great steps taken in securing Bunker's moral progress came from brave individuals who had to cut off part of their time to resist insulting Bunker as they devoted their lives to reducing the suffering of others. When Thomas Payne emphasized "human rights" in 1792, he was tried and convicted in absentia by the British for defamation. It will be another 150 years before it recognizes his great idea globally at the United Nations. Emily Pankhurst was arrested seven times in her struggle for women's suffrage, and she was constantly hated by the "moderates" at the time for her radical approach to seeking something that was now an undisputed base. When Rachel Carson published The Silent Spring in 1962, with the first scandalous display of indiscriminate use of pesticides, her solitary position was denounced as hysterical and unscientific. Just eight years later, 20 million Americans marched to protect the environment on Earth's first day.
It is time for progressives to retrieve the message of "progress." Stephen Bunker tries to capture a great idea with which he has no right, by deceptively restricting the concept of advancing free-market economics and the values of centrist parties. For humans and non-humans alike, advances in quality of life are worthy of celebrating any heart-bearing organism. This did not happen through capitalism, and in many cases was achieved in contrast to Bunker's “free market”. I personally feel proud to be progressive, and with many others, to devote my energy to the progress of these and future generations. While we did, it would not be thanks to Steven Bunker and his deceptive arguments.
_______________________________________________
This article is taken from resilience and does not necessarily reflect the location of Medan