A Better World?

Sometimes we feel as if there is no end to the big global challenges that we face. Income inequality, epidemics, carbon emissions, air pollution, large population lacking clear water, xenophobia, gender inequality, human rights violations, economic migration, refugee crisis, terrorism, nuclear weapons, unemployment, social unrest, autocratic leaders – and the list goes on.

YouGov, a global public opinion and data company, in 2015 conducted and published a survey, asking participants ‘All things considered, do you think the world is getting better or worse?’ The results were unsurprisingly depressing. In the UK, only four per cent thought things are getting better, and in the US, the figure was only six per cent. Even in Australia and Germany, two among the world’s most peaceful countries, only three per cent and four per cent, respectively, thought the world was getting better. Hardly anyone thinks that things are getting better.  

Better Tomorrow by Yuumei

On the other hand, we see indications of hope, optimism, and positivity. The number of the world’s population living in extreme poverty has considerably decreased since the nineteen-fifties. Majority of people are literate, homicides and war deaths have decreased, life expectancy has risen, democracy is flourishing in more countries today, and more countries today are contributing to global growth, with several nations transitioning to middle-income status.   

Assessing the situation of the world is harder than it sounds. Steven Pinker, a psychology professor at Harvard University, in his book Enlightenment Now: The case for reason, science, humanism, and progress, argues that the world is, in fact, getting better and better. If not in every way, things are getting better in many ways that we often overlook.

The power of bad news is monstrous. Memory is selective. We remember bad incidents more than we remember good ones. Likewise, negative news receives more attention from us than positive news do. It is easy to be pessimistic about the world and to think that nothing is getting better. Following daily news is not a parameter to ascertain how the world is changing. Progress, our most important product, is a slow process that seldom makes the headline.

If the empirical evidence is to be believed, on almost all of the dimensions of material well-being -health, literacy, poverty, human rights, and freedom - the world at present is a better place than it was a century or even fifty years ago. The need is to communicate to the widest audience possible that technical, political, and socio-economical efforts are in fact yielding a very positive impact.

Nietzsche’s Sovereign Individual

Are we free?

I may want to eat some cookies (first-order desire) now, but I also may not want this (second-order desire) due to reasons related to my being health-conscious. My will is free only if I can make any of my first-order desires the one upon which I act. 

We feel we choose, but we don’t. As per the science of conscious intention, free will is illusion. Schopenhauer and Einstein both said that a human can very well do what he wants, but cannot will what he wants. 

Nietzsche, in On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), blamed customary morality for limiting humanity by making our actions predictable. He argues that it’s possible for a person of autonomy to exist beyond customary morality. He talks about a concept known as sovereign individual, describing him as ‘the ripest fruit on its tree, like one to itself, having freed itself from the morality of custom, an autonomous, supra-ethical individual’.         

In order to be a sovereign individual, Nietzsche said, it is necessary to give style to one’s character. Doing that is possible by examining our weaknesses and strengths and then put them into a concrete and artistic plan in which they appear as art and reason, and in which even weaknesses please the eyes.

By following only the herd morality, one will never be able to develop a strong will. One must rise above herd mentality - by dominating one’s lower desires and bringing them entirely in balance with one’s will - to become a creator of oneself. Achieving sovereignty as an individual is an excruciating job.

Although Nietzsche suggested that becoming a sovereign and free self is possible, neurologists have plenty of reasons to be sceptical about philosophical ideas concerning free will. The concept of free will, along with Nietzsche’s sovereign individual, finds no support in science, but remains an important ideal. Free will may be an illusion, but belief in it can be healthy, given that we are aware of the fact that there are various factors influencing our behaviour subconsciously. 

In an interview with the Paris Review, Isaac Bashevis Singer once said, ‘the greatest gift which humanity has received is free choice. It is true that we are limited in our use of free choice. But the little free choice we have is such a great gift and is potentially worth so much that for this itself, life is worthwhile living.’

‘It’s raining, but I don’t believe that it’s raining.’

As the saying goes, ‘everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.’

Producing around 100,000 chemical reactions and 50,000 thoughts, the human brain, the command centre of our nervous system, is a natural wonder. With this titanic processing power, we tend to believe that our judgement would be vastly precise, but that’s far from the truth.

We have long been curious about the circumstances in which it’s right to believe. The key source of this allurement is the desire to believe something for which we have inadequate evidence.    

What gives you the right to believe whatever you want to believe? What gives you the right to believe that climate change is a hoax, or you’re racially and morally superior because you’re white, or the Earth is flat? Such right to believe is a negative right. If your mind is closed, it’s not open for learning.

‘It is raining, but I don’t believe that it is raining,’ as G E Moore, an English philosopher, in the 1940s, said, concerning absurdity. Moore's paradox emphasises on our unwillingness to acknowledge of ourselves that we occasionally believe false things. Our pride grooms us into wanting to be correct at all times.

We know we’re wrong when we choose not to believe in the vital goodness of, and the truth about, humanity but, frankly, we don’t care, because it helps us to be content or happy by believing in what’s wrong.