Agency and the Making of History | Martin Seligman | Ep. 86

Adam Omary (0:13)

A virtual warm welcome to Cato. I'm Adam Omary, a research fellow at Cato's humanprogress.org. I'm honored to be joined by Dr. Martin Seligman, Director of the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania.

Dr. Seligman is widely credited with founding the Modern Positive Psychology Movement and has been called by my graduate advisor, Steven Pinker, perhaps the world's greatest living psychologist. He's the author of many books, including, most recently, Agency, The Psychological History of Human Progress, which we'll be speaking about today. Dr. Seligman, thank you for being with us.

Martin Seligman (0:54)

I'm delighted to be here, Omar. Thank you.

Adam Omary (0:58)

I'm also joined by my colleague, Johan Norberg, Senior Fellow in the Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity at Cato, and a historian of human progress. Thank you for being with us, Johan.

Johan Norberg (1:10)

Thank you. As an old Martin Seligman fan, I'm also delighted to be here tonight.

Adam Omary (1:16)

Being a psychologist myself, I plan to discuss Agency with Dr. Seligman from the psychological perspective, and Johan will discuss human progress from the historical perspective. We're going to speak for about 40 minutes total, followed by 20 minutes of audience Q&A. For our audience, please go to the Cato Agency event webpage to submit your questions.

Before we start our panel, Dr. Seligman, I'd love to hear an overview of the book from you.

Martin Seligman (1:49)

I'm trying to find a new field, Adam.

The field that Isaac Asimov called Psychohistory, and it has two aims.

The attempt to show that psychological states profoundly influence historical events, and then to use what we know about history to try to predict the future. The state I deal with here psychologically, specifically, is Agency. And Agency for me has three components. The first is efficacy, the belief that you can accomplish your goal.

Optimism, the belief that you can do this into the distant future, and imagination, the range of goals that you can possibly achieve. And the historical hypothesis is that when civilizations believe in human agency, that's when progress and innovation occur. And when they're absent, that's when stagnation and even regression occurs. So in the course of the book, I start with hunter-gatherers and what we know about their agency through the Greco-Roman period, in which we see Bronze Age belief of the gods do it, which in the Golden Age becomes overriding belief that it's humans that accomplish things. And then that declines actually up through Augustine in the fourth century, who renounces human agency. Then I look at the Middle Ages and the glacial growth of agency.

Then the Renaissance, the Reformation in which agency is greatly reduced by Luther and Calvin. And then the Armenian Protestant revolts against Luther and Calvin. And finally, modern views of human agency. And the book culminates with what I do full time now, Adam. And that's AI. And the question of, is AI going to destroy us? Which I do not believe. Or is it the most technologically important aid to human agency, certainly of my lifetime? And that's what I believe. But that's the book.

Adam Omary (4:40)

I'm excited to get to AI.

And I want to begin with conceptions of progress. As you describe an agency and as we outline with data on humanprogress.org, by so many measures, we're living in the most extraordinary time of human history. Our wealthier and freer lifespan is longer than ever. Disease rates and mortality are going down. And yet, despite these extraordinary improvements in human living conditions, so many people seem pessimistic about the future. Why is that?

Martin Seligman (5:16)

Well, first, the facts of the matter are that people are pessimistic in spite of overwhelming statistics in quality of life, personal freedom, technology, purchasing power, health and the like. And your question is, how could that be?

How could people be denying human progress? And I think there are at least two answers. One is ideological. And that is, it's become very beneficial politically to argue that we're in one crisis after another. And that only I, the political candidate, can solve that crisis. And so I think the belief in perpetual crisis, in spite of the fact that what we have is a fairly steady growth in progress and even in peace for the most part.

And the other is journalism and what's conveyed to people. So a hundred years ago, if you were a farmer in Nebraska, you might find out a month later that the Titanic went down. Right now, if you just watch CNN all day long, you're just going to hear about one horrible thing after another. If it bleeds, it leads. And I think this gets people to think that it's really bleeding that's going on and not progress. So, I think the combination of political ideology and journalism are two of the factors that lead people to believe that progress is a myth.