Reply to a 2019 article in The Guardian by J. Steven Pinker's Counter-Counter-Enlightenment

The Fake News Campaign Against Steven Pinker and Enlightenment Now With intellectual depth and literary flair, Pinker makes the case for reason, science, and humanism: the ideals we need to confront our problems and continue our progress.Įnlightenment Wars: Some Reflections on ‘Enlightenment Now,’ One Year Later The result is a corrosive fatalism and a willingness to wreck the precious institutions of liberal democracy and global cooperation. Pinker is a psychology professor at Harvard and a wide-ranging. Many commentators, committed to political, religious, or romantic ideologies, fight a rearguard action against it. The strength of Enlightenment Now, Steven Pinker’s new book, is that it articulates the first part of this conversation. The Enlightenment project swims against currents of human nature-tribalism, authoritarianism, demonization, magical thinking-which demagogues are all too willing to exploit. But more than ever, it needs a vigorous defense.

It is a gift of the Enlightenment: the conviction that reason and science can enhance human flourishing.įar from being a naïve hope, the Enlightenment, we now know, has worked. This progress is not the result of some cosmic force. Instead, follow the data: In 75 jaw-dropping graphs, Pinker shows that life, health, prosperity, safety, peace, knowledge, and happiness are on the rise, not just in the West, but worldwide. Steven Pinker makes case for human progress in ‘Enlightenment Now’. Is the world really falling apart? Is the ideal of progress obsolete? In this elegant assessment of the human condition in the third millennium, cognitive scientist and public intellectual Steven Pinker urges us to step back from the gory headlines and prophecies of doom, which play to our psychological biases. 'My new favorite book of all time.' - Bill Gates

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