The Case for Reason - and Progress

This is one of the best books I've ever read but with reservations.
1. A self declared atheist/enlightment thinker should not quote Hebrew texts and Jewish prophets on every other page, but I guess this is not just a problem with Steven Pinker. Other fundamentalist atheists like Sam Harris and Dawkins also commit the same error shedding their wrath on Christianity and Islam. Mind you Evil has 3 roots not just 2. Why focus on 2 evils and skip the third let alone copy/paste paragraphs from it every other page ???
2. His concepts about progress / inequality are confusing or even deceptive. The improvement of conditions in backward countries or impoverished populations in advanced countries should never be considered in absolute numbers and mind boggling graphs but rather should be relative to the more economically advantaged populations. Had the author adopted a relativist view his outcome would have been different.
3. It's not AI that will take over the world controlled by "evil robots" as the authors tries to ridicule the threat which is real but the enemy in actuality is invisible in the form software and apps that are not intelligent at all but controlled by "evil businessmen" who do know that contrary to the author's false concept that mobile apps and technology is far cheaper than humans and far less annoying. Rather than AI I would coin the term AIFU (artificially induced forced unemployment). This is happening at a very rapid pace and if some "smart people" don't see it , well it's their problem. I agree HAL won't take over the world but far less humans would be 'needed'. Solution is simple and does NOT include halting AI research at all. It simply means we need to reduce world population to a sustainable level compatible with progress. World population should be reduced to no more than 1 billion in a hundred years. How I don't know. We will always be needed but in a far fewer numbers.
Please stop blaming the victims. Blaming the post colonial rulers of 3rd world countries for the shitty state of their current affairs is atrocious.
Despite adopting a rather convincing logical approach in most of the book chapters the chapter on happiness fails entirely to convince the read. Look around Mr Pinker.. Do you see many happy people ? Yes the QOL is so far better than it was even 20 years but no one is happy. Blame it on FB, capitalism, competetivism or whatever but people are not happy anymore

Wonderful book that brings some optimism to a pessimist world. Funny to read the one star reviews of people that can't get past that an atheist can have a good idea or in denial that we have made real progress. I wouldn't want to grow up in my parents generation or their parents either. That is progress. And if I was foolish enough to have kids they would have surely said the same.

The title suggests this book was imaginative and idealistic for the current state of the world, at least the western world. Pinker is one of my favorite authors, he does an excellent job with his profession in Psychology to create a realistic framework for grounding people, to combat pessimism, and dispel pervasive thoughts of doomsday in the public-sphere. He has created a very optimistic outlook in this book while also keeping the reader in a realistic and reasonable scope for the future of this enlightened world.

Honestly, I won't deny that I was gripped by this book from the first to the last page, and I claim it to be a very positive sign, which I, personally would justify to myself by appropriate language used. But eventually I came to realisation that the publication slightly contradicts itself.( For instance thoughts on nuclear power). On the hole it is a thought-provoking work( even though one track minded, repeating constantly 'we're better off than before'), that has definitely changed my mind considering some points( I prefer to leave them to myself).

This book should be required reading. It's dense but incredibly insightful. We live in very emotionally charged times and it's fair to ask who profits from our whipped up feelings? I listened to the audible version and then bought the kindle version to highlight passages.

I do love all the scholarship that Steven Pinker included in his 450 page summary of the progress the human race had made from the Age of Enlightment to today. It's filled with timeline graphs in so many areas. I'm only giving it 4 stars instead of 5 because he brings up the election of Donald Trump so often. To be fair, he is critical of both right wing and left wing variants of populism. What I found unnecessary is his crediting of Donald Trump's election to voting irregularities.The election results have already been investigated and validated in the 3 states where the results were close. Steven Pinker implies Trump voters were irational without examining and explaining the possibility they made their choice in opposition to the excesses of the previous US president's administration totaling 8 years in 2 terms. It's for that reason I'm glad I only borrowed it from the library and didn't buy it. Though Pinker is an atheist and I can understand why he didn't attribute any progress to organized religion, I did notice a noteworthy error. He credits the Enlightment for criminal penalty reform. Actually, proportionate infraction sentencing originated in the Torah. Maybe it was from the Enlightment that this was widely adapted.

This could have been an uplifting optimistic look at the world if the author had not laced it with his own hatred and bigotry toward Trump. He decries tribalism nut exhibits its worst in his alignment with the democratic party and their Trump/republican bashing. I am not a Trump supporter nor a republican but am sick of the press and other's clear hate and slanted representation of him and his actions. On the author's religious views,his pronounced atheism seems to be as much based on faith as any religion is, no one knows what sparked sentient life or what happens after death (as the wide variety of religions and beliefs demonstrates) and we should all be open minded about the possibilities. To claim that we are just a collection of atoms that evolved by accident from the soup of the big bang in a universe prone to entropy is fantastical. If you can get past the author's personal biases and beliefs, there is a lot of good information about the world's progress, I just found that hard to do.

A well-argued case for for faith in human progress along with caution against threats to its causes. If every citizen believed this, we would elect better leaders and have more civil public discourse. I cannot remember a book that was so clarifying for me while, at the same time, changing so many of my opinions. I agree with Bill Gates —“my new favorite book of all time.”

Review of Pinker’s "Enlightenment now" by Paul F. Ross

Pinker’s Enlightenment now (2018) was published by Viking on Tuesday 13 February 2018. It received a first-page, favorable review in the Review section of the Wall Street Journal on Saturday-Sunday 10-11 February 2018 (AnonymousWSJ, 2018). I bought my copy of Enlightenment now in Barnes and Noble, Bellevue WA, on 13 February, surprised and delighted that my local bookstore had a copy of this item on the first day of its public release. Two weeks later, in the Review section of the Wall Street Journal on Saturday-Sunday 24-25 February, Enlightenment now was listed in third place in sales among the nation’s non-fiction books for the week. Then The Economist (AnonymousEcon, 2018) published another very favorable review. On 23 February 2018, Shermer (2018) published a favorable review in Science. There are no surprises here. Pinker’s Enlightenment now merits the reviews, the purchases, and the readership it is getting.

In The better angels of our nature (2011), Pinker assembled data from pre-human-history to the present time to show that people, now, are killing each other at a lower rate than ever before. He hypothesizes about the changes in thought and economic and social practices that produced this progress in human behavior. Enlightenment now (2018) opens by inviting the reader to understand the changes in thought produced by the Enlightenment, introduces entropy, evolution, and information as processes shaping human progress, and completes his introduction with a chapter responding to arguments that readers have voiced for disbelieving Pinker’s 2011 findings. Pinker opens his data presentation in Enlightenment now with a chapter on “progressophobia,” showing us how the role of news dissemination in the last century or two emphasizes bad news. Inundated with bad news, our psyches buy into the notion that things are getting worse. We believe there is a need to “make America great again,” losing sight of the fact that America and the rest of the world are and continue to be great when viewed by historical standards. Recognizing progress does not require overlooking the problems still to be solved. Pinker follows this introduction with fifteen chapters of evidence-supported descriptions of multiple parades of progress … in lifespan, health, calories feeding individuals, wealth, the social costs of income inequality, the environment, peace, safety, terrorism, democracy, equal rights, knowledge, the quality of life, happiness, and a decrease in existential threats. He summarizes the discussion, then speculates on the future of reason, science, and humanism. Pinker’s report of human progress is built on the research of scientists of every stripe.

Pinker’s product is not without flaws. Ever hear of “deontological morality”? Neither had I. Gird yourself with your strongest vocabulary, enjoy the plunge, and expect to be flummoxed. You’ll get along just fine. Sometimes I think Pinker uses more words than are needed to make his point … and then I stumble upon the next gem. An important flaw worth thoughtful notation is his dismissal of income inequality as relatively unimportant (Chapter 9). This reader thinks many people understand and accept the idea that different individuals contribute differently to the general economic welfare and, therefore, earn and deserve different pay levels. In that sense, Pinker’s views on inequality reflect reality accurately. However individuals look about and see some paid much more than they deserve and others paid too little. It is the injustice in pay inequality – where it occurs – that makes pay inequality an issue. This reader, a psychometrician, knows that psychometrics has been offering questionnaires prompting descriptions of job performance that are valid, observer biases having been minimized by getting reports from multiple informed observers. These questionnaires have been available since at least the 1940s. No organizations are using them. Even scientists, who pledge to do peer review of manuscripts offered for publication so that the best science gets published, fail to agree on what should be published and what should be rejected. The median correlation between two peers’ recommendations with respect to “publish, reject” in six sciences is r < 0.3. That means the two reviewing peers share less than nine percent of the variance in their judgments about the value of the work. Consensus at the level of r < 0.3 means the reviewers’ judgments forecast essentially nothing of importance with respect to the future value of the work just evaluated. A large demonstration rating published scientific works using an 85-item questionnaire in 1978, and a small demonstration in 2007-2008 using a 45-item questionnaire, showed that questionnaire-prompted evaluations by peers disclosed consensus at the level of r > 0.9, a tenfold improvement in consensus detection over day to day practice by scientific journals and their editors. Evaluations of just-published works made in 2007-2008 correlated r ~ 0.6 with citation frequency for the published works accumulated over the next nine years, the 2007-2008 judgments anticipating subsequent citation counts! It has been known since 1910 (Google the “Spearman-Brown formula”) that asking one question when evaluating job performance (or anything else) is not enough. Yet scientists continue using a deeply flawed method, asking just one question, when a better method has long been known. When the decision to publish a scientific manuscript, or when high pay for one person and less pay for another person, are implemented based largely on one or two observers’ judgments, and when those performance evaluations are not valid, social tensions arise. Pinker is wrong in treating pay inequality as unimportant. The science of psychology offers real help on this matter. Pinker fails to recognize the importance of the issue and describe its solution.

Another flaw in Pinker’s presentation is his frequent repetition of the idea that “correlation is not causation.” The observation is correct, of course. But the observation that “correlation identifies causation” is equally correct. Isaac Newton observed that the behavior of sun and planets in our solar system had something to do with mass and distance. The correlation of a planetary body’s mass with its distance from the sun and the time needed for a complete orbit around the sun described a set of “causes” (gravity, velocity) explaining the behavior of the solar system. To fall into the habit of repeating “correlation is not causation,” a habit widely practiced by all scientists, while failing to teach the statistical methods of factor analysis, a century-old psychology-invented statistical means for probing the meaning of correlations among many variables, is a serious bad habit affecting all sciences. This reader would rather that Pinker, the scientist, avoided continuing to teach this flaw.

Still, Pinker’s examination of the meaning of reason, science, and the humanities along with his evidence-supported description of progress and of the risks of human choices unguided by reason-science-humanities are outstanding accomplishments plainly displayed here … and much too little known. Enlightenment now merits reading by a very wide swath of humanity … by organizational leaders, policy makers, scientists, the curious, the bewildered … by everyone ready to learn.

Bellevue WA
6 March 2018

Copyright © 2018 by Paul F. Ross All rights reserved.

References

AnonymousWSJ The enlightenment is working, The Wall Street Journal, Review, 10-11 February 2018, p C1-2

AnonymousEcon The state of the world : a future perfect, The Economist, 24 Feb – 2 Mar, 2018, p 71-72

Best selling books The Wall Street Journal, Review, 24-25 February 2018, p C 10

Pinker, Steven The better angels of our nature: Why violence has declined 2011, Viking, New York NY

Pinker, Steven Enlightenment now: The case for reason, science, humanism, and progress 2018, Viking, New York NY

Shermer, Michael Reason (and science) for hope, Science, 23 February 2018, 359, p 876

New York Times's commentator, Sarah Bakewell, reviewed Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now, and summarizes her opinion saying that the book "strikes me as an excellent [one], lucidly written, timely, rich in data and eloquent in its championing of a rational humanism that is — it turns out — really quite cool." And that is just what I wanted to say.

On the other hand, here and there I read some reviews that put one star to the work or say it is boring. In any case, that kind of assessment is a confirmation of what Pinker said in the book with respect to people when confronted to ideas that are against their own (they feel angry and cannot hide it). The same thing happens to me when I read books that condemn the ideas for which I am inclined to or better represent what I think. Point for Pinker, I guess.

But the book says many more things and all of them are important to consider as long as they are the target of any intellectual today (with --unfortunately-- very few exceptions): health, sustenance, wealth, inequality, the environment, peace, safety, for naming just a few. The idea is to show you how, in every field, the internal clock of reasoning working in the atmosphere of an enlightened mind has given the good results we could easily (but reluctantly) see around us. That's the idea. We have progressed a lot, and that is the fruit of the Enlightenment, that fertile episode of the 18th Century in Europe, and that, by the way, is perfectly alive today.

That's the good guy, Enlightenment. The bad guy is a misconception that sees Enlightenment as a failure, guilty of provoking two World Wars and a long list of disgraces. Thus, Pinker confronts those two characters in every page of the book, but with a superb finale that the author reserves for the last part: Reason, Science, and Humanism. Maybe this is the part that read those that don't like the idea of reading the whole book (full of good news) so it is understandable that they feel anxious (for saying the least). Here you have Pinker in his element, audacious, smart, and straight to the point.

I'm a professor in several Chilean universities and experience the tough opposition that these good news generates. I don't know why people tends to see the world as a heap of bad news always. Everything is falling apart all the time. Pinker explores this question with the calm and the distance of someone who have had to work hard for gathering all the data and all the information that make up his case ("The bulk of the book is devoted to defending those ideals in a distinctively 21st-century way: with data."). He confronts positions, analyzes, put pressure (even on himself!) to draw the meanings and get the answers. In doing this, he tells you why you should see the world the other way round, in open opposition to what the News channels or the printing press tell you.

Finally, the only objection I have is for some mistakes that are impossible to overcome considering the enormous scope of the book, for instance when he says in chapter 14 on Democracy, "Military and fascist governments fell in southern Europe..., Latin America (...Chile in 1990)," which is incorrect because Chilean military government never fell, it simply finished.

I hope the book is read everywhere. It should be a companion for several others like The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (P.s.), or Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future. Those works also began with some resistance on the public (maybe because the depressives always read first) but as the time went by they started winning stars.

Pinker has flown high. And us with him.

Highly recommended.

If there is any book worthy or relevant to Pinker’s ‘The Better Angels of Our Nature’, it is this, his latest book. Pinker strongly believes that the light that began to shine from the Age of Enlightenment has not diminished but has, in fact, spread, and he endeavours to show how we can facilitate its continued growth. If ‘Better Angels’ is a book of optimism and hope, this book is optimism and hope, expanded.

Drawing on myriad examples since Kant was awakened to the idea of enlightenment, declaring, at the same time, that we have freed ourselves from our ‘lazy and cowardly submission to ‘dogmas and formulas’ imposed by religion and political authority, Pinker proceeds to trace the growth of human civilisation as nurtured by the light of enlightened thinking.

He discusses several major areas in which humans all over the world has gotten a much better deal today than their ancestors had prior to the Enlightenment. We have much better health, and the means of sustaining ourselves and our societies. He explains why we are wealthier now, and that the basis for the creation of wealth is ‘knowledge and cooperation’. This book is not a recitation of all that is good – that is Pinker’s contemplation – but he arrives at each point by confronting the problems and the pessimists who contribute to them. Each point is thus well-argued and a joy to read.

He discusses the problem of rising inequality and puts them all in perspective that even the strongest critic may have to give credit for such…enlightened…thinking. He considers the prevalence of peace in a world still at war, he considers the virtues of democracy even as autocrats and auto bots loom in recent times. He measures the state of human happiness and is pleased. So, having declared that all is good, he hesitates to bid us goodnight. Instead, he spends the latter half of the book explaining that we have come thus far, and will continue evermore, because of reason, science, and humanism.

Reason stands foremost because as he says, ‘Opposing reason is, by definition, unreasonable’. That has not deterred many unreasonable claims as he points out; in spite of the unprecedented growth of knowledge. He tries to show how we can improve the standards of reasoning. Next, he exclaims the marvels of scientific progress: ‘Yet there is one realm of accomplishment of which we can unabashedly boast before any tribunal of minds, and that is science’. Perhaps the most enjoyable and heart-warming chapter is saved for the last by design. His chapter, ‘Humanism’, covers history, psychology, religion and philosophy. He reports on this growing movement with such pride and adulation that one might think that Pinker was the father of humanism.

Critics as well as those who count themselves as realistic may be sceptical of such bright views of the state of humanity and the glowing optimism that lines each page of the book, but if you want to feel good, really good, and have a nice long read, this book is the answer. It only remains for all to hope that Pinker the optimist, is right.

Listened as audiobook. I listen to a couple of dozen audiobooks a year, all non-fiction. This is one of the very best books of the past three years.

A very important book.

If your party or your tribe is more important to you than reason, you will hate this book. There's plenty here to challenge ideologues on both the left and the right.

If you care about the fate of humanity and understand that only through reason can we continue to improve the lives of people in material ways, then you will love this book.

A superb reminder of the dramatic progress of civilization over the past two centuries across a broad number of metrics of human flourishing as we as a species reap the benefits of the endorsement of reason and science over dogma and blind faith. A repudiation of pessimism about our future. An ode to the myriad benefits of democracy, regulated capitalism, and technology. A call to foster continued progress with the tools of rationality. Love this book.

Pinker is among my favorite scientists and writers. His talent for writing caught my attention in How the Mind Works, which is interlaced with deep insight, wit, and truly hilarious examples of human nature. Till this day, I can recall the sections of Hot Heads and Family Matters that had me literally laughing out loud. That he is a humanist is obvious, but here lies the problem all of us more liberal minded academics have: a primrose outlook on humanity based mostly on our own in-group interactions. It only takes a short walk away from your university and a hop on a bus or train and a quiet look around to see how bigoted, aggressive, and close-minded people can be. A black and white man vying for the same seat on a train exchange ugly looks at first that then quickly escalates into racially charged epithets. A man about to fall into the tracks is watched with an almost derived entertainment for that anticipated fate. Sure there are counter-examples: The gentleman that will nod to another man to take the only seat left or the good samaritan that will rush to the scene and gently pull the man about to fall unto the tracks aside and see if he needs medical assistance. While these more positive examples exist, the negatives ones are arguably more common and seemingly on the rise. We now live on a planet that is over-populated and ever more competitive on all scales from local to international levels—while despite all our technological marvels, we are least developed to truly communicate effectively. And most seem hopelessly lost of these facts with potentially horrific consequences on large scales. For the first time since the fall of the Soviet Union the Dooms Day Clock as been pushed closer to midnight and ironically we are now far more at risk of having a nuclear conflict in our life times with Russia. Yes, we’ve improved economically and have more rights and freedoms globally. These are good things, of course. But an improvement of the human condition in terms of being more cooperative and conscientious of our actions and how they impact others, we are worse than our forefathers. People are more akin to selfish and self-entitled children with a hubristic sense of importance over others and possessed with a too commonly found zero-sum thinking of outcomes. So while I applaud Pinker and his view and do acknowledge the evidence of improvement of our species in many areas, the area that arguably matters the most is appalling in disrepair: civil discourse. And I see no true communication today at any scale that fosters true unity and ultimately the vision that Pinker is presenting. Instead, we are more like inhabitants of the great Tower of Babel, each speaking their own specialized dialect of self-interest and relating little with the other. That said, this is a damn good read and I would highly recommend it, for like all of Pinker’s books, it makes you think and see interesting connections, again brought to life with humor and depth.

This book is a timely antidote to our culture's pervasive and cynical pessimism. It is not, as others have suggested, a neo-liberal excuse to sit on our hands and stop fighting to improve society's many problems, but rather a guide to continue pursuing the actions, policies, and philosophies that have proven useful historically.

This is the best non-fiction book I have ever read and, in my opinion, the most important book for those around our polarized and hysterical nation to read. Pinker takes no shortcuts, pulls no punches and leaves no stone unturned in this eloquent story of our modern society.

If you're interested in the true current state of humanity and in making the world a better place, and if you think you can handle 450 pages of facts and rationality that may challenge what you think you believe, this is the book.

Very good book. It was refreshing to read something that was actually optimistic on our world for a change. Steven does a great job providing the data to provide rationale for his arguments. The commentary on Humanism versus religion was a bit hard to swallow for me but I took it as food for thought.

At least, I didn't find that item of plumbing in the index, nor do I remember encountering it while reading. Almost everything else is in there, if it connects to the main topic even tenuously.

Being in the process of writing my own book, one that addresses many of the same issues, I can relate to the difficulty of deciding what to include or exclude. Even more, I can appreciate the immense amount of research that went into the writing, and the sheer labor of organizing it and writing it in an eloquent fashion. Pinker handles it all, generally with amazing attention to detail, especially regarding the wording. I very much respect it when someone is careful about expressing his thoughts precisely; we'd all be better off if more of us took that approach.

(OTOH I've seen some truly eloquent expressions from those who have fallen into the black hole of primitivism, which is more than I can say for most commentators on "conventional" political issues of the day.)

Pinker has gathered a lot of material together that sorely needed expression. Like me, he stands in the middle of the road, but does not just triangulate a position between the farthest extremes; rather, he usually just ends up where he does because of where the facts lie.

With that said, I think Pinker has started getting careless in some areas. Maybe he just had so much to say that he almost bit off more than he could chew, but there are many little mistakes in this book that surprise me when I remember that Pinker is a linguist by profession. Some examples:

(p 47) "racking their brain" (should be "wracking")

(p 91) Again, the same thing: "…civil wars that had racked developing countries."

(49) "…while pessimists sound like [sic] they're trying to help you. optimists sound like [sic again] they're trying to sell you something."

(89) "Of course that day is a ways off." Geez. "A ways"? That's just appalling.

(109) "Developing countries today…stint [sic] on social spending."

(At this point I'm starting to wonder why software isn't catching these.)

(118) "inexpensification" Are you sure it isn't supercalifragilisticexpialidocious?

(129) "someone who has woken up [sic] thinking it's 1965"

(132) "More interesting is the fact that the companies" Look at a hundred sentences that include "the fact that," and you will find that "the fact that" is almost always completely redundant.

(145) "no reason to stint on emissions" What was the intended word? "Skimp"? Here, it's hard to tell, but "stint" isn't even close.

(146) "densification" Is there such a word? The nature of English may be that, if it gets used, it's a word. Maybe I just need to accept that.

(148) "barges anchored offshore cities"

(163) "outlawry of war"

(286) "Will O'Neill entitled his history" A common mistake; people are entitled to benefits and other things. Creations (and some possessions) are titled.

This is far from a complete list, but let's move on to errors on matters of fact.

I'm just getting started.

(255) "Both Al Gore and Dan Quayle lamented its demise [the family dinner] in the runup to the 2000 presidential election" Neither Al Gore nor Dan Quayle was running in 2000. Beyond that, the sentence is ambiguous—did the lament the demise (in some year), or did the demise of the family dinner occur in 2000? We all know the answer, but such an ambiguous wording is, at best, distracting (although sometimes amusing).

(330) "Solar panels made with carbon nanotubes can be a hundred times as efficient as current photovoltaics" Given that a typical solar panel nowadays is about 20% efficient, it's obviously impossible for another panel to be 2000% efficient. Even if Pinker meant to say 100% more efficient, this would be near the upper bound of what has been reported even in research labs (with multiple junctions and special materials, with little concern for price). And none of it is based on nanotubes. There is an NREL chart of efficiency over time for PV cells. This chart has been making the rounds enough that it's become almost a cliché, and it makes no mention of carbon nanortubes. That's not to deny that some such thing may well occur soon, but it's beyond the present technology. Pinker said "can," not "could." He also refers to "continuing Moore's Law for solar energy." Well, I'm as big a proponent of solar energy as you'll find, but Moore's Law does NOT apply to solar energy. What does apply is Swanson's Law, which says that a doubling of cumulative production of solar cells results in a 20% price drop. That's profoundly important, but nowhere near as explosive as Moore's Law.

(330) "…a new design for a zero-emissions gas-fired plan uses the exhaust to drive a turbine directly, rather than wastefully boiling water…" The idea is to spin a gas turbine with the exhaust gas, then run that same gas through a boiler to make steam and turn a steam turbine, thereby capturing a larger percentage of the combustion energy. This is a really good idea, but not all that revolutionary or new. It works for gas, but not directly for coal, because of the bombardment by solid particles that a gas turbine would experience in a coal-fired plant. IAC Pinker's wording implies that boiling water is wasteful. It is, necessarily (as Carnot told us), but the same water-boiling occurs in the plant he mentions, except that additional efficiency comes from the gas turbine.

(331) "Robots can take over jobs that humans hate, like mining coal [and other things]" My crystal ball says that coal mining will disappear before it gets taken over by robots. Time will tell.

-----

After all that, I'd like to add some kudos for a few pleasant surprises:

(313) Several titles were mentioned that deal with the threat of nuclear terrorism. I appreciate those suggestions very much, and will be investigating them.

(450) Nikon vs Canon as an arena for a hatefest. Who'd have thought? This sounds really amusing! I must check it out (although I have a hard time believing it would be more fun than Duke vs UNC, or vinyl vs CD).

(453) "the spiral of recursive improvement" For reasons I don't understand myself, this seems an especially apt phrase.

-----

But enough of nits. The main problems with the book are in Chapter 10, The environment. Pinker sees opposition to nuclear power as rooted in the same anti-modern attitudes he describes so well in the rest of the book. For some, it surely is. But when he gets taken in by the siren song of the Nuclear Renaissance, IMO he goes completely off the rails. Nuclear power will NOT have a renaissance, at least not in anything like the context imagined by those using the phrase. (If you want to talk about the 23rd Century in the outer Solar System, I can have some fun with that; but really, let's stay on Earth for now.) An especially disturbing thing is that the main problems are not what tend to get focused on. Fuel availability is not going to be an issue. Waste disposal is also quite tractable, with multiple solutions. Proliferation may or may not be an issue—that involves predicting events that are beyond horrendous, but which might require a convergence of highly unlikely events. But what we do know is that market forces are killing nuclear power. Capex is a wall that it just cannot surmount. It cannot descend its learning curve fast enough to be a contender. You cannot go down a learning curve when you're making something with a half-million parts, in quantities of hundreds. It just won't work, unless there just is no viable allternative (and there is). "Small modular reactors." You think 200 MW is SMALL? "Walk-away safe." Are you SLEEPWALKING?

Pinker really needs to rethink his positions on energy matters. The other things I mention here could be fixed, with the right editor. But he owns this topic. He needs to back up and get some perspective. Maybe that's where his next book will come from.

Should be mandatory reading, especially for the cynical and nihilistic among us who consume far too much sensationalist news. This book will change your worldview for the better, assuming you believe in objective reality and can overcome your cognitive dissonance.

The purpose of this book is fairly simple: If you think life is bad or civilization is falling apart or violence is getting worse or otherwise people and society are failing, you're wrong. All over the world, poverty is being eradicated, people are more educated, threats from disease to terrorism are lessened (and some no longer apply). Health is overall better, people are wealthier than ever before, the environment isn't as bad as it seems (although climate change is a real threat that must be managed or human beings will need to adjust in a different world). The world is more peaceful, war is not what it used to be. Life expectancy is up even in the worst parts of the world. People are finding out that democracy is better than monarchies or theocracies and equality is improving in all areas of life.

In general, the principles of reason and science put forth a few hundred years ago (although Pinker starts the clock in the 18th century) are working and we're not about to go backwards. Except...

Pinker notes that should a strong man, a populist leader could emerge to squash this period of goodness. Or should the economy continue to stagnate, we could slide backwards a bit. But we won't readily go by choice. No one is going backwards from the acceptance of LGBT rights and acceptance of interracial couples. No one is preferring prayer over the wonders of modern medicine or preferring the 1970s encyclopedia set over the vastness of knowledge available via the Internet. No one is doing this (except for some rare and odd fundamentalists) for three reasons which Pinker discusses at the end of the book: Reason, science and humanism. If we continue to apply these three principles, the world will get even better than it is now.

Enlightenment NOW is a great book to take you past the day to day news cycle that may make the world look like a terrible place. After reading this, there's no way to think romantically anymore about some "good old days". We're living in the good days. We should strive to continue the work begun all those years ago and make it even better.

Excellent book. Should be on every educator, politician, sientist, and concerned citizen's reading list. This book will change how you think about the state of the world, the power of science and human progress.

Thank you, Steven Pinker, for the work you put into this book and for having the skill and patience to turn so much data into readable, enjoyable prose. It is such an important message and such an important resource for the conditional optimists in the world, like me.

This is as clear-eyed as analysis gets. We are so focused on the very real crises of the moment that we don't recognize the progress we've made as a species, including the eradication of various plagues, famines, and wars fought for conquest and glory. A rare book in that the world would genuinely be a better place if everyone read it and took its insights and observations seriously.

This is a great book for those who already agree with Pinker. It is also a great book that might persuade some people to think less negatively. "Things aren't as bad as you think" seems to be the theme of the book. We should wake up to what we've got. Its not so bad.

However, Pinker himself starts with this: (“ Dear Professor Pinker, What advice do you have for someone who has taken ideas in your books and science to heart, and sees himself as a collection of atoms? A machine with a limited scope of intelligence, sprung out of selfish genes, inhabiting spacetime?”)

I doubt that whoever asked him this question would agree that Pinker has successfully answered it. Pinker's answer seems to be that; although you are an automation, a meaningless collection of atoms, that you must make a leap of faith and be optimistic.

Pointing out time and time again, that our material conditions are better now than they were a few hundred years ago, is not really an answer to the philosophical question the student raised. An well oiled electro/chemical robot - is still a robot. The student's question was about being - not becoming. Can an accidental collection of atoms obtain enlightenment?

Just finished “Enlightenment Now.” I have been reading Pinker’s work since “Blank Slate,” and went to lectures a few times. He is the quintessential reasonable man and a true liberal in the real sense.

The Economist does a better job than I would in reviewing the book. I would emphasize a few points that I think key.

First is the Pinker is a near absolutist on defending free speech. I agree 100%. Free speech is the basis of all our all of our science and most of our liberty. He laments that fact that the defense of free speech has become more identified with the right than with the left these days.

Second is that a reasonable person does not demand perfection because he knows that perfection is not possible and even defining what perfection means is not possible over the whole system. Pluralism is better, since that allows for improvement.

In fact, demand for perfection is the hallmark of totalitarians.

Pinker did not say this exactly, but I thought about it from what he did say. Progress in human affairs and evolution in nature depends on variation and selection. There is nothing fated to happen. History is contingent and can go in many directions. Some things happen by coincidence and there is no meaning beyond that. So the best system is not one that produces the one true result, but rather one that throws up lots of possible options, so far so good.

Some people like to say that there are no stupid ideas; they are mistaken. However, the stupid ideas may be useful in that they might stimulate or reveal better ones. The problem comes in the selection phase. We praise creativity, but sometimes dislike the pruning process.

I have a hard time with pinker's general texts, which are not grounded in linguistics and neural science, and seem to represent the writings of a scientist who wishes to contribute to the formation of public policy, and I can't somehow integrate this text with that of, for example, how the mind works. those who find pinker's public policy texts: blank slate, the better angels of our nature, and now this text cannot help but applause his humanitarianism and scholarship and pure pluckiness on taking on the really big issues. but I don't learn anything from these books. they are not the stuff of thought. they do not tease out the language instinct. all of these research areas have proven insubstantial in the trajectory of understanding how the brain works, and I think Steven is facing the same dilemma all competitive scientists face when their educational paradigm is no longer current, and there is no big payoff in terms of the field they wish to be master. and so they turn to philosophy and policy, using metaphors from the science, like entropy, that seems really absurd in the form pinker choose to apply it. chomasky, his teacher, faced the same decoherence of his intellectual framework. I think all language science without a neural correlate is doomed to become our generations Fahrenheit/celcius quarrel before a kelvin comes to ground temperature in a physical model.

Interesting view of historical trends, but highly biased interpretation of these trends. Quite uneven in the depth of scholarship in various areas of focus: original research mixed with references to newspaper and magazine articles. I had the sense that this was written by a number of different authors with varying knowledge of their respective fields.

It is doubtful the author read many of the books he quotes from. This author's premise that man is a conglomeration of bio-physical elements with a self-prescribed purpose is a symptom of pathological nihilism as Neitzsche pointed out. The logical contradictions in this book are astounding; for example, author goes from man being a improbable conglomeration of physical elements to the idea that there is purpose and we are progressing in that direction -- Purpose and Progress implies value judgment based on "better" or "worse" "good" and "evil", yet if all is a physical happenstance of mere change there is no "better", "worse", "good" and "evil" -- the world and everything in it just is what it is -- no progress just moments of being in whatever state the world finds itself.

A bit more boring than I thought it would be. It contains the usual pile of charts and graphs that Pinker is by now used to make in order to claim that the world is a good. Not so bad as a writer, I think he needs to add more theoretical solidity in his arguments. He clearly also needs to make this more entertaining as my attention was dwindling as I approached the second half of the book.

I wonder, also, how much of all this data is cherrypicked, since hardly any contrary result is mentioned. I can't put away this book without the impression that he set out to write it with the wish of saying that things are going for the better and then collected the necessary data that served the purpose. This is not how science should proceed.

Incidentally, I happened to read Jason Hickel "The Divide" just before this, which uses some of the same data as Pinker but interpreted differently to reach opposite conclusions. I found Hickel's more cogent overall.

Edit: Having read John Gray's excellent recent review of the book ("Unenlightened thinking: Steven Pinker's embarrassing new book is a feeble sermon for rattled liberals") I've downgraded it to 2 stars. Gray review truly nails the main problems in Pinker's approach.

What a great defense of modernity. We always see what’s bad in the world in the news, so we think the world is getting worse. This book makes a great case that the world is getting better, much better, at an accelerating rate. Will open your eyes, and your mind

Steve Pinker does great work. He addresses important topics and presents detailed facts to support his arguments. After The Blank Slate I had high hopes for this book. Unfortunately, what could have been a powerful and uplifting message, i.e. that the world is demonstrably becoming a better place, was lost. The message was so diluted so as to make reading the book painful. Steven has done himself a disservice. A true master is able to distill down the message and make it accessible to all. This book takes the opposite approach.

Pinker's "stock" has been falling in recent years. Even his earlier work is coming under more and more critical attack for painting graphs showing progress while wearing rose-colored glasses. Reading Pinker, you would think humanity is marching inexorably towards utopia.
Armed with his scientific looking graphs, he tries to appear scientific. Alas, just like in computers, its GIGO - Garbage In Garbage Out.
He really stepped on a nail with this latest book. He is not a historian, and real historians have been falling all over themselves in a mad rush to shout, "He's making amateur mistakes - Get a real book instead!".
Pinker has traded on his credentials at Harvard and his appearances at conferences. He's done everything except real research, according to the historians I've read.
His big mistake, in my opinion, is that history is not about graphs and differential calculus. History is too messy, too chaotic, too probabilistic to be treated like physics. Battles could have gone either way, depending on a thunderstorm, or a shaky bridge, or a general with a toothache. There is no "arrow of time" pointing to TODAY saying that today was inevitable. It is sheer luck that the Cuban Missile Crisis did not destroy technological civilization for a hundred years.Yet, according to Pinker, cooler heads prevailed because we're all becoming more civilized by the better angels of our nature.
From what I've read, the Enlightenment was not a monolithic force moving humanity from superstition towards logic and reason. Just read Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau to see if they agreed on much. They couldn't even agree on what The Enlightenment was, or how goals should be accomplished. And that's Pinker's problem. It's messy. It's a lot messier than any graph reveals. And, just like the Cuban Missile Crisis, it could have ended differently, The French Revolution was not inevitable. Just look at Russian history to see the twists and turn it has taken.
In my opinion, reading this book was a waste of time. Although it was enjoyable and made me feel optimistic, and gave me hope that a glorious world of progress awaits us, it's like an ice cream sundae. The calories are ultimately empty.
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I had to add this to my review! I just remembered Voltaire, a towering figure of the French Enlightenment. His book pokes fun at Pinker's giddy, boyish, optimism, as expressed by the young boy, Candide, who believes:

EVERYTHING IN LIFE THAT HAPPENS IS ULTIMATELY FOR THE BEST...
BECAUSE WE LIVE IN THE BEST OF ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS!
- Candide

Life's tragedies shatter Candide's beliefs about how beautiful the world is. Pinker is Candide as a young boy.

This is a powerfully persuasive book. If you look at actual data instead of relying on intuition, anecdote, or the evening news, you'll find that whether you're looking at crime, health, longevity, poverty, terrorism, education, all of these things have gotten better over the course of the last few hundred years. And boy does Pinker bring on the data, which can get a little boring to get through at times. Other than that, don't believe the haters with the 1-star reviews, who obviously haven't read the book. This is fantastic stuff, and a needed antidote to all the negativity about the world coming to an end. It's most definitely not, and here's the evidence, in graph after glorious graph, showing that life is indeed pretty darn good.

Dear Steven, I tried to read your book but could only get to chapter 4. Unfortunately the negative stereotypes overwhelmed. So surprising in a Harvard Professor! "Intellectuals hate progress", you state. Somehow you attempt to overgeneralize while at the same time complicating the matter with intricate details. I really wanted to finish the book. But couldn't get past the negative tone and overalls assumptions . I do believe the human race is at its best point in history. Can't argue that, but your framing and assumptions about people left me depressed and hopeless . Better luck next time.

This is a good work. Lots of facts and data, lots of evidence. Unfortunately, it gets to be, like, beating a dead horse after a while. Certainly makes a good case for human progress. But Neiblum's work did a better job of this, over a year ago, and with less redundancy. 'Unexceptional: Darwin, Atheism & Human Nature' is a brilliant work, and does a far superior, more insightful job of recognizing human progress, and, at the same time, also placing it within it's broader historical and philosophical context's as well.

It took me several weeks to get through Enlightenment Now because of limited free time, but I am certainly glad I continued to push my way through this highly informative and deeply well-researched book.

Enlightenment Now takes the reader through a synopsis of Dr. Pinker's last work The Better Angels of Our Nature, while giving a solid abstract at the outset of what he plans to discuss, why he decided it was a good time to bring these statistics to light and where it could be that human civilization is heading.

Naysayers and news media like to insist that we are becoming more polarized, more divided, less free, less safe; that poverty is growing rampant in first world countries, murder and crime are at all time high's and that the world will soon run out of every day essential needs such as food and water due to growing population concerns. Thankfully, all of these "happenstances" or "soon to occur" motions are utterly false.

This book will give you a solid grounding in current statistics regarding the aforementioned topics and give you hope that tomorrow truly can and should be better, so long as we continue to seek reason, further cultivate our empirical sciences and strive toward progress towards all aspects of our functionality on this tiny blue dot.

Enlightment now is really big book in many senses. For me as the Russian speaking person it was also difficult to read because of a rich language - what isn't surprising considering that Pinker is linguist - but there are of course much more fundamental objections.
First of all this book lacks sound methodology. Some examples. All graphs begin at best from Middle Ages as if there wasn't history behind these times and almost all of them depict the West but not the Rest. Not better is the main promise of author. Though he tries his best there's no convincing explanation why all this will go on in the same direction. And one more. There isn't background how was obtained factual material.
Second. There's problem with what is omitted albeit not completly. Reading this text can create an impression that there isn't dark side of this story. Negative consequences of science's thiumph are observed scarcely and ecological disasters are only mentioned but not explained in the same vein. As if it's not enough many of them aren't noted at all - offhand shrinking biodiversity, monoculture fields, contaminated oceans, overpopulation, degrading soils and so on. If you write a book on such issues as progress you must also view its collateral damade.
And finally. The last chapter is unbearable on one hand because it's too lengthy but what is more important due to its logical weakness. Our mind isn't ideal and we as a species weren't prepared for civilization. So what we do contradicts to what we were destined for, namely to be haunters-gatherers. As a result we ruin this world because we are just naked primates. For more deliberated approach see my book:
Civilization and its fate: What civilization is and why it is doomed

Pinker's latest book is a follow-up to the equally engaging Better Angels of Our Nature, although it can be read independently. It has a broader focus: why the world at large has become a better place thanks to the wide adoption and application of reason, logic, science, etc. This doesn't exclude the fact that there are plenty of pockets of misery in tons of places —a problem that we must confront— but, overall, in our times more people than ever live better lives than ever.

Pinker arguments are quite solid and, even if you know you're going to disagree with him, the book will be enjoyable if only because it'll force you to sharpen your thoughts and consider contradicting evidence. In this sense, reading this book feels like a dialogue. One example for me is the discussion about inequality. Pinker says that income inequality isn't a problem; the real problem for him is societal unfairness, but his take is quite unsatisfactory as I have the hunch that both are closely intertwined.

This is a bold book. Pinker's claim that "the world is getting better" is endorsed by less than 20% of people in most countries. Yet rather than pandering, Pinker wages a relentless siege of data for hundreds of positive trends in different aspects of human wellbeing, with virtually no negative trends. I think for many readers, this seige is necessary to whittle down the deeply embedded intuitions we have due to increased news coverage of negative events, the outrage we feel at the current suffering in the world (you can feel this while still thinking it's less suffering than it used to be!), charities that paint a negative picture in order to get more support, etc.

Like in his previous books, Pinker's writing is eloquent and entertaining. He's one of the world's best writers of serious nonfiction, making it as entertaining as the best fiction or memoir (at least to readers like me).

You'll probably finish the book with some concerns. For me, I worry a lot that human progress is undercut by the vast suffering of the hundreds of billions of nonhuman animals who share this planet with us. Pinker unfortunately skips over this potential defeater to his argument. (However, there is room for optimism here thanks to technology and moral progress that seems like it will help us end atrocities like factory farming.) I also found his treatment of risks from artificial intelligence unconvincing, given he doesn't go into much detail the many thoughtful people I know who have written in detail have found the risk much more compelling. Finally, I always worry about a book that yields such little ground to its opposition. Even with the sociological conclusions I find most compelling, there are always valid counterarguments and counterexamples. To give an analogy, if a panel of 10 judges all find someone guilty, that could be less convincing than if 9/10 do, because the 10/10 situation could easily be a case of corruption, bias, groupthink, etc.

But that's okay. It'd be a strange world if I agreed fully with every author I read. Enlightenment Now is an important, and neglected, perspective on the arc of human progress, and I'm very glad I read it.

The most important book you’ll ever read. This book should be required reading for every man and woman on earth. It should be a prerequisite for voting or engaging in any kind of public debate. Buy it. Read it. And tell everyone you know to read it, too. Please.

Pinker shows how practically every measure relating to human well-being has been improving dramatically, in the world and in the US, since the Enlightenment began and even since what some consider the "good old days" of the 1950's, backed up by lots and lots of data. But he emphasizes that this is not some kind of "given," but rather has come about because of the continuing efforts of lots of people, and we always need to keep working to keep the momentum going the right direction. This part of the book would make a great TV mini-series, explaining the strides made in a couple of the numerous covered subject areas each week.

Other portions of the book make the cases for reason and humanism. Some of this might be hard going for religious people, hard-core conservatives, and hard-core liberals, but Pinker speaks from data with calm reason rather than the confrontational tone so popular nowadays. There's much here to consider, regardless of your position.

Overall, a wealth of under-reported, under-appreciated information about human progress and some thought-provoking arguments about attitudes and beliefs.

Steven Pinker writes well. Very well. As a reviewer of one of his books years ago said, Steven Pinker’s writing is “witty, erudite, stimulating, and provocative”. Most of the books he’s written I’ve read, and for the most part, enjoyed reading. His books entertain.

But his books do not help me learn. For all his writing skill, Steven Pinker is not much of a thinker. He is too much hat and too few cattle. He is too thorough in his research and writing and not deep enough in his thinking.

That shows in his books. Saying I’ve read his books means many of the pages in them, but far from every word. Maybe about half over all. His thinking is very reductionist -- he sketches out very broad themes that he then supports with myriad (and interesting) details. He tries to make the complex simple.

Steven Pinker’s approach has worked well for him in academia. After stints at MIT and Stanford, he returned to Harvard where he wears titles like the “Harvard College Professor of Psychology” and the “Johnstone Family Professor” and sits in his huge Harvard office to do his work.

He has become a popular scientist too. His books become best sellers. His trademarked curly locks won him membership in the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists (LFHCfS). He is on his third wife (like similar popular scientists Carl Sagan and Richard Dawkins, and like his villian Donald Trump).

He has made all the right connections to get awards like “100 Most Influential People” and the like. To promote this his latest book, he suits up to talk with Bill Gates in Gates’s palatial place on Lake Washington. (He reminds me of Columbia's Jeffrey Sachs, a similar celebrity academic who instead of Bill Gates has U2’s Bono as his fan.)

But what of Steven Pinker’s thinking? That’s shallow. His books do not age well. How the Mind Works, for example, explained how the human mind works. But the model of a modular mind shaped by natural selection seems much too simple to explain what we now know about minds. The Blank Slate too seems to have been off the mark a little even when published, and to be getting further off the mark now.

In this book, Steven Pinker first goes wrong when he talks about how “entro, evo and info” kind of explain everything about how humans progress. He means by that entropy (the second law of thermodynamics), evolution (neo-Darwinist style), and information (a la Claude Shannon). But his discussion of those basic principles reduces complex ideas to simplistic slogans. That sets the stage for the reductionism of the entire book.

Steven Pinker gets the idea of entropy largely right. That’s a concept from physics, and reductionism works in physics. It’s when he gets to evolution that he goes off the tracks, as reductionism in biology gets you near nowhere. In a few paragraphs he says that Charles Darwin (and with political correctness Steven Pinker doesn’t forget to include Alfred Russel Wallace) explained how complex things can be created without a designer.

But did they? I don’t think so. Steven Pinker had just explained how everything in the universe tends to go from order to disorder. When he gets to evolution, he then says (without evidence) that there are “a set of processes called self-organization” that allow order to emerge. How does all that work? There’s a lot of hand waving and a footnote to a few sources (no specific references to page numbers are given), but I’ve read those sources and they don’t support Steven Pinker’s argument.

The fact is, biology is complex, much more so than physics and chemistry. Trying to explain complex systems by reducing them to simple principles just doesn’t work. Yet that is what Steven Pinker does in this book.

That seems arrogant to me. For example, Steven Pinker dismisses Donald Trump (in what amount to limit more than screeds) as an “authoritarian populist,” one who is against all the Enlightenment values that have brought human progress. Oh really? That is the reductionism of a melodrama, where characters become caricatures as evil villains and humble heroes. Where is the nuance? Donald Trump, like all of us, has his strengths and his weaknesses. Steven Pinker needs to recognize that.

Instead of the self-importance that we see in (many) TED talks and in Steven Pinker’s books, we ought to recognize that we do not know much about many of the complexities of our world. Many scientists understand this. Like Isaac Newton said: "I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."

Albert Einstein too: "We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many different languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn't know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see a universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws, but only dimly understand these laws. Our limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that moves the constellations."

Richard Feynmann: “I think it is safe to say that no one understands quantum mechanics.” “One does not, by knowing all the physical laws as we know them today, immediately obtain an understanding of anything much.” “The more you see how strangely Nature behaves, the harder it is to make a model that explains how even the simplest phenomena actually work. So theoretical physics has given up on that.”

Scientists often get locked into their own theories and can't accept that they may be wrong. That's how the human mind works. As Max Planck put it, "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." (Or as now many people pithily paraphrase it, "Science advances one funeral at a time.")

None of us knows much. We can at least be humble about it. We can recognize that we cannot explain everything in sweeping strokes using terms like reason, science, humanism, and progress. We can recognize that none of us really understands this wonderful world we live in. We can recognize that each of us, Harvard professor or reality-television president, can only tell us what they believe rather than what is.

If Steven Pinker had that kind of perspective in his book, that would truly be enlightenment now.

I highly recommend this book for the wealth of relevant data and the compelling explanation of the power of Reason, Science, Humanism, Democracy, and Free Markets. Though I agree with the vast majority of the expressed values, I was thoroughly disappointed with the tone. Pinker fell victim to today’s tendency towards divisive discourse. Rather than seeking common ground, the book reflects a dangerous degree of hubris. Two examples come to mind:
1) Pinker asserted (three times I believe) that “Faith, by definition, is believing in something without good reason.” A more inclusive definition would be that “Faith is believing in something that cannot be proved.” The existence of something beyond our understanding such as a Deistic creator is unprovable and must be accepted (or rejected, if you’re an atheist) on faith. A dismissive comment implied the inanity of a simultaneous belief in a “Holy Trinity” and a single God. I doubt Pinker would be dismissive of the similarly odd belief that Light is simultaneously a particle and a wave…or dismiss a theoretical physicist who believes in an untestable theory of multiverses.
2) Pinker dismissed concerns over a dangerously powerful General AI…noting his own experience as a programmer in Assembler language early in his career. I too programmed in Assembler in the 1980s but I would not assert that as a credential in dismissing Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Max Tegmark who have all raised concerns. They have not argued to stop scientific progress, but merely to manage the risks. The simple analogy that engineers simply “build bridges” not “safe bridges” misses the fact that occasionally, unintended consequences like unexpected harmonic vibration caused bridges to fail. Pinker attacked the “Literary Intellectuals” who dismiss Capitalism by noting that he was not defending unregulated Free Markets. Can’t the same logic apply to Artificial Intelligence?
While I found his defense of enlightened thinking based upon hard data quite compelling, the attack on alternative points of view as inferior (or even fundamentally flawed) distracted and can disenfranchise the people he seeks to convince. Seek common ground to advance the cause of enlightened thinking.

Enlightenment is a book in two parts. One, which is nearly the first 90% of the book, is the less interesting, less important, but the most impactful is the one that had to be written, while the other - the last 10% on Humanism - is the one that has to be read! The two have tenuous connections, despite the author’s best efforts. Overall, the book contains much that is obvious and some unbearably blue-sky, but for its balanced tone, nuggets of information all through, the section on humanism in the end and most importantly, the sheer positivity, it is a worthwhile read.

The author starts with an important point: our daily news is all about whatever that does not work. The din of such reports feeds a widespread paranoia of humanity heading towards one or the other disaster. The book lists dozens of all-important aspects of life quality where there is nothing but relentless improvement in the last few decades or centuries. Data of all kind is blasted at the reader to brush aside any possibilities of counterarguments. In the process, points mentioned are more often than not extremely obvious, although the author does take a strong positive stand on certain controversial aspects too. These sections also include some good theories and arguments, albeit in the author’s consistent, factual style rather than many other popular book writers. For example, Nasim Taleb would make tall claims about the concept of “ergodicity”, something he feels he has invented, to refute that income inequality is a rising problem. Mr Pinker, pronounced as someone Mr Taleb cannot stand, would arrive at the same conclusions on inequality not being a problem with four powerful points but none with any fancy titles. One of the four, which is apparently used by many academics for decades, is ergodicity in all but name.

While the author is reasonably balanced most of the times while countering the dissenting theories, he allows himself to be blindsided by his pre-decided favourable opinions about the progress as well. For example, the author makes valid points on how past doomsday forecasts of “peak stuff” have never been proven true. Yet, he is far too rational to really take that as any evidence of somehow this will never happen in future as well. For someone who knows that progress is not preordained, it should not be difficult to appreciate the value of fears. More often than not, we have conquered many diseases, disasters, wars and other societal issues simply by imagining their nightmare unfolding, leading to few from somewhere in the system arriving at the best solutions. As the author said, it is the higher vigilance - in response to the fears of terrorism-related events or crimes - that has led to a sharp reduction in crime. Yes, inequality may not be as bad as some believe, or pollution might be curable, but none of these problems is going to be sorted if everyone decides to simply count the positives.

Despite some great data, and a chest-thumping positive assessment of humanity’s progress - topics that are making the book wildly famous - the book’s best sections are towards the end on the philosophy of humanism. Philosophers and intellectuals have historically fallen into two traps: a. Over-philosophising metaphysically while completely missing the practical or ontological parts, thus needlessly complicating even the simplest of aspects of morality or ethics and b. Focusing too much on the perceived or real, generalised or specific ills without recognising the continuous progress humans make. The author’s call for the reason to rule, science to guide, our innate humanity to drive is powerful, even if simplistic. In fact, the naivety in the author’s optimism is both the book’s biggest strength and its biggest weakness. It allows the book to take a tack that makes the book unique and feel-good. But, it also makes the author sweep far too many real issues under the carpet in the most callous fashion. One such example is the way the threat posed by faster machines is handled in less than a few statements by simply announcing that they cannot have any purpose (which is even more galling given the book’s later sections on physicality of concepts like soul, mind or conscience)

In sum, a good book.

I got halfway through this book and thought not bad, but anti-Trump too much. In the second half, it becomes very anti-Trump.
Pinker has no education in economics or finance. He has no clue how things are financed or engineered or how they work. Pinker is an atheist who doesn't in any way feel there are things that are wrong in the world. Everything is hunky-dory. Very disappointing, not uplifting. Really goes downhill from the midway point.

I prefer George Friedman's books because they are far more enlightened and deal with the real world of human and political intention.

At over 570 pages, this book is not for everyone, but once you start it, you realize you are beginning a journey that is important and well worth the investment of time. Pinker is an intellectual and he takes on the fast-paced seductive need for (mostly negative) news that keeps chipping away at all of our perspectives about what is really happening in the world. His review of the current situation and historical look back are fascinating. This is an excellent book, and, I now see why Bill Gates calls this is his favorite book of all time. I just wish there were an abridged version that could be required reading for freshman. It would better equip them to make sense of how the media and social media skew our thinking.

People arguing with Pinker seem to comically do combat with a wall. As did sad critics of "Better Angels," in light of Pinker's airtight arrangement of facts and preemptive arguments. Maybe you can find some minor hole in his process and pounce, but it will probably be a degradingly slight gotcha--for you, not him. And even if you presume to undermine the "whole thing," I'm not sure how a massive social breakdown like your crazy Uncle used to prep for is even going to discredit these books. They'll be beautiful, nostalgic reminders that we don't need to live like "Walking Dead," we can do better, and probably will, after the zombies are eradicated, and we rehabilitate the roving cannibal gangs.

So I had a few problems with this book, but more dilettante reader and temperamental cynic's gripes than feeble factual objections. Good first. 1)This isn't some bland tome about the general philosophical joys of enlightenment, which I feared the publisher pressured him into, in lieu of doing a more specific, less marketable book (maybe on the evolutionary psychology of morality?) Some science doesn't sell well anymore, like anything that doesn't make people feel warm n' fuzzy. Not pretending this is some kind of profound, ironic challenge to Pinker's main arguments, even he's argued something similar, in terms of stupid marketing, clickbait and the simplification of presidential speechifying. But this, for the better, is basically a sequel to "Better Angels of Our Nature," one of his best books. Great?

2)Mostly great, I think. Level of research and writing is up there with "Better Angels," and his opening chapters about the rising standards of living worldwide hit the same counterintuitive-but-unassailable sort of notes. Warm and fuzzy, incidentally, but so implacably true, you'd best just sit down and shut up and listen. Like a Better Angels supplement...which to me is all good, given I feared it might be dull stuff about how Voltaire was great.

3)Yet, revenge of the first impression: book eventually does run short on the self-propulsive gas "Better Angels" had, and explore some weaker enlightenment digressions. Which might tap into some minor, longstanding irritations with Pinker-as-philosopher and aesthete, even if you'd be idiotic to argue with his factual presentation and arguments. Pinker can alternate hardcore brilliance with some duller, hidebound observation and rumination.

Like HL Mencken said of John Dewey: "He was an expert in pedagogics, metaphysics, psychology, ethics, logic, politics, pedagogical metaphysics, metaphysical psychology, psychological ethics, ethical logic, logical politics and political pedagogics...He had written a book called 'How to Think.'[lol @ so close to "How the Mind Works."]...He sat in a professor’s chair and caned sophomores for blowing spit-balls...I myself greatly enjoyed and profited by the discourses of this Prof. Dewey...a man of the highest bearable sobriety." Dr. Pinker will surely occupy as prominent a historical place as Dewey, but like Mencken, I vaguely long for more iconoclasm and eye-gouging, by personal temperament.

4)Pinker probably rightly views himself as a general corrective to a frequently-idiotic culture of negativity, but the tone of relentless positivity can get more boring, when the ideas and data aren't as fascinating. And then perhaps arguably dubious, as abstract temperamental approach..."I have to admit it's getting better all the time." To the extent critics even bother (ignoring books that make them look like idiots is their soundest strategy, tactically-speaking,) this will probably be an angle of attack. "A bland encouragement to view everything in society as relentlessly trending positive." Only really bothered me as a cynic inherently pained by a positive outlook, perhaps wholly to its credit.

5)Book star ratings are now completely meaningless, just like most other Internet user ratings are becoming. Pinker makes chattering frauds and charlatans butthurt, but this only speaks in his favor, to me. So take any outraged, filibustering, weirdly vapid pan as being a potential recommendation, assuming anybody bothers.

There is a lot to swallow here, but Pinker's entire body of work (outside this book) supports his theses laid out here on top of the books content itself. You need to already be familiar with his work, even if you don't appreciate it.

This is a very positive, optimistic work. Unfortunately, as the great Hyman Rickover (the creator of the US Nuclear Navy) once said, “Optimism and stupidity are nearly synonymous.” I will return to this really important point later.

The argument of this book has three logical parts.
Part one is to argue that science and technology are the result of the Enlightenment.
Part two is to show how science and technology have significantly improved the human condition over the centuries. The author also argues that they will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
Part three is to connect the intellectual achievements of the Enlightenment to the author’s favorite political system. This system is what could be called “Globalist Liberalism.”

Other commentators have convincingly shown that the link from Enlightenment to science is historically dubious as scientific progress led to the Enlightenment, not the other way around. Also, one must recognize the great accomplishments of science in the Romantic period. Many great scientific discoveries were made by scientists of the Romantic tradition. For instance, Werner Heisenberg, the discoverer of the “Indeterminacy Principle” and main creator of Quantum Mechanics, was a lifelong follower of Goethe as a philosopher of nature, not just a poet.

I will concentrate my criticism to the strongest point, that is, the argument that science and technology have been only sources of progress and not also of great evil. I am generally a technological optimist and I have defended nuclear energy, vaccinations, etc. Still, one must realize that technology has been complicit in some of the greatest evils of all times. For example, technology was partially responsible for the Holocaust. While Hitler was an unprecedentedly evil monster, he would not have conquered most of Europe without the technology of the blitzkrieg. There is no way around this. One could say that the responsibility was not of technology but of the German engineers that built the war machine that made blitzkrieg possible. But this is nonsense. Technology/science by itself never does anything good or bad: it is alway scientists and engineers that do the work. For instance, a great accomplishment of science was the eradication of smallpox, as the author rightly claims. That accomplishment, however, was not the work of science in abstract , but of teams of doctors and epidemiologist, just as the Nazi war machine was the work of German engineers. There is really no difference, unless the author claims that, in the case of the Holocaust, technology was innocent because “it was just following orders.”

The author is always terribly wrong when he speaks about war and violence. Great wars are rare, but very destructive events. They only happen at intervals of a century or more. For this fact, see the recent work by Aaron Clauset [Trends and fluctuations in the severity of interstate wars, Aaron Clauset, Sci Adv 4 (2)]. The period of (relative) peace since the end of WW2 is not statistically significant: a very destructive war is still possible. And this war could very well be a nuclear war causing even greater destruction than WW1 and WW2 (a combined number of casualties of about 100 millions). The author seems to think that, during the cold war, people were excessively scared of nuclear annihilation. He does not even consider the fact that we survived Cold War 1 (CW1) because the people and the leaders were scared. Fear is good, fear keeps you alive. Pessimists like Admiral Rickover ( “optimism and stupidity are nearly synonymous”) kept us alive during CW1. The fact that today the public and world leaders are less scared of nuclear war than in the past is one of the reasons to be worried that it could actually happen.

The other reason is China. As others have pointed out, China is the author’s main problem. China is not, in any way, an Enlightenment country in the sense used by the author. It is, in fact, a brutal Communist dictatorship but much of the recent progress that the author attributes to the Enlightenment, like hundreds of millions moving from poverty into the middle class, actually happened in China. Also, China is the main adversary of the US and a fast rising one. These conditions, historically, have led to major wars. [See “Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap?” by Graham Allison]. Both China and the US are nuclear powers so that a war between them could escalate into a nuclear conflict. There are really no reasons for the author’s naive optimism: survival will require hard decisions and a realistic (pessimist) world-view.

This book is very often wrong, sometimes comically so. It is not designed to inform or educate, but to push the agenda of “Globalist Liberalism.” (The author uses the term “Cosmopolitan Liberalism,” but I think “Globalist” is easier to understand.) It is a propaganda piece that will not convert anybody, but it might comfort uninformed liberals.

Steven Pinker's "The Blank Slate" still remains the book that has influenced my world view the most but EN is now a very close second and rising. It's fantastic. I learned so much I wouldn't know where to begin. Do not be dissuaded to read this book by negative reviews. Pinker slays many sacred cows. The religious, Marxists, disciples of Critical theory, and postmodern thought are going to hate this book with a passion. All the more reason to read it.

Most of the negative reviews here demonstrate that all of the people who Pinker predicts will not agree with him will not agree with him. Read the book with an open mind (if that's even possible) and decide for your self. I learned a lot from this book, and I highly recommend it to anyone needing some clear explanations as to why our civilization is not necessarily doomed.

Turns out if you’re not Pinker then your an unenlightened boob. Pinker has a gift in being able to offend anyone that disagrees with his idea of “enlightenment”. Unfortunately many of the people that actually participated/contributed to the actual enlightenment are not around to tell him how misguided he is.

I’m a Steve Pinker fan from way back, but I think he went a bit astray with The Better Angels of Our Nature, and now, with Enlightenment Now.
I have no material dispute with his data. I completely believe that the use of in-home refrigerators in America has jumped from about zero to nearly 100% of households in less than 100 years—makes me happy.
Pinker’s main point is not convincing to me. Yes, indeed, health, prosperity, safety, knowledge, and, arguably, the general level of human happiness and overall human well-being have been improving during our lifetimes and the lifetimes of our parents and grandparents.
I’m trying to say a little bit more than the obvious. In effect, Pinker has cherry-picked his data. What he’s saying is true, but Enlightenment Now doesn’t tell enough of the whole story.
It doesn’t seem to occur to Pinker to assess the countervailing reality that World War I, World War II, Hiroshima-Nagasaki, the oppressive and deadly regimes of Stalin and Mao and dozens of others, the Korean and Vietnam wars, AIDS, African and Balkan genocides, opioid drug deaths, accelerating global climate change, and the enduring curse of racism were very much a part of the human condition during those lifetimes.
Grant Pinker’s charts and many more statistical truths: human deaths from saber-tooth tiger bites are down significantly in the last 15,000 years, and bubonic plague deaths have plummeted since the Black Death in the 14th century, and the flushing toilet has been the rising star of indoor conveniences since 1596—all of this makes me happy.
Let’s celebrate improvements in the human condition, certainly, but let’s keep our eyes on the great big bad things that are happening right now around us, and to us.
More of my reviews at
richardsubber.com

Wow, it’s amazing to see how many people still fall for Pinker’s ideas. Have you ever heard of Mark Twain’s "Lies, damned lies, and statistics”? It seems as if Pinker carefully picks statistics that support his view while disregarding mountains of evidence to the contrary. I can easily do the same for the opposite theory that says things are getting worse…

1. Depression rates are up pretty much everywhere one bothers to look:

“In nations as diverse as Taiwan, Lebanon and New Zealand each successive generation is growing more vulnerable to the malady. Although rates of depression rise with age, the study found increases among young people. In some countries the likelihood that people born after 1955 will suffer a major depression -- not just sadness, but a paralyzing listlessness, dejection and self-deprecation, as well as an overwhelming sense of hopelessness -- at some point in life is more than three times greater than for their grandparents' generation.” - New York Times

“Ministry of Health figures have revealed that a growing number of young New Zealanders are battling psychological distress. The percentage of 15- to 24-year-olds struggling with mental health has been steadily increasing, affecting 5 per cent five years ago, 8.8 per cent in the 2015/2016 year, and 11.8 per cent in the past year.” - Stuff

“Depression is on the rise in U.S. teens, a new study finds.” - Live Science

“In April a Mission Australia report found nearly one in four Australian teenagers met the criteria for having a "probable serious mental illness" — a 20 per cent increase from five years ago.” - CathNews

“The rate of depression amongst South African men is at an all-time high. "It's an absolute crisis," clinical psychologist Zamo Mbele tells HuffPost SA.” - Huffington Post SA

“We know, thanks to a growing body of research on suicide and the conditions that accompany it, that more and more of us are living through a time of seamless black: a period of mounting clinical depression, blossoming thoughts of oblivion and an abiding wish to get there by the nonscenic route. Every year since 1999, more Americans have killed themselves than the year before, making suicide the nation’s greatest untamed cause of death.” - Newsweek

So, how exactly is life getting better if people are getting more and more unhappy? Shouldn’t happiness be a measure above all others?

2. In the real world, health is not doing too great. Sperm counts fell in Western nations by 60% in 40 years, and it’s biologically impossible that health would be getting better at the same time. Therefore we see so many diseases on the rise as well, like many types of cancer, diabetes, obesity, autoimmune diseases etc. To top it off, life expectancy is already declining in many developed countries (like US and most of EU).

I wouldn’t be surprised in the least if life expectancy continues to go down in the following years.

3. Environmental problems are spiraling out of control:

“A “biological annihilation” of wildlife in recent decades means a sixth mass extinction in Earth's history is under way and is more severe than previously feared, according to research [from 2017].” - The Guardian

“The number of wild animals on Earth has halved in the past 40 years, according to a new analysis. Creatures across land, rivers and the seas are being decimated as humans kill them for food in unsustainable numbers, while polluting or destroying their habitats, the research by scientists at WWF and the Zoological Society of London found.” - The Guardian

"In just 3 decades, insect populations in German nature reserves have plummeted by more than 75%, according to a new study. The reasons for the decline aren’t clear, but the pattern is consistent over a swath of western and northern Germany, from the region around Bonn and Cologne to the countryside south of Berlin." - Science

"Global fish production is approaching its sustainable limit, with around 90% of the world’s stocks now fully or overfished and a 17% increase in production forecast by 2025, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO)."

“Erik Solheim, executive director of the UN environment agency, describes the problem of marine pollution as “Armageddon in the making”. “We will have the same weight of plastic as fish in the sea by 2050 if this continues,” he says. “It’s all over the place, even in northern Norway, hundreds of miles from human habitation.”“

“Beijing’s pollution has made the city almost “uninhabitable for human beings”, according to a new study released by the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences…”

Anyone who doesn’t see humanity as something apart from nature knows that what we do to nature, we do to ourselves. And no, I'm not talking about global warming, a theme close to Pinker's heart. There are many other urgent issues to solve.

4. Even our food production is in peril:

“Generating three centimeters of top soil takes 1,000 years, and if current rates of degradation continue all of the world's top soil could be gone within 60 years, a senior UN official said on Friday.” - Scientific American

Let this be enough for now. What I wanted to show with these citations is not that everything is getting worse, but that I can easily make a case that it is by citing sources, studies etc. that agree with this. However, the fact remains that many things are not that great in this “enlightenment age” and that we need to collectively work towards a better future. This book is encouraging people towards complacency, which given the issues cited above I find very harmful.

They say to never write a negative review of a book until it has received too many positive ones. Which brings us to “Enlightenment Now: The Case For Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress,” by Steven Pinker.

The tl;dr is that he doesn’t actually argue this case, he just presents a bunch of under-reported optimistic curves and, in the face of problems that cannot be swept under the rug, assures us that if only we treat them as problems to be solved and not get depressed about them, all will be well.

If you say “Gee, that sounds like Pinker’s book ‘The Better Angels of Our Nature’, which was a good book!” I’d agree with you. If this book had been called “Even Better Angels of Our Nature” I’d have no problem with it. But Pinker’s “Case for Reason, etc.” is essentially “these curves happened, they correlate (kind of) with periods when ‘Enlightenment ideals’ were popular, therefore, Enlightenment ideals caused the curves!” That’s bad logic.

The only reason I’m criticizing this book is because I would love to engage a book that actually _made_ the case for these ideals and wrestled with the question of why, while still broadly paid lip service to (the climate deniers don’t say “Science is wrong!” they claim that science is on their side), they seem to have lost traction in terms of driving societal action. Or, perhaps more in the vein of things Pinker likes to do, to discover that “no, history is always an ebb and flow and the tide of Enlightenment continues to roll in.” (I’d be happy to have that case made.)

Pinker wants us to believe that the curves of the book — global poverty, lifespan, wealth, etc. — are strongly predictive of future improvement and, over and over, frames the thought ‘But will that continue?’ as one of pessimism versus optimism. I am temperamentally an optimist, and can rationalize that (“Optimism gives you agency! Pessimism is demotivating!”). But [Optimism bias]is a cognitive mistake. The Enlightenment Ideal is to put aside optimism and pessimism and engage with the facts. Yes, it’s true that the Malthusians have been wrongly predicting “we’re just about to run out of capacity!” for 200 years, and “doom is unlikely” _should_ be your starting point. But maybe humanity’s time on Earth is like that of an individual — ups and downs, and heartbreakingly limited, potentially with a long period of decline before the end. Hypochondriacs are consistently wrong, but in the end all of them can put “I told you so.” on their gravestone.

Beyond the problems of what the book _engages in_ is what it just plain ignores. “The case for Enlightenment” is essentially a philosophical task and the proper balance of reason and passion have been discussed since (at least) the days of Plato and Aristotle. The word “Romanticism” only occurs twice in the book, in brief dismissals, and which is a worse reason to ignore it: not engaging with its explicitly anti-Enlightenment philosophy or deliberately ignoring it, knowing that many people happily identify themselves as romantics and might be less receptive of your position if it were posed as a choice?

“Enlightenment Now” isn’t a _bad_ book. As “Even Better Angels of Our Nature” it’s fine. But ultimately it’s as shallow as a “pull yourselves up by your bootstraps!” self-help book.

"the Enlightenment—with its dedication to science, reason, humanism, and progress—has led people to live longer, healthier, freer, and happier lives"?? This is seriously manipulative...I think some people just live in a fantasy reality.
- 87% of employees feel disengaged or work to death (literally, as Stanford professor Jeffrey Pfeffer shows in his scary new book, Dying for a Paycheck), the average American house size has more than doubled since the 1950s, while the average family size shrunk by half during that same period, widespread loneliness and social isolation in America: where nearly half of all adults feel lonely today, a rate that has more than doubled since the 1980s, chronic diseases (cancer, heart disease, diabetes) are now epidemic in the developing world–accounting for 53% of deaths–due to unhealthy lifestyles;obesity is now killing three times more people than malnutrition, the income gap between the top earners and the middle/lower classes is wider than ever, Americans throw away 14 million tons of clothes each year - a 100% increase in the past two decades. Professor John Schramski, a systems ecologist at the University of Georgia, views Earth as a once-charged battery that stores chemical energy built up by our planet over 4.5 billion years of evolution. With great concern, Schramski notes: “In just the last few centuries–an evolutionary blink of an eye–human energy use to fuel the rise of civilization and the modern industrial-technological-informational society has discharged the earth-space battery.” With such rapid depletion, Earth is irrevocably moving to a state where it would become inhospitable for humanity. For the sake of nature–and our own survival as human species–Schramski believes we must change our lifestyles and slow down.
Sounds "Enlightened" to me.

As with Steven Pinker’s earlier "The Better Angels of Our Nature," of which this is really an expansion and elucidation, I was frustrated by this book. On the one hand, Pinker is an able thinker and clear writer, free of much of the ideological cant and distortions of vision that today accompany most writing about society (for society is what this book is about), and he is mostly not afraid to follow his reasoning to its conclusions. His data on human progress is voluminous, persuasive, and extremely interesting. On the other hand, Pinker regularly makes gross errors about history, some of little import, but some that undermine the entire thesis of his book—which is that that the Enlightenment is the sole cause of the human progress he illustrates.

I like Pinker for his clarity of mind. And since I have been reading a steady diet of books whose central claim is that the Enlightenment was a mistake, and moreover I am personally enamored of Reaction, the idea of creating a new thing by reference to the old, it is only fair that I consider the opposite ideas presented as well as possible. Moreover, this book claims to answer exactly a current question of mine—is the material marvel that is the modern world the child of the Enlightenment? I was not disappointed; this book is just what the doctor ordered, at least to clarify my own thoughts, though probably not with the result Pinker intended. He wants to prove the Enlightenment is responsible for everything that is good in the modern world, and every good thing that will be in the future, but he ends up, for the most part, refuting himself on all his key claims. Still, the ride is interesting enough and that alone makes his book worth reading.

On the second page of his book, Pinker enunciates the core of his argument, by referring to “the Enlightenment principle that we can apply reason and sympathy to enhance human flourishing.” The next sentence, by implication, defines the Enlightenment further as “the ideals of reason, science, humanism, and progress.” The following paragraph says the Enlightenment is “also called humanism, the open society, and cosmopolitan or classical liberalism.” All this creates a somewhat confused definition, but once you read the whole book, it’s evident that to Pinker, the middle sentence is the key—the Enlightenment consists in the primacy to human societies of “reason, science, humanism, and progress.” His book revolves around these four concepts, and we will return to each of these concepts in turn.

Pinker divides his book into three parts. The first, shortest, part expands on what Pinker means by “the Enlightenment.” Here, Pinker begins by turning to the driver of all the progress that he details at great length later in the book, namely, the Scientific Revolution. “The Enlightenment is conventionally placed in the last two-thirds of the 18th century, though it flowed out of the Scientific Revolution and the Age of Reason in the 17th century.” Given that the term Age of Reason is only used in one other place in this book, at the very end in a similar context, while the terms “Enlightenment” and “Scientific Revolution” are used continuously, it seems fair to conclude that Pinker believes that the Scientific Revolution (actually beginning in the 1500s, and possibly earlier, not in “the 17th century”) was the necessary first step that combined with the Enlightenment to produce the benefits of the modern world. Pinker reinforces this conclusion by summarizing the modern understanding of scientific progress to include entropy, evolution, and information. Grasping these three underlying drivers of scientific progress, Pinker tells us, allows a more complete approach to scientific understanding, and thus of the Enlightenment.

All this is true. The problem with this definition of the Enlightenment, though, is that it is all about the Scientific Revolution, from its inception to today, and when you look closely at it, has nothing to do with the Enlightenment. The Scientific Revolution led to technology, which ultimately (with some other drivers that are endlessly debated) led to the Industrial Revolution, which created nearly all the progress Pinker spends the second part of his book documenting. But this eliding of the Enlightenment with the Scientific Revolution is the fatal error of Pinker’s entire book—every chapter, and practically every page, is shot through with it. Pinker claims for the Enlightenment, a system of political and philosophical principles with a laser focus on increasing liberty, the advantages of created by the Scientific Revolution, a pre-Enlightenment happening whose success, and whose single-handed creation of the modern world, had essentially nothing to do with the Enlightenment. Pinker does this because he wishes to advocate for Enlightenment principles (in particular, emancipation and atheism), but justify those principles almost wholly by reference to the achievements of the Scientific Revolution. This is a neat parlor trick, but intellectually dishonest. I cannot tell whether Pinker realizes the dishonesty, or merely has wandered so far into the weeds he cannot think clearly. In either case, the effect is to make some parts of the book fascinating, and others risible.

There are many, many claimed reasons for why the Industrial Revolution occurred, and why it only occurred in the West. But no serious historian claims that it was the Enlightenment that caused the Industrial Revolution, which is no doubt why Pinker glosses over the supposed linkage and offers no citations tying the Enlightenment to the Industrial Revolution (or, for that matter, to the Scientific Revolution). For a man dedicated to carefully parsing the evidence and linking causal chains through reasoning, this is a glaring omission. Fortunately for the reader, though, these first philosophical musings, or ramblings, only take up the first thirty-five pages of the book. The next 300 are an endless, and endlessly fascinating, series of statistical analyses about various forms of (mostly material) progress. In the final sixty pages, the last third of the book, Pinker returns to philosophy, attempting to synthesize the progress he has demonstrated with his other claimed keystones of the modern world, reason, science, and humanism.

Pinker’s basic point about progress is a broadening of his claims about peace in "The Better Angels of Our Nature"—that those who think the world is getting worse are wrong, not (mostly) from malice, but from various forms of psychological bias, such as the “Optimism Gap” (people see their own lives as better than other people’s); “Availability Bias” (we make decisions based on data easily available to us, which is often weighted toward the negative); and “Negativity Bias” (it’s easier to imagine how things could be dramatically worse than how they could be dramatically better). To prove this, Pinker offers fourteen separate chapters, each covering a totally different area of progress, demonstrating that since the Scientific Revolution human conditions have gotten better.

Pinker starts with Life—he shows how life expectancy, both at birth and at later periods of life, has dramatically increased over time—or, rather, since the Industrial Revolution in the West, and since the early twentieth century in much of the rest of the world. Next is Health, to much the same effect. In both chapters, Pinker relies heavily on Nobel Prize-winner Angus Deaton’s "The Great Escape," a fascinating book. But Pinker’s philosophical confusion shows up every time he makes other than statistical claims—for example, he tells us that “Deaton notes that even the idea that lies at the core of the Enlightenment—knowledge can make us better off—may come as a revelation” to some (i.e., the non-Western) parts of the world. There are two problems with this. First, that is not the “idea that lies at the core of the Enlightenment,” it is in an idea that, in the West, far pre-dated the Enlightenment, as I discuss further below. More to the immediate point, that’s not what Deaton says (since I have a copy of his book, I checked). What Deaton actually says is that people in poor countries are often satisfied with their health, not knowing it can be better. He saying nothing about the Enlightenment, or knowledge in general. Unfortunately, such appeals to authority are common in Pinker’s book (surprising, since appeal to authority has been identified as a basic logical fallacy for millennia), and when the authority is mis-cited, it makes matters worse. (The reader’s suspicion is further exacerbated by Pinker’s frequent habit of not offering page cites, just footnotes to books as a whole, though he does give a page cite to Deaton’s book.)

Anyway, Pinker next turns to food (Sustenance), where he again talks about the Scientific Revolution (including its modern continuation in Norman Borlaug’s Green Revolution) feeding the world, and then tries to claim that it was an accomplishment of the Enlightenment, and failure to feed people as shown by Stalin’s terror famines was because (supposed) Enlightenment values weren’t honored. That’s a stretch. Next is wealth, where Pinker focuses on GDP per capita, showing the takeoff since the Industrial Revolution in the West and more recently in some Asian countries, and the reductions in extreme poverty in other countries that have not experienced the same kind of takeoff.

Following is Inequality, which Pinker acutely and subtly analyzes (channeling Thomas Sowell in some cases—you can tell that Pinker is, in many areas, broad-minded by the several times he cites Sowell for different propositions, since Sowell is anathema to doctrinaire leftists). Then Environment, noting that other than global warming, the environment is doing just fine and shows every sign of doing better in the future, on every metric. In particular, he notes how resource apocalypses, from Peak Oil to supposed shortages of rare earth elements, are invariably falsified, by technology in general and by hard work enabling us to produce better things with less material. He also covers Peace, updating his earlier book "Better Angels," and Safety, noting the declines in homicides and accidents. He quickly dismisses Terrorism as a tempest in a teapot.

It’s not just material progress that Pinker covers, although that’s the focus. It’s also moral progress—we are, among other things, nicer to people. Less torture, fewer executions, more value assigned to human life and happiness. True enough, but a necessary leg of Pinker’s entire argument is that there was no significant moral progress prior to the Enlightenment, since prior progress would disprove the causation he claims. But prior progress in the West was very great, as anyone with any grasp of history knows. Christianity immediately obviated many of the worst moral behaviors of the Ancient World (variants of which are still common in non-Christian cultures), from infanticide to the Roman practice of starving children to death in sight of a banquet, to distill their organs into love potions that would enhance desire. Christianity further led to the rule of law and was instrumental in the creation of the institutions that made possible the Scientific Revolution. All these moves forward, as Pinker documents while glossing over their cause, led to further moral gains. To hide his embarrassment at these pre-Enlightenment advances, Pinker chants, over and over again, the same trite phrases about “endless religious wars” and repeats boring anecdotes about witchcraft and bearbaiting.

After these convincing chapters (convincing for their substance, at least), Pinker cover some softer topics, somewhat less successfully. Generally, the less harder-edged and susceptible to statistical analysis the topic, the worse Pinker does in showing that actual progress is being made. In fairness, though, it is true these softer topics, to the extent one agrees they constitute actual progress comparable to that covered in the earlier chapters, are more tied to actual Enlightenment ideas.

First up is Democracy, which he claims is increasing, but Pinker helps himself over the finish line by defining democracy as basically any good government, one which “threads the needle, exerting just enough force to prevent people from preying on each other without preying on the people itself.” That, along with other definitional broadening from Karl Popper and John Mueller, means that democracy is redefined as any government with the rule of law and some responsiveness to public opinion. But in any case, there’s more democracy, however defined, and that’s Progress. Next is Equal Rights, where Pinker goes full Left, trumpeting all emancipation as good for what ails a society, and all failure to emancipate as evil incarnate (although he seems confused, since what is evil, anyway, to someone who denies the reality of moral abstractions other than utilitarian ones?) He does try to give a scientific gloss to his philosophical attachment to emancipation, ascribing it to more wealth means more people seek self-actualization, and want the same for others. This he then extrapolates to a claim that liberal values are spreading everywhere, with a lot of graphs (though we’re never told what “liberal values” are being measured, but by implication they overlap with “emancipative values”).

Then Knowledge (we know more, and we’re getting smarter); Quality of Life (we work less and both the necessities and luxuries of life are cheaper); and Happiness (we are happier, largely because we’re richer, though Deaton covers this much better and more subtly). Along with Daniel T. Rodgers, Pinker huffily rejects Robert Putnam and others who point to the atomization of American lives as a problem, with the flip response that “Users of the Internet and social media have more contact with friends” and they “remain as satisfied with the number and quality of their friendships as in the decade of Gerald Ford and Happy Days.” But this is obtuse. Putnam’s claim wasn’t that people didn’t have friends anymore, it was that the intermediary institutions that were the entire basis of the success of any successful, and in particular, the successful American, society had been completely destroyed, resulting in the cascading baleful effects that Tocqueville and Robert Nisbet had earlier identified and feared. Pinker totally fails to make this connection, or more likely deliberately obfuscates it (which is probably why he refers to fears of social atomization as a “hysterical misconception”—that’s protesting too much). Not to mention that Putnam would have told him, too, that the problem was well under way by the time of Gerald Ford, so the 1970s are probably not the best comparison decade to today.

Finally, Pinker points out that Existential Threats, from Y2K to bioterror, are grossly exaggerated. Sure, we can’t know the future, but on balance, we’re not all likely to wink out of existence next week, or next millennium. Of the supposed threat from artificial intelligence, he says “the scenario makes about as much sense as the worry that since jet planes have surpassed the flying ability of eagles, someday they will swoop out of the sky and seize our cattle.” Ha ha. He’s also heinously sexist. “There is no law of complex systems that says that intelligent agents must turn into ruthless conquistadors. Indeed, we know of one highly advanced form of intelligence that evolved without this defect. They’re called women.”

I like all this, and agree with much of it (although I could do without the constant references to Mama Cass and the Beatles, reminding me Pinker is stuck, in many ways, in the 1960s). I am mostly a techno-optimist myself. However, Pinker’s greatest technical error, as opposed to failure of vision, is to believe (like Joseph Tainter) that if it can’t be quantified, it doesn’t exist. I’m a quantitative guy, personally—I have an MBA with finance and accounting concentrations from the Booth School of Business, and my wife correctly says I view the world as Neo does in the last scenes of "The Matrix"—as cascading columns of numbers underlying the perceived, but merely surface, reality of things. Certainly, non-quantifiable views of human flourishing are subject to errors of perception, which is probably why Pinker repeatedly excoriates the Romantics. But Pinker is too quick to reject that humans seek transcendence, and all the new flavors of Doritos and life extension in the world isn’t going to change that. “Man shall not live by bread alone.” Pinker is fond of quoting Jesus, always with a sneer, but he does not offer us that truth, because it scares him, since it cannot be quantified.

But the unquantifiable aspects of progress are a topic too long to get into in this review. Pinker wraps up Progress by talking about its future. He does this by making totally unsupported claims about the origin of Progress. “Since the Enlightenment unfolded in the late 18th century, life expectancy across the world has risen from 30 to 71, and in the more fortunate countries to 81.” “The Enlightenment is working: for two and a half centuries, people have used knowledge to enhance human flourishing.” Therefore, it’s going to continue, don’t you know? No logic is offered, just repetition of the mantra of “knowledge” and trying to tie the Enlightenment to the Scientific Revolution by repeatedly mentioning them in the same breath. It’s not convincing; in fact, it comes across as desperate.

Embedded within all this proof of progress (for proof is what it is—we can quibble, or call it incomplete, but only a fool would say that material progress since the Scientific Revolution and the Industrial Revolution has not been immense), is the truth, difficult for some to accept, that all this progress was caused purely by, and until recently only affected, the West. It is the Western world has gotten better—and finally, after 400 years, some of those benefits have been adopted by others. That’s it. This is not a global phenomenon in cause, and it may not be a global phenomenon in effect, if the inferior cultures of the world, for whatever reason, refuse to accept the gifts offered by the Western Scientific Revolution. Pinker doesn’t make this point, either, though I can see why—it’s inflammatory and distracts from his argument. (He does admit that his first love, the Enlightenment, was a wholly Western phenomenon, a topic he shuffles away from quickly, mumbling about how ideas have no home, which may be true, but they do have a birthplace.)

There are two topics related to Progress that Pinker avoids like the plague, mentioning them only in passing and in lists of other, related topics. Those are slavery and abortion. Why he avoids them is obvious, if you give it a little thought. Slavery he avoids because all progress toward eradicating it was based on religious belief; the Enlightenment had nothing to do with it. Slavery had been increasingly frowned upon by the Church, to the point of disappearing in Europe long before the High Middle Ages. It made a comeback outside Europe with the conquest of the Americas, with intense debate about its morality applied to Africans and Indians within a Christian framework, and it was solely Christian believers in England and America who ultimately pushed for the ending of, and ended, slavery. Pinker’s beloved Enlightenment had nothing to do with it, and in fact most of his precious Enlightenment thinkers, like Jefferson, were fine with slavery. This is not convenient to the thesis that religion is poison and the Enlightenment made us all free, so it is glossed over. For similar reasons, Pinker avoids abortion. If violence is decreasing, and infanticide is a horror equivalent to public torture-executions, why is abortion OK? Pinker never explains, and in fact he once lists abortion in a list of bad things in which the United States leads, including homicide and incarceration. The reader suspects that Pinker is either unable to overcome his own internal cognitive dissonance, or is afraid of no longer being invited to the right parties if he suggests that abortion should be treated as a moral bad. (In fairness, he did address this in Better Angels, where he admitted that abortion logically is indistinguishable from infanticide.)

Another topic that Pinker studiously avoids is China. Yes, he mentions China in various sections on Progress. But since China embodies the very opposite of Enlightenment political thought, in particular “emancipatory values,” its progress is hard to square with Pinker’s thesis that the Enlightenment is solely responsible for all progress. It is easy to square, though, with China adopting Western science and rejecting Western political values. Which is exactly what has happened, which suggests those political values are not, in fact, important for, or even related to, progress. Again, though, the reader is offered no thoughts in this direction.

Pinker only sees two possible threats to ever more progress. The first is economic stagnation, which he dismisses the possibility of with, in essence, “not going to happen because I say so.” Not for Pinker grappling with Robert Gordon’s "The Rise and Fall of American Growth" and its claims that productivity is likely to stay low (which he does mention), or Peter Thiel’s lament, “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” Mostly he doesn’t grapple with those arguments because he’s falling all over himself to get to the real threat to progress: Donald Trump. Pinker offers an insane list of caricatures and falsehoods about Trump and, more generally, all Republicans, for good measure throwing in pro-Brexit Britons. Did you know that Trump opposes all of Life, Health, Wealth, the Environment, Safety, Peace, Democracy, and more? That is, Trump is opposed to Progress, and wants to strangle it, then throw its body into a fire and dance naked around it. Pinker does everything but Photoshop a picture of Trump with a red suit, a tail, horns, and a pitchfork and fold it into the center of his book. This section goes on in this vein at great length, but in the entire book, every few pages, Pinker snarls and foams at the mouth about Trump, attacking him irrelevantly while discussing unrelated topics. I suppose, like the mad dog he resembles here, Pinker can’t help it, since he very evidently suffers from Trump Derangement Syndrome, which relates to the older Leftist Derangement Syndrome in the same way that Ebola does the common cold.

But it’s at this point that Pinker’s book starts to go off the rails. Not the stuff about Trump—that’s just boring, and par for the course in these days of #Resistance (though it is certain to make the book date badly, whatever the future holds—authors do themselves no favors by ranting about the politics of the moment in books not about the politics of the moment). And Pinker generally appears to have none but the most simplistic grasp of politics—not for him any references to any political thinker, from Spartans to Athenians to Machiavelli. No, it’s his final three chapters, on Reason, Science, and Humanism, that cause Pinker to implode. This is where Pinker exalts what he claims are the principles of the Enlightenment, without making any attempt to actually show they were the basis of the Enlightenment, re-defining them to avoid the inconvenient truth that reason and science pre-dated the Enlightenment, and Humanism has nothing to do with progress.

As far as reason, Pinker first rambles about various cognitive biases that limit reasoning. Then he notes that conservatives and liberals are equally subject to these biases. Having established his impartiality, he throws it in the trash, attacking only conservatives viciously and at length (Jonathan Haidt would be appalled). He starts by claiming “the first modern conservative, Edmund Burke, suggested that humans were too flawed to think up schemes for improving their condition and were better off sticking with traditions and institutions that kept from the abyss,” which falsely suggests (without quite saying it) that Burke, and by extension all conservatives, are opposed to all reason and therefore all progress (and miscasts Burke, of course). After various sonorous paragraphs about predictive bias and the like, Pinker returns to “the major enemy of reason in the public sphere today—which is not ignorance, innumeracy, or cognitive biases, but politicization.” It’s a little bit of a problem that all academia has been politicized by the Left, but the real problem is “a Republican Party that has become synonymous with the extreme right,” which “has undermined the institutions of democracy.” Only Republicans gerrymander. Only Republicans “encourage unregulated donations from moneyed interests.” Only Republicans politicize the Supreme Court. Only Republicans “shut down the government when their maximum demands aren’t met” (this book went to press before the Democrats did just that three weeks ago to get amnesty for illegal aliens). But help is on the way! It’s in the form of “fact checking,” by PolitiFact and Snopes, neutral helpers who can help the virtuous, neutral, public-minded media show the masses the Truth. Yawn. Pinker really beclowns himself here; he would have done himself a service by deliberately selecting some non-#Resistance editors, for his book, so he could have avoided demonstrating so effectively the cognitive biases he is only too eager to point out in others.

But the even bigger problem is that reason is not a feature of the Enlightenment. Pinker really, honestly, seems to think reason was invented in 1750. This is laughable. Reasoning about first principles, about reason itself, has always characterized the West. The idea that people were irrational until the Enlightenment is totally bizarre (and for good measure Pinker seems to think anyone living before 1600 was somewhere between credulous and stupid). An obsessive pursuit of reason in the most refined forms possible has always been the hallmark of the West, starting with the Ancient Greeks, through the Neoplatonists (many Christian); and into its rediscovery in the court of Charlemagne, where Alcuin and Theodulf began the process of re-introducing rigid patterns of reason into the philosophical toolkit of the West. This pattern continued through the Middle Ages, Early, Middle and High. (Only dolts believe in the “Dark Ages” anymore, and to be fair, Pinker never mentions such a thing—but then, he mentions nothing at all substantive about any era prior to A.D. 1600.) The Western search for reason (which had no analogue anywhere else on Earth) led directly to the Scientific Revolution, in which the Church played a critical funding and organizational role. Then that led into the Industrial Revolution. Where was the Enlightenment in this process? Nowhere. The Enlightenment was about political reasoning, which is interesting in its own right, and has to do with progress to the extent political change is progress, but not beyond, and most people would rate being able to eat and live as much more important progress than any form of political advancement.

Pinker next (briefly) covers Science, by which he explicitly doesn’t mean to repeat what he said earlier about progress being based on science, but to focus on hostility to science. By this he means that anyone who sees any value to any philosophical system that is not purely based on hard science is a fool. Most attacked is Leon Kass (who is attacked throughout the book, not just here), but most of the chapter serves for Pinker to channel the British intellectual C. P. Snow (who, along with a physicist named David Deutsch, of whom I have never heard, is cited scores of times in this book). While Pinker meanders on about the need not to separate science and the humanities, what he is really getting at is that religion must be exterminated. “The moral worldview of any scientifically literate person—one who is not blinkered by fundamentalism—requires a clean break from religious conceptions of meaning and value.” Why this should be, precisely, is never explained, any more than Pinker ever explains anywhere in this book what one’s “moral worldview” should be, other than utilitarianism, while simultaneously telling us that it is an absolute certainty that “the fate of the black rhinoceros [is] a significant moral concern” and that a bedrock moral principle is that “life is sacred.” Anyway, mercifully, this chapter ends quickly.

So Pinker’s chapter on Reason isn’t great, nor is his one on Science. But they are written with a golden quill by an angel, compared to his chapter on Humanism, by which he means Atheism. Here, Pinker’s unhinged bigotry is let fly. Still, he starts slow, saying “The goal of maximizing human flourishing—life, health, happiness, freedom, knowledge, love, richness of experience—may be called humanism.” So it may be, even if he cribbed that list from Martha Nussbaum (whom he repeatedly praises for making up these types of lists.) So far, fair enough, if simplistic enough. Then he flips that into a claim that “there is a growing movement called Humanism, which promotes a non-supernatural basis for meaning and ethics: good without God.” Why this logically follows is anyone’s guess, given that maximizing human flourishing is hardly incompatible with religion, or at least with Christianity. In fact, most of the human flourishing Pinker documents in his book is the result of, at least in part and often nearly wholly, of Christianity, a direct result of how it created the ethos of the West, whether Pinker wants to admit it or not.

[Review finishes as first comment.]

Love Pinkers' work and this is no exception. A lot of interesting and informative material here. Seeing him and Sam Harris in LA in a few weeks. Can't wait to see this discussed more live.

P.S. seems to be some unnecessary and unfair reviews here, don't be fooled if you're a fan of Steven you will enjoy. Cheers!

Enlightenment Now is a brilliantly written, expansive book that cuts through the noise and explains both why civilization is healthier than ever before, and how to fast track this improvement.

I wonder if those panning this book actually read the entire book, as much of their criticism is clearly answered by Pinker in the second half. No, if you are an unemployed opioid addict, you’re life doesn’t feel great. That’s an obvious fact that Pinker addresses again and again. But, if you’re an unemployed opioid addict who is wondering what kind of world your children and grandchildren might be inhabiting in ten, thirty, or fifty years, this book paints what might be be a pretty accurate picture.

Pinker brilliantly makes the case for the value of enlightenment principles which should need no defense but in an era of postmodernism, these principles have come under heavy attack. The number of 1-star reviews on a great book such as this demonstrates the extent to which Pinker is right about the attack on basic liberal values. A must-read for anyone who cares about truth and progress.

I just read the chapter on Happiness here on the store preview out of curiosity. And my first impression was directly: cherry picking, errors, flawed thinking, and political agenda. I couldn't believe it.

If you want read a Book that gives you some honest, well debated perspective about where Humanity has been , were it is currently and were it might go in the Future just read Yuval Noah Harari's "Sapiens - A Brief History of Humankind".

A very well thought out and constructed tome. But man the reviews, both positive and negative, are almost as long as the damn book itself. The best ideas about something are short and to the point, not trying to dazzle with BS.

To me, Pinker's book seems a carbon-copy of his last "tome" which was "The Better Angels of Our Nature.".

This book is 556 pages. (The last book was 700 pages...idiotic).

The Content pages: There are 23 Chapters.

He has 75 charts, figures, and graphs in the book.
(Obviously, he has an army of Data Scientists and Statisticians. Now a funny quotation:
“There are three types of lies -- lies, damn lies, and statistics.” ― Benjamin Disraeli).

Book Preface:
On the first page of the Preface, Pinker makes a back-handed slap at President Trump. And on page 432, he describes Trump as "a casino developer who is vainglorious, sybaritic, vindictive, lewd, misogynistic, ostentatiously wealthy, and contemptuous of the people he calls losers."

In the Preface, Pinker expresses "thanks" to all the brilliant people (like himself) who offered help, advice, and encouragement during the book writing...In fact these other geniuses number 123 people including 14 family members!

On the first page of the book, Pinker says that "The most arresting question I have ever fielded" was from a lady in the audience who asked me: "What is the meaning of life?"
Wow, that was the essence of my book (You Call This Living?)...and recall what I wrote on page 3:
In his book, Why We Do It, Niles Eldredge writes:
“Science, of course, doesn’t deal with strictly philosophical questions, and even philosophers seldom wrangle anymore over life’s meaning or purpose. Meaning-of -life issues have long since been relegated to the provinces of received doctrine in organized religion and college dormitory bull sessions.”

At the end of Pinker's book, there are 983 Notes for the 23 Chapters.

This is followed by over 1,000 References (before the Index pages).

I gladly and thankfully "hop-scotched" through the book since it is extremely boring. For example, the title of Chapter 18 is "Happiness" and this is a whopping 27 pages!

Incidentally, the longest Chapter is about "Peace"...as with his previous book, I remark: Yeah, what a peaceful world we live in. That's Pinker's main shtick: "We live in the best of all possible worlds" (a quote from Gottfried Leibniz).

You see...People with large incomes and financial assets find it easy to pontificate that this is the best of all possible worlds. However, ordinary people feel that the world is in turmoil and our country is "going to Haiti in a hand basket." Most of us do not live in Ivory Towers with rose-colored glasses.

This book provides important data showing how, despite the doom & gloom reports which sell newspapers, human life is getting better, not worse. The content gets 5 stars. The book gets only one star, because it is plagiarized. All this material was published perhaps 10 years ago in "Rational Optimist" by Matt Ridley. Dr Ridley's book provides data showing that (a) we live longer and better than ever before, (b) even the poorest now enjoy unmatched material abundance, (c) wealth inequality *decreases* over the long term despite Prof. Picketty's argument that it has increased recently, (d) the environment (ex-China) is every decade getting cleaner prettier safer, (e) we kill each other less often, (f) crime is decreasing. Steven Pinker simply plagiarizes all those arguments. If you like this topic, I'd recommend the audible version of Rational Optimist because the delivery/narration is not merely informative, but very funny.

Did you know that the life expectancy, globally, today is 71 years whereas 200 years ago the life expectancy was 31?. Did you know that there is a much smaller chance today that you will be murdered, go to war, die in a plane or car crash, or die from a lightning strike than in any other time in history? Did you know that a higher proportion of people are born into democracies and have access to sufficient food and money than ever before? To quote a quote from this book: “If you could choose to be born anytime, you would choose now” - Barack Obama

Steven Pinker is, without doubt, one of the most important and knowledgeable intellectuals in the world today. With Enlightenment Now, he proves this point again. Few write as well as Pinker. And even fewer can pack so much information and statistics into a book and still maintain such beautiful prose. Even if you only remember a small part of all the knowledge you will acquire if you read this book, you will have learned a lot.

The book has two parts. The first and longest part (around 20 chapters) describes the progress that has occurred in a number of different areas of life (see below). The second part of the book is a defense of the ideas of the enlightenment - the ideas that are responsible for much of the progress that has been observed. Below is a non-exhaustive list of topics reviewed by Pinker in this book

Life duration - Life expectancy, at any age, is longer today than it has ever been i.e. old people today also have a longer life expectancy than old people in the past

Economics - We are much much richer and every day another 130.000 people in the world exits extreme poverty

Access to food - All parts of the world have access to more food, in the west, the poor are often obese

Equality - There is more equality between the genders and between different ethnic groups and people (especially youth) value equality more than ever before

The environment - Climate change IS a potential concern however we are making progress and in most other respects the environment is getting better: more trees, cleaner air etc. As we are entering the digital age we are also using fewer resources (paper, plastics etc).

Wars - Whereas wars used to be the norm, there are no wars between major powers today and even with the terrible civil war in Syria, casualties are nowhere near that in previous wars

Accidents - People are less likely to die from car crashes, lightning strikes, falls etc. We seem to value life more today and we have taken steps to look out for and prevent all kinds of accidents

Violence - Murders, rapes, and violence are less common. It is very unlikely that you will die in a terror-attack.

Political systems - Contrary to what you might think if you watch the news, democracy is on the rise and has been for a long time. The anti-enlightenment populism (ex Trump) is a concern however, it is an old-people movement and will likely dissipate

Quality of life - More people today find their life exciting and meaningful than before. We have more spare-time and we don’t have to work until we die

Happiness - People are happier today and happiness comes with progress in the other variables described here.

Existential threats - The hole in the ozone is gone, forests are growing, no nukes have been launched (despite what doomsayers of yesterday would have you believe).

To sum up the first part of the book: Things have gotten better. Much better. Still, don’t think that Pinker believes that all problems are gone. He reiterates the point that the laundry does not wash itself - and global challenges don’t solve themselves. Despite the progress we have seen there are ample challenges left. There are still wars, famines, genocides, and environmental issues. Pinker acknowledges this, however, he emphasizes that the world has seen progress, not regress. And it is important to acknowledge that things have gotten better - not to pad ourselves on the shoulder - but rather so that we can analyze what it is that has worked so that we can keep doing that.

Is it the enlightenment ideas that have caused the undeniable progress in the world? This is the question addressed in the second part of the book. Since progress occurred in the world before the enlightened philosophers took the stage I would say only partly. Then again there were people acting in the spirit of the enlightenment even before Hume, Voltaire and the rest. And it feels safe to say that progress is not achieved through irrationality, populism, and closed-mindedness. To me as a scientist, this seems like a relatively trivial point, but I get reminded that it isn’t a view shared by the rest of the world every time I turn on the TV or radio.

The objections to this book are predictable (see other reviews). People are accusing Pinker of being a politically motivated naive optimist. If you think so then I can only advice you to read the book (and finish it), and then make up your own mind. Unlike most of those who criticise him, Pinker provides data to back his claims. I can only assume that it is Pinker’s critics, not Pinker himself, who are politically motivated “progressophobics” who, upon hearing a couple of anecdotes or reading about the war in Syria, throws all data out the window and claim that things are getting worse and that anyone who says otherwise is a naive optimist, right-wing fundamentalist or climate change denier.

This book is another masterpiece from one of the best non-fiction writers, and on my rating scale it no doubt deserves the top rating. However, I still think that Better Angels, with its more narrow focus, is probably a better book. To some extent, this book is a follow up to Better Angels, even though this book has a broader scope. Since Better Angels was published many people seem to think that things have turned around and that the world is now regressing. If you read this book you will learn that this is not the case. The progress until 2011 when Better Angels were published has continued and is expected to continue into the future as well.

So, to sum up, read this book if you want an antidote to all the doomsayers that dominate the media. Read this book if you want to revive the optimist in you. Evidently, we can make the world a better place - as we have done in the past.

I have read the Pinker book, and don’t find anything wrong with it (from me, that is high praise) ;)

I think I understand where the naysayers are coming from. I think their disagreement comes from angst that their world-view crumbling.

Science and technology, as wielded by liberal technocrats have generated peace, wealth and prosperity for essentially everyone, the likes of which the world has never seen. The arc of history is clear; poor people are demonstrably much better off today, than they have ever been in human history, and by a gigantic amount, and that arc shows no sign of slowing, as much as the detractors of this progress are trying to stop it.

Who are the detractors of progress? It is those who subscribe to a zero-sum, top-down social power hierarchy, where they want to be the “leaders” at the top, who wield the power of the hierarchy (solely) by virtue of being at the top of it, and maintain their power by abusing and subjugating those at the bottom (using the power of the hierarchy).

Pinker makes it clear; peace, wealth and prosperity isn’t coming from the “top” of the top-down social power hierarchy, it is coming from the bottom. Those at the top are trying to exploit those below them on the social power hierarchy (my statement, not Pinker’s).

There are a number of zero-sum, top-down social power hierarchies and all of them are crumbling. The Patriarchy is a top-down zero-sum social power hierarchy driven by misogyny, where the alpha-male is at the top of his local network, and his chattel (women and children) are below him. That social power hierarchy has been made obsolete by social structures that empower women to own property, vote, and be full citizens with rights equal to men. Of course Patriarchs and want-to-be-patriarchs don’t like that. The want-to-bes have been sucking-up to patriarchs for a long time, waiting for their “turn”, and now their “turn” isn’t going to happen. Of course the Alt-Right and Conservatives are going to push back.

Patriarchal Religions have also been made obsolete. Secular, wealthy and liberal democracies spend more on caring for the poor and provide much better care than theocracies every did, or ever will. Subscribing to science, instead of magical thinking makes one’s economies more efficient and allows one to build an industrial society that actually works, and that works for everyone, not just elites. Magical thinking doesn’t let you do that.

Authoritarian top-down political structures don’t have the efficiencies that bottom-up political structures have. The authoritarian at the top doesn’t have the information, the intelligence, or the bandwidth to control what needs to happen at the bottom for the society to be efficient. All that authoritarian top-down social systems have is the ability to maintain power through abusive suppression of those at the bottom. Social structures run by abusive authoritarians will never be as efficient or as productive as bottom-up social structures are. That is what killed the Soviet Union, that is what will kill Russia with Putin in charge (once the West gets off the Russian oil and gas that is maintaining Putin propped up).

Authoritarians need an enemy to mobilize the low status people at the bottom against, so as to maintain the authoritarians in power. That is the purpose of war; to kill off the low status young males, so as to maintain the power of the hierarchy, and to increase the number of females available to the patriarchs. Killing off the young men of each warring society helps the patriarchs of both societies maintain power. That is what WWI was about; the Germans and the UK killing off the surplus young men, to empower the “leaders”, and to enrich the war profiteers. That is still what war is about.

North Korea is what you get from an authoritarian top-down zero-sum social power hierarchy. No one but those at the top of such an authoritarian power structure want any part of that.

When people are educated about what is possible, they will choose peace, wealth, health and prosperity over an authoritarian top-down social power hierarchy every time (unless they are lied to). Lying to people is the only way that would-be authoritarians can convince anyone that their programs will work, and that only works for a while.

Steven Pinker makes his case for reason, science and humanism in his latest book. Enlightenment Now is primarily composed of areas of life that have improved based on these three foundations. He lays out in vivid detail and with numerous examples and charts the progress made by humans in the fields of: life, health, food abundance, wealth, peace, safety, freedom, rights, literacy, democracy, knowledge, intelligence, happiness, and opportunities. He also contrasts these with the ideas of top down autocrats and all anti-reason philosophies, mainly focusing on religion.

He starts off in an objective, fact-based manner and makes an irrefutable case for progress. This calm and cool manner although is quickly disturbed when he devolves into a hysterical diatribe against Trump. Although a little jarring, this is not the reason this book is so off-base. The critical flaw is Pinker's own defense of his cherished values. He states reason cannot be justified at a fundamental level, which introduces the problem of why it is not okay for others to diverge from reason, when he himself admits his entire foundation is not based on reason. In what is the most tragic aspect of all philosophy, this problem has been attempted to be resolved by just about all philosophers and the only person able to do it is widely ignored and universally dismissed, namely Ayn Rand. For a consistent and therefore more rational, and convincing, explanation of the power of the ideas of the enlightenment, read her works. If you truly believe that you are an open minded individual, as most people reading this book probably do, read OPAR (not others interpretations of her ideas) and then if you disagree with her ideas, try to explain where it is that she errs. Go in with the knowledge that her ideas are a radical departure from everything you've read before, but keep an open mind and judge for yourself whose overall philosophy is more coherent. Even Pinker mentions her and dismisses her as some hack copy of Nietzsche, which clearly shows he has never actually read and thought about her ideas based on the absurdity of that comparison. The other flaws of the book, such as collectivism, are an outgrowth of these errors at the base. On the plus side, it is inspirational to read how much progress human kinds have made and makes one grateful to be alive.

Much hype about book ... content doesn't deliver. Author seems quite full of "self." Keeps promising to deliver but fails. Disappointed not only in the book but in the people who gave it such high reviews

Pinker's book is a pollyanna view of the 19th and 20th Centuries. Selective listing of statistics to prove his thesis that we have been on a steady upward path of human progress. He brushes aside the 80 million who died in WWII and 37 million in WW1, 2.5 million dead in the Biafran war, 3 million by the Khymer Rouge, 3.2 million in the Vietnam War, and on and on. Half way through I put it down.

Pinker believes the fruits of the Enlightenment: science, reason, and humanism have greatly improved the lot of mankind.We are riding the crest of a wave, and if a firm hand grips the rudder of destiny, we can avoid the shoals of ignorance, fear and pessimism and sail into a new era of 'human flourishing.' (Mostly my words.) I am afraid I have to take the wind out of his sails and prick his balloon of optimism.

Pinker bases his arguments on statistics. He piles statistics so high they tumble down on you brain and send you reeling.It seems he did not speak to real people to get their views about their lives: past, present and future prospects.For many centuries ordinary people had it rough. There was no democracy. Autocratic kings and feudal lords ruled and exploited the masses. It was long hard struggle to get democracy, yet still today vested interests do their best to thwart the democratic process.

Pinker has a simplistic view of human nature. He says man has innate violence because he descended from primates prone to be violent. He sees human life before civilisation as being
‘harsh, brutish and short.’ He says it was a state of anarchy with much intertribal violence.He does not know that the Aborigines have been living in Australia for at least 65,000 years, possibly more. They lived in communities of up to 5,000 people. Many lived in stone dwellings, destroyed by the British invaders. Some early white explorers reported grain crops stretching to the horizon, and that much of the country resembled parkland. There is evidence of skilful fish traps on some rivers and waterways. 65,000 years is a pretty good record. They lived in harmony with the land and others.

Bruce Pacsoe in Dark Emu: Black Seeds: Agriculture or Accident writes:

“Aboriginal people did build houses, did build dams, did sow, irrigate and till the land, did alter the course of rivers, did sew their clothes, and did construct system of pan-continental government that generated peace and prosperity.”

Recently I heard an Aboriginal woman on the radio saying it is and was the women who maintained Aboriginal society.They had ways of dealing with disputes, but did not go to war. No group tried to establish an empire and rule the rest.There is no evidence or reason for war in matrifocal societies. Pinker writes a lot about human violence, but he never mentions that war is an intrinsic feature of patriarchal societies. To admit man was mostly peaceful before patriarchy would disprove his basic thesis that man is inherently violent and prone to engage in war.

For many centuries ordinary people had it rough. There was no democracy. Autocratic kings and feudal lords ruled and exploited the masses. It was long hard struggle to get democracy, yet still today vested interests do their best to thwart the democratic process.

Various groups would disagree with Pinker that ‘you have never had it so good.’For example, America has the highest rate of imprisonment in the world.Black men are six times more likely to be imprisoned that white men. One in three black men can expect to be imprisoned during their lifetime. Pinker doesn’t mention this situation.

Pinker side steps the issue of guns in America. By comparing the small numbers killed in mass shootings with those killed in other ways, e.g. road deaths, homicides, he plays down the significance of mass killings. I quote from The Washington Post:

“Active-shooter drills are part of our kids’ education. They learn to hide in closets and stay silent while an imaginary gunman prowls the halls….Millions of kids have not lived through a school shooting but are filled with fear that they will…..More than 150,000 students attending at least 170 primary or secondary schools have experienced a shooting on campus since the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, according to an ongoing and conservative Washington Post analysis that does not include after-school assaults, accidents and suicides that involve guns.” 2018

Pinker has a materialist philosophy and is an atheist. He says the industrial revolution ‘launched a Great Escape from poverty.’ Only to turn the masses into wage slaves. Poverty was caused by the exploiting ruling classes. Does the consumer society really make people happy? Naturally people need food, clothing and shelter. The consumer society is based on dissatisfaction. Advertisements incessantly say get the latest fashion, gadget, etc., or you’ll be left behind.

As an atheist Pinker has no notion of the spiritual side of life. The only God he knows about is the God of patriarchal religion.Christianity began as a mystery religion wiht roots in ancient Egypt. (See Th Lost Light by Alvin Boyd Kuhn.) It was hijacked by the patriarchy and turned into an instrument of repression.

Pinker is stuck inside’Plato’s cave,’ or his Selfhood, as William Blake would have it. Pinker could learn a lot from Blake:

“If the doors of perception were cleansed, man would see everything as it is, Infinite.For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.”

“The Nature or my Work is Visionary or Imaginative
it is an Endeavour to Restore what the Ancients called the Golden Age.”

"Now I a fourfold vision see,
And a fourfold vision is given to me.
Tis fourfold in my supreme delight,
And threefold in sort Beulahs night,
And twofold always. May God us keep
From single vision & Newtons sleep.”

I’m afraid Pinker has “single vision.” He is missing out on the cosmic dimensions of life.Blake again:

“To see a World in a Grain of Sand,
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, 
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand 
And Eternity in an hour”

Pinker is missing so much. There are ample works by various mystics and visionaries available. The 13th century Sufi poet Rumi is said to be the best selling poet in America. This shows many have yearning for the truly spiritual. Pinker could utilise his Jewish heritage and study Kabbalah.This esoteric system shows man has a divine origin and a divine destiny. As Max Ehrmann’s Desiderata says: ‘No less than the stars and the trees, you are a child of the universe.’

To materialists like Pinker 'progress' is something you can measure, such as longer life span and more 'stuff.' True 'progress' would be to have a holistic worldview, cultivate the soul, achieve cosmic consciousness, and regain our divine destiny.

While the sections of the book discussing historical trends and putting our time into historical perspective are fantastic, Pinker abandons all such perspective when it comes to climate change. If he would pull up a geological CO2 chart and see the historical low levels of CO2 in our world today, he might get some perspective on the issue and not abandon the optimism of most of the rest of his book.

This book is heresy to the radical Left. I wonder if the horde of neo-Marxist university professors will encourage their apprentices to try to shut him down like they do JW Peterson for stating essentially the same facts.

Especially the left. The right (except extremists but of course liberals believe they are all extremists) believes that life is hard and unfair, that human beings are naturally selfish, that change and kindness can be brought about through persuasion without demanding too much self sacrifice, that betterment is slow, that the betterment we have seen is the result of western culture and capitalism. Without the creation of wealth none of it could happen. The left on the other hand refuses to admit that things are better. Instead of being happy that more that more people than ever have money left over after paying for necessities, that people don’t see their children die like they used to, that they can go to school, etc., they are angry about it. They want people to suffer more and more because they think that will bring about the REVOLUTION where there is no private property or nations or religion (at least no Christians) and enforced equality (except for the LEADERS, who will all be billionaires). So the idea of slow improvement through trade and the spread of ideas is anathema to them. So they insist that everything is as bad as it could be and that it is all American’s and the west’s fault.

Pinker writes a good book. Everything he says is reason to feel better. Less hunger, less misery, longer lives, less child mortality, less disease. Do not sneer at this. Is there a price for all this? Yes, there is nothing that does not have a price. But what would a liberal suggest? That famine become routine again. Pinker does not claim anything is perfect, just that it is better and that we no longer believe that unending suffering is the inevitable lot of mankind. And this is due to the west. One thing Pinker is wrong about is Christianity. Without that, trade and reason alone could not have brought about these changes. It is the radical Christian desire to help all mankind, an unnatural desire which reason alone cannot bring about. And when that is gone, the world will go back to its old ways. Improvement is not mandated. The Judeo christians made it happen.
What Pinker calls reason is western thinking. Others think differently. It is the strength and success of the west that causes others to at least play with the idea of "reason."

Things are indeed better in many ways and many areas.

But.

The deep irony here is the Pinker fails to live up to the standard of reason he promotes. He cherry picks data. He misrepresent many of the thinkers he cites. He neglects many important counterexamples to his premise.

He glosses over the most glaring disaster of the modern age, of the Age of Enlightenment. Our vaunted technology and enlightenment has brought us to the brink of a global ecological and environmental disaster.

He is like a great professor brilliantly arguing for appreciation of progress and the need for gratitude and perspective by laying out thoughts as if building an elegant structure of the components of his reasoning on a table for his class to gaze upon in justified admiration. Then at the end the word Trump comes into his mind (after brief foreshadowing earlier in the book) and he pulls on a court jesters hat, kicks over the table and starts hooting and hopping around like a lunatic Daffy Duck lunatic in a jaw dropping refutation of the need for perspective he just spent the entire book building the case for! All that intellectual horsepower and absolutely unable to concieve of a single reason one might prefer someone other than a legacy psuedo wanna be royalty family candidate.

So many flawed arguments. The man cherry picks stats to show what he believes to be true when he's in a good mood - that is, the world should be a happy place.

Actually, I won't be reading Bill Gates' book recommendation anymore.

The Enlightenment as Pinker describes it never happened. This book is quite literally a mythology designed to support his belief system, not unlike those invented by the Freemasons or the Golden Dawn, suggesting that the origins of their orders go back to King Solomon. So, read it as you would the Da Vinci Code - it’s more engaging and aimed at the same audience - I.e., people who just want to take someone else’s word for what certain philosophers believed without reading those philosophers, or legitimate secondary scholarship on them. This is not legitimate secondary scholarship in any sense of the term. It cherry-picks certain quotes and ideas, and completely uncharitablely an inaccurately attacks others, in order to buttress its conclusion. More groupthink, with as much nuance and sophistication as a Facebook post.

The book is a love letter to neoliberalism. i.e. don't focus on the bad stuff, markets solve everything, we don't need regulation, growth is everything, money is a net good in the world, look how much better poor people have it, science will bail us out when we tempt catastrophe. Enlightenment now, empathy never.

A wildly inaccurate characterization of the Age of Enlightenment with the added bonus of yet another there-there chorus of "technology with fix everything". Don't waste your time. I can't believe the AHA put this guy on the cover of their magazine.

I was looking for Pinker to make the case for reason, science, humanism and progress--concepts that are incredibly close to my heart. He failed. Instead, I got propaganda about how everyone should be so thankful for technology. (No wonder Bill Gates loves land recommends this book.) There has been progress for the human condition, and I am hoping to see more. But it quickly became clear that progress leading to more economic equality was not what he had in mind. Equally clear was his love of the status quo with billionaires getting more and more and everyone else having less and less. He points out how "everyone" has a cell phone (a delicacy like shrimp, right , except you can't eat it?) but neglects talking about how people are working their lives away at two jobs, trying to pay rent they can't afford, buying the cheapest least healthy food and going into debt more and more with stagnant wages and outrageous medical costs. And he loves analogies. Here's one of my own:

Shrimp is a delicacy. How fortunate to have fresh, tasty shrimp and we should be thankful for it, right? Suppose I have 10,000 pounds of delicious shrimp cocktail. I eat all I want, toss you one shrimp and throw the rest in the freezer. The next day, the same thing. 10,000 pounds for me, one shrimp for you and the rest in my freezer bank account. Same thing over and over, day after day, month after month, year after year. But I notice you look dissatisfied. So, I get an attack of unrelenting, compassionate generosity. The next day I toss you two shrimp. Twice as much! Progress! Things are so much better! Yet, you are not appreciative. You are not happy. What is wrong with YOU! Ingrate!!!

I listened to this book on Audible. The above analogy is this book in a nutshell. I listened to this book on Audible. It was so obviously unscientific and essentially partisan that I couldn't even finish it. General idea: The billionaires should ALMOST have it all but they will toss you a crumb or two if they must.

I think Pinker is one of the greatest minds to ever walk this earth. No one is infallible and many will find points of contention with him, he's human after all and subject to bias like everyone else. I haven't finished the book but already I'm deeply impressed. The perspective he offers is immensely beneficial to my outlook on life and humanity in general. I've read most of his books and think he's probably my favorite author. Thank you professor Pinker!

Why did he have to start out with an unnecessary slam of President Trump? Really? We're barely one year in, and Pinker infers that the load of negativity (and divisiveness, which cropped up only during the previous 8 years) we've endured in America for decades is in some way due to our current leader. I call Bulls%#t!

I love good news, and this book goes a long way to cast doubt upon the negativity-purveyors, which is an absolute breath of fresh air. But, why does he have to start out with a slap-in-the-face to those of us who are happy about being Americans, and who don't buy into those who would have us believe something sinister.

That said, with Bill Gates' endorsement I'm hopeful this message will give pause to those who think it's their job to "help" the world out of the "shameful" state it's in. This good news can free them up to go and do something productive. Yaaay!

I first heard about the book last weekend on tv when I happened upon the tail-end of an interview with the author and a PBS reporter. It captured my attention in part because of the demeanor of the interviewer. He seemed so disappointed to hear that things in the world are--and have been for some time--getting better. He looked like someone had popped his last balloon!

Steven is as always an engaging and worthwhile read. ln this interesting take, Dr. Pinker proposes enlightened thinking as an alternative to God, soul and religion, thus proposing another kind of "religion" that can bestow joy via progress, vision and mentation, even if we don't have immortal souls.

An interesting intial assumption in the book is that science has "all but proven" atheism. BUT, even if the world "seems" to be going to hell in a handbasket, and he begins by quoting Trumpists (or Trumpets?) on how terrible the planet is, well, guess what, things really ARE great in the big picture, not as Divine mercy or Divine commitment to human evolution, but because science, reason and technology has, and will continue to, save us and generate an upward spiral of positive evolution.

Heck, who can possibly argue against such a positive vision? Here in Arizona we have cat's claws, which we call the "wait a minute bush." Through your great hiking PROGRESS, once in a while one grabs you, and you have to pause a bit. So, wait a minute. Steven, doesn't your poetic amswer to the young woman's "why should I live?" question strike you as existentially hollow? So, go on living to enjoy books, contribute to society, and procreate?

First, science (and admittedly I'm a mathematician, not a scientist), IMHO doesn't "prove" anything about God our our immortal souls, because the subject matter of science is physics, not metaphysics. Pretty basic gaffe. Next, despite the wonderful, readworthy tone of positivity and encouragement, do you REALLY, in an ivory tower sense, think that armies hacking off Christian children's heads doesn't bode too well for "let's just reason them out of it" solutions?

The real failing of this line of thought, dear doc, is more along the lines of another great new book: Nassim Taleb's Skin in the Game. The idea of enlightenment as a cause in which we can go "all in" for, as Buddha, Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, Baha'u'llah, etc. did by "risking it all" for the love of God and humanity, falls completely short of the two things Taleb sees as two reasons for all in commitment and risk: economics or obsessive love.

I do love math and have devoted my life to its beauty, but simply cannot be all in for it without associating it with the Divine Engineer, nor can I see first responders giving their lives for others out of a courage born of math and physics? Nor can I see an all in risk taking cause as based on Darwinian economic efficiency, tricks and traps, since science is amoral, not immoral. E.g. the pre-darwin "eat and don't be eaten" vs. the post darwin (selfish gene) "eat your competitor's offspring, and don't be eaten." This is pure, scientific economic efficiency, and as Taleb would say, is based on brutal natural risk shifting efficiency, not social justice.

Easy examples abound of lying, cheating and stealing when there is no fear of an All-Knowing God in a nature-only darwinian world of scientifically evaluated competition: spiders that excrete moth mating pheneromes, snakes that have insect like tongue tips to "lure" frogs, and cowbirds and cukoos who lay eggs in other birds nests. In risk shifting terms, mother cukoo gets the benefit of another mother raising her young, but then why also does a lance-equipped baby bird emerge who also kills all the other parasitical stepbirds?

Luckily, all the wonders and positive forces at work on the planet not only give your questioner a reason to live, but regardless of the wonders of enlightened science, her soul also continues to evolve eternally in spiral staircases of wonder after wonder regardless of our analysis. Why? Because 90 trips at near light speed on this rock around this star isn't nearly enough time to REALLY appreciate the dumbfounding skill and genious of the Creator.

The book is pinker watering down chomsky, again. He is not a profound thinker or real academic so much as a "pundit" that waters down the basic insights of Chomskyian linguistics and Chomsky's philosophy, yet without Chomsky's radicalism. This book was just bad, fluffier than the Jeri Curl of its author... I only read half of it. I couldn't believe the nonsense.

Please read John Gray's review published in the New Statesman about this book. Simply search the web for Stephen Pinker John Gray and it will work.

please read it before buying this book.

Got this book because of the Bill Gates recommendation, and because the summary sounded interesting. Two chapters in and I'm just not quite sure what the book is about. I think it's the history and philosophy behind science, knowledge, and curiousity? I can't tell. I really couldn't tell you what this book is about and I'm not motivated enough to find out anymore

Don't fall in love with Pinker until you've read Gray

https://smile.the store.com/Silence-Animals-Progress-Other-Modern/dp/0374534667/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1521821934&sr=8-2&keywords=john+gray+straw+dogs

For me, enlightement has to do with the natural unfolding of events and the recognition of the perfect essence within everything. Instead, the view of progress presented in the book is that which leads us to anxiousness and suffering. Assuming that we are better than our ancestors and worse than upcoming generations provokes pride and dissatisfaction, respectively. Then, we spend our whole lives striving for as much progress as we can, knowing that we'll never fulfill our expectations and ending up disappointed. Maybe the title shouldn't contain enlightement on it.
Then, the oversimplification of our existence and mind to a computational optimization problem makes the argument very shortsighted. Probably that's why some people fear that artificial intelligence will take over and replace us. I think that the author should have started by asking the question "what is the mind?" and then maybe he would be more humble about his reason-obsessed and highly egocentric view. Likewise, the author could have taken a perspective regarding quantum mechanics, for instance. Then, he would acknowledge that facts are not as rigid as they appear, and statistics are not facts at all.

Especially the left. The right (except extremists but of course liberals believe they are all extremists) believes that life is hard and unfair, that human beings are naturally selfish, that change and kindness can be brought about through persuasion without demanding too much self sacrifice, that betterment is slow, that the betterment we have seen is the result of western culture and capitalism. Without the creation of wealth none of it could happen. The left on the other hand refuses to admit that things are better. Instead of being happy that more that more people than ever have money left over after paying for necessities, that people don’t see their children die like they used to, that they can go to school, etc., they are angry about it. They want people to suffer more and more because they think that will bring about the REVOLUTION where there is no private property or nations or religion (at least no Christians) and enforced equality (except for the LEADERS, who will all be billionaires). So the idea of slow improvement through trade and the spread of ideas is anathema to them. So they insist that everything is as bad as it could be and that it is all American’s and the west’s fault.

Pinker writes a good book. Everything he says is reason to feel better. Less hunger, less misery, longer lives, less child mortality, less disease. Do not sneer at this. Is there a price for all this? Yes, there is nothing that does not have a price. But what would a liberal suggest? That famine become routine again. Pinker does not claim anything is perfect, just that it is better and that we no longer believe that unending suffering is the inevitable lot of mankind. And this is due to the west. One thing Pinker is wrong about is Christianity. Without that, trade and reason alone could not have brought about these changes. It is the radical Christian desire to help all mankind, an unnatural desire which reason alone cannot bring about. And when that is gone, the world will go back to its old ways. Improvement is not mandated. The Judeo christians made it happen.
What Pinker calls reason is western thinking. Others think differently. It is the strength and success of the west that causes others to at least play with the idea of "reason."

Things are indeed better in many ways and many areas.

But.

The deep irony here is the Pinker fails to live up to the standard of reason he promotes. He cherry picks data. He misrepresent many of the thinkers he cites. He neglects many important counterexamples to his premise.

He glosses over the most glaring disaster of the modern age, of the Age of Enlightenment. Our vaunted technology and enlightenment has brought us to the brink of a global ecological and environmental disaster.

He is like a great professor brilliantly arguing for appreciation of progress and the need for gratitude and perspective by laying out thoughts as if building an elegant structure of the components of his reasoning on a table for his class to gaze upon in justified admiration. Then at the end the word Trump comes into his mind (after brief foreshadowing earlier in the book) and he pulls on a court jesters hat, kicks over the table and starts hooting and hopping around like a lunatic Daffy Duck lunatic in a jaw dropping refutation of the need for perspective he just spent the entire book building the case for! All that intellectual horsepower and absolutely unable to concieve of a single reason one might prefer someone other than a legacy psuedo wanna be royalty family candidate.

So many flawed arguments. The man cherry picks stats to show what he believes to be true when he's in a good mood - that is, the world should be a happy place.

Actually, I won't be reading Bill Gates' book recommendation anymore.

The Enlightenment as Pinker describes it never happened. This book is quite literally a mythology designed to support his belief system, not unlike those invented by the Freemasons or the Golden Dawn, suggesting that the origins of their orders go back to King Solomon. So, read it as you would the Da Vinci Code - it’s more engaging and aimed at the same audience - I.e., people who just want to take someone else’s word for what certain philosophers believed without reading those philosophers, or legitimate secondary scholarship on them. This is not legitimate secondary scholarship in any sense of the term. It cherry-picks certain quotes and ideas, and completely uncharitablely an inaccurately attacks others, in order to buttress its conclusion. More groupthink, with as much nuance and sophistication as a Facebook post.

The book is a love letter to neoliberalism. i.e. don't focus on the bad stuff, markets solve everything, we don't need regulation, growth is everything, money is a net good in the world, look how much better poor people have it, science will bail us out when we tempt catastrophe. Enlightenment now, empathy never.

A wildly inaccurate characterization of the Age of Enlightenment with the added bonus of yet another there-there chorus of "technology with fix everything". Don't waste your time. I can't believe the AHA put this guy on the cover of their magazine.

I was looking for Pinker to make the case for reason, science, humanism and progress--concepts that are incredibly close to my heart. He failed. Instead, I got propaganda about how everyone should be so thankful for technology. (No wonder Bill Gates loves land recommends this book.) There has been progress for the human condition, and I am hoping to see more. But it quickly became clear that progress leading to more economic equality was not what he had in mind. Equally clear was his love of the status quo with billionaires getting more and more and everyone else having less and less. He points out how "everyone" has a cell phone (a delicacy like shrimp, right , except you can't eat it?) but neglects talking about how people are working their lives away at two jobs, trying to pay rent they can't afford, buying the cheapest least healthy food and going into debt more and more with stagnant wages and outrageous medical costs. And he loves analogies. Here's one of my own:

Shrimp is a delicacy. How fortunate to have fresh, tasty shrimp and we should be thankful for it, right? Suppose I have 10,000 pounds of delicious shrimp cocktail. I eat all I want, toss you one shrimp and throw the rest in the freezer. The next day, the same thing. 10,000 pounds for me, one shrimp for you and the rest in my freezer bank account. Same thing over and over, day after day, month after month, year after year. But I notice you look dissatisfied. So, I get an attack of unrelenting, compassionate generosity. The next day I toss you two shrimp. Twice as much! Progress! Things are so much better! Yet, you are not appreciative. You are not happy. What is wrong with YOU! Ingrate!!!

I listened to this book on Audible. The above analogy is this book in a nutshell. I listened to this book on Audible. It was so obviously unscientific and essentially partisan that I couldn't even finish it. General idea: The billionaires should ALMOST have it all but they will toss you a crumb or two if they must.

I think Pinker is one of the greatest minds to ever walk this earth. No one is infallible and many will find points of contention with him, he's human after all and subject to bias like everyone else. I haven't finished the book but already I'm deeply impressed. The perspective he offers is immensely beneficial to my outlook on life and humanity in general. I've read most of his books and think he's probably my favorite author. Thank you professor Pinker!

Why did he have to start out with an unnecessary slam of President Trump? Really? We're barely one year in, and Pinker infers that the load of negativity (and divisiveness, which cropped up only during the previous 8 years) we've endured in America for decades is in some way due to our current leader. I call Bulls%#t!

I love good news, and this book goes a long way to cast doubt upon the negativity-purveyors, which is an absolute breath of fresh air. But, why does he have to start out with a slap-in-the-face to those of us who are happy about being Americans, and who don't buy into those who would have us believe something sinister.

That said, with Bill Gates' endorsement I'm hopeful this message will give pause to those who think it's their job to "help" the world out of the "shameful" state it's in. This good news can free them up to go and do something productive. Yaaay!

I first heard about the book last weekend on tv when I happened upon the tail-end of an interview with the author and a PBS reporter. It captured my attention in part because of the demeanor of the interviewer. He seemed so disappointed to hear that things in the world are--and have been for some time--getting better. He looked like someone had popped his last balloon!

Steven is as always an engaging and worthwhile read. ln this interesting take, Dr. Pinker proposes enlightened thinking as an alternative to God, soul and religion, thus proposing another kind of "religion" that can bestow joy via progress, vision and mentation, even if we don't have immortal souls.

An interesting intial assumption in the book is that science has "all but proven" atheism. BUT, even if the world "seems" to be going to hell in a handbasket, and he begins by quoting Trumpists (or Trumpets?) on how terrible the planet is, well, guess what, things really ARE great in the big picture, not as Divine mercy or Divine commitment to human evolution, but because science, reason and technology has, and will continue to, save us and generate an upward spiral of positive evolution.

Heck, who can possibly argue against such a positive vision? Here in Arizona we have cat's claws, which we call the "wait a minute bush." Through your great hiking PROGRESS, once in a while one grabs you, and you have to pause a bit. So, wait a minute. Steven, doesn't your poetic amswer to the young woman's "why should I live?" question strike you as existentially hollow? So, go on living to enjoy books, contribute to society, and procreate?

First, science (and admittedly I'm a mathematician, not a scientist), IMHO doesn't "prove" anything about God our our immortal souls, because the subject matter of science is physics, not metaphysics. Pretty basic gaffe. Next, despite the wonderful, readworthy tone of positivity and encouragement, do you REALLY, in an ivory tower sense, think that armies hacking off Christian children's heads doesn't bode too well for "let's just reason them out of it" solutions?

The real failing of this line of thought, dear doc, is more along the lines of another great new book: Nassim Taleb's Skin in the Game. The idea of enlightenment as a cause in which we can go "all in" for, as Buddha, Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, Baha'u'llah, etc. did by "risking it all" for the love of God and humanity, falls completely short of the two things Taleb sees as two reasons for all in commitment and risk: economics or obsessive love.

I do love math and have devoted my life to its beauty, but simply cannot be all in for it without associating it with the Divine Engineer, nor can I see first responders giving their lives for others out of a courage born of math and physics? Nor can I see an all in risk taking cause as based on Darwinian economic efficiency, tricks and traps, since science is amoral, not immoral. E.g. the pre-darwin "eat and don't be eaten" vs. the post darwin (selfish gene) "eat your competitor's offspring, and don't be eaten." This is pure, scientific economic efficiency, and as Taleb would say, is based on brutal natural risk shifting efficiency, not social justice.

Easy examples abound of lying, cheating and stealing when there is no fear of an All-Knowing God in a nature-only darwinian world of scientifically evaluated competition: spiders that excrete moth mating pheneromes, snakes that have insect like tongue tips to "lure" frogs, and cowbirds and cukoos who lay eggs in other birds nests. In risk shifting terms, mother cukoo gets the benefit of another mother raising her young, but then why also does a lance-equipped baby bird emerge who also kills all the other parasitical stepbirds?

Luckily, all the wonders and positive forces at work on the planet not only give your questioner a reason to live, but regardless of the wonders of enlightened science, her soul also continues to evolve eternally in spiral staircases of wonder after wonder regardless of our analysis. Why? Because 90 trips at near light speed on this rock around this star isn't nearly enough time to REALLY appreciate the dumbfounding skill and genious of the Creator.

The book is pinker watering down chomsky, again. He is not a profound thinker or real academic so much as a "pundit" that waters down the basic insights of Chomskyian linguistics and Chomsky's philosophy, yet without Chomsky's radicalism. This book was just bad, fluffier than the Jeri Curl of its author... I only read half of it. I couldn't believe the nonsense.

Please read John Gray's review published in the New Statesman about this book. Simply search the web for Stephen Pinker John Gray and it will work.

please read it before buying this book.

Got this book because of the Bill Gates recommendation, and because the summary sounded interesting. Two chapters in and I'm just not quite sure what the book is about. I think it's the history and philosophy behind science, knowledge, and curiousity? I can't tell. I really couldn't tell you what this book is about and I'm not motivated enough to find out anymore

Don't fall in love with Pinker until you've read Gray

https://smile.the store.com/Silence-Animals-Progress-Other-Modern/dp/0374534667/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1521821934&sr=8-2&keywords=john+gray+straw+dogs

For me, enlightement has to do with the natural unfolding of events and the recognition of the perfect essence within everything. Instead, the view of progress presented in the book is that which leads us to anxiousness and suffering. Assuming that we are better than our ancestors and worse than upcoming generations provokes pride and dissatisfaction, respectively. Then, we spend our whole lives striving for as much progress as we can, knowing that we'll never fulfill our expectations and ending up disappointed. Maybe the title shouldn't contain enlightement on it.
Then, the oversimplification of our existence and mind to a computational optimization problem makes the argument very shortsighted. Probably that's why some people fear that artificial intelligence will take over and replace us. I think that the author should have started by asking the question "what is the mind?" and then maybe he would be more humble about his reason-obsessed and highly egocentric view. Likewise, the author could have taken a perspective regarding quantum mechanics, for instance. Then, he would acknowledge that facts are not as rigid as they appear, and statistics are not facts at all.

I thought I would just review the "monumental" Bill Gates "best of all time book" from the library, because , after all, if Bill Gates finds it the best of all time, my goodness, we must have this book, shouldn't we? Save your money. This guy is the biggest windbag of all time, he could write the story of the three little pigs and it would the size of War and Peace. He has an underlying hateful attitude towards any and all religions and thinks Spinoza was just the smartest person ever. He quotes Spinoza's "all rational men want the same for everyone else as they have", yet somehow he is such a arrogant blowhard he doesn't realize wanting and doing are two different things. Pinker just did " I wish a upon a star first ...." in his head basically. He hates religion, and yet under Spinoza's "rational concept" and from the fact that most people are dirt poor, then the only rational people are Christian and Buddhist monks and sisters who have taken a vow of poverty. If there were no one poor, hungry, or needy, no need for vow of poverty.

I have not seen so much intellectual nonsense in one book (that was not fiction) in my entire life. Much of what is presented here is true It is how he takes things and makes conclusions using a smattering of logical fallacies, and totally disregards two very important global trends. The sequestering of wealth and power into fewer and fewer hands, and the very real destruction of our environment that can not be solved by science no matter how she tries to make it so, unless we lower the world's population on a global scale.
I was given this book as a gift. The only enjoyment I got out of it was a few laughs at the very concept of describing her as a cognitive scientist. Only if you want to enjoy a brilliant mishmash of ideas and have fun poking holes with all its logical fallacies, would I recommend this book.
Of course anyone who actually regards Kant as a rational individual is already doing something intellectually indefensible.

An ad for this book has appeared on my screen several days now. Of interest, is the fact that I was searching for one of the excellent books by Samuel Epstein. At the bottom of the page for the book authored by Epstein, which was a critique of the American Cancer Society, the National Cancer Institute and the rampant conflicts of interest that exist in light of the profit-seeking agenda of the cancer industry, a box appeared, asking viewers to check the box if "inaccurate information" was conveyed. No such box appears for this book. I conclude that the store is pushing an agenda. Anybody who searches for a book that questions hegemonic medicine will likely be bombarded by ads for books like this. Let me guess, it is pushing a robust vaccine schedule? Bill Gates loves it! I will spend my time and money reading Samuel Epstein instead.

Tinkers better Angels was really nothing more than liberal propaganda. This round he is on safe for ground to some degree, and the way I'm not finished with the book, I can't help but think that it's an exercise in Liberal propagandizing one more time. But even if it's not that, it does become pretty repetitive...

So it is not so bad as it seems, or at last that is the opinion of Pinker. This is the age of enlightenment even if everything seems so dark....well I would like to share the author's optimism, but in a way I was not so convinced by his reasoning and suggestions of how to read the world right now. Best part is the chapter about humanism.

A quanto pare le cose non sono cosí brutte come sembrano, o almeno questa é l'opinione di Pinker, anzi siamo nella fase di un nuovo illuminismo (anche se sembra tutto piuttosto oscuro)....mi piacerebbe condividere l'ottimismo dell'autore, ma ammetto che i suoi ragionamenti non mi hanno convinto piú di tanto e nemmeno i suoi suggerimenti su come "leggere" il mondo attuale. Comunque il capitolo migliore é quello sull'Umanismo.

I have the blank slate, from standing out among other books and providing unique perspective and input. Pinker continues the same, yet contemporary scholarhip is tainted in the same way 30's- 40's Germany produced works where: to criticize certain parties meant real consequences for the author.
Joan Didion (self), Roger D. Hodge (ex-Harper's chief editor), Dr. Cornel West (Harvard, Union Theological), Mark Lilla (Columbia). One must play cocktail party with power as it plays upon an entire country without borders, on the Internet, to further its aims of power and have all ages and groups enchanted by suspicions and pride of ideals never taught. These minds, never once questioned, form an Easy Moral Majority of back-slapping with the most awful put-downs of those standing outside the fire.
If Trump threatens all your easy back-slapping Moral majority of the not-much-left Left, a left offering candy to all and asking hard moral questions to none, Trump is the newer new Left. Who else could stand up among all the rotten tomatoes and banana peels.
So much, for an astute, hopeful academic who maintains the smiley profile of respectability, so delectable now the easiest lay on the White House lawn is gone. Sailing etc.

Do cherry picked data and anecdotes really gain any kind of legitimacy by being picked from seventy-five different orchards?

One star for the feel-good statistics and sophistry and none for the globalist clap-trap.

Happiness and enlightenment are like being in love. You know when you have it because the feeling is unmistakable... and when you dont have it its absence is felt just as strongly. No amount of pseudo-scientific number fudging can change that. We are living in a dark time in human history and everyone knows it. This author makes the case that everything is in fact hunky-dory, despite appearances, by measuring completely irellevant data. It is sort of like those happiness surveys whereby they determine that a certain city or country must be the happiest place on earth because the have a good education system, good healthcare, high employment rates, low divorce rates, affordable housing, low rates of malnutrition, etc. These things do not lead to long term happiness and fulfillment. In fact, the desperate pursuit of them, and the dissapointment and emptiness felt once they are accomplished and revealed to be hollow victories, is a major obstacle to happines. That is why we live in the most prosperous land and age in recent history, yet people are more miserable than ever. If you want to be happy look to God. If you do not believe in God, look to nature. In whatever way makes sense to you, learn to joyfully submit to your fate, come to terms with the impermenance of all things, and stop coveting that which you do not possess. These are the teachings of Jesus Christ, the Buddha and other wise men of history. Happiness is nowhere to be found in the works of man or the ever-changing circumstances of this life. Science, technology, politics, philosophy, art... all of these inventions claim to set man free and lighten his burden... but they only contribute to the ever increasing misery of the human race.

This is the same thing Pinker has been repackaging for years in book after book. Just using all capital letters NOW doesn't really change that. Also, this is the result of a social scientist trying to write or at least write about philosophy, which almost always turns out badly.

I can’t understand why people are so desperate to disprove the existence of God that they will write an inept book. Are they hoping that there are enough desperate God haters that they can make money from the effort. Sorry, I will contribute no more than $2.99 for the ebook privilege of panning the book for its inacuracies. Why can’t people just “taste and see”. It’s so much easier than fighting the darkness with an unlit candle..

I dislike all of pinker's work, and this is no exception. he's not novel in any of them. I hate most that the store puts a book I've dismissed on every single damned search result, bar none. That alone has made me hate this the most of all this awful author's terrible books. He's a dreadful cross between Jordan Peterson and Malcolm Gladwell, only more shallow.

I must confess that I did not read the book but I listened to the interview with Philip Dood (BBC) in relation to the book. Incredible ignorance and closure in the field of religion. It is clear that he is full of prejudices and commonplaces and, above all, it is clear that he has not deigned to study anything of this kind: only superficial commonplaces that did not even support the criticism of Dood who, yes, he does knows how to use Enlightenment reason.
Mauro Buffolo

This book probably should be required reading for all professional academics in the arts and humanities who teach at American colleges and universities (those in the sciences already know this stuff). The Kindle version is well-done with quick links to the notes that can be checked as one reads. Finally academic works are being digitally formatted in a useful way!

Another strong case for humanism and, I would say, moderation of the world religions and other ideologies. We won’t get rid of them, but if they can be made to _openly_ comply to the present state of knowledge (science) and wisdom (philosophy) much is won. It won’t be resolved in my lifetime, but I’m sure we’ll get there.

I'm generally a Steven Pinker fan when it comes to his books on the neurobiology of language. However, when a linguist ventures into sociology, the expected crash & burn occurs. It's like asking a talented actor to comment on global warming. All we get is non-informed speculation. While he has obviously read widely (and consulted with his wife, who is better trained in this), he is annoyingly selective in his cherry-picking of factoids to support what Is not necessarily a valid thesis. This started with his prior, similar book.

For several decades there has been an increasing turning away from the ideals of the Enlightenment by many scholars and their students in the areas of the Humanities and Social Sciences. One effect has been the celebration of identity politics and the condemnation of the idea of the individual. I have even heard the Enlightenment described as a singular cultural catastrophe. It is heartening to hear Pinker place the Romantic period as a reaction to it. The horrors visited on the world by Hitler, Stalin and so many of their ilk are the legacies of that reactionary movement. Pinker is one of several intellectuals who is part of a growing resistance to the despair and ignorance that is infesting Academe. Instead of thought and reason we see feeling and belief dominate discourse. That there have already been reviews condemning and even ridiculing his book shows he has touched a nerve.

This is a very large book on a very important topic. Some of it is compelling and inspiring; some of it is enraging and small-minded. Some of it embodies Enlightenment principles; some of it misunderstands and distorts them. Some of it aspires to the breadth of spirit within the Enlightenment’s impulses; some of it is politically and culturally partisan to a flagrant and embarrassing degree. Some of it exhibits a dazzling array of empirical knowledge; some of it is simply ignorant.

When I look at the title I expect an academic book on an academic subject. The Enlightenment has been under significant attack. The principal mainline attacks came from the French Nietzscheans beginning in the late 60’s or so and continuing for a generation. They promoted what E.D. Hirsch called ‘cognitive atheism’, a challenge to knowledge and methods that had previously been considered foundational, a challenge to the efficacy and reliability of language, the promotion of a strident and all-encompassing relativism, the denial of ‘objective truth’, and so on. Why? Why challenge the scientific thrust of the Enlightenment, the desire to utilize human reason and experimental evidence to achieve learning and progress? The best answer that I have encountered is that this was a movement on the left whose collectivist political aims had been dashed by the empirical realities of famines, purges and body counts. Hence, the only way to revive those aims and create space for them was to deny the efficacy of empirical argument, to dethrone and destroy the kind of objective information which, e.g., Pinker himself provides in a weighty compilation of statistical data that ‘traditional’ thinkers, i.e., Enlightenment-inflected thinkers would have found incontrovertible. This assault on reason and evidence dominated the literary humanities for decades; its effects were largely negative. The fact that the ideas were essentially self-destructive and in some cases patently silly (relativism can never provide the steady ground which an intellectual position requires), one comes to ENLIGHTENMENT NOW with great expectations. Pinker has, e.g., challenged the omnipresent constructivism in the social sciences in THE BLANK SLATE. Perhaps he will now thwack the anti-Enlightenment antinomians of the late twentieth century once and for all.

And he does. A bit. And it’s wonderful. And his mountain of data supporting the advance of human life and happiness traceable to science, technology and the free exchange of ideas is persuasive and bracing. But then, one wonders, why he mounts no more than a mini-counterassault on the contemporary academy’s Stalinist attacks on free speech. And one wonders why he says next to nothing about the erosion of expectations within post-1968 (more or less) higher education. If education is the center of the Enlightenment (the pivotal focus of the French Encyclopedia was to bring knowledge to those who had previously lacked access to it—practical, powerful knowledge such as how to construct and utilize a printing press or to dig a well) why does he not inveigh against the reduction of our universities to daycare centers and the failure of our K-12 system to emerge from mediocrity (on the PISA tests, for example) after a tripling of funding? The neo-Deweyesque ‘progressivism’ of the schools which valorizes self-esteem (aided and abetted by the armies of student support personnel within our universities) are inspired by Romanticism, not the Enlightenment. This is not a great secret; Richard Hofstadter made the point crisply and clearly in 1963 and Christopher Lasch had depicted its ethos in 1977 and 1979.

Instead of addressing these central issues (or, indeed, the educational and cultural impact of the breakdown of the family, which receives virtually no attention and is associated with naïve, wistful longing for the past by reactionaries) he attacks populism, religious fundamentalism and Trumpism, all of which he sees as a heinous phalanx setting back the possibility of human advance. Needless to say, the book comes too soon to take account of the statistical data associated with Trump’s actions (e.g. the radical increase in job opportunities for African Americans). Instead he compiles a list of Trumpian enormities that sounds more like a list prepared by a crusading, blindered, bubbled intern than a scholar of serious note. (One of the sad ironies of the book is that his rhetorical attacks on Trump reproduce, precisely, all of the oversimplified, bigoted, inconsistent, hyperbolic characteristics that Pinker associates with him.) This is not the way to plead a case to open-minded supporters of the Enlightenment who seek reason and evidence.

In fairness, his attacks on the fundamentalists include balancing attacks on academic Marxists. He acknowledges that there are problems of this sort on both sides of the political aisle but the ‘balanced’ attacks come out about 70-30 or sometimes 80-20 on behalf of the left. Still, we are grateful for his occasionally acknowledging, e.g., the economic wisdom of a Thomas Sowell, but his own intellectual commitments blind him to the possibility of ‘sympathy’, ‘empathy’, etc. which he properly associates with the Enlightenment. Global warming, e.g., is settled and anyone who disagrees with him is a reactionary know-nothing, but it would be more useful for his case if, e.g., he acknowledged that numbers have been jiggered by his fellow proponents and that computer projections are different in scientific kind from other arguments. On the simplest level, it is widely believed (if not in every detail) that around 7,600 years ago there was sufficient global warming to result in glacial melt that elevated sea levels to the point that the Mediterranean crashed through the Bosporus Valley and turned the Black Lake into the Black Sea, an event that may have spawned the concept of Noah’s Flood. The senior scientists demonstrating those realities with hard evidence of both flooded communities and the now coexistence of freshwater-only and saltwater-only mollusks, William Ryan and Walter Pitman, were from Columbia and their research was published in 1998 by Simon and Schuster. There were no Buicks 7,600 years ago. That is not a denial of manmade global warming, but a simple illustration that the debate should be conducted with honesty, dignity and a reticence to demonize those who seek greater evidence as idiots.

His attacks on religion are as thoroughgoing as his attacks on Trump. They are also extremely naïve and unfairly argued. He does not, for example, draw a distinction between religion and faith. There are a great number of individuals, e.g., whose faith coexists with systematic disagreements with the Vatican, just as there are individuals who look to religious institutions for social interaction rather than searching, spiritual guidance. In some cases his attacks on religion are as mean spirited, rhetorically, as his attacks on Trump. He derides, e.g., the notion of the Trinity as being silly and unintelligible. Given the distance between human capacity and divine possibility this is like a debate between Alan Turing and an amoeba. He attacks ‘proofs’ of God’s existence without mentioning that the ‘proofs’ were always seen as aids to piety rather than apodictic proofs that compelled belief. Hence, Alvin Plantinga’s depiction of the persuasiveness of the various proofs in probabilistic terms, but Alvin Plantinga, arguably the world’s expert on the matter, does not appear in the book’s bibliography. Similarly, the world’s expert on the necessity for a sense of the transcendent, a necessity that in an important sense underwrites all human creativity, George Steiner, is nowhere to be found. Some would say that the most important human issues can neither be addressed nor solved by philosophy. The ‘some’ would include Wittgenstein, the most important philosopher of the twentieth century, who, again, does not appear in these pages.

The most critical dimension of SP’s attack on religion is that it misrepresents the actual nature of the Enlightenment. SP’s Enlightenment is the Enlightenment of the French salon, one whose principal goals are to crush Rome and shock the bourgeoisie. There are actually multiple Enlightenments, the principal one emerging in England (where, just in passing, it was possible to produce an individual such as Sir Thomas Browne who was a man of great faith who also set as one of his great tasks the exposure of ‘vulgar errors’, precisely the way Samuel Johnson would conduct himself in the next century [Johnson also wrote Browne’s life]). The “Enlightenment” which Voltaire observed in England consisted of two key elements: political liberty for the thinkers combined with the inductive, empirical method of English science (characteristically contrasted, by Swift, e.g., with the deductive, theory-driven science of Descartes). The Enlightenment is about truth claims and its principal targets are the arbitrary ‘knowledge’ of the church and the aristocracy. Their knowledge is ‘arbitrary’ because it is anchored in ‘authority’ rather than in reason and evidence.

English science was not, a priori, opposed to faith and religion. The chemist Robert Boyle endowed a series of lectures designed to demonstrate the manner in which science could reinforce faith and Isaac Newton probably considered his work on biblical ‘chronology’ to be of greater importance than his physics. Nevertheless, the English scientists and scientific advocates knew that a dispute concerning truth claims could have significant political repercussions. Hence they restricted the meetings of the Royal Society to considerations of science, consciously excluding the discussion of politics and religion. When the history of the Royal Society was written it was written, quite consciously, by Thomas Sprat, a bishop. The most skeptical, possibly agnostic, possibly atheist representatives of the English Enlightenment—Hume and Gibbon—were both shocked by the aggressive atheism which they encountered in France. Parenthetically, Pinker comments that the design argument for the existence of God was countered by Darwin; actually it was countered by Hume in his DIALOGUES CONCERNING NATURAL RELIGION. For all of his ‘impiety’, however, Hume argues for an important role for religion in society and he always maintains a decorous reverence when speaking of it.

More to the point, Hume argues that reason cannot attack religious faith because it is by definition, FAITH. It exists in a separate intellectual realm. Hume would smile politely at SP’s references to those who believe the opposite. Even more to the point, Hume argues against the prerogatives of reason itself, saying that it is and always should be the slave of the passions. The principal social psychologist of our time who has taken up this notion and extended it is Jonathan Haidt (whose important and very suggestive work is listed in SP’s bibliography but only mentioned in passing). Haidt argues that ‘reason’ is the thing we use/do when we’re challenged and have to cobble together some quick and dirty argument to embarrass and defeat a challenger. His reading of Hume explains much of our contemporary political and cultural ethos. Pinker, on the other hand, never really defines ‘reason’ at length, despite its centrality to his argument.

Bottom line: ENLIGHTENMENT NOW is part reasoned, compelling argument, part partisan polemic, part intemperate and sometimes unkind screed. It singles out some worthy targets for searching criticism, is marginally but somewhat bravely countercultural within the academy and an unreliable guide to the actual Enlightenment.

A well retold, and argument, story about the World today.
Through the looking glass of the main four terms of the Enlightenment.
The meaning of the terms- précised by a psycho linguist.
:-) A good quantity of energy
in help, for a while, to put in a personal order, unnatural for Nature,
the Natural entropy of terms, opinions, trends, indicators and historical events
Thank you, Professor Pinker, from a reader!
Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

A very balanced book that sets tribalism and motivated reasoning aside and identifies clear reasons to be optimistic about the progress of humanity while also taking a sober look at the most urgent threats to our existence (nuclear weapons and global warming). Everyone should read this book.

I can’t understand why people are so desperate to disprove the existence of God that they will write an inept book. Are they hoping that there are enough desperate God haters that they can make money from the effort. Sorry, I will contribute no more than $2.99 for the ebook privilege of panning the book for its inacuracies. Why can’t people just “taste and see”. It’s so much easier than fighting the darkness with an unlit candle..

I dislike all of pinker's work, and this is no exception. he's not novel in any of them. I hate most that the store puts a book I've dismissed on every single damned search result, bar none. That alone has made me hate this the most of all this awful author's terrible books. He's a dreadful cross between Jordan Peterson and Malcolm Gladwell, only more shallow.

I must confess that I did not read the book but I listened to the interview with Philip Dood (BBC) in relation to the book. Incredible ignorance and closure in the field of religion. It is clear that he is full of prejudices and commonplaces and, above all, it is clear that he has not deigned to study anything of this kind: only superficial commonplaces that did not even support the criticism of Dood who, yes, he does knows how to use Enlightenment reason.
Mauro Buffolo