Life is better than ever for most of humanity; despite a barrage of media that paints a dismal picture of life on Earth. Most of humanity would agree with Barack Obama’s 2016 view“…. if you had to choose blindly what moment you’d want to be born, you’d choose now.”[1] In “Enlightenment Now”, Stephen Pinker provides a quantitative assessment of how life has improved over the course of human history. He asserts:

“…. I will show that this bleak assessment of the state of the world is wrong. …. I will present a different understanding of the world, grounded in fact and inspired by the ideals of the Enlightenment: reason, science, humanism, and progress.”[2]

The book starts with three chapters that explain the Enlightenment, some basic science, and the counter-Enlightenment. The majority of the books, seventeen chapters, deal with progress in life, health, sustenance, wealth, inequality, the environment, peace, safety terrorism, equal rights, knowledge, quality of life and happiness. The final three chapters deal with reason, science and humanism in our world.

First, Pinker asks: What is the Enlightenment? He starts with Immanuel Kant’s 1784 definition:

“Enlightenment is man's release from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is man's inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another. Sapere aude! "Have courage to use your own reason!" -- that is the motto of enlightenment.” [3]

Of course, if the Enlightenment was so great, why aren’t all human problems solved? Pinker says:

“And if you’re committed to progress, you can’t very well claim to have it all figured out. It takes nothing away from the Enlightenment thinkers to identify some critical ideas about the human condition and the nature of progress that we know and they didn’t. Those ideas, I suggest, are entropy, evolution, and information.”

Pinker next explains entropy, evolution, and information. I found this chapter a bit hard to grasp. Perhaps my engineering background causes me to yearn for straightforward definitions. Let’s say that entropy is the tendency towards disorder (such as my office) and that energy is required to counteract entropy. A brief synopsis of Pinker’s description:

[Entropy]“Living things are made of organs that have heterogeneous parts which are uncannily shaped and arranged to do things that keep the organism alive (that is, continuing to absorb energy to resist entropy).”

[Evolution]“The replicating systems would compete for the material to make their copies and the energy to power the replication. Since no copying process is perfect—the Law of Entropy sees to that—errors will crop up, and though most of these mutations will degrade the replicator (entropy again), occasionally dumb luck will throw one up that’s more effective at replicating, and its descendants will swamp the competition.”

“Information may be thought of as a reduction in entropy—as the ingredient that distinguishes an orderly, structured system from the vast set of random, useless ones.” [4]

Here’s a summary of why we should care about entropy, evolution, and information:

“Getting back to evolution, a brain wired by information in the genome to perform computations on information coming in from the senses could organize the animal’s behavior in a way that allowed it to capture energy and resist entropy. …. Energy channeled by knowledge is the elixir with which we stave off entropy, and advances in energy capture are advances in human destiny.” [5]

Next chapter, there are some details of the counter-Enlightenment. Pinker provides four alternatives:

1. Religious faith

2. “People are the expendable cells of a superorganism…”

3. [declinism] “One form of declinism bemoans our Promethean dabbling with technology.”

4. [scientism] “… the intrusion of science into the territory of the humanities ….

A brief summary of why the counter-Enlightenment should be transcended:

“Our greatest enemies are ultimately not our political adversaries but entropy, evolution (in the form of pestilence and the flaws in human nature), and most of all ignorance—a shortfall of knowledge of how best to solve our problems.”[6]

The majority of “Enlightenment Now” deals with progress in many areas of human life. Here are a few of my most significant findings from Pinker’s extensive research, supported by much data.

[Sustenance]

“ … in spite of burgeoning numbers, the developing world is feeding itself. Vulnerability to famine appears to have been virtually eradicated from all regions outside Africa.” . … “Famine as an endemic problem in Asia and Europe seems to have been consigned to history.” …

“Once the secrets to growing food in abundance are unlocked and the infrastructure to move it around is in place, the decline of famine depends on the decline of poverty, war, and autocracy.” [7]

[Wealth]

“Among the brainchildren of the Enlightenment is the realization that wealth is created. It is created primarily by knowledge and cooperation: networks of people arrange matter into improbable but useful configurations and combine the fruits of their ingenuity and labor. The corollary, just as radical, is that we can figure out how to make more of it.”

…. “Also, technology doesn’t just improve old things; it invents new ones. How much did it cost in 1800 to purchase a refrigerator, a musical recording, a bicycle, a cell phone, Wikipedia, a photo of your child, a laptop and printer, a contraceptive pill, a dose of antibiotics? The answer is: no amount of money in the world. The combination of better products and new products makes it almost impossible to track material well-being across the decades and centuries. “ [8]

[Inequality]

“Inequality is not the same as poverty, and it is not a fundamental dimension of human flourishing.”

… “As globalization and technology have lifted billions out of poverty and created a global middle class, international and global inequality have decreased, at the same time that they enrich elites whose analytical, creative, or financial impact has global reach. The fortunes of the lower classes in developed countries have not improved nearly as much, but they have improved,….” [9]

[Environment]

“The key idea is that environmental problems, like other problems, are solvable, given the right knowledge. …. humanity is not on an irrevocable path to ecological suicide.”

“An enlightened environmentalism recognizes that humans need to use energy to lift themselves out of the poverty to which entropy and evolution consign them.” [10]

[Knowledge]

“Homo sapiens, “knowing man,” is the species that uses information to resist the rot of entropy and the burdens of evolution. ….

But some of the causal pathways vindicate the values of the Enlightenment. So much changes when you get an education!

• They are less racist, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic, and authoritarian.

• They place a higher value on imagination, independence, and free speech.

For all these reasons, the growth of education—and its first dividend, literacy—is a flagship of human progress.” [11]

[The Future of Progress]

“Ever since the Enlightenment and the invention of science, we’ve managed to create a tiny bit more than we’ve destroyed each year. But that few percent positive difference is compounded over decades into what we might call civilization. . . . [Progress] is a self-cloaking action seen only in retrospect. Which is why I tell people that my great optimism of the future is rooted in history.”

Hans Rosling, who, when asked whether he was an optimist, replied, “I am not an optimist. I’m a very serious possibilist.” [12]

The final part of “Enlightenment Now” explains the importance of reason, science, and humanism. Pinker makes a strong case for the use of reason in explaining the world. Here’s a brief selection of why reason matters:

“Making reason the currency of our discourse begins with clarity about the centrality of reason itself.”

“The human brain is capable of reason, given the right circumstances; the problem is to identify those circumstances and put them more firmly in place.”

“People understand concepts only when they are forced to think them through, to discuss them with others, and to use them to solve problems. A second impediment to effective teaching is that pupils don’t spontaneously transfer what they learned from one concrete example to others in the same abstract category.” [13]

Pinker advocates that science is the best tool humanity has to understand the world. Here is his explanation of what distinguishes science from other exercises of reason:

“All the methods are pressed into the service of two ideals, and it is these ideals that advocates of science want to export to the rest of intellectual life.

1. The first is that the world is intelligible.

2. The second ideal is that we must allow the world to tell us whether our ideas about it are correct.

When scientists are pressed to explain how they do this, they usually reach for Karl Popper’s model of conjecture and refutation, in which a scientific theory may be falsified by empirical tests but is never confirmed.” [14]

The final chapter of the book is an explanation of humanism, why it matters, and how it should be substituted for religion in the modern world. Here are some of Pinker’s explanations of humanism:

“Spinoza: “Those who are governed by reason desire nothing for themselves which they do not also desire for the rest of humankind.” Progress consists of deploying knowledge to allow all of humankind to flourish in the same way that each of us seeks to flourish. The goal of maximizing human flourishing—life, health, happiness, freedom, knowledge, love, richness of experience—may be called humanism.”

“There is a growing movement called Humanism, which promotes a non-supernatural basis for meaning and ethics: good without God.”[15]

Pinker addresses many of the deficits of religion in this chapter. It’s not really possible for me to synopsize all his arguments but here one quote that stuck in my mind:

“To begin with, the alternative to “religion” as a source of meaning is not “science.” No one ever suggested that we look to ichthyology or nephrology for enlightenment on how to live, but rather to the entire fabric of human knowledge, reason, and humanistic values, of which science is a part.”[16]

One issue I see, current representations of all of human knowledge aren’t in a holistic framework that cover “entire fabric of human knowledge” that’s accessible to most humanity. It would be useful to have an accessible form of humanism, the closest that I’m aware of are Unitarian Universalists.

To summarize, “Enlightenment Now” makes a strong case, using data, references and cogent explanations, that life is improving for most of humanity. As Pinker asserts:

“As always, the only way to know which way the world is going is to quantify.” [17]

The author makes a strong case that reason and science are the root cause for the progress of human life across many dimensions. In contrast, while Pinker well explains the importance of humanism, in the end, I’m not sure how to truly put humanism into practice in my life and community. That said, “Enlightenment Now” is a profound and encouraging book. I agree with Pinker:

“We will never have a perfect world, and it would be dangerous to seek one. But there is no limit to the betterments we can attain if we continue to apply knowledge to enhance human flourishing.” [18]

Notes

[1] As quoted in “Enlightenment Now”, Part III

[2] “Enlightenment Now”, Preface.

[3] Kant, Immanuel. "An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?" (Was ist

Äufklarung?), 30 September, 1784. Pinker translates the Latin “Sapere aude!” as “Dare to understand!” Instead of “Have courage to use your own reason!"

[4] “Enlightenment Now”, Chapter 2. I’d note that the majority of living things are single cell organisms but that doesn’t change Pinker’s observation.

[5] “Enlightenment Now”, Chapter 3.

[6] “Enlightenment Now”, Chapter 3.

[7] “Enlightenment Now”, Chapter 7.

[8] “Enlightenment Now”, Chapter 8.

[9] “Enlightenment Now”, Chapter 9.

[10] “Enlightenment Now”, Chapter 10.

[11] “Enlightenment Now”, Chapter 16.

[12] “Enlightenment Now”, Chapter 20.

[13] “Enlightenment Now”, Chapter 21.

[14] “Enlightenment Now”, Chapter 22.

[15] “Enlightenment Now”, Chapter 23.

[16] “Enlightenment Now”, Chapter 23.

[17] “Enlightenment Now”, Chapter 14.

[18] “Enlightenment Now”, Chapter 23.

This is a story about breathtakingly vast improvements in the human condition that were kick started by enlightenment ideals of reason, science, and humanism in the 19th century.

Cognitive biases have made thinkers throughout history believe they were living in an era of decline despite the spectacular improvements ongoing: vertiginous reductions in war deaths, homicides, infant mortality, infectious disease, famine, increased life expectancy, access to clean drinking water, political freedom, and practically every type of creature comfort you can imagine.

In the West, life expectancy has shot up from 35 years to 80. Child mortality plummeted from 30% to a fraction of a percent. Rates of death in childbirth dropped 300 fold. Five *billion* lives have been saved by health improvements such as sanitation, vaccines, and antibiotics. Smallpox alone killed 300 million people in the 20th century and is now eradicated. The global proportion of people living in extreme poverty has dropped from 90% to 10%. Rates of traffic accident deaths fell twenty-four-fold since 1921. And there have been huge declines in deaths due to fire, drowning, falls, workplace accidents, natural disasters, and even lighting strikes. People work fewer hours, have paid vacations, spend fewer hours on housework, have more hours of leisure, and enjoy luxuries beyond the wildest dreams of the kings of yesteryear like air conditioning, instant communication around the world, air travel, and light bulbs. Though the developing world has lagged behind the West, they too have more recently started making many of the same advances.

This incredible progresses will make you appreciate the time we live in and I think it’s well worth understanding how we got here and how we can continue on this path. These improvements don’t happen automatically and they are not guaranteed to go on forever. They are brought about through the efforts of humans to apply their ingenuity to the betterment of humanity. Some philosophies create progress while others destroy it. Pinker’s arguments that enlightenment ideals are the engine of progress are laid out clearly and persuasively in a style that is accessible to any educated reader.

Critics point out that despite all these improvements (and more!), we have a terrible price to pay in the form of environmental degradation, terrorism, inequality, nuclear war, and other threats. He addresses each of these concerns and puts to rest the most pessimistic and alarmist visions of those threats while acknowledging the world is not a perfect place. As problems are solved, new problems emerge and they can be solved in their turn. The answer is not to smash the machine and return to pre-enlightenment ideals.

But there is always the siren song of regressive philosophies that appeal to our primal human brains: nationalism, tribalism, and concepts of a clash of civilizations in which ethnic groups or classes are pitted against each other in zero-sum competition. If the widespread notion that our society is in decline is not dispelled, people may reason they have nothing to lose by supporting a theocracy or a strongman to lead by force of personality who promises to take us back to a mythical golden age that never existed. The case for the enlightenment needs to be made time and again. It’s worth taking stock of our progress and how we got here as a vanguard against embracing regressive ideologies.

Life is better today than it has ever been before and Steven Pinker has the data to show us how and why. He posits that reason, science, and humanism (all Enlightenment values) are foundational to the progress that humankind has made and why we experience the relative luxuries that we do today. The average human alive today can expect to live well into their 70s or 80s (depending on what country they’re in), when just a century ago the global average life expectancy was around 33. That statistic alone is proof that we are doing something right.

Pinker examines his research through the lens of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that in an isolated system entropy never decreases. In physics, entropy is the loss of energy available to do work, and because the total amount of energy in a system is constant (the First Law of Thermodynamics) it can never decrease. So, if you have an isolated system unencumbered by outside forces, that system will “become less structured, less organized, less able to accomplish interesting and useful outcomes” as it continues to exist and transfer energy back and forth. Basically, the flow of energy will always work against us if we let it. For example, a cup of coffee will cool down as its heat leaves and it approaches the temperature of the room it is in. The fast-moving molecules in the hot coffee want to find equilibrium with the slower-moving cooler molecules of the room (pretending, for the sake of this example, that this room is a closed system). While this law was originally codified in the name of physics, it has a socially-ordered application as well. We humans have directed enormous amounts of energy towards bettering our collective existence, and if we stop, entropy will take the reins. “Life and happiness depend on an infinitesimal silver of orderly arrangements of matter amid the astronomical number of possibilities” Pinker writes, and continues: “far more of the arrangements of matter found on Earth are of no worldly use to us, so when things change without a human agent directing the change, they are likely to change for the worse.” To use our hot beverage example as a metaphor, the societies that humankind have developed over time are like a hot cup of coffee (in the form of peace and prosperity), and we must continually keep them warm through applications of reason, science, and humanism, for if we ever stop applying progressive energy and let it cool, the worse off humanity would objectively become (and things like tyranny and violence would reemerge en mass again).

Through this lens of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, Pinker shows (with literal graphs) the many ways in which we Homo Sapiens have improved over the course of our existence. For one example, “in [the past] two hundred years the rate of extreme poverty in the world has tanked from 90 percent to 10, with almost half that decline occurring in the last thirty-five years.” Life today is healthier, wealthier, more equal, more peaceful, safer, more democratic, smarter, happier, and longer lasting than at any point in our history. “An American in 2015, compared with his or her counterpart a half-century earlier, will live nine years longer, have had three more years of education, earn an additional $33,000 a year per family member (only a third of which, rather than half, will go to necessities), and have an additional eight hours a week of leisure.” Reason has shown that people of different cultural and spiritual beliefs can coexist in harmonious communities. Humanism has led societies to provide children with education and play as opposed to hard work and toil. Science has given us the ability to pull nitrogen out of the air and turn it into fertilizer on an industrial scale, enabling us to enrich depleted soil and feed billions.

With these statistical truths in mind, an important question that needs addressing is why we don’t feel better about it? Where are the news stories talking about the amazing acts of progress being made individually and collectively by different members of our global community? Pinker takes a shot at this answer as well. One explanation is what psychologists call the Availability Heuristic, which states that “people estimate the probability of an event or the frequency of a kind of thing by the ease with which instances come to mind.” This explains why people can conjure up many examples of mass shootings, but not mass births of healthy babies born to healthy mothers. All of this leads to a second explanation: The news is overwhelmingly negative. While the goal of a news company is ostensibly to report the news, they cannot do this without an audience. And what is the best way to hold an audience’s attention? Stories of fear or destruction. Negative news trumps positive news by a wide margin. (Fun Fact: In the English language, there are around three-times as many words for negative emotions than positive ones.) With this in mind, it’s no wonder that regardless of progression in any field through any lens, we all still feel the presence of the negative areas of our lives. The daily news cycle keeps it fresh in our minds. We feel the burden of unhappy relationships, financial debt, and looming terrorism without appreciating that we have the opportunity to pursue fulfilling relationships in the first place, or that we have some money and the relative freedom to choose what we do with it, or that ‘terrorism’ has killed less people in the twenty years since September 11th, 2001, than died on that actual day. Once upon a time marriages were arranged, money couldn’t change anything in your life (if you were fortunate enough to even have any), and war was the norm. Instead of allowing cultural and political pundits to frame life today for us, Pinker believes we should let data lead the way, reasoning that a quantitative approach “is in fact the morally enlightened one, because it treats every human life as having equal value rather than privileging the people who are closest to us or most photogenic.” With this sentiment, I fervently agree.

According to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and through millennia of repeated applications of ever-progressing reason, science, and humanism, we humans have built a peaceful world out of a violent one. We have sewn safety with needles of chaos. We have grown democracies from the ashes of fascism. Against impossible odds, we have kept our cup of coffee warm, but looming threats like global warming and political tribalism require that we continue working together towards keeping social entropy at bay. What we have is precious, and we should be both grateful to those who came before us and disciplined enough ourselves to continue keeping our coffee warm. The moment we take our foot off the progress gas pedal, entropy will begin the process of slowing down and reverting us back to a state of chaos and poverty—what life was like before the Enlightenment.

This book gives a superb, extremely well-reasoned, documented argument in favor of the author's positions. Prof. Pinker is careful to delineate his position, as well as the positions of others that he sees as supplying the counterweights to his. He arguments are well-supported by statistical evidence, and the reasoning of the great philosophers and scientists who built the Enlightenment perspective he champions. I personally learned a significant amount from his clear, careful, and complex book. He supplies an excellent argument for his "team", and one intended, I think, to also help attitudes of those sympathetic to his position. I certainly gained from many of his discussions, including his comments related to psychology and philosophy. I for one have had, I think, a more pessimistic attitude than is warranted, despite the seriousness of some of the problems, like climate change, environmental degradation, human suffering, reducing chance of nuclear war, and technological disruptions with the coming improvements in weak AI, that we see now and which threaten our future. In some ways, it is clear that this book, too, represents an ongoing dialogue with his critics. He certainly does not give much, in terms of openings, to attack his positions. His brilliance, his biases, his wide and deep knowledge, make him an excellent spokesman and defender of science, reason, humanism, and progress, as advertised in the subtitle of his book. He provides extensive notes and a good list of references, so that his views can be critically assessed by anyone who wants to defend other points of view, or just explore better those he presents. This is a good book to learn from, to adapt a better perspective, and to get a picture of the modern inheritors of the Enlightenment. I can extremely strongly recommend this book, especially to people like myself that are sympathetic to Pinker's perspective. He has obviously worked very hard to get to the level of organization presented in this book, and communicate the enormous insights, many of which are quite subtle. The rise of the autocrats, as anticipated by Nietzsche concern him greatly, and he expressed obvious concern over Trump's presidency in the U.S. To a certain extent, I think that there are many constraints on Trump as a wannabe ubermensch. So it is not too clear to me as to the extent to which he represents a threat to our liberal democracy in the U.S. Nevertheless, I think Nietzsche's ideas were considered by Pinker as serious indicators of the chronic problem in the modern world of the autocrat, and Pinker's discussion of this was very good. In addition, his discussion of religion is very cogent, because it shows well that humanism does indeed offer a rational alternative, in terms of supporting ethical and moral behavior. As affluence, education and human flourishing continue to progress in the world, the strength of his views will remain clear.

This is a magnificent book written by a brilliant author who happens to be one of the world’s foremost experts on language and the mind. (Yes, he’s a psycholinguist.)

Thankfully, I fully agree with 99% of everything he says. The case for humanism and for progress has never been stronger and he makes that case clearly and strongly. The problem with reality, however, is that it always exists in context, so when it comes to graphs and statistics, there’s a lot of wiggle room if you have the time and the research staff. Having said that, I nonetheless believe that this is a very disciplined and sincere attempt to tell an accurate and complete story.

If there is a but for me it is the fact that Enlightenment reason is often interpreted to be deductive reason. It is the reason behind the scientific method that moves from left to right conceptually – the logic behind cause and effect. It is the gift of the Enlightenment and, as Pinker notes, is so far ahead of our prior knowledge that it is almost ridiculous to compare. But—and it’s a but he accepts—it’s not infallible.

Said differently, science is often more about probabilities than truths. Initial scientific conclusions are often wrong, although “wrong” is the wrong word. Technology and science don’t determine truth so much as they reveal the truth that has always been there. Which is why it sometimes takes a few attempts and no one should ever wish to turn back the clock of technology. It won’t happen and we shouldn’t want it to.

One of the unintended consequences of the Enlightenment focus on deduction, however, is that we tend to see the world in binary terms of either/or. We tend to see the only alternative to humanism or liberal democracy, in other words, to be authoritarianism, or, as Pinker puts it, “a strong leader who wrenches the country backward to make it ‘great again’.”

The implication, I think, is that liberalism must be built on individualism. And I’m not convinced it has to be. Why can’t liberalism exist for the collective good? Are not the purpose of power and the structure of power two different things?

Pinker uses Adam Smith’s famous example of the pin maker, as an example, to echo Smith’s individualistic sentiment that in a free market “each gets back something that is more valuable to him than what he gives up.” And for much of the post-Enlightenment era that truth has held.

It is, however, predicated on the ideal of “efficient markets” and “fully informed” consumers and labor. And do those really exist in our current technologically connected world? Is the single mother working for minimum wage really getting back more than she gives up when we consider that in modern society we have made money not just a luxury flowing from the division of labor but a necessity for bare survival? To put it in Pinker’s own terms of progress, the destitute poor today are arguably worse off—relatively speaking—than the destitute poor during Smith’s time. Yes, they lived hard lives back then, but, as Pinker would point out, nobody lived very long, health and safety standards were low for everyone, and there was little in the way of meaningful convenience that even money could buy. And where will the single mother’s kids be without access to good education and technology – both of which now cost money?

Early in the book, in the chapter aptly named “Progressophobia,” Pinker notes, “Seeing how journalistic habits and cognitive biases bring out the worst in each other, how can we soundly appraise the state of the world? The answer is to count.” At one level, it’s spot on. At another level, however, a count is one-dimensional. (It’s binary) In my experience, however, reality is full of dualities. My count is someone else’s ‘don’t have.’ He notes this himself. The denial of duality is a simple strategy for winning an argument but doesn’t always do the subject justice.

Which brings me to my last point. And I suppose it’s another version of the binary challenge. Pinker notes, for example, “Intellectuals hate progress. Intellectuals who call themselves ‘progressive’ really hate progress. It’s not that they hate the fruits of progress … It’s the idea of progress that rankles the chattering class …” I won’t take it personally because he doesn’t know me from a bag of elbows. Hate is an awfully binary word, however.

A truly great book. Perhaps book of the year. You need to read it.

This is an interesting book to review. I've read a lot of reviews of the book before actually reading the book which is fairly rare for me. I usually only read one or two book reviews at most. To be upfront, I personally enjoy Pinker's style, and agreed with him on most of the issues he presented already. I also appreciate that Pinker does a great job of explaining his ideas clearly, in a way that I understand how he came to such an idea, whether or not I actually agree with the reasoning process.

For the most part, I have found that the criticisms of Pinker seem less strong after having read the book. Not all criticisms, but many. Pinker's data of some progress for humans is, in totality, certainly hard to argue with. The picture painted is of great progress in the past couple centuries, and it is almost perverse to disagree with this. We certainly still have a long way to go, but Pinker's point that we should appreciate what we've already accomplished is well-taken.

Some have taken issue with Pinker's presentation of the Enlightenment. I would certainly agree that Pinker does not provide a strong history of the Enlightenment. On the other hand, Pinker uses the word "Enlightenment" to mean a set of ideas associated with reason, science, and humanism. While I agree this may not be a typical or even historically useful definition, he makes this association clear very early on, so that I don't see it as much of a criticism. He mostly uses Enlightenment for the set of ideas he proposes are important for human flourishing.

As I said, I find most of what Pinker says credible, but I think that he sometimes too easily vanquishes an argument. His environmentalism and anti-AI arguments seem to me to defeat the arguments of his opponents a bit too easily. I personally am skeptical of an intelligence boom in AI, but I don't think Pinker argues against the strongest arguments in favor of such an intelligence boom (or the reasons to invest in containing a superintelligence). For the most part, though, I think he fairly represents opponents's arguments in the book where I have some familiarity with the background. It appeared to me he may have painted some environmentalism a bit too negatively, but it seems mostly so that he can embrace neo-environmentalism (i.e., ecomodernism or ecopragmatism)

The final part of the book on humanism was also an interesting addition. It is certainly the section with the least number of graphs and data. What stood out most to me here was that Pinker has a very negative opinion of Nietzsche (I don't know enough about Nietzsche to determine how biased a perspective this is).

Overall, I enjoyed the book. Pinker is a very clear, concise writer for the most part, and his arguments don't require more than a bit of sense and data to understand. That's not to say that these are obvious or necessarily true arguments, but that the reasons for believing them are laid out for all to see. I don't really see how the idea that we've made a ton of progress in human flourishing in the past couple of centuries could be controversial, but perhaps I just agree too much with the measurements of flourishing that Pinker uses.

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.

Although people who need to read this book likely won't, the author deserves credit for the effort, a substantial one. He makes the point -- indirectly, in a statement about evolution -- that people disregard facts contrary to their position because they prefer to believe what they want to be true, rather than what is. This may seem a simplistic (or obvious) statement but it has had many bad consequences, and there seems to be no easy, or hard, fix.

Great stats

Oct 17, 2019

it was amazing

bookshelves: economy

A beautiful book to push yourself to deep thought about the true values of human life.

A magnetic field is produced by moving electrically charged objects, an electric field is produced by moving a magnetic field. The combination as an electromagnetic field is the source of light, the light is the most beautiful way to enjoy the colors of the world.

In the same way, science is produced by changing the reason space, and the reason is produced by changing the science space. The combination of reason and science is the source of progress, progress is the most beautiful way to enjoy the colors of human life, namely humanism. @sapinker

Pinker's sequel to the Better Angels of Our Nature is a passionately written but dispassionately argued assertion that, contrary to all the garbage we are fed by the media and populists, the Enlightenment as delivered by modern science, reason and humanism has worked beyond anyone's wildest dreams. In making the case, Pinker points to data - 'we count' as the medicine to counter overly negative assertions to the contrary. And he pulls out the data - table after table reveals exactly how the appliance of science and to a large extent, free markets are making lives longer, healthier, wealthier, wiser, safer, etc.

For Pinker, the starting point isn't God, it's entropy. Without human beings pursuing rational solutions, everything devolves into chaos. That's why progress happens - it isn't fate or the arc of history - it's us, working to overturn problems by using reason. That is why he is not an optimist -a ridiculous assertion if you read this book. Pinker believes that the counter Enlightenment, Romanticism, is the mortal enemy, aided and abetted by the Availability bias identified by Tversky and Kahneman. Romanticism creates and re-inforces a pessimistic view of human progress - we are destroying the world, natural is good, mankind is bad - that we have to confront and overcome. Predictions of overpopulation, environmental catastrophe, etc. are products of this irrational thinking. For Pinker, if you use reason to identify a problem you use science to help overcome it. You develop new tools when you need them or use old tools when you have them. I find his approach laudable, as it diminishes the self flagellation that religion, with its apocalyptic negativity, and puts us on more positive, solution oriented thinking. Whenever we get too Romantic, we create vicious over-reactions to real problems - like Marxism - which prove to be worse than the problems identified.

Pinker is not PC and seems unafraid of the attacks being prepared for him by the Romantics (Trumpian, left environmentalists, deniers of human nature, etc). He is armed to the teeth with reason, science and humanity, and seems ready to take on all comers.

I have never felt prouder to be a secular humanist than when I finished this sharply written, factually dense and closely argued book. A must read for intelligent people who like facts to understand the world..

excellent book

Fantástico. Lectura obligatoria para todos aquellos que quieran ver sentido en en el mundo tal como es.