Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now is, quite simply, a fantastic book. In this fact-filled and incredibly well-footnoted tome, Pinker, a Harvard psychology professor, shows how the conditions of life for ordinary people have gotten much better, not just for those in wealthy countries but also for most people around the world.
He shows that life expectancy has increased almost everywhere, health and nutrition have improved, and wealth and living standards have skyrocketed. The environment has improved. The destruction caused by war—and war itself—have decreased. Safety has increased and terrorism is a tiny problem. Literacy has increased. People have become generally more tolerant of others’ differences and people are happier.
He attributes this progress to the Enlightenment, the four pillars of which—as the book’s subtitle suggests—are reason, science, humanism, and progress. In laying out the facts and his argument, Pinker also shows a knack for the punchy, and often humorous, turn of phrase. Although he occasionally slips, as when he criticizes libertarianism, his slips are few and far between.
These are the opening 3 paragraphs of “The Wonder of Modern Life,” which is the lead book review in the Summer 2018 issue of Regulation.
Do read the whole thing, especially if you want to comment.
And, even better, read Pinker’s book; you will likely be “enlightened.”
HT to Pierre Lemieux and Richard B. McKenzie for telling me that the issue is out electronically.
READER COMMENTS
JFA
Jun 20 2018 at 3:10pm
Having not read the book, take this with a grain (or heap) or salt: My sense is that Pinker is good on the data, but in attributing all good things to the Enlightenment (and its 4 pillars), he ignores much of the foundation (especially human rights) that previous thinkers (such as the medieval and Renaissance scholars) developed, while also eliding over the fact that there were many Enlightenments, each with its own distinct emphases and values. And (again, having not read the book) many have critiqued his argument as being a bit circular, e.g. the good things that came about were due to the Enlightenment’s 4 pillars and if it was bad then it wasn’t due to Enlightenment’s 4 pillars. I get also the sense that he either didn’t emphasize or mention that the demise of slavery was due (in large part) to religious fervor (which doesn’t really fit into those 4 pillars).
quidnunc
Jun 20 2018 at 4:17pm
The section on Enlightenment values is only 55-60 pages, including a chapter on what the Enlightenment was missing. The book is more about transformed values but that didn’t stop tired genealogical debunking arguments. Pinker may have purified reason, science, humanism too much in his mind but that should be about recovering contemporary coherence not Enlightenment era ideas, as if you could decompose and trace back our current thinking. What’s amusing is Pinker is a Hobbesian who thinks progress is contingent. So what a lot of the criticisms came down to was him not being sufficiently pessimistic or stealth arguments about him not having the right kind of politics.
I have serious disagreements with the chapters on inequality and environmentalism but at least those disagreements are about arguments he actually made.
Fazal Majid
Jun 20 2018 at 3:43pm
Right, something that happened a quarter of a millennium ago explains the sudden acceleration of human welfare in the last twenty years.
Todd Kreider
Jun 20 2018 at 3:59pm
One point is that it wasn’t the last 20 years but in some cases like the fall in extreme poverty that has fallen from 40% in 1980 to 10% today goes back 200 years when 95% of the world lived in abject poverty.
James
Jun 21 2018 at 12:27pm
Can someone explain why people like Pinker feel the need to take shots at libertarians at all? Libertarians are a tiny minority in the US and the world. In the US more politicians and policy people identify as liberals, conservatives and even socialists than as libertarians. Does Pinker see some looming threat of libertarians taking over?
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