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I don't think Pinker is against activists making the world better. But activists need to convince people that their ideas actually will improve things. Lots o
by haberman 9y ago
I don't think Pinker is against activists making the world better. But activists need to convince people that their ideas actually will improve things. Lots of activists have made the world better, but some have made it worse, despite having good intentions (see: eugenics, communism).
If you're trying to sell people on the idea that status quo institutions like capitalism are bad, you have to compare it to the alternatives. You can't just say "bad things happen under capitalism, therefore we need to do away with it." That's comparing capitalism vs. utopia, but utopia doesn't exist, for all kinds of practical reasons.
Pinker makes the case for what the world as we know it has achieved. An activist who thinks another system would be better has to convince people that their alternative will achieve more.
- sooheon 9y ago> An activist who thinks another system would be better has to convince people that their alternative will achieve more. Not necessarily according to Pinker's cherry picked statistics. Plantation owners were not going to achieve more by freeing their slaves, at least according to their own accounting.
- haberman 9y agoSure, if someone else thinks other statistics are relevant, they can cite those. I agree that a plantation owner would probably have cited statistics that didn't capture the harms of the fact that they are enslaving people.
- pron 9y ago"The world" hasn't achieved anything on its own. People of precisely the kind Pinker dislikes and dismisses are those who have achieved those things for our world. They achieved it not by convincing others through theory, but through their strong beliefs. You're right, sometimes they failed miserably, but even those who've brought us to where we are today were ridiculed just as those who've failed.