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Review of Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now

186 points by onuralp 9y ago

whatyoucantsay 9y ago
> I’ve noticed that everything Pinker writes bears the scars of the hostile mistranslation tactic. Scarcely does he say anything before he turns around and says, “and here’s what I’m not saying”—and then proceeds to ward off five different misreadings so wild they wouldn’t have occurred to me, but then if you read Leon Wieseltier or John Gray or his other critics, there the misreadings are, trotted out triumphantly; it doesn’t even matter how much time Pinker spent trying to prevent them. > I’m depressed, more generally, that for centuries, the Enlightenment has been met by its beneficiaries with such colossal incomprehension and ingratitude. Save 300 million people from smallpox, and you can expect a return a lecture about your naïve and arrogant scientistic reductionism.
- scandox 9y ago
  I'm very sympathetic to Aaronson's position in this review, but I think these two comments reveal the problematic aspect of his position: * In his mind (and that of many others) the Enlightenment is about this special group of people who bestowed gifts on normals. I'm sure he'd challenge that characterisation, but I think that's what it amounts to. So instead of this idea being inclusive it becomes an us and them, in which the us is constantly expecting gratitude, while slightly missing the fact that society as a whole always has to be the enabler for what they do - even when it appears to be resisting them! * That aggressive mistranslation explains away the other POV. I think there is mistranslation but let's ask WHY intelligent people are doing that: because they believe that Pinker (et al) have a dangerous subtext, or that their ideas trend in a specific direction. And there is something in that because consider the tension Aaronson feels: he agrees with Pinker that what happened in the past is good, but feels it is leading to disaster. So - if it was so good - why have we ended up in such a bad place? Enlightment people cannot simply say: "it's not our fault we've tried to stop this". They need to accept that maybe something in their ideas and way of approaching things is part of the problem.
  - Arnt 9y ago
    In his mind, as I see it, the Enlightenment is about this special group, whose membership is defined by doing enlightenment things for us all. Some of the 2m apps on Google Play are written to achieve some goal for you and not interrupt you or grab your attention. I think the people who write such apps are great, and do something very good in a small way. Now, who are these people? That set of people is defined by the good thing they do. Saving 100m people's lives is a bigger act than writing a good smartphone app. The principle is the same: The membership of the group is attained by doing.
  - whatyoucantsay 9y ago
    > "while slightly missing the fact that society as a whole always has to be the enabler for what they do - even when it appears to be resisting them!" Even when society was drowning and burning them to death for heresy? There are a multitude of examples of this, if you care to read histories of the Inquisition. I will give you a starting point—Google "Giordano Bruno" > "They need to accept that maybe something in their (enlightenment) ideas and way of approaching things is part of the problem." :/ > "but let's ask WHY intelligent people are doing that: because they believe that Pinker (et al) have a dangerous subtext, or that their ideas trend in a specific direction." The reasonable answer is because they're highly ideologically motivated, not nearly as intelligent and certainly not as ethical as Pinker.
    - thraway180306 9y ago
      burning them to death for heresy Do you have any examples of actual burning? Of someone who was going around enlightening and got burned for science. Only example I know, Giordano Bruno was as much a scientist as today's theologians and Templeton-sponsored cosmologists; got on the hook for spreading pantheism. Galileo and Copernicus besides not being burnt were also wrong. Church decided to shun them not because of their philosophy (unlike Bruno they were doing surprisingly little theology for the ire that met them), but calculations rightly evaluated to be wrong. In case of Galileo also obnoxious activism asking for persecution. The heresy part came in because of dogma that proper science is god-inspired and thus should be at least somewhat reasonable, which this stuff wasn't at the time (recall, Newton was an alchemist first, the first scientist a second). I can perfectly imagine stuff like this going on in today's groupthink grant system, between suicides of tenured faculty and Prasher turned taxi driver despite Nobel-grade work. ideologically motivated Do you realize that this is tautological? Where do you think ideologies come from if not from reason? Do you, in your arbitrary intelligence, realize that every presumption came to be for a reason? Phenomenon of tradition illustrates that pretty well, even if original reasoning was lost.
- justin66 9y ago
  I've seen Neil deGrasse Tyson discuss the near necessity today of preempting misinterpretation by explicitly explaining what you're not saying. I believe it was during an interview with Sam Harris that's available at least in part on youtube. The reality is that it works to some degree with people who are just in a hurry and might be inclined to misunderstand your argument due to carelessness. In the case where someone is using your work as a prop and they could just as easily be using someone else's work in its place, that sort of writing or speaking does not provide much protection.
- haZard_OS 9y ago
  I see the same phenomena in response to Sam Harris. I would blame shortened attention spans for the misreadings (which seems the fashionable scapegoat today) but even other academics spout nonsense with regards to Pinker and Harris. I am, I confess, deeply puzzled by the responses I read and hear about these two (and a few others).
KarenSatantsby 9y ago
Seven Pinker is a Jewish Comedian in the Shakespearean way. His books have a happy ending. He makes the world a better place through taking something that seems incongruous and makes it fit. So yeah he helps with my depression in a personal and discomfiting way - he is the cognitive behavioral therapist for the world. Re-framing debates - so you are worried about Nuclear power - how often are we really hurt by it.. You are worried your husband will start a war or cheat on you Ms. Trump.. well war is illegal and he is already cheated so we can work towards a resolution. - So it takes real self-evaluation to change - how many people are sick every day because someone does not wash his hands at Chipotle but so many people do wash their hands. What can I do to be a better human in the context of optimism I can try to be kind to be respectful and treat every human with dignity and consideration. I can ask my legislators to not spend money and time on killing people because its not helpful. I can do this.. it does matter and I can.. I can and that is the real gift that Dr. Pinker gives the less educated and less brilliant a voice. It is for all of us - the overly wealthy and the guy who has no 401k and a $100 of twitter stock in Robinhood. You can see how reason makes a difference - how Might and Money does not make right only gets you more Facebook ads. That Greenpeace really is a club for wealthy scions of wealth to wealth about in boats but fur is... kind of icky. But beef is yummy and we will figure out how to grow it more humanely because we want to.
ebbv 9y ago
Pinker has found a fun niche like many authors before him; write books that only the well off and mostly content folks will buy and read and tell them what they want to hear. (Gladwell and many other authors popular among upper middle class and wealthy people play the same game.) And I'm not saying Pinker lies or anything, but he just gives a point of view that is comforting if you're wealthy. His spiel comes down to; "Everything's mostly great, it's not just you, don't worry so much about how great you have it vs the suffering of others. Everything is getting better just as it is." I know that's very reductionist, but to me it's kinda what it boils down to. Gladwell pulls the "The complex issues that people around you tell you are complex? Well they have easy secret answers!" game. I find it all very anti-intellectual and it's disappointing to me that these authors are so popular and widely praised.
- api 9y ago
  I've heard them called "court intellectuals." The problem with Pinker's optimism isn't that it's wrong. If you look at aggregate statistics everything is getting better. The problem is that the distribution of that wealth is shifting toward an extreme hockey stick. A rising tide no longer lifts all boats. Those realities don't show up in aggregate statistics. You get what you measure. In fact it's even worse than that. In certain cases a rising tide sinks many peoples' boats. Case in point: exploding asset prices. The savings of the extremely wealthy are re-invested in issuing more private debt, which in turn inflates the cost of things like real estate and college tuition which makes these basic things less affordable to ordinary people. One person can't afford a house because someone else's money has been parked in real estate. Then there's the fact that advancing technology keeps raising the bar for entry level labor. Eventually the bar gets raised so high that someone with a merely average IQ or who is too young to possess the required experience is no longer profitably employable, leading to mass youth and lower class unemployment. Basically it doesn't matter if everything is getting better for someone else. It matters if it's getting better for you. The trouble is that all the solutions we have to wealth inequality are totalitarian and generally against the grain of enlightenment humanism. The most effective economic levelers are authoritarian socialism and warfare. The latter creates a huge amount of stimulus spending that creates a lot of jobs and effectively redistributes wealth to the working class. Without either forcible redistribution or war, wealth seems to just accumulate at the top due to network effects until the richest 0.01% own everything.
RoutinePlayer 9y ago
To paraphrase Gate, this is my new favorite review of this book :-). The other is http://quillette.com/2018/03/11/steven-pinkers-counter-counter-enlightenment/ http://quillette.com/2018/03/11/steven-pinkers-counter-count... It's simple. Responses to Pinker's writings can be divided into two groups: The rational pessimists and the rational optimists.
- ianamartin 9y ago
  Don't forget Taleb. Not sure if he's optimist or pessimist, but he's definitely not rational.
  - muro 9y ago
    Why is he not rational? I like his highlighting of hidden risk. It's hard to make rational decisions if you don't have all/enough information and there are plenty recent examples of unbounded optimism ending badly.
    - geodel 9y ago
      I think it is because Taleb uses hard statistics to make counter arguments. A pop rationalist will tell us how things have become awesomely awesome over last few hundred years.
- mannykannot 9y ago
  Both of these reviews bring up the matter of irrational responses, in the form of what Aaronson calls 'hostile mistranslation', the willful misinterpretation of the work in order to build whatever straw man the reviewer wants to attack.
  - thraway180306 9y ago
    This matter being itself a cliche in these circles. Rationalist forums are full of denouncing uncharitable critics who intentionally misunderstand what is obviously innocuous and infallible if you would just understand (presumably by god-given charity). I think this knee-jerk reaction is itself irrational. In the above review for example the reviewer builds a straw-man that the critics are anti-science. Calling out religious features of arguments bordering on scientism (it does even have a church!) is not denouncing scientific method.
larsiusprime 9y ago
The nature of the tension between the blessings of the Enlightenment and the general fear of the future Scott expresses here might be rooted in the fact that what modern science and technology has done is increase humanity's raw power. Take for example the case of Fritz Haber [1] -- who with one hand greatly innovated in the use of poison gas for widespread use in war (later used by the Nazis, and against his own people at that), condemning millions to death, and with the other hand greatly innovated chemical fertilizers, arguably saving millions from famine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber We're more powerful as a species than ever before. That means we can do wonderful things previously unimaginable, but it also means our destructive powers have been equally magnified. Problems are solvable, but the big red shiny buttons are redder and bigger and shinier than ever, too. And I'm not just talking about the threat of nuclear war.
- truculation 9y ago
  Tension, yes. The stakes have been raised but there's no going back. We need increasing knowledge, technology and wealth to confront not only the problems of today but problems we don't even know about yet. Any attempt to reverse englightenment values or even just slow down the effects could only degenerate swiftly into violence and make the fears come true. As Karl Popper put it: "The future is open. It is not predetermined and thus cannot be predicted – except by accident. The possibilities that lie in the future are infinite. When I say ‘It is our duty to remain optimists’, this includes not only the openness of the future but also that which all of us contribute to it by everything we do: we are all responsible for what the future holds in store. Thus it is our duty, not to prophesy evil, but, rather, to fight for a better world."
  - larsiusprime 9y ago
    The problem is what constitutes "enlightenment values"? -- I'm sure Haber saw himself as an heir to the enlightenment, meticulously unlocking nature's secrets and bending them to the will of man. But many of the men who's will his inventions fulfilled were evil. As you say, we indeed need power to solve problems, but we must be deeply skeptical of anyone who dismisses or minimizes the importance of critiquing power.
amsilprotag 9y ago
(Pinker lists the following medical researchers and public health crusaders as having saved more than 100 million lives each: Karl Landsteiner, Abel Wolman, Linn Enslow, William Foege, Maurice Hilleman, John Enders. How many of them had you heard of? I’d heard of none.) The first 94 pages are available on Google Books. Here is a link to the page with a table of these researchers' accomplishments and approximate lives saved. https://books.google.com/books?id=J6grDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA64& https://books.google.com/books?id=J6grDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA64&
criddell 9y ago
Offtopic, but I found the right justification made that kind of hard to read. The big mid-sentence spaces read like pauses in my head.
- p3llin0r3 9y ago
  If you use Firefox, you can use the "Reader view" to center align and dark-mode the page contents. I use it constantly, great feature. If you use Pocket, it will do the same thing. I'm sure there is a chrome plugin that does something similar.
  - dsr_ 9y ago
    "Just Read"
  - criddell 9y ago
    I just reloaded the page and did reader view and it makes a huge difference. Thank you for that. It's a nice reminder of just how far the web still has to go as far as typography is concerned.
  - FabHK 9y ago
    Reader View in Safari makes it left aligned, right ragged, which I personally find most pleasant (unless it's professionally typeset justified).
vanderZwan 9y ago
> As I read Pinker, I sometimes imagined a book published in 1923 about the astonishing improvements in the condition of Europe’s Jews following their emancipation. Such a book might argue: look, obviously past results don’t guarantee future returns; all this progress could be wiped out by some freak future event. But for that to happen, an insane number of things would need to go wrong simultaneously: not just one European country but pretty much all of them would need to be taken over by antisemitic lunatics who were somehow also hyper-competent, and who wouldn’t just harass a few Jews here and there until the lunatics lost power, but would systematically hunt down and exterminate all of them with an efficiency the world had never before seen. Also, for some reason the Jews would need to be unable to escape to Palestine or the US or anywhere else. So the sane, sober prediction is that things will just continue to improve, of course with occasional hiccups (but problems are solvable). > Or I thought back to just a few years ago, to the wise people who explained that, sure, for the United States to fall under the control of a racist megalomaniac like Trump would be a catastrophe beyond imagining. Were such a comic-book absurdity realized, there’d be no point even discussing “how to get democracy back on track”; it would already have suffered its extinction-level event. But the good news is that it will never happen, because the voters won’t allow it: a white nationalist authoritarian could never even get nominated, and if he did, he’d lose in a landslide. What did Pat Buchanan get, less than 1% of the vote? But the Nazi's were defeated, anti-Semitism isn't solved but still way less than it used to be, and US citizens are actively fighting Trump & Co. I share the feeling that at some point, we're going to see a mass genocide thanks to either CRISPR-based targeted viruses or hard-to-stop drones being much too easy to weaponise by a single nutcase. The world is always resource constrained, and technologies do enable ever more efficient ways of killing ourselves. These are real things to worry about. But the WWII and Trump examples came about because of a different reason: mass communication. What seems to be missing from Aaronson's review at the societal level, is the insight from Clay Shirky into what enabled both of these things to happen: > So, what happens when a medium suddenly puts a lot of new ideas into circulation? (...) When the telegraph came along, it was clear that it was going to globalize the news industry. What would this lead to? Well, obviously, it would lead to world peace. The television, a medium that allowed us not just to hear but see, literally see, what was going on elsewhere in the world, what would this lead to? World peace. (Laughter) The telephone? You guessed it: world peace. Sorry for the spoiler alert, but no world peace. Not yet. > Even the printing press was assumed to be a tool that was going to enforce Catholic intellectual hegemony across Europe. Instead, what we got was Martin Luther's 95 Theses, the Protestant Reformation, and, you know, the Thirty Years' War. All right, so what all of these predictions of world peace got right is that when a lot of new ideas suddenly come into circulation, it changes society. What they got exactly wrong was what happens next. Shirky then continues to discuss that he believes that the reason we stil think of these technologies as good is because it effectively forced us to become better at arguing. His example is that it enabled things like the scientific revolution[0]. I have yet to read Pinker's newest book, or Better Angels for that matter, so perhaps he addresses these aspect too. I expect him to since he discusses one aspect of this in his earlier language-oriented work: mutual knowledge. Better communication means an improvement in mutual knowledge. And if there is a lot of trauma, resentment and injustice in society, an increase in mutual knowledge brings instability[1]. For example, Shirky's does not explicitly mention what the flaw in the reasoning of the Catholic Church was: it was oblivious or ignorant to the huge injustices in their system. The current craziness is coming about because the existing structures turn out not to be working out so well, and need to be changed. But that will be hard and messy process. [0] https://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_the_internet_will_one_day_transform_government https://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_the_internet_will_... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-son3EJTrU&t=7m40s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-son3EJTrU&t=7m40s
taeric 9y ago
So my advice is this: buy Pinker’s book and read it. Then work for a future where the book’s optimism is justified. I personally hope most get to the conclusion of this review and take it's advice.
maldusiecle 9y ago
The critiques of Pinker that I've found most convincing have focused on his presentation of the Enlightenment's intellectual side. The review by John Gray that Aaronson dismisses has some fairly convincing points, and it's disappointing seeing him travesty Gray's case. It should be pretty obvious to someone with reasonably good reading comprehension that Gray is not saying, as Aaronson suggests he is, that Pinker supports eugenics. Gray's point is that the thinkers who Aaronson presents as defining "Enlightenment values" in fact had much more ambivalent positions. The argument is that one cannot define "Enlightenment values" simplistically--because the Enlightenment thinkers were in disagreement about basic principles. I don't agree with all of Gray's critique--I think Pinker's case that things have improved over the last several centuries is reasonable--but I think this part of his argument is difficult to answer. It's very easy to define praiseworthy "values" if you keep them divorced from real-world arguments, and that seems to be Pinker's approach. Any thinker who can present Enlightenment values as simple and univocal is going to do a poor job understanding things as they are today. Deny the disagreements of the past, and you're sure to miss the substance of today's disagreements. Aaronson is happy to take the "classic liberal" label. I wonder if he's familiar with the work of others who identify as classic liberals right now; my guess, given what I've seen of his writing, is that he'd disagree with many of them pretty strenuously.
- csallen 9y ago
  Did Pinker ever say in his book that every Enlightenment thinker shared the same exact set of values about which there was no disagreement? I seem to recall him saying the opposite at times. The point of the book was not to praise the thinkers of 2-300 years ago, but to identify a subset of the values that really picked up steam around that time and to show how they have contributed to significant progress since. (EDIT: clarity)
  - maldusiecle 9y ago
    Of course he didn't say that literally every Enlightenment thinker shared the exact set of values. Neither I nor Gray are claiming that. But his argument, as I understand it, is that there are a certain determinate set of "Enlightenment values" that these thinkers mostly shared, that Pinker himself shares, and that society as a whole needs to share in order to make progress, stay civilized, etc. Gray's point is that no such set of values exists, that Enlightenment thinkers were always in contradiction with each other, and that people who claim to hew to "Enlightenment values" today are likely to be in fundamental disagreement with each other.
geodel 9y ago
I find the linked review by John Gray more reasonable and mostly because unlike Pinker he does not seems too eager to please affluent with all great things happening around.
d_burfoot 9y ago
A lot of people, including Pinker, seem to make too much of the connection between Good Ideas about philosophy and politics, and the resulting benefits to humanity. On the one hand, sure, good ideas lead to benefits. But good ideas aren't scarce and probably never have been. Anyone who spends some time surfing the internet will find dozens of good ideas that would probably lead to dramatic improvements in human welfare. The limiting factor is the political willingness to try out new ideas. What's special about the Enlightenment era is not that the ideas were good, but that the political systems were willing and able to implement the ideas. Our current political system can't or won't contemplate even small changes to the Way It's Done. And this intolerance to new ideas is not just an unfortunate misrepresentation of the Will of the People: most people really don't like new ideas about politics and will often scream at you for suggesting them.
- AnimalMuppet 9y ago
  > What's special about the Enlightenment era is not that the ideas were good, but that the political systems were willing and able to implement the ideas. I'm not sure that's true. It seems to me more that the people were grabbing on to some Enlightenment ideas, and were willing to implement them over the dead bodies (sometimes literally) of the political system.
  - frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
    >It seems to me more that the people were grabbing on to some Enlightenment ideas, and were willing to implement them over the dead bodies (sometimes literally) of the political system. What makes this seem true to you?
    - AnimalMuppet 9y ago
      The times those ideas were implemented were often revolutions. Certainly the American and French Revolutions, but also the revolutions of 1848. One could argue that England didn't have that, and still wound up with Enlightenment ideas changing their political system. That's true (though the American Revolution was certainly an impact on England). But for almost everywhere else, it seems that there was at least one revolution along the way.
yedava 9y ago
It should be noted that enlightenment era ideals failed to include many classes of the members of homosapiens. Enough credit is not given to those classes who actually fixed the ideals and made them what they are today - universally applicable rights and principles. Slaves had to prove they are humans by spilling their own blood and lives. Women had to prove that they are capable of participating in a democracy and they deserve same rights as men. Colonial subjects had to prove they deserve autonomy, again by suffering violence. Because these members of these groups have remained mostly unknown, haven't we taken the lazy path of showering praise on some specific eras, and some specific set of intellectuals whose writings have been recorded? So how justified is Pinker on laying the foundations of progress on the enlightenment era norms?
- smogcutter 9y ago
  Bingo. Almost as if a philosophy of property rights and political autonomy for the white male bourgeoisie is a byproduct of the rise of the bourgeoisie as an economic class, rather than its cause.
- michaelkeenan 9y ago
  If we trace an idea (like abolition or gender equality) back to its beginnings, we'd expect to find that the idea was controversial. It must take time for an idea to persuade people, even others of the same movement (who might be primarily focused on other aspects of the movement). So I think it can make sense to praise Enlightenment-era anti-slavery thinkers and attribute their anti-slavery to their ideals (especially if that's their explicit reasoning), even if not every Enlightenment thinker was anti-slavery. Wikipedia's article on the Age of Enlightenment lists eight major figures[1]. Of those, four are notable for their opposition to slavery[2]. That method shows less support for gender equality being traceable to the Enlightenment. As far as I can tell, none of the eight major figures supported gender equality. A few of Wikipedia's longer list of Enlightenment intellectuals[3] did (e.g. Marquis de Condorcet, John Locke and Mary Wollstonecraft). If they were the first-ever feminists on the path that led to modern feminism, that's evidence that Enlightenment ideals sparked that. But if the base rate of feminist thinkers was similar in the period before the Enlightenment, then it wouldn't appear that the Enlightenment helped. I don't know the answer to that, though for what it's worth, the Wikipedia article on the history of feminism[4] has a whole section called 18th century: the Age of Enlightenment, so it seems that the writers of that article thought the Enlightenment was relevant. [1] Beccaria, Diderot, Hume, Kant, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Adam Smith, and Voltaire - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Enlightenment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Enlightenment [2] Montesquieu, Rousseau, Adam Smith, and Voltaire [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_intellectuals_of_the_Enlightenment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_intellectuals_of_the_E... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_feminism#18th_century:_the_Age_of_Enlightenment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_feminism#18th_centu...
lowbloodsugar 9y ago
Reviewers conclusion: "So my advice is this: buy Pinker’s book and read it. Then work for a future where the book’s optimism is justified." Please.
FabHK 9y ago
I'm curious why nobody seems to have compared Pinker's book to Julian Simon's 1996 tome The State of Humanity. It's also full of statistics and graphs showing the vast improvements in human life over time leading up to now. Simon's book has been co-opted by the libertarian right (Cato Institute etc.) to show that all is peachy and no government intervention is needed - that's lamentable. However, the underlying facts marshalled and documented in the books of Simon and Pinker - that life is measurably getting better on so many fronts - ought to be better known. EDIT to add: Here's a short article by Simon summarising the message of the book: https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/state-humanity-good-getting-better https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/state-humanity-...
- jamesblonde 9y ago
  i always felt that Hans Roslings message was similarly coopted by the same libertarian right - to the detriment of the world's poorest and the non human inhabitants we share the planet with. it behoves us a to have the bigger picture - the state of humanity must also include our inhabitat, which is in trouble.
- dredmorbius 9y ago
  I don't think co-opted is the accurate term. Simon was of the libertarian right.
  - FabHK 9y ago
    I think you're right. Maybe better to say that he and others (Cato) used his (largely sensible) empirical and historical work to support conclusions that don't follow and libertarian policies that I disagree with.
    - dredmorbius 9y ago
      His work is not sensible.
mcguire 9y ago
"Or I thought back to just a few years ago, to the wise people who explained that, sure, for the United States to fall under the control of a racist megalomaniac like Trump would be a catastrophe beyond imagining. Were such a comic-book absurdity realized, there’d be no point even discussing “how to get democracy back on track”; it would already have suffered its extinction-level event. But the good news is that it will never happen, because the voters won’t allow it: a white nationalist authoritarian could never even get nominated, and if he did, he’d lose in a landslide." I'm not exactly a fan of Trump, but the sheer mass of hyperbole in this article is more irritating than the fiery radiation of a thousand giant elliptical galaxies. I get it, Steven Pinker is the smartest being who has ever lived, evah, but he's blinded by his own beatific, deified optimism and cannot see that we are all well and truly fuck'd, and for the good of the general universe (it's far too late for the mere Earth; "...the very thought of the earth gone desolate—its remaining land barely habitable, its oceans a sewer,...") we should all commit hiri-kiri. But, seriously, if the United States' system of government cannot withstand a single, or even a series, of really poor decision, then it doesn't deserve to survive. (And given what I know about some of the historical presidencies, I hope I can be forgiven for thinking it already has.) Global climate change is bad. But it's not so bad as do leave nothing behind but cockroaches and algae. It may leave the state of Florida as an archipelago of levy-surrounded cities (and cause massive destruction and death in the rest of the world) and destroy the agriculture of the central United States (but that was going to happen anyway, when the Ogalala aquifer runs out of water and the Great Plains returns to being the Great American Desert). It's going to cause a lot of problems, possibly even including the fall of Western Civilization, or at least those countries that make up Western Civilization. But "barely habitable?" Don't get above your station, Scott. As for the Nazis? Bah! Sure, they were bad, but the sum of deaths from WWII, the Soviets, Chinese Communists, and a stack of other genocides don't even seem to be noticeable on the graph of population growth in the 20th century. Humanity in general doesn't really seem to have cared and certainly the rest of the universe doesn't. And the Nazis weren't "a desperate, failed attempt to turn back the ratchet of cosmopolitanism and moral progress, by people who viscerally understood that time and history were against them;" they were a follow-on to WWI, which ate the economies and civilian governments of Europe. If not them, Germany could have gone soviet. Or a corporal from France (or England) could have risen to right-wing totalitarian power.
8bitsrule 9y ago
A Mar 2018 Long Now seminar podcast (with discussion) can be DL'd directly at this link. http://longnow.org/projects/seminars/SALT.xml http://longnow.org/projects/seminars/SALT.xml
zerostar07 9y ago
So, if you’re already an optimist, this book is useless

186 points by onuralp 9y ago

> I’ve noticed that everything Pinker writes bears the scars of the hostile mistranslation tactic. Scarcely does he say anything before he turns around and says, “and here’s what I’m not saying”—and then proceeds to ward off five different misreadings so wild they wouldn’t have occurred to me, but then if you read Leon Wieseltier or John Gray or his other critics, there the misreadings are, trotted out triumphantly; it doesn’t even matter how much time Pinker spent trying to prevent them. > I’m depressed, more generally, that for centuries, the Enlightenment has been met by its beneficiaries with such colossal incomprehension and ingratitude. Save 300 million people from smallpox, and you can expect a return a lecture about your naïve and arrogant scientistic reductionism.

scandox 9y ago
I'm very sympathetic to Aaronson's position in this review, but I think these two comments reveal the problematic aspect of his position: * In his mind (and that of many others) the Enlightenment is about this special group of people who bestowed gifts on normals. I'm sure he'd challenge that characterisation, but I think that's what it amounts to. So instead of this idea being inclusive it becomes an us and them, in which the us is constantly expecting gratitude, while slightly missing the fact that society as a whole always has to be the enabler for what they do - even when it appears to be resisting them! * That aggressive mistranslation explains away the other POV. I think there is mistranslation but let's ask WHY intelligent people are doing that: because they believe that Pinker (et al) have a dangerous subtext, or that their ideas trend in a specific direction. And there is something in that because consider the tension Aaronson feels: he agrees with Pinker that what happened in the past is good, but feels it is leading to disaster. So - if it was so good - why have we ended up in such a bad place? Enlightment people cannot simply say: "it's not our fault we've tried to stop this". They need to accept that maybe something in their ideas and way of approaching things is part of the problem.
- Arnt 9y ago
  In his mind, as I see it, the Enlightenment is about this special group, whose membership is defined by doing enlightenment things for us all. Some of the 2m apps on Google Play are written to achieve some goal for you and not interrupt you or grab your attention. I think the people who write such apps are great, and do something very good in a small way. Now, who are these people? That set of people is defined by the good thing they do. Saving 100m people's lives is a bigger act than writing a good smartphone app. The principle is the same: The membership of the group is attained by doing.
- whatyoucantsay 9y ago
  > "while slightly missing the fact that society as a whole always has to be the enabler for what they do - even when it appears to be resisting them!" Even when society was drowning and burning them to death for heresy? There are a multitude of examples of this, if you care to read histories of the Inquisition. I will give you a starting point—Google "Giordano Bruno" > "They need to accept that maybe something in their (enlightenment) ideas and way of approaching things is part of the problem." :/ > "but let's ask WHY intelligent people are doing that: because they believe that Pinker (et al) have a dangerous subtext, or that their ideas trend in a specific direction." The reasonable answer is because they're highly ideologically motivated, not nearly as intelligent and certainly not as ethical as Pinker.
  - thraway180306 9y ago
    burning them to death for heresy Do you have any examples of actual burning? Of someone who was going around enlightening and got burned for science. Only example I know, Giordano Bruno was as much a scientist as today's theologians and Templeton-sponsored cosmologists; got on the hook for spreading pantheism. Galileo and Copernicus besides not being burnt were also wrong. Church decided to shun them not because of their philosophy (unlike Bruno they were doing surprisingly little theology for the ire that met them), but calculations rightly evaluated to be wrong. In case of Galileo also obnoxious activism asking for persecution. The heresy part came in because of dogma that proper science is god-inspired and thus should be at least somewhat reasonable, which this stuff wasn't at the time (recall, Newton was an alchemist first, the first scientist a second). I can perfectly imagine stuff like this going on in today's groupthink grant system, between suicides of tenured faculty and Prasher turned taxi driver despite Nobel-grade work. ideologically motivated Do you realize that this is tautological? Where do you think ideologies come from if not from reason? Do you, in your arbitrary intelligence, realize that every presumption came to be for a reason? Phenomenon of tradition illustrates that pretty well, even if original reasoning was lost.
justin66 9y ago
I've seen Neil deGrasse Tyson discuss the near necessity today of preempting misinterpretation by explicitly explaining what you're not saying. I believe it was during an interview with Sam Harris that's available at least in part on youtube. The reality is that it works to some degree with people who are just in a hurry and might be inclined to misunderstand your argument due to carelessness. In the case where someone is using your work as a prop and they could just as easily be using someone else's work in its place, that sort of writing or speaking does not provide much protection.
haZard_OS 9y ago
I see the same phenomena in response to Sam Harris. I would blame shortened attention spans for the misreadings (which seems the fashionable scapegoat today) but even other academics spout nonsense with regards to Pinker and Harris. I am, I confess, deeply puzzled by the responses I read and hear about these two (and a few others).

KarenSatantsby 9y ago

Seven Pinker is a Jewish Comedian in the Shakespearean way. His books have a happy ending. He makes the world a better place through taking something that seems incongruous and makes it fit. So yeah he helps with my depression in a personal and discomfiting way - he is the cognitive behavioral therapist for the world. Re-framing debates - so you are worried about Nuclear power - how often are we really hurt by it.. You are worried your husband will start a war or cheat on you Ms. Trump.. well war is illegal and he is already cheated so we can work towards a resolution. - So it takes real self-evaluation to change - how many people are sick every day because someone does not wash his hands at Chipotle but so many people do wash their hands. What can I do to be a better human in the context of optimism I can try to be kind to be respectful and treat every human with dignity and consideration. I can ask my legislators to not spend money and time on killing people because its not helpful. I can do this.. it does matter and I can.. I can and that is the real gift that Dr. Pinker gives the less educated and less brilliant a voice. It is for all of us - the overly wealthy and the guy who has no 401k and a $100 of twitter stock in Robinhood. You can see how reason makes a difference - how Might and Money does not make right only gets you more Facebook ads. That Greenpeace really is a club for wealthy scions of wealth to wealth about in boats but fur is... kind of icky. But beef is yummy and we will figure out how to grow it more humanely because we want to.

ebbv 9y ago

Pinker has found a fun niche like many authors before him; write books that only the well off and mostly content folks will buy and read and tell them what they want to hear. (Gladwell and many other authors popular among upper middle class and wealthy people play the same game.) And I'm not saying Pinker lies or anything, but he just gives a point of view that is comforting if you're wealthy. His spiel comes down to; "Everything's mostly great, it's not just you, don't worry so much about how great you have it vs the suffering of others. Everything is getting better just as it is." I know that's very reductionist, but to me it's kinda what it boils down to. Gladwell pulls the "The complex issues that people around you tell you are complex? Well they have easy secret answers!" game. I find it all very anti-intellectual and it's disappointing to me that these authors are so popular and widely praised.

api 9y ago
I've heard them called "court intellectuals." The problem with Pinker's optimism isn't that it's wrong. If you look at aggregate statistics everything is getting better. The problem is that the distribution of that wealth is shifting toward an extreme hockey stick. A rising tide no longer lifts all boats. Those realities don't show up in aggregate statistics. You get what you measure. In fact it's even worse than that. In certain cases a rising tide sinks many peoples' boats. Case in point: exploding asset prices. The savings of the extremely wealthy are re-invested in issuing more private debt, which in turn inflates the cost of things like real estate and college tuition which makes these basic things less affordable to ordinary people. One person can't afford a house because someone else's money has been parked in real estate. Then there's the fact that advancing technology keeps raising the bar for entry level labor. Eventually the bar gets raised so high that someone with a merely average IQ or who is too young to possess the required experience is no longer profitably employable, leading to mass youth and lower class unemployment. Basically it doesn't matter if everything is getting better for someone else. It matters if it's getting better for you. The trouble is that all the solutions we have to wealth inequality are totalitarian and generally against the grain of enlightenment humanism. The most effective economic levelers are authoritarian socialism and warfare. The latter creates a huge amount of stimulus spending that creates a lot of jobs and effectively redistributes wealth to the working class. Without either forcible redistribution or war, wealth seems to just accumulate at the top due to network effects until the richest 0.01% own everything.

RoutinePlayer 9y ago

To paraphrase Gate, this is my new favorite review of this book :-). The other is http://quillette.com/2018/03/11/steven-pinkers-counter-counter-enlightenment/ http://quillette.com/2018/03/11/steven-pinkers-counter-count... It's simple. Responses to Pinker's writings can be divided into two groups: The rational pessimists and the rational optimists.

ianamartin 9y ago
Don't forget Taleb. Not sure if he's optimist or pessimist, but he's definitely not rational.
- muro 9y ago
  Why is he not rational? I like his highlighting of hidden risk. It's hard to make rational decisions if you don't have all/enough information and there are plenty recent examples of unbounded optimism ending badly.
  - geodel 9y ago
    I think it is because Taleb uses hard statistics to make counter arguments. A pop rationalist will tell us how things have become awesomely awesome over last few hundred years.
mannykannot 9y ago
Both of these reviews bring up the matter of irrational responses, in the form of what Aaronson calls 'hostile mistranslation', the willful misinterpretation of the work in order to build whatever straw man the reviewer wants to attack.
- thraway180306 9y ago
  This matter being itself a cliche in these circles. Rationalist forums are full of denouncing uncharitable critics who intentionally misunderstand what is obviously innocuous and infallible if you would just understand (presumably by god-given charity). I think this knee-jerk reaction is itself irrational. In the above review for example the reviewer builds a straw-man that the critics are anti-science. Calling out religious features of arguments bordering on scientism (it does even have a church!) is not denouncing scientific method.

larsiusprime 9y ago

The nature of the tension between the blessings of the Enlightenment and the general fear of the future Scott expresses here might be rooted in the fact that what modern science and technology has done is increase humanity's raw power. Take for example the case of Fritz Haber [1] -- who with one hand greatly innovated in the use of poison gas for widespread use in war (later used by the Nazis, and against his own people at that), condemning millions to death, and with the other hand greatly innovated chemical fertilizers, arguably saving millions from famine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber We're more powerful as a species than ever before. That means we can do wonderful things previously unimaginable, but it also means our destructive powers have been equally magnified. Problems are solvable, but the big red shiny buttons are redder and bigger and shinier than ever, too. And I'm not just talking about the threat of nuclear war.

truculation 9y ago
Tension, yes. The stakes have been raised but there's no going back. We need increasing knowledge, technology and wealth to confront not only the problems of today but problems we don't even know about yet. Any attempt to reverse englightenment values or even just slow down the effects could only degenerate swiftly into violence and make the fears come true. As Karl Popper put it: "The future is open. It is not predetermined and thus cannot be predicted – except by accident. The possibilities that lie in the future are infinite. When I say ‘It is our duty to remain optimists’, this includes not only the openness of the future but also that which all of us contribute to it by everything we do: we are all responsible for what the future holds in store. Thus it is our duty, not to prophesy evil, but, rather, to fight for a better world."
- larsiusprime 9y ago
  The problem is what constitutes "enlightenment values"? -- I'm sure Haber saw himself as an heir to the enlightenment, meticulously unlocking nature's secrets and bending them to the will of man. But many of the men who's will his inventions fulfilled were evil. As you say, we indeed need power to solve problems, but we must be deeply skeptical of anyone who dismisses or minimizes the importance of critiquing power.

amsilprotag 9y ago

(Pinker lists the following medical researchers and public health crusaders as having saved more than 100 million lives each: Karl Landsteiner, Abel Wolman, Linn Enslow, William Foege, Maurice Hilleman, John Enders. How many of them had you heard of? I’d heard of none.) The first 94 pages are available on Google Books. Here is a link to the page with a table of these researchers' accomplishments and approximate lives saved. https://books.google.com/books?id=J6grDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA64& https://books.google.com/books?id=J6grDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA64&

criddell 9y ago

Offtopic, but I found the right justification made that kind of hard to read. The big mid-sentence spaces read like pauses in my head.

p3llin0r3 9y ago
If you use Firefox, you can use the "Reader view" to center align and dark-mode the page contents. I use it constantly, great feature. If you use Pocket, it will do the same thing. I'm sure there is a chrome plugin that does something similar.
- dsr_ 9y ago
  "Just Read"
- criddell 9y ago
  I just reloaded the page and did reader view and it makes a huge difference. Thank you for that. It's a nice reminder of just how far the web still has to go as far as typography is concerned.
- FabHK 9y ago
  Reader View in Safari makes it left aligned, right ragged, which I personally find most pleasant (unless it's professionally typeset justified).

vanderZwan 9y ago

> As I read Pinker, I sometimes imagined a book published in 1923 about the astonishing improvements in the condition of Europe’s Jews following their emancipation. Such a book might argue: look, obviously past results don’t guarantee future returns; all this progress could be wiped out by some freak future event. But for that to happen, an insane number of things would need to go wrong simultaneously: not just one European country but pretty much all of them would need to be taken over by antisemitic lunatics who were somehow also hyper-competent, and who wouldn’t just harass a few Jews here and there until the lunatics lost power, but would systematically hunt down and exterminate all of them with an efficiency the world had never before seen. Also, for some reason the Jews would need to be unable to escape to Palestine or the US or anywhere else. So the sane, sober prediction is that things will just continue to improve, of course with occasional hiccups (but problems are solvable). > Or I thought back to just a few years ago, to the wise people who explained that, sure, for the United States to fall under the control of a racist megalomaniac like Trump would be a catastrophe beyond imagining. Were such a comic-book absurdity realized, there’d be no point even discussing “how to get democracy back on track”; it would already have suffered its extinction-level event. But the good news is that it will never happen, because the voters won’t allow it: a white nationalist authoritarian could never even get nominated, and if he did, he’d lose in a landslide. What did Pat Buchanan get, less than 1% of the vote? But the Nazi's were defeated, anti-Semitism isn't solved but still way less than it used to be, and US citizens are actively fighting Trump & Co. I share the feeling that at some point, we're going to see a mass genocide thanks to either CRISPR-based targeted viruses or hard-to-stop drones being much too easy to weaponise by a single nutcase. The world is always resource constrained, and technologies do enable ever more efficient ways of killing ourselves. These are real things to worry about. But the WWII and Trump examples came about because of a different reason: mass communication. What seems to be missing from Aaronson's review at the societal level, is the insight from Clay Shirky into what enabled both of these things to happen: > So, what happens when a medium suddenly puts a lot of new ideas into circulation? (...) When the telegraph came along, it was clear that it was going to globalize the news industry. What would this lead to? Well, obviously, it would lead to world peace. The television, a medium that allowed us not just to hear but see, literally see, what was going on elsewhere in the world, what would this lead to? World peace. (Laughter) The telephone? You guessed it: world peace. Sorry for the spoiler alert, but no world peace. Not yet. > Even the printing press was assumed to be a tool that was going to enforce Catholic intellectual hegemony across Europe. Instead, what we got was Martin Luther's 95 Theses, the Protestant Reformation, and, you know, the Thirty Years' War. All right, so what all of these predictions of world peace got right is that when a lot of new ideas suddenly come into circulation, it changes society. What they got exactly wrong was what happens next. Shirky then continues to discuss that he believes that the reason we stil think of these technologies as good is because it effectively forced us to become better at arguing. His example is that it enabled things like the scientific revolution[0]. I have yet to read Pinker's newest book, or Better Angels for that matter, so perhaps he addresses these aspect too. I expect him to since he discusses one aspect of this in his earlier language-oriented work: mutual knowledge. Better communication means an improvement in mutual knowledge. And if there is a lot of trauma, resentment and injustice in society, an increase in mutual knowledge brings instability[1]. For example, Shirky's does not explicitly mention what the flaw in the reasoning of the Catholic Church was: it was oblivious or ignorant to the huge injustices in their system. The current craziness is coming about because the existing structures turn out not to be working out so well, and need to be changed. But that will be hard and messy process. [0] https://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_the_internet_will_one_day_transform_government https://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_the_internet_will_... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-son3EJTrU&t=7m40s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-son3EJTrU&t=7m40s

taeric 9y ago

So my advice is this: buy Pinker’s book and read it. Then work for a future where the book’s optimism is justified. I personally hope most get to the conclusion of this review and take it's advice.

maldusiecle 9y ago

The critiques of Pinker that I've found most convincing have focused on his presentation of the Enlightenment's intellectual side. The review by John Gray that Aaronson dismisses has some fairly convincing points, and it's disappointing seeing him travesty Gray's case. It should be pretty obvious to someone with reasonably good reading comprehension that Gray is not saying, as Aaronson suggests he is, that Pinker supports eugenics. Gray's point is that the thinkers who Aaronson presents as defining "Enlightenment values" in fact had much more ambivalent positions. The argument is that one cannot define "Enlightenment values" simplistically--because the Enlightenment thinkers were in disagreement about basic principles. I don't agree with all of Gray's critique--I think Pinker's case that things have improved over the last several centuries is reasonable--but I think this part of his argument is difficult to answer. It's very easy to define praiseworthy "values" if you keep them divorced from real-world arguments, and that seems to be Pinker's approach. Any thinker who can present Enlightenment values as simple and univocal is going to do a poor job understanding things as they are today. Deny the disagreements of the past, and you're sure to miss the substance of today's disagreements. Aaronson is happy to take the "classic liberal" label. I wonder if he's familiar with the work of others who identify as classic liberals right now; my guess, given what I've seen of his writing, is that he'd disagree with many of them pretty strenuously.

csallen 9y ago
Did Pinker ever say in his book that every Enlightenment thinker shared the same exact set of values about which there was no disagreement? I seem to recall him saying the opposite at times. The point of the book was not to praise the thinkers of 2-300 years ago, but to identify a subset of the values that really picked up steam around that time and to show how they have contributed to significant progress since. (EDIT: clarity)
- maldusiecle 9y ago
  Of course he didn't say that literally every Enlightenment thinker shared the exact set of values. Neither I nor Gray are claiming that. But his argument, as I understand it, is that there are a certain determinate set of "Enlightenment values" that these thinkers mostly shared, that Pinker himself shares, and that society as a whole needs to share in order to make progress, stay civilized, etc. Gray's point is that no such set of values exists, that Enlightenment thinkers were always in contradiction with each other, and that people who claim to hew to "Enlightenment values" today are likely to be in fundamental disagreement with each other.

geodel 9y ago

I find the linked review by John Gray more reasonable and mostly because unlike Pinker he does not seems too eager to please affluent with all great things happening around.

d_burfoot 9y ago

A lot of people, including Pinker, seem to make too much of the connection between Good Ideas about philosophy and politics, and the resulting benefits to humanity. On the one hand, sure, good ideas lead to benefits. But good ideas aren't scarce and probably never have been. Anyone who spends some time surfing the internet will find dozens of good ideas that would probably lead to dramatic improvements in human welfare. The limiting factor is the political willingness to try out new ideas. What's special about the Enlightenment era is not that the ideas were good, but that the political systems were willing and able to implement the ideas. Our current political system can't or won't contemplate even small changes to the Way It's Done. And this intolerance to new ideas is not just an unfortunate misrepresentation of the Will of the People: most people really don't like new ideas about politics and will often scream at you for suggesting them.

AnimalMuppet 9y ago
> What's special about the Enlightenment era is not that the ideas were good, but that the political systems were willing and able to implement the ideas. I'm not sure that's true. It seems to me more that the people were grabbing on to some Enlightenment ideas, and were willing to implement them over the dead bodies (sometimes literally) of the political system.
- frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
  >It seems to me more that the people were grabbing on to some Enlightenment ideas, and were willing to implement them over the dead bodies (sometimes literally) of the political system. What makes this seem true to you?
  - AnimalMuppet 9y ago
    The times those ideas were implemented were often revolutions. Certainly the American and French Revolutions, but also the revolutions of 1848. One could argue that England didn't have that, and still wound up with Enlightenment ideas changing their political system. That's true (though the American Revolution was certainly an impact on England). But for almost everywhere else, it seems that there was at least one revolution along the way.

yedava 9y ago

It should be noted that enlightenment era ideals failed to include many classes of the members of homosapiens. Enough credit is not given to those classes who actually fixed the ideals and made them what they are today - universally applicable rights and principles. Slaves had to prove they are humans by spilling their own blood and lives. Women had to prove that they are capable of participating in a democracy and they deserve same rights as men. Colonial subjects had to prove they deserve autonomy, again by suffering violence. Because these members of these groups have remained mostly unknown, haven't we taken the lazy path of showering praise on some specific eras, and some specific set of intellectuals whose writings have been recorded? So how justified is Pinker on laying the foundations of progress on the enlightenment era norms?

smogcutter 9y ago
Bingo. Almost as if a philosophy of property rights and political autonomy for the white male bourgeoisie is a byproduct of the rise of the bourgeoisie as an economic class, rather than its cause.
michaelkeenan 9y ago
If we trace an idea (like abolition or gender equality) back to its beginnings, we'd expect to find that the idea was controversial. It must take time for an idea to persuade people, even others of the same movement (who might be primarily focused on other aspects of the movement). So I think it can make sense to praise Enlightenment-era anti-slavery thinkers and attribute their anti-slavery to their ideals (especially if that's their explicit reasoning), even if not every Enlightenment thinker was anti-slavery. Wikipedia's article on the Age of Enlightenment lists eight major figures[1]. Of those, four are notable for their opposition to slavery[2]. That method shows less support for gender equality being traceable to the Enlightenment. As far as I can tell, none of the eight major figures supported gender equality. A few of Wikipedia's longer list of Enlightenment intellectuals[3] did (e.g. Marquis de Condorcet, John Locke and Mary Wollstonecraft). If they were the first-ever feminists on the path that led to modern feminism, that's evidence that Enlightenment ideals sparked that. But if the base rate of feminist thinkers was similar in the period before the Enlightenment, then it wouldn't appear that the Enlightenment helped. I don't know the answer to that, though for what it's worth, the Wikipedia article on the history of feminism[4] has a whole section called 18th century: the Age of Enlightenment, so it seems that the writers of that article thought the Enlightenment was relevant. [1] Beccaria, Diderot, Hume, Kant, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Adam Smith, and Voltaire - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Enlightenment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Enlightenment [2] Montesquieu, Rousseau, Adam Smith, and Voltaire [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_intellectuals_of_the_Enlightenment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_intellectuals_of_the_E... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_feminism#18th_century:_the_Age_of_Enlightenment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_feminism#18th_centu...

lowbloodsugar 9y ago

Reviewers conclusion: "So my advice is this: buy Pinker’s book and read it. Then work for a future where the book’s optimism is justified." Please.

FabHK 9y ago

I'm curious why nobody seems to have compared Pinker's book to Julian Simon's 1996 tome The State of Humanity. It's also full of statistics and graphs showing the vast improvements in human life over time leading up to now. Simon's book has been co-opted by the libertarian right (Cato Institute etc.) to show that all is peachy and no government intervention is needed - that's lamentable. However, the underlying facts marshalled and documented in the books of Simon and Pinker - that life is measurably getting better on so many fronts - ought to be better known. EDIT to add: Here's a short article by Simon summarising the message of the book: https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/state-humanity-good-getting-better https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/state-humanity-...

jamesblonde 9y ago
i always felt that Hans Roslings message was similarly coopted by the same libertarian right - to the detriment of the world's poorest and the non human inhabitants we share the planet with. it behoves us a to have the bigger picture - the state of humanity must also include our inhabitat, which is in trouble.
dredmorbius 9y ago
I don't think co-opted is the accurate term. Simon was of the libertarian right.
- FabHK 9y ago
  I think you're right. Maybe better to say that he and others (Cato) used his (largely sensible) empirical and historical work to support conclusions that don't follow and libertarian policies that I disagree with.
  - dredmorbius 9y ago
    His work is not sensible.

mcguire 9y ago

"Or I thought back to just a few years ago, to the wise people who explained that, sure, for the United States to fall under the control of a racist megalomaniac like Trump would be a catastrophe beyond imagining. Were such a comic-book absurdity realized, there’d be no point even discussing “how to get democracy back on track”; it would already have suffered its extinction-level event. But the good news is that it will never happen, because the voters won’t allow it: a white nationalist authoritarian could never even get nominated, and if he did, he’d lose in a landslide." I'm not exactly a fan of Trump, but the sheer mass of hyperbole in this article is more irritating than the fiery radiation of a thousand giant elliptical galaxies. I get it, Steven Pinker is the smartest being who has ever lived, evah, but he's blinded by his own beatific, deified optimism and cannot see that we are all well and truly fuck'd, and for the good of the general universe (it's far too late for the mere Earth; "...the very thought of the earth gone desolate—its remaining land barely habitable, its oceans a sewer,...") we should all commit hiri-kiri. But, seriously, if the United States' system of government cannot withstand a single, or even a series, of really poor decision, then it doesn't deserve to survive. (And given what I know about some of the historical presidencies, I hope I can be forgiven for thinking it already has.) Global climate change is bad. But it's not so bad as do leave nothing behind but cockroaches and algae. It may leave the state of Florida as an archipelago of levy-surrounded cities (and cause massive destruction and death in the rest of the world) and destroy the agriculture of the central United States (but that was going to happen anyway, when the Ogalala aquifer runs out of water and the Great Plains returns to being the Great American Desert). It's going to cause a lot of problems, possibly even including the fall of Western Civilization, or at least those countries that make up Western Civilization. But "barely habitable?" Don't get above your station, Scott. As for the Nazis? Bah! Sure, they were bad, but the sum of deaths from WWII, the Soviets, Chinese Communists, and a stack of other genocides don't even seem to be noticeable on the graph of population growth in the 20th century. Humanity in general doesn't really seem to have cared and certainly the rest of the universe doesn't. And the Nazis weren't "a desperate, failed attempt to turn back the ratchet of cosmopolitanism and moral progress, by people who viscerally understood that time and history were against them;" they were a follow-on to WWI, which ate the economies and civilian governments of Europe. If not them, Germany could have gone soviet. Or a corporal from France (or England) could have risen to right-wing totalitarian power.

8bitsrule 9y ago

A Mar 2018 Long Now seminar podcast (with discussion) can be DL'd directly at this link. http://longnow.org/projects/seminars/SALT.xml http://longnow.org/projects/seminars/SALT.xml

zerostar07 9y ago

So, if you’re already an optimist, this book is useless