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The thing is, how can you trust Pinker's interpretation of the Enlightenment? Pinker thinks the Enlightenment was an important engine of 'progress,' but John Lo
by zasz 9y ago
The thing is, how can you trust Pinker's interpretation of the Enlightenment? Pinker thinks the Enlightenment was an important engine of 'progress,' but John Locke was a tremendously influential Enlightenment thinker who argued in defense of slavery, who owned shares in a slave-trading company. (http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0090591713485446?journalCode=ptxa http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0090591713485446...)
Locke was also responsible for many of the ideas surrounding natural rights that are now enshrined in the American Constitution, but from the perspective of an African slave, Locke was not progressive.
Thomas Hobbes was even more illiberal than Locke. He didn't even believe in natural rights at all, and he would have hated democracy.
Pinker's getting a lot wrong that he can't cover for just by making a token nod to the vagueness of exactly when the Enlightenment started. His poor understanding of what the Enlightenment was, who was in it, and what they actually believed means that whatever story he tells of human progress is going to be fundamentally flawed.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- csallen 9y agoAgain, the point of the book is not to cover the history of the Enlightenment, to praise or judge the Enlightenment thinkers themselves, or to defend some "correct" interpretation or definition of what the Enlightenment entailed. You're arguing against a strawman. The point of the book is that reason, science, and humanism are valuable ideas that have helped us progress as a species since the Enlightenment, and that they continue to drive progress today.
- FranzFerdiNaN 9y agoIf he simply ignores everything he doesn't like about the thinkers he writes about, his book is useless. His earlier book, Better Angels Of Our Nature, was also terribly wrong in presenting the hunter-gatherer state of humans as being much more violent than archeologists and anthropologists think, just to present his case that civilization is a good thing. So I don't have much faith in this book, as he clearly starts with a certain idea (civilization is needed because the human being is inherently violent) and looks for arguments to support it instead of the other way around. He should probably stick to his own field of psychology.
- csallen 9y ago> If he simply ignores everything he doesn't like about the thinkers he writes about, his book is useless. This makes zero sense. If I write a guide about how to use red paint to create beautiful paintings, is my guide useless if it fails to acknowledge the atrocities that may or may not have been committed by the inventor of red paint? Of course not. > Better Angels Of Our Nature, was also terribly wrong in presenting the hunter-gatherer state of humans as being much more violent than archeologists and anthropologists think He supported his position with loads of strong evidence. Your counterargument, however, presents no evidence.