Enlightenment Now
Allen Lane 576pp £25 The Week Bookshop £23 (incl. p&p)
Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011) argued that humanity has become progressively less violent over the centuries, said John Carey in The Sunday Times. Enlightenment Now, a sequel to that volume, “catalogues other aspects of life that have improved”. Pinker (right) draws on a wealth of empirical data to show that life today is objectively better than at any previous point in history. For example, disease and famine are at their lowest ever levels; the world is “100 times wealthier than it was 200 years ago”; traffic accidents and even lightning strikes are vastly less common than they were in the early 20th century. Pinker attributes all this to reason and science, the “guiding principles of the 18th century Enlightenment”. He is exasperated by claims that progress has stalled and thinks that humanity “has scant gratitude for the improvements engineered on its behalf”. While Pinker’s thinking has its blind spots – he finds the continuing appeal of religion baffling – Enlightenment Now “brims with fact and challenge”.
This is a “wonderfully expansive” book by a writer whose command of quantitative data is “awesome”, said William Davies in The Guardian. Yet its argument relies on some “questionable political manoeuvres”. Through a selective reading of history, Pinker manages to position the Enlightenment, reason and science on the right side of every argument and conflict. Meanwhile, “every horror of the past two centuries is put down to ignorance, irrationality or ‘counter-enlightenment’ trends”.
The basic problem is that Pinker’s understanding of the Enlightenment is extraordinarily crude, said John Gray in the New Statesman. He depicts it as a great leap in human understanding that “produced all of the progress of the modern era and none of its crimes”. In fact, the Enlightenment was a complex, disparate movement with both rationalist and anti-rationalist strains, and which gave rise not only to modern science and liberal democracy, but also the “murderous totalitarianism” of Stalin and Hitler. With his “laborious graphs”, Pinker presents his book as a scholarly exercise, when in fact it’s a “rationalist sermon” designed to ease the anxieties of today’s liberals. I disagree, said David Aaronovitch in The Times. This book is an important – and often richly entertaining – refutation of the trendy doctrine of “progressophoboia”. Because progress is not seen as heroic, it tends to be “badly undersold”. Pinker uses this book to resell it – and he “does a pretty good job”.