STEVEN PINKER’S CASE FOR REASON, SCIENCE, HUMANISM AND PROGRESS
Pessimism is at odds with reality
Things aren’t that bad. Or so author Steven Pinker would like to suggest. In “Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress,” Mr. Pinker argues that even though it may feel as if our world is out of control, we are actually living in golden times. We just need a history lesson. And a remedial course in Enlightenment principles.
Today, the world enjoys an unprecedented low poverty rate, a low occurrence of war, advances in medicine that eradicate diseases such as smallpox and polio, and wonders of science and technology that would be seen as magic by past generations. Extreme poverty, the state for most people in the world since time immemorial, has been reduced from 90 percent to less than 10percent in the past 200 years.
Literacy, democracy, health, civil rights and happiness have improved by substantial measure within a few generations. For Mr. Pinker, all of these are universal standards of progress that any reasonable person would agree upon. After millennia of wayward barbarity, the Enlightenment ideals of reason, humanism and science steered humanity in the right direction. The important thing now is not to abandon them.
But this is what Mr. Pinker is afraid of, and what drives “Enlightenment Now.” His book has two points to make: that things are much better than popular sentiment would have you believe and that any mistrust in the merits of reason, science and humanism is unfounded, foolish and harmful to making the world a better place. With a wealth of knowledge, graphs and statistics, a strong grasp of history and an engaging style of writing, he not only defends the usefulness of Enlightenment ideals in the world today, but also he contends that they are the only stars to guide us on our way.
The fact that this is both sorely needed and such an unpopular stance is how we get his imperative title. After a few chapters, it begins to sound like a picketer’s chant — “What do we want?” “Enlightenment!” “When do we want it?” “Now!”
The popular view that the world is awash in moral decay and economic crisis is hard to justify in the context of human history. But what both the left and the right have in common is a discontent about the state of things in the world. Mr. Pinker, true to his high regard for enlightening, sheds light on a variety of subjects such as inequality, health, the environment, terrorism, peace and quality of life. Indeed, “Enlightenment Now” provides a convincing case for gratitude.
In one section, Mr. Pinker points out that while the news may veer toward the negative on a daily basis, if newspapers came out only once every 50 years they might include bold print headlines such as “Life Expectancy Increases, Again!,” “Global Wealth Triples!” or “Polio and Smallpox Vanquished!” With a little statistical leeway, he argues that they could have even run the headline “Number of People in Extreme Poverty Fell by 137,000 Since Yesterday” every day for the past 25 years.
Mr. Pinker isn’t saying that we aren’t without our problems, but he stresses that accuracy is better than being either gloomy or obtuse. There are no golden epochs of the past that live up to nostalgia, just as there are no eras without their troubles. Consider Barack Obama’s thought experiment: “If you had to choose a moment in history to be born, and you did not know ahead of time who you would be .... You’d choose right now.”
So if things truly aren’t so bad, why is there a prevailing sentiment that they are? Well, even though they say never to discuss religion or politics at work, Mr. Pinker does both. Religion, in its romantic conceptions of belief without evidence, is scrutinized for its usual incongruences with science.
Politics takes the brunt of the blame. The politicization of fact and identity politics being the things most inimical to reason. (Poignantly, while I was reading “Enlightenment Now” someone commented that Steven Pinker is good friends with Bill Gates, who in turn is a major contributor to the Clinton Foundation. As if he had just foiled some plot!)
As a cognitive psychologist, however, Mr. Pinker’s exploration of the tricky ways that cognitive biases subtly affect our understanding of the world is most compelling. From confirmation biases and availability heuristics, to a paradox of rationally choosing tribal allegiance over rationality, “Enlightenment Now” offers up important ideas about not only the world itself, but also in how we make it our own.
“ENLIGHTENMENT NOW: THE CASE FOR REASON, SCIENCE, HUMANISM, AND PROGRESS” By Steven Pinker Viking ($35)