People are living longer, healthier, freer, and happier lives, and while our problems are. Reply to a 2019 article in The Guardian by J. 127K views 3 years ago Authors at Google If you think the world is coming to an end, think again. Steven Pinker's Counter-Counter-Enlightenment So writes eternal optimist Pinker (Psychology/Harvard Univ.

The Fake News Campaign Against Steven Pinker and Enlightenment Now The bomb The plague Trump Not to worry things are getting better. He posits that reason, science, and humanism (all. With intellectual depth and literary flair, Pinker makes the case for reason, science, and humanism: the ideals we need to confront our problems and continue our progress.Įnlightenment Wars: Some Reflections on ‘Enlightenment Now,’ One Year Later Life is better today than it has ever been before and Steven Pinker has the data to show us how and why. The result is a corrosive fatalism and a willingness to wreck the precious institutions of liberal democracy and global cooperation. Many commentators, committed to political, religious, or romantic ideologies, fight a rearguard action against it. The Enlightenment project swims against currents of human nature-tribalism, authoritarianism, demonization, magical thinking-which demagogues are all too willing to exploit. Steven Pinker, the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, is an experimental cognitive scientist and one of the world's foremost. But more than ever, it needs a vigorous defense. It is a gift of the Enlightenment: the conviction that reason and science can enhance human flourishing.įar from being a naïve hope, the Enlightenment, we now know, has worked. This progress is not the result of some cosmic force. Instead, follow the data: In 75 jaw-dropping graphs, Pinker shows that life, health, prosperity, safety, peace, knowledge, and happiness are on the rise, not just in the West, but worldwide. Is the world really falling apart? Is the ideal of progress obsolete? In this elegant assessment of the human condition in the third millennium, cognitive scientist and public intellectual Steven Pinker urges us to step back from the gory headlines and prophecies of doom, which play to our psychological biases. 'My new favorite book of all time.' - Bill Gates

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