Sean Illingĭo you blame the media for cementing this impression that everything is broken and awful? Steven Pinker But the objective record shows that progress has taken place, and it’s really an enormous success story. Human welfare has improved dramatically, and it’s improved by almost any measure you like - longevity, health, prosperity, education, literacy, leisure time, and on and on.Īll of these have increased, and yet you’re likely to draw the opposite impression from reading headlines or watching cable news. I try to call attention to the fact that the Enlightenment project has succeeded wildly, and we don’t fully appreciate that fact. What we get with the Enlightenment is a shared and deliberate effort to use knowledge and sympathy to enhance human flourishing. The parts of the Enlightenment that I’m singling out for praise are the goal of enhancing human well-being and the means of understanding the way the world works through science and reason. What is the Enlightenment, and what story does the data about violence, education, wealth, etc. It’s not to make people feel better about the future so much as to make them appreciative of what we’ve accomplished in the past, because what will happen in the future very much depends on the choices that we make now. Do you see yourself as deliberately pushing back against a pervasive pessimism? Steven Pinker I feel like you’re waging a heroic campaign to make us all feel better. I spoke with him about why he’s so optimistic about the future and about why I’m not.Ī lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows. He also rebuts dystopian arguments about the dangers of technology, particularly artificial intelligence. Pinker highlights the data on education, literacy, wealth, and longevity to make the broader case that life, on the whole, is getting better. This is basically the period in which the spirit of science - reason, evidence-based thinking, and the belief that knowledge can be used to improve the human condition - exploded in the Western world. Pinker zooms back and examines the “big picture of human progress” since the late 18th century, right around the time the Enlightenment Age kicked off. His latest book, Enlightenment Now, doubles down on this argument. His last book, The Better Angels of our Nature, looked at the data and showed that violence has declined steadily throughout human history, and that the present age is in fact the safest we’ve ever seen. Steven Pinker, a Harvard psychologist and author of Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, has been arguing for years that this is an illusion.
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