The book is really a polemic, albeit one with a vast number of footnotes. 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. Is the world really falling apart? Pinker does identify three scientific theories that have arisen since the 18th century, and which form an indispensable part of the scientific imagination: evolution, entropy and information. The big reveal at the end of the book is of the single thinker whose ideas capture, and perhaps even cause, everything that is wrong with today’s world: Friedrich Nietzsche.This is Pinker at his bluntest and least imaginative, suggesting that he has allowed American campus politics to get to him.

Adaptations and Essays. This (as Nietzsche noted) makes science harder, not easier. Is the ideal of progress obsolete?

Enlightenment Wars: Some Reflections on ‘Enlightenment Now,’ One Year Later.

“Quite possibly, had there been no Nazis, there would be no nukes.”What he won’t countenance, but which theorists such as Max Weber, This line of argument is rubbished as the obsession of “leftist intellectuals” and “postmodernists”, who are characterised in the most extraordinary terms as figures nostalgic for mills and mines “probably because they never worked in one”, who “poison voters” against progress, and believe “liberal democracy is the same as fascism” (the footnotes suddenly dry up at these points). Environmentalists “capitalise on primitive intuitions of essentialism and contamination among the scientifically illiterate public”, while research suggests that “most voters are ignorant not just of current policy options but of basic facts”. 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.

In his new book, Pinker points out that the slow creep of progress is not as newsworthy as, say, an earthquake or … Steven Pinker’s answer to this problem is to double down on progress: the policies of the past 300 years are still the best available. Perhaps making this argument makes me a “leftist intellectual”, but I couldn’t help finding it a more appealing – even affecting – ethical pitch than the triumphalism that announces that the good guys have already won. Pinker takes this challenge head on, but lapses into some fantastical arguments along the way. 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. As for climate, we all need to calm down and open our minds to geo-engineering. 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. He argues that “notwithstanding the habitual self-flagellation by Western intellectuals about Western racism, it’s non-Western countries that are the least tolerant”, without considering that maybe some self-flagellation is therefore good.The vice-like grip of Pinker’s reasoning derives from his curious relationship to intellectual history. Copyright © 2020 The President and Fellows of Harvard College The heroic ethos of science, of progress, is to carry on regardless, even in the knowledge that entropy will eventually win. In which case, why the manifesto?Perhaps the answer lies in the occasional hints of existential angst. This progress is not the result of some cosmic force. Two thirds of the book, which is a kind of sequel to his bestselling Various foes are swatted away, for misreading the facts or using suspect moral reasoning. © 2020 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies.