He calls a belief in the existence of an immaterial soul “factually dubious and morally dangerous.” 5īut the book isn’t really about such definitions. Some of these terms he defines very broadly: Science is “the refining of reason to understand the world.” But by “humanism” Pinker essentially means a rigid, Richard Dawkins–style atheism. Instead, he points to four “themes” that he highlights in his book’s subtitle: reason, science, humanism, and progress. It is not entirely clear what Pinker means by “the Enlightenment.” At one point he calls it “a cornucopia of ideas, some of them contradictory,” but at another a coherent “project.” He locates it in the last two-thirds of the 18th century but makes little reference to the actual thinkers and writers of the period. The nay-saying that is so prevalent in our culture is simply an error, the product of cognitive biases compounded by the influence of foolish intellectuals and ignorant politicians. More specifically, human beings today lead longer, safer, healthier, wealthier, and indeed happier lives than at any point in recorded history, and they do so thanks to the Enlightenment.

Despite all the doom and gloom bandied about today, Pinker argues, things are good-in fact, the best they’ve ever been. Like a TED Talk, Enlightenment Now is easy to summarize. The genre it most closely resembles, with its breezy style, bite-size chapters, and impressive visuals, is not 18th-century philosophie so much as a genre in which Pinker has had copious experience: the TED Talk (although in this case, judging by the book’s audio version, a TED Talk that lasts 20 hours). It also gives readers the spectacle of a professor at one of the world’s great universities treating serious thinkers with populist contempt. It is a dogmatic book that offers an oversimplified, excessively optimistic vision of human history and a starkly technocratic prescription for the human future. Enlightenment Now has few of these qualities.

Steven pinker enlightenment