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Enlightenment
Now
The
Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress
Steven
Pinker
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. Instead, follow
the data: In seventy-five 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. This progress
is not the result of some cosmic force. It is a gift of the Enlightenment:
the conviction that reason and science can enhance human flourishing.
Far from being a naïve
hope, the Enlightenment, we now know, has worked. But more than
ever, it needs a vigorous defense. The Enlightenment project swims
against currents of human nature--tribalism, authoritarianism,
demonization, magical thinking--which demagogues are all too willing
to exploit. Many commentators, committed to political, religious,
or romantic ideologies, fight a rearguard action against it. The
result is a corrosive fatalism and a willingness to wreck the
precious institutions of liberal democracy and global cooperation.
Pinker takes on the
sources of cynicism and dread. Are humans inherently irrational?
Do we need religion to ground morality? Has modernity just left
us lonely and suicidal? Do we live in a "post-truth era"?
An "age of terror"? And will it all come crashing down
in an apocalypse of nuclear war, resource shortages, climate change,
and runaway artificial intelligence?
With intellectual depth
and literary flair, Enlightenment Now makes the case for reason,
science, and humanism: the ideals we need to confront our problems
and continue our progress.
ISBN: 978-0525427575
* Viking Press, 2018 * 556 pages * $45.00 |
