Subtitled “The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress”
(Viking, Feb. 2018, xix+556pp, including 102pp of notes, references, and index.)
This is the last of the ‘big’ Steven Pinker books that I’ve read but not yet written up here. Though there was one book in between them (THE SENSE OF STYLE, 2014) and though the connection isn’t explicit, this book is a companion, perhaps even a spiritual sequel, to THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE. (And RATIONALITY, 2021, is in a sense third in a trilogy.) I read this one when it came out, in early 2018. Upon reviewing it and my notes just now, this one strikes me as perhaps the single-most core volume in my library that summarizes my own worldview, one aligned with liberalism, aligned with science fiction, and describing how to approach the world objectively and not via the filters and biases of tradition or received religious ideology. And how that approach, unlike those of tradition and religion, has brought about great improvement in the world.
Since this book was published in 2018, it covers relatively ‘current events’ like the Trump administration in a way that BETTER ANGELS, published seven years earlier, did not. Let’s start by quoting the first two long paragraphs of the Preface.
The second half of the second decade of the third millennium would not seem to be an auspicious time to publish a book on the historical sweep of progress and its causes. At the time of this writing, my country is led by people with a dark vision of the current moment: “mothers and children trapped in poverty … an education system which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge … and the crime, and the gangs, and the drugs that have stolen too many lives.” We are in an “outright war” that is “expanding and metastasizing.” The blame for this nightmare may be placed on a “global power structure” that has eroded “the underlying spiritual and moral foundations of Christianity.”
In the pages that follow, I will show that this bleak assessment of the state of the world is wrong. And not just a little wrong — wrong wrong, flat-earth wrong, couldn’t-be-more-wrong. But this book is not about the forty-fifth president of the United States and his advisors. It was conceived some years before Donald Trump announced his candidacy, and I hope it will outlast his administration by many more. The ideas that prepared the ground for his election are in face widely shared among intellectuals and laypeople, on both the left and the right. They include pessimism about the way the world is heading, cynicism about the institutions of modernity, and an inability to conceive of a higher purpose in anything other than religion. I will present a different understanding of the world, grounded in fact and inspired by the ideal of the Enlightenment: reason, science, humanism, and progress. Enlightenment ideals, I hope to show, are timeless, but they have never been more relevant than they are right now.
