Recently, I finished ENLIGHTENMENT NOW, by Steven Pinker. This took me around a year to read; not because the subject matter is difficult to parse, but as I so regularly found it clashing with a surprisingly deep-rooted pessimistic worldview, borne of a special brand of intellectual progressive elitism - that we’re doomed. That the existential problems we face today are too much to handle. This book has really forced me to rethink some of these core beliefs and has put me on an interesting intellectual path. This book could also be subtitled “The Intellectual Argument for Optimism”.
There are a few decipherable theses to this book that I’ve found generally convincing:
- Overall, we discount how much humans have progressed and that things are better today than we give them credit for;
- In society today, it’s trendy/intellectual/respected to be pessimistic and think the world is ending/doomed/screwed, and “naïve” to think things are getting better and to be optimistic about our ability to continue to solve problems in the future;
- Humanism, i.e., good without god, is the biggest tent path forward for humanity’s positive growth. I found this argument so convincing that in the last year, I joined a local Humanist organization (Unitarian Universalists) and have started becoming more active in my local community (joined my county’s Climate Change, Environment, and Energy Commission).
Pinker makes a succinct argument that scientists, politicians, and intellectuals have used fear to motivate action with a lot of unintended consequences, from fueling mass apathy to pushing people into the arms of authoritarianism, cults, and populism. If the world is about to end, and we’re in a “hellscape”, why wouldn’t you follow the strongman that promises you salvation? Why wouldn’t you simply give up? If the infamous “Doomsday Clock” has been a couple of minutes from midnight for 80 years, is the clock simply broken? Do we really need fear to motivate us into action?
I appreciate that he dedicated a chunk of the book to repudiating Trumpism and populism, including an interesting sidebar on the importance of the prestige of democracy that I had never quite understood before. His arguments that populism is demographically on its way down have a few more years to be tested, but I certainly hope they're true.
However, it did feel that the author was being contrarian to be contrarian and using misleading data and studies to hit us over the head with how everything measurably is better. It’s hard to fight too much against the book's first part, which states obvious progress on the timescale of total human history, such as there is less polio and that’s demonstrably good. But once Pinker started arguing that there’s no evidence that social media has any negative influences at all (to be fair, this book came out a year before the Instagram studies linking depression to teenage girls), and that the loneliness epidemic is entirely a myth and “kids will be kids”, I found myself questioning all the other data he presented as factual. Unfortunately, I don’t have the patience to go back through and rigorously interrogate the sources of all his studies, but it did weaken his argument to state so equivocally that negative trends shouldn’t be taken seriously.
I also found him to be quite dismissive of some core existential problems of our age (climate change, AI, increasing wealth concentration, etc.). Who’s to say that our ancestors’ focus on their existential issues isn’t why those issues were solved? What of the existential issues that have taken down nations? It seems that Pinker over relies on statistics and numbers and forgets the importance of systems, power, social influence, and social structures. In the face of existential global threats, why is the fear response a bad thing? Is there a happy medium?
While “radical incrementalism” may not get the blood pumping, there’s a powerful case that it’s been overall a stable force for progress (not to undermine the importance of radicals and revolutionaries, which Pinker does discount). The book’s diversion into politics and idealogues has also inspired me to pick up a few conservative & libertarian books at my next library stop, as I want to interrogate more of my core beliefs and really decipher if my positions are truly my own or if some are just “identity protective”; i.e. I believe XYZ because my party/peers/professionals tell me to believe XYZ.
If the point of a good book is to make you think and inspire change, then this was a 5-star experience, underscored by the fact that this motivated me to write the first real book review I’ve ever written.
So… yeah. I recommend this book. You should read it with an open mind, and see what happens to it.