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Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

Steven Pinker

Last accessed on Tuesday November 26, 2019

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Enlightenment (also called humanism, the open society, and cosmopolitan or classical liberalism).

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Optimism (in the sense that I have advocated) is the theory that all failures—all evils—are due to insufficient knowledge.

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application of reason revealed that reports of miracles were dubious, that the authors of holy books were all too human, that natural events unfolded with no regard to human welfare, and that different cultures believed in mutually incompatible deities, none of them less likely than the others to be products of the imagination. (As Montesquieu wrote, “If triangles had a god they would give him three sides.”)

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it was only by calling out the common sources of folly that we could hope to overcome them.

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humanism, which privileges the well-being of individual men, women, and children over the glory of the tribe, race, nation, or religion.

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Cruel punishments, whether or not they are in some sense “deserved,” are no more effective at deterring

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If you extol reason, then what matters is the integrity of the thoughts, not the personalities of the thinkers.

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Our bodies are improbable assemblies of molecules, and they maintain that order with the help of other improbabilities: the few substances that can nourish us, the few materials in the few shapes that can clothe us, shelter us, and move things around to our liking.

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The brain’s aesthetic response may be a receptiveness to the counter-entropic patterns that can spring forth from nature.

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conatus (effort or striving), which Spinoza defined as “the endeavor to persist and flourish in one’s own being,” and which was a foundation of several Enlightenment-era theories of life and mind.7

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Energy channeled by knowledge is the elixir with which we stave off entropy, and advances in energy capture are advances in human destiny.

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the next leap in human welfare—the end of extreme poverty and spread of abundance, with all its moral benefits—will depend on technological advances that provide energy at an acceptable economic and environmental cost to the entire world (chapter 10).

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They think that words and thoughts can impinge on the physical world in prayers and curses.

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the desire to be right can collide with a second desire, to know the truth, which is uppermost in the minds of bystanders to an argument who are not invested in which side wins.

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you have to provide reasons for your beliefs, you’re allowed to point out flaws in the beliefs of others, and you’re not allowed to forcibly shut people up who disagree with you.

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Knowledge of science, he argued, was a moral imperative, because it could alleviate suffering on a global scale by curing disease, feeding the hungry, saving the lives of infants and mothers, and allowing women to control their fertility.

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In almost every year from 1992 through 2015, an era in which the rate of violent crime plummeted, a majority of Americans told pollsters that crime was rising.

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News is about things that happen, not things that don’t happen. We never see a journalist saying to the camera, “I’m reporting live from a country where a war has not broken out”—or

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Bad things can happen quickly, but good things aren’t built in a day, and as they unfold, they will be out of sync with the news cycle.

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Intellectual culture should strive to counteract our cognitive biases, but all too often it reinforces them.

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“Rage, rage against the dying of the light,” adjured Dylan Thomas.

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Hungry Europeans titillated themselves with food pornography, such as tales of Cockaigne, a country where pancakes grew on trees, the streets were paved with pastry, roasted pigs wandered around with knives in their backs for easy carving, and cooked fish jumped out of the water and landed at one’s feet.

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“Whoever makes two ears of corn, or two blades of grass to grow where only one grew before, deserves better of humanity, and does more essential service to his country than the whole race of politicians put together.”

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“In 1976,” Radelet writes, “Mao single-handedly and dramatically changed the direction of global poverty with one simple act: he died.”32

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