Enlightenment now : the case for reason, science, humanism, and progress

Title:

Author:

Pinker, Steven, 1954- author.

ISBN:

9780525427575

Personal Author:

Pinker, Steven, 1954- author.

Publication Information:

New York, New York : Viking, [2018]

Physical Description:

xix, 556 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm

Contents:

Part I: Enlightenment -- Dare to understand! -- Entro, evo, info -- Counter-enlightenments -- Part II: Progress -- Progressophobia -- Life -- Health -- Sustenance -- Wealth -- Inequality -- The environment -- Peace -- Safety -- Terrorism -- Democracy -- Equal rights -- Knowledge -- Quality of life -- Happiness -- Existential threats -- The future of progress -- Part III: Reason, science, and humanism -- Reason -- Science -- Humanism.

Abstract:

The follow-up to Pinker's groundbreaking The Better Angels of Our Nature presents the big picture of human progress: people are living longer, healthier, freer, and happier lives, and while our problems are formidable, the solutions lie in the Enlightenment ideal of using reason and science. 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.

Subject Term:

Progress.

Civilization, Modern -- 21st century.

Social change.

Quality of life.

Humanism.

Document ID:

SD_ILS:2289935

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Summary

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2018
ONE OF THE ECONOMIST'S BOOKS OF THE YEAR

"My new favorite book of all time." --Bill Gates

If you think the world is coming to an end, think again: people are living longer, healthier, freer, and happier lives, and while our problems are formidable, the solutions lie in the Enlightenment ideal of using reason and science. By the author of the new book, Rationality .

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.

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.

Author Notes

Steven Pinker is the Harvard College Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. A two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist and the winner of many awards for his research, teaching, and books, he has been named one of Time's 100 Most Influential People in the World Today and Foreign Policy's 100 Global Thinkers.

Reviews (7)

Publisher's Weekly Review

Harvard psychology professor Pinker (The Sense of Style) defends progressive ideals against contemporary critics, pundits, cantankerous philosophers, and populist politicians to demonstrate how far humanity has come since the Enlightenment. These ideals, as well as progress, science, reason, and humanism, are explored through the lenses of evolutionary biology, physics, sociology, anthropology, and, of course, history. Pinker explores the fallacies that critics of progressive ideals employ and presents graphs and statistics to demonstrate that issues such as income inequality, terrorism, and racial intolerance are not at the crisis levels the hysterical media commonly suggests. He astutely captures the deceptive techniques of the naysayers whose opinions alter those of the wider public, describing "the social critic's standard formula for sowing panic: Here's an anecdote, therefore it's a trend, therefore it's a crisis." In the book's final section, Pinker explores how political discourse exploits cognitive biases, exacerbating polarization and partisanship, and how humanism is a preferable ideology to its main rivals, theism and nationalism. In an era of increasingly "dystopian rhetoric," Pinker's sober, lucid, and meticulously researched vision of human progress is heartening and important. Agent: David Brockman, Brockman Inc. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Booklist Review

Prolific writer, psychologist, and public-intellectual Pinker (The Better Angels of Our Nature, 2011) is a highly regarded, albeit sometimes controversial, observer of humanity. In his latest tome, which weighs in at more than 500 densely packed pages, he takes on the idea of progress, elegantly arguing that in various ways humanity has every reason to be optimistic over life in the twenty-first century. Reaching back and forth in time with ease (he name checks the Hebrew Bible and Chris Rock within 2 pages while writing of sustenance), Pinker tackles a wide range of topics as he presents substantial evidence (including his trademark graphs) to argue that life is far better for people now than it has ever been. Some of these comparisons fall a bit flat obviously, traffic safety was less assured in the era before crosswalks and traffic lights and his seemingly casual dismissal of ethics concerns surrounding the Tuskegee experiment is troubling to say the least, but Pinker certainly crafts a defense of progress that will provoke deep thinking and thoughtful discourse among his many fans.--Mondor, Colleen Copyright 2018 Booklist

New York Review of Books Review

THE RECOVERING: Intoxication and Its Aftermath, by Leslie Jamison. (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $18.99.) Jamison, adding to a large group of addiction memoirs, maps her own recovery while considering the relationship between creativity and substance abuse. The emotional firepower of the book comes in its second half, after she has embraced sobriety; our critic, Dwight Garner, called this section "close to magnificent, and genuinely moving." LOVE AND RUIN, by Paula McLain. (Ballantine, $17.) McLain's latest novel, about the marriage between the journalist Martha Gellhorn and Ernest Hemingway, takes up the question that vexed (and probably doomed) their relationship: Why must a woman choose between her career and what her husband wants her to be? McLain drew on primary sources to develop her fiery protagonist. A WORLD WITHOUT 'WHOM': The Essential Guide to Language in the BuzzFeed Age, by Emmy J. Favilla. (Bloomsbury, $18.) The BuzzFeed copy chief discusses her plan to codify language in a digital era, balancing a need for logic with flexibility to account for how people actually talk. Along with a look at the rules she devised, the book offers a guide to the quandaries we face as the way we communicate online reshapes language itself. MADNESS IS BETTER THAN DEFEAT, by Ned Beauman. (Vintage, $17.) Emboldened by "fungal clairvoyance" after inhaling mold in an old temple, a C.I.A. agent tells the story of a fateful meeting in the Honduran jungle in 1938. The novel's twists and turns touch on everything from colonialism to conspiracy theories. Our reviewer, Helene Stapinski, called the story "a kitchen-sink sendup of spy novels, 1930s Hollywood and screwball newspaper comedies, with a pinch of Pynchon thrown in for fun." ENLIGHTENMENT NOW: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, by Steven Pinker. (Penguin, $18.) Pinker sets out to persuade pessimists - people disturbed by today's threats like climate change and the rise of authoritarian populism across the globe - of one thing: that life has never been better, both in the West and in developing countries. The Harvard psychologist marshals an impressive array of data to back up his claim. ETERNAL LIFE, by Dara Horn. (Norton, $15.95.) When readers meet Rachel, she's a suburban great-grandmother in the 21st century. But that life is only the latest in a string of reincarnations, the consequences of a promise she made in Roman-occupied Jerusalem some 2,000 years earlier. Horn's elegant novel explores how Rachel's immortality impedes her ability to be fully, truly alive.

Choice Review

A renowned scientist and popularizer of science, Pinker (psychology, Harvard) makes a moral, political, and philosophic case for the values and practices of the Enlightenment. He sees enemies on both the Right and the Left; they include traditional religion, populist tribalism, and Nietzschean postmodernism. Pinker begins with the good news. Graph after graph shows that humans are living longer, healthier, and happier lives and that violence and loneliness are down. The optimistic 18th-century philosophes have been vindicated, the fears of the Romantic pessimists falsified. True, the planet faces serious threats like global warming and nuclear arms, but pragmatic solutions are available. Pinker concludes with a philosophical defense of science, which he contends is entirely in harmony with humanistic values. The future is bright, if religion, tribalism, and "second culture" pessimism can be kept at bay. As a polemic the book is effective, and its unashamed, old-fashioned scientism is refreshing and probably currently useful. But perhaps the picture is a little too perfect. Historians may cavil at Pinker's traditional account of the Enlightenment; philosophers may think his scorn for alternatives overdone. But Pinker's lively prose and persuasive use of examples give his argument considerable impact. Summing Up: Recommended. All readers. --Fred E. Baumann, Kenyon College

Guardian Review

Now is the best time to be alive claims this triumphalist defence of scientific rationality ¿ if it matters, we¿ll solve it How do you write a manifesto for something that is already established? This might sound like a problem that confronts conservatives, but over the past 20 years or so it has become more of a riddle for progressives. One response is provided by the movement known as ¿new atheism¿, which successfully assembled a band of science-loving devotees, but too often seemed to end up in a cul-de-sac of stale machismo and Islamophobia. More pertinently, the failed 2016 campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Remain demonstrated that, in the eyes of many people, ¿progress¿ simply meant more of the same. When people feel trapped and patronised by progress, then any alternative ¿ even regress ¿ will feel like freedom. Informing them that the policies of the past 40 years are still the best available starts to sound hopeless. Steven Pinker¿s answer to this problem is to double down on progress: the policies of the past 300 years are still the best available. Enlightenment Now is a bold, wonderfully expansive and occasionally irate defence of scientific rationality and liberal humanism, of the sort that took root in Europe between the mid-17th and late 18th century. With Donald Trump in the Oval Office, populists on the march across Europe and US campuses at the centre of yet another culture skirmish, the timing of the book requires little explanation. Pinker is up for a fight, and his main weapon is quantitative data. Two thirds of the book, which is a kind of sequel to his bestselling The Better Angels of Our Nature, consists of chapter after chapter of evidence that life has been getting progressively better for most people. ¿How can we soundly appraise the state of the world?¿ he asks. ¿The answer is to count. ¿ The litany of facts is awesome, covering health, wealth, inequality, the environment, peace, democracy and on and on, though one wonders if there is any possible tipping point within this deluge where a doubter might suddenly be convinced. Various foes are swatted away, for misreading the facts or using suspect moral reasoning. The confidence with which Pinker tears through the issues that cause such deep anxiety today, such as rising inequality and global warming, is a compelling spectacle, although he relies on some questionable political manoeuvres. Ultimately, economic inequality ¿is not itself a dimension of human wellbeing¿, he tells us, and that¿s that. As for climate, we all need to calm down and open our minds to geo-engineering. If it matters, we¿ll solve it. Unlike his allies in the political sphere, he clearly isn¿t troubled by the charge of elitism. Environmentalists ¿capitalise on primitive intuitions of essentialism and contamination among the scientifically illiterate public¿, while research suggests that ¿most voters are ignorant not just of current policy options but of basic facts¿. Pinker would no doubt argue that reason is not a popularity contest, and yet this is scarcely the way to win the public round to the progressive cause. He is well aware that facts don¿t settle political and ethical arguments, as much as he might like them to, and he reviews plenty of evidence to confirm this. The book is really a polemic, albeit one with a vast number of footnotes. With some deft intellectual moves, he manages to position ¿enlightenment¿ and ¿science¿ on the right side of every argument or conflict, while every horror of the past 200 years is put down to ignorance, irrationality or ¿counter-enlightenment¿ trends. Take nuclear weapons, which on the face of it would suggest potentially catastrophic consequences of scientific ¿progress¿. Pinker takes this challenge head on, but lapses into some fantastical arguments along the way. Scientists working on the first ever nuclear weapon only did so because they were each personally invested in beating Hitler, he informs us. ¿Quite possibly, had there been no Nazis, there would be no nukes.¿ What he won¿t countenance, but which theorists such as Max Weber, Hannah Arendt and Zygmunt Bauman pondered at length, is the notion that modern science lacks any ethical logic of its own. Could it not be that ¿progress¿ is both liberating and threatening? That rationality is dangerous precisely because of how hugely it expands human power? Even the most pessimistic social theorists of the last 150 years were not against enlightenment, so much as the machinery that it made available to less enlightened political forces, including capital. This line of argument is rubbished as the obsession of ¿leftist intellectuals¿ and ¿postmodernists¿, who are characterised in the most extraordinary terms as figures nostalgic for mills and mines ¿probably because they never worked in one¿, who ¿poison voters¿ against progress, and believe ¿liberal democracy is the same as fascism¿ (the footnotes suddenly dry up at these points). The big reveal at the end of the book is of the single thinker whose ideas capture, and perhaps even cause, everything that is wrong with today¿s world: Friedrich Nietzsche. This is Pinker at his bluntest and least imaginative, suggesting that he has allowed American campus politics to get to him. The penultimate page of the book implores us to ¿finally, drop the Nietzsche¿, to which the simple answer is ¿don¿t feed the troll, Steven¿. He seems frustrated that people show so little ¿gratitude¿ for the benefits that enlightenment has delivered them, and uses tales of disease, death and foul workplaces to convince us that now is the best time to be alive. Every horror of the past 200 years is put down to ignorance, irrationality or 'counter-enlightenment' trends But is gratitude ever what progress depended on? Martin Luther King Jr could have been grateful not to be living in 1850s Louisiana, but where would that have got him? Surely it is an essential and welcome feature of modern societies that people are restless and dissatisfied, even as things improve. He argues that ¿notwithstanding the habitual self-flagellation by Western intellectuals about Western racism, it¿s non-Western countries that are the least tolerant¿, without considering that maybe some self-flagellation is therefore good. The vice-like grip of Pinker¿s reasoning derives from his curious relationship to intellectual history. Just as US politics gets trapped by the assumption that all major political questions were dealt with in 1787, Pinker has no real need of any philosopher after Immanuel Kant. Enlightenment becomes like a wind-up toy that we should just let run, as long as pesky ¿critics¿ can be cleared out of the way. Despite his contempt for populists, theocrats and de-growth environmentalists, he ultimately dismisses them as having already lost. In which case, why the manifesto? Perhaps the answer lies in the occasional hints of existential angst. Pinker does identify three scientific theories that have arisen since the 18th century, and which form an indispensable part of the scientific imagination: evolution, entropy and information. Common to all is a sense of the tragic, that life lacks purpose, and will ultimately fall apart. The most stirring passages are those that reflect on what this means, on how unlikely progress is, rather than on its all-conquering logic. Unlike Kant and the other high priests of the Enlightenment, today¿s rationalist somehow has to make do without God or unfolding historical logic. This (as Nietzsche noted) makes science harder, not easier. The heroic ethos of science, of progress, is to carry on regardless, even in the knowledge that entropy will eventually win. Perhaps making this argument makes me a ¿leftist intellectual¿, but I couldn¿t help finding it a more appealing ¿ even affecting ¿ ethical pitch than the triumphalism that announces that the good guys have already won. - William Davies.

Kirkus Review

The bomb? The plague? Trump? Not to worry; things are getting better. So writes eternal optimist Pinker (Psychology/Harvard Univ.; The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, 2011, etc.)."Why should I live?" So asked one of the author's students. "Explaining the meaning of life is not the usual job description of a professor of cognitive science," he writesbefore gamely proceeding to answer that very question from a variety of stances, all resting on the assumption that life is best endowed with meaning if only we remember our Enlightenment ideals. Those ideals, "products of human reason," hinge onwell, reason, and science, the latter the "refining of reason to understand the world." Against these are what Pinker characterizes as manifestations of delusional thinking, including religious faith and the "hermeneutic parsing of sacred texts," the "suffocating political correctness" on campus, the "disaster of postmodernism" that has devastated humanistic thought, and the "identity-protective cognition" that has made political discourse so soul-killing. Pinker's protestations are progressive, though the academically orthodox will find him an apostate. Just so, his atheism may put him in company with Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris, but he would doubtless say that it's the only logical conclusion to come to, and Pascal's wager be damned. In a long, overstuffed, impeccably written text full of interesting tidbits from neuroscience and other disciplines, the author examines the many ways in which Enlightenment ideals have given us lives that our forebears would envy even if gloominess and pessimism are the order of the dayon which he sensibly remarks, "a modicum of anxiety may be the price we pay for the uncertainty of freedom." There's work to be done, of course, from educating the illiterate and innumerate to taking the world's nuclear arsenal down to, ideally, zero, and much else besides.For those inclined to believe that the end is not nigh and who would like to keep up with recent science, this book is awell, not a godsend, but a gift all the same. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Library Journal Review

In this fascinating yet frustrating work, Pinker (The Stuff of Thought) argues that as bleak as they may seem, modern times are not as dark as they appear. The values and techniques that arose from the Enlightenment have guided humanity into a better world at an uneven pace, which can be verified through statistical analysis guided by those same values. The material produced is a wide-ranging and deeply interesting examination of many aspects of culture over time, from agriculture to gun ownership. This exploration is a bit marred by the reliance on long lists and digital charts; though they are included as PDFs, listeners not sitting at a computer may struggle to follow along. The breadth of the material covered is commendable, but small errors, omissions, and a tendency to dip into the irrational techniques the author decries are noticeable to a listener in the know, and that tends to undercut the author's credibility, e.g., the author failed to address the Deepwater Horizon tragedy while discussing oil spills. Emphasizing the potential problems of a successful white male academic explaining why the world isn't so bad, the author has the poor taste to include extensive quotes from Louie C.K. and Woody Allen without commentary on their actions. He also fails to speak to the problems of underreported statistics such as sexual abuse and harassment. Both the author and narrator Arthur Morey frequently come across as talking down to the listener, which can make for an unpleasant experience. VERDICT Flawed yet interesting, this book has a powerful message degraded by the telling. Recommended for fans of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens.-Tristan Boyd, Austin, TX © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Excerpts

Part I Enlightenment The common sense of the eighteenth century, its grasp ofthe obvious facts of human suffering, and of the obvious demands of humannature, acted on the world like a bath of moral cleansing. --Alfred North Whitehead In the course of several decades giving public lectureson language, mind, and human nature, I have been asked some mighty strangequestions. Which is the best language? Are clams and oysters conscious? Whenwill I be able to upload my mind to the Internet? Is obesity a form ofviolence? But the most arresting question I have ever fieldedfollowed a talk in which I explained the commonplace among scientists thatmental life consists of patterns of activity in the tissues of the brain. Astudent in the audience raised her hand and asked me: "Why should I live?" The student's ingenuous tone made it clear that she wasneither suicidal nor sarcastic but genuinely curious about how to find meaningand purpose if traditional religious beliefs about an immortal soul are underminedby our best science. My policy is that there is no such thing as a stupidquestion, and to the surprise of the student, the audience, and most of allmyself, I mustered a reasonably creditable answer. What I recallsaying--embellished, to be sure, by the distortions of memory and l'esprit del'escalier, the wit of the staircase--went something like this: In the very act of asking that question, you are seekingreasons for your convictions, and so you are committed to reason as the meansto discover and justify what is important to you. And there are so many reasonsto live! As a sentient being, you have the potential to flourish.You can refine your faculty of reason itself by learning and debating. You canseek explanations of the natural world through science, and insight into thehuman condition through the arts and humanities. You can make the most of yourcapacity for pleasure and satisfaction, which allowed your ancestors to thriveand thereby allowed you to exist. You can appreciate the beauty and richness ofthe natural and cultural world. As the heir to billions of years of lifeperpetuating itself, you can perpetuate life in turn. You have been endowedwith a sense of sympathy--the ability to like, love, respect, help, and showkindness--and you can enjoy the gift of mutual benevolence with friends, family,and colleagues. And because reason tells you that none of this isparticular to you, you have the responsibility to provide to others what youexpect for yourself. You can foster the welfare of other sentient beings byenhancing life, health, knowledge, freedom, abundance, safety, beauty, andpeace. History shows that when we sympathize with others and apply ouringenuity to improving the human condition, we can make progress in doing so,and you can help to continue that progress. Explaining the meaning of life is not in the usual jobdescription of a professor of cognitive science, and I would not have had thegall to take up her question if the answer depended on my arcane technicalknowledge or my dubious personal wisdom. But I knew I was channeling a body ofbeliefs and values that had taken shape more than two centuries before me andthat are now more relevant than ever: the ideals of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment principle that we can apply reason andsympathy to enhance human flourishing may seem obvious, trite, old-fashioned. Iwrote this book because I have come to realize that it is not. More than ever,the ideals of reason, science, humanism, and progress need a wholehearted defense.We take its gifts for granted: newborns who will live more than eight decades,markets overflowing with food, clean water that appears with a flick of afinger and waste that disappears with another, pills that erase a painfulinfection, sons who are not sent off to war, daughters who can walk the streetsin safety, critics of the powerful who are not jailed or shot, the world'sknowledge and culture available in a shirt pocket. But these are humanaccomplishments, not cosmic birthrights. In the memories of many readers ofthis book--and in the experience of those in less fortunate parts of theworld--war, scarcity, disease, ignorance, and lethal menace are a natural partof existence. We know that countries can slide back into these primitive conditions,and so we ignore the achievements of the Enlightenment at our peril. In the years since I took the young woman's question, Ihave often been reminded of the need to restate the ideals of the Enlightenment(also called humanism, the open society, and cosmopolitan or classicalliberalism). It's not just that questions like hers regularly appear in myinbox. ("Dear Professor Pinker, What advice do you have for someone who hastaken ideas in your books and science to heart, and sees himself as a collectionof atoms? A machine with a limited scope of intelligence, sprung out of selfishgenes, inhabiting spacetime?") It's also that an obliviousness to the scope ofhuman progress can lead to symptoms that are worse than existential angst. Itcan make people cynical about the Enlightenment-inspired institutions that aresecuring this progress, such as liberal democracy and organizations ofinternational cooperation, and turn them toward atavistic alternatives. The ideals of the Enlightenment are products of humanreason, but they always struggle with other strands of human nature: loyalty totribe, deference to authority, magical thinking, the blaming of misfortune onevildoers. The second decade of the 21st century has seen the rise of politicalmovements that depict their countries as being pulled into a hellish dystopiaby malign factions that can be resisted only by a strong leader who wrenchesthe country backward to make it "great again." These movements have beenabetted by a narrative shared by many of their fiercest opponents, in which theinstitutions of modernity have failed and every aspect of life is in deepeningcrisis--the two sides in macabre agreement that wrecking those institutions willmake the world a better place. Harder to find is a positive vision that seesthe world's problems against a background of progress that it seeks to buildupon by solving those problems in their turn. If you still are unsure whether the ideals ofEnlightenment humanism need a vigorous defense, consider the diagnosis ofShiraz Maher, an analyst of radical Islamist movements. "The West is shy of itsvalues--it doesn't speak up for classical liberalism," he says. "We are unsureof them. They make us feel uneasy." Contrast that with the Islamic State, which"knows exactly what it stands for," a certainty that is "incrediblyseductive"--and he should know, having once been a regional director of thejihadist group Hizb ut-Tahrir.1 Reflecting on liberal ideals in 1960, not long after theyhad withstood their greatest trial, the economist Friedrich Hayek observed, "Ifold truths are to retain their hold on men's minds, they must be restated inthe language and concepts of successive generations" (inadvertently proving hispoint with the expression men's minds). "What at one time are their mosteffective expressions gradually become so worn with use that they cease tocarry a definite meaning. The underlying ideas may be as valid as ever, but thewords, even when they refer to problems that are still with us, no longer conveythe same conviction."2 This book is my attempt to restate the ideals of theEnlightenment in the language and concepts of the 21st century. I will firstlay out a framework for understanding the human condition informed by modernscience--who we are, where we came from, what our challenges are, and how we canmeet them. The bulk of the book is devoted to defending those ideals in adistinctively 21st-century way: with data. This evidence-based take on theEnlightenment project reveals that it was not a naïve hope. The Enlightenmenthas worked--perhaps the greatest story seldom told. And because this triumph isso unsung, the underlying ideals of reason, science, and humanism areunappreciated as well. Far from being an insipid consensus, these ideals are treatedby today's intellectuals with indifference, skepticism, and sometimes contempt.When properly appreciated, I will suggest, the ideals of the Enlightenment arein fact stirring, inspiring, noble--a reason to live. Chapter 1 Dare to Understand! What is enlightenment? In a 1784 essay with that questionas its title, Immanuel Kant answered that it consists of "humankind's emergencefrom its self-incurred immaturity," its "lazy and cowardly" submission to the"dogmas and formulas" of religious or political authority.1 Enlightenment'smotto, he proclaimed, is "Dare to understand!" and its foundational demand isfreedom of thought and speech. "One age cannot conclude a pact that wouldprevent succeeding ages from extending their insights, increasing their knowledge,and purging their errors. That would be a crime against human nature, whoseproper destiny lies precisely in such progress."2 A 21st-century statement of the same idea may be found inthe physicist David Deutsch's defense of enlightenment, The Beginning ofInfinity. Deutsch argues that if we dare to understand, progress is possible inall fields, scientific, political, and moral: Optimism (in the sense that I have advocated) is thetheory that all failures--all evils--are due to insufficient knowledge. . . .Problems are inevitable, because our knowledge will always be infinitely farfrom complete. Some problems are hard, but it is a mistake to confuse hardproblems with problems unlikely to be solved. Problems are soluble, and eachparticular evil is a problem that can be solved. An optimistic civilization isopen and not afraid to innovate, and is based on traditions of criticism. Itsinstitutions keep improving, and the most important knowledge that they embodyis knowledge of how to detect and eliminate errors.3 What is the Enlightenment?4 There is no official answer,because the era named by Kant's essay was never demarcated by opening andclosing ceremonies like the Olympics, nor are its tenets stipulated in an oathor creed. The Enlightenment is conventionally placed in the last two-thirds ofthe 18th century, though it flowed out of the Scientific Revolution and the Ageof Reason in the 17th century and spilled into the heyday of classicalliberalism of the first half of the 19th. Provoked by challenges toconventional wisdom from science and exploration, mindful of the bloodshed ofrecent wars of religion, and abetted by the easy movement of ideas and people,the thinkers of the Enlightenment sought a new understanding of the humancondition. The era was a cornucopia of ideas, some of them contradictory, butfour themes tie them together: reason, science, humanism, and progress. Foremost is reason. Reason is nonnegotiable. As soon asyou show up to discuss the question of what we should live for (or any otherquestion), as long as you insist that your answers, whatever they are, arereasonable or justified or true and that therefore other people ought tobelieve them too, then you have committed yourself to reason, and to holdingyour beliefs accountable to objective standards.5 If there's anything theEnlightenment thinkers had in common, it was an insistence that weenergetically apply the standard of reason to understanding our world, and notfall back on generators of delusion like faith, dogma, revelation, authority,charisma, mysticism, divination, visions, gut feelings, or the hermeneuticparsing of sacred texts. It was reason that led most of the Enlightenment thinkersto repudiate a belief in an anthropomorphic God who took an interest in humanaffairs.6 The application of reason revealed that reports of miracles weredubious, that the authors of holy books were all too human, that natural eventsunfolded with no regard to human welfare, and that different cultures believedin mutually incompatible deities, none of them less likely than the others tobe products of the imagination. (As Montesquieu wrote, "If triangles had a godthey would give him three sides.") For all that, not all of the Enlightenmentthinkers were atheists. Some were deists (as opposed to theists): they thoughtthat God set the universe in motion and then stepped back, allowing it tounfold according to the laws of nature. Others were pantheists, who used "God"as a synonym for the laws of nature. But few appealed to the law-giving,miracle-conjuring, son-begetting God of scripture. Many writers today confuse the Enlightenment endorsementof reason with the implausible claim that humans are perfectly rational agents.Nothing could be further from historical reality. Thinkers such as Kant, BaruchSpinoza, Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, and Adam Smith were inquisitivepsychologists and all too aware of our irrational passions and foibles. Theyinsisted that it was only by calling out the common sources of folly that wecould hope to overcome them. The deliberate application of reason was necessaryprecisely because our common habits of thought are not particularly reasonable. That leads to the second ideal, science, the refining ofreason to understand the world. The Scientific Revolution was revolutionary ina way that is hard to appreciate today, now that its discoveries have becomesecond nature to most of us. The historian David Wootton reminds us of theunderstanding of an educated Englishman on the eve of the Revolution in 1600: He believes witches can summon up storms that sink shipsat sea. . . . He believes in werewolves, although there happen not to be any inEngland--he knows they are to be found in Belgium. . . . He believes Circereally did turn Odysseus's crew into pigs. He believes mice are spontaneouslygenerated in piles of straw. He believes in contemporary magicians. . . . Hehas seen a unicorn's horn, but not a unicorn. He believes that a murdered body will bleed in thepresence of the murderer. He believes that there is an ointment which, ifrubbed on a dagger which has caused a wound, will cure the wound. He believesthat the shape, colour and texture of a plant can be a clue to how it will workas a medicine because God designed nature to be interpreted by mankind. Hebelieves that it is possible to turn base metal into gold, although he doubtsthat anyone knows how to do it. He believes that nature abhors a vacuum. Hebelieves the rainbow is a sign from God and that comets portend evil. Hebelieves that dreams predict the future, if we know how to interpret them. Hebelieves, of course, that the earth stands still and the sun and stars turnaround the earth once every twenty-four hours.7 A century and a third later, an educated descendant ofthis Englishman would believe none of these things. It was an escape not justfrom ignorance but from terror. The sociologist Robert Scott notes that in theMiddle Ages "the belief that an external force controlled daily lifecontributed to a kind of collective paranoia": Rainstorms, thunder, lightning, wind gusts, solar orlunar eclipses, cold snaps, heat waves, dry spells, and earthquakes alike wereconsidered signs and signals of God's displeasure. As a result, the "hobgoblinsof fear" inhabited every realm of life. The sea became a satanic realm, andforests were populated with beasts of prey, ogres, witches, demons, and veryreal thieves and cutthroats. . . . After dark, too, the world was filled withomens portending dangers of every sort: comets, meteors, shooting stars, lunareclipses, the howls of wild animals.8 To the Enlightenment thinkers the escape from ignoranceand superstition showed how mistaken our conventional wisdom could be, and howthe methods of science--skepticism, fallibilism, open debate, and empiricaltesting--are a paradigm of how to achieve reliable knowledge. Excerpted from Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by Steven Pinker All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.