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    Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress
    Unavailable
    Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress
    Unavailable
    Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress
    Audiobook19 hours

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

    Written by Steven Pinker

    Narrated by Arthur Morey

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    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.

    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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateFeb 13, 2018
    ISBN9780525529781
    Unavailable
    Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress
    Author

    Steven Pinker

    One of Time magazine's "100 Most Influential People in the World Today," Steven Pinker is the author of seven books, including How the Mind Works and The Blank Slate—both Pulitzer Prize finalists and winners of the William James Book Award. He is an award-winning researcher and teacher, and a frequent contributor to Time and the New York Times.

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    Reviews for Enlightenment Now

    4/5

    252 ratings18 reviews

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    • 4/5
      I love reading Pinker - he is incredibly insightful and thought provoking. This book is something of a continuation of Better Angels, with the content broadened from violence to quality of life.As he makes clear, we live in the best of times. Not perfect, but free of most of the the blights of starvation, early death, cruelty of government etc etc etc. This applies to the world generally, not just rich countries. And it is still improving. So much for the carping of conservative media.I have a couple of quibbles. Pinker writes in volume. The words flow and flow. I often find my self wishing he would marshal the thoughts and words more. In the words of the very basic trainers manual: - tell 'em what you're going to tell 'em; tell 'em; then tell 'em what you told 'em!Second, he often uses religious references and allusions to illustrate his points. In view of the basic premise of the book - that reason triumphed where religion had signally failed - I find this usage jarring.But these are minor points.
    • 5/5
      Probably the most perspective-changing book I've ever encountered. A book that, even though it spends 99% of it throwing praise to some things and condemnation to others, wraps up with the invitation to cast doubt on itself. Even though Pinker himself had little to do with the things the book talks about, we can say for sure that this book stands on the shoulders of giants and is armored with the greatest shield: data and doubt. Maybe not necessarily this book, but the skills it talks about and the data it contains, should be know by everyone regardless of anything.
    • 5/5
      A light house of rational optimism in the middle of a crazy time. Another great book
    • 5/5
      Do you want to change your outlook on life, people, race, culture, religion, dogmas etc. This book will do that for you. Can you just walk in to Harvard and listen to a 19 hours lecture? No, you cannot but you can read this astounding magnificent book.
    • 4/5
      Liked it, of course, I’ve been devouring Steven Pinker for ten years or more. I think I agreed with pretty much all his positions and conjectures. But I was a bit disappointed too. The book felt heavy handed, bludgeoning almost.
    • 5/5
      Another outstanding work (of course) from the author, a broad and detailed world survey of the state of the society, and especially of violence, war, crime, and prosperity and the feeling of well-being. Most people tend to see the world deteriorating year by year, but Pinker says that this is usually mistaken view, brought about by the greater influence of recent events and the media, which give headlines to a few bad events. If you look at it as statistical averages and rate per 10,000 population, most of these bad things have declined, and good things increased, over the centuries, especially since the scientific-humanistic revolution of the Enlightenment.
    • 4/5
      Dry to listen to. Encouraging to think things are better. Goes into the complexity of trying to separate cause from correlation. How it is often more than one thing going on.
    • 5/5
      Excellent!
    • 5/5
      Best thing I've read in the last few years, at least. Speaks to my worries, works through facts, and leaves me more inspired and hopeful than I can remember being in a long time. I can't recommend this book enough.
    • 3/5
      Ug. Frustrating book. Lots of wonderful statistics about how the world is better than we think. But that could have been done in half the # of pages. The latter half of the book is a rambling and often unconvincing dissection of political and religions behaviors interspersed with interesting data and anecdotes about how humans don't always decide things rationally. I was left wondering what the point of this book was, and who the intended audience was...
    • 3/5
      A lot of reviews of this book I’ve read set up a false dichotomy that you must love it or hate it, swallow it whole without argument or reject it in its entirety. I think the reality is somewhere in between. Yes, some of Pinker’s arguments are flawed (I rely on better-informed intellectuals’ fact-checking for this assertion). Yes, he tends to hyperbolize and cherry-pick, particularly when finding fault with today’s progressives. But I tend to agree with him that problems are solvable, if we identify the problem and set our will to solving it. Or at least I think catastrophizing our problems is not going to solve them, and approaching them as potentially solvable is the only rational, workable position to take. And I hope he’s right about nationalism and populism.
    • 5/5
      I love and loathe this book all at once. It speaks very powerfully to much of what I feel, and then sometimes seems to get things so staggeringly, simplistically wrong that I want to shout my opinions in the town square.

      It will be a while before I can write an even-handed review on this one.
    • 5/5
      The best book I have read for the entire 21st century. Highly recommended to every single book lover.
    • 5/5
      A thoughtful well constructed Defense of Enlightenment values in the modern era with multiple examples on why the future might be rosier than you might think. Varying from cognitive biases to public health, neuroanatomy to quantum physics this is a wide based evidence analysis with hypothesis testing piece of work. Fun to read and yet absorbing. Highly recommended
    • 5/5
      This book is very controversial because it deals with such a large subject. Having just finished this book and the 3 books by Yuval Hurari, I find that together they give a very global perspective about where we are at this moment in history. Pinker uses a lot of data to illustrate his main point. It is that things have never been better as it relates war, health, crime, poverty. He charts the progress from the beginning of the 18th century and graphically shows the remarkable progress humanity has made in the last 250 years. Despite the critics who dismiss him as too optimistic, he does acknowledge that we have a long way to go and many problems that need to be solved. He does talk about climate change but does show faith in our ability to tackle the problem(not sure on that one). Pinker is a globalist and throughout the book he does go after Trump and his nationalistic approach. He definitely goes after religion and although he shows examples of the positive parts of belief in a higher being, he does show many examples of the problems of organized religion in terms of halting the progress of science. Because bad news sells more than good news we have a tendency to see the world in a more negative light than we should. Pinker's book displays the big picture. We can only judge the world from our perspective and experience. If you live in the USA and have an upper middle class life as does all of your peers, then you take this somewhat for granted. Reading Pinker should give you a sense of how incredible your life is and create a little more humility. Because he is a globalist he tends to see the loss of American manufacturing jobs that lead to improvements in other parts of the world as a positive thing. Of course those impacted by this have a different viewpoint. A book this large and dealing with so many issues will always create positive and negative reviews. I thought this was an excellent book but it is long and Pinker can be a bit verbose at times, but his message aligns with my world view on the subject so for me it was a must read.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 2/5
      This is the first book in many years that I gave up on. I simply found it too dense, too verbose, the required cognitive effort too great.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      This was very interesting and remarkably cheering. Mostly very easy to read although I found bits of the last chapter well over my head.He is a bit "oh woe is us" over Trump and I thought a few times that maybe he needed to reread his own book to see it as just a blip.What I took from the book is that human nature is to moan and complain that things are worse but from that comes progress on a long timeline.A good companion to this would be Bill Bryson's "At Home" which will also remind you that you really don't want to go back to when there was no indoor plumbing or antibiotics or electricity or the myriad of other things which make live more pleasant.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      You’ve never had it so good, and Steven Pinker has the stats and charts (over 70!) to prove it. Wars are fewer and less severe, homicides are down, racism is in decline, terrorism is a fading fad, democracy rules, communicable diseases and poverty are on their way out. Life expectancy is up, and police are killing fewer people, both black and white. Even the poor have refrigerators. Inequality is a requisite sign of success. So appreciate the wonderful state of affairs you find yourself in. This is the message of Enlightenment Now, with a title that sounds like a protest placard, but which is actually a survey of the world by the statistics that states collect.We’re so “progressive”, we’re beating back entropy itself. Steven Pinker takes 500 pages to create a world where everything is so fabulously much better than it ever has been, that anyone who says different is perpetuating an intellectual lie. This is why it is your enlightenment. The book is an endless, uplifting editorial. If you’re buying.He’s at his best criticizing politics and science. He shows precisely how our biases prejudice our most thoughtful conclusions, and bemoans the lack of respect for science and the humanities. He says science is presented in some schools as “just another narrative, or myth”. Humanities are in danger of extinction, and they are critical to progress.Pinker has a nice tendency to support his arguments with examples and charts. Unfortunately, he balances this with a tendency to ignore states or countries that don’t conform to his claims, and he swings numbers around to make them look better. He claims when he measures what people consume as opposed to what they earn, the poverty rate in the USA is 3%. So really, everyone is thriving. Even if they’re visibly not. I fully realize Pinker is untouchable and slated for sainthood, but many things he says don’t add up, and a lot of it is just outrageous on its face. Let him speak for himself:-On war: “Virtually every acre of land that was conquered after 1928 has been returned to the state that lost it.” (Something must have happened in 1927 for him to pick 1928, but he doesn’t say). Where do you even begin to refute this? Kaliningrad? Mauritania? The South China Sea? Crimea? Dombass? Palestine?-He defends the demolition of the middle classes in the West. Yes, a hundred million Americans are worse off. But a billion Chinese are better off. “The tradeoff is worth it,” he says. That the extremely rich got fabulously more rich is fine with him, too. -On terrorism’s “decline”, Pinker points to recently low numbers of victim deaths to show how safe we really are. He doesn’t mention all the freedom of movement, assembly and privacy we have lost to the terrorists. He’s satisfied they don’t kill that much, and that they will eventually fade away. -On the mellowing of war: “Weapons don’t come into existence just because they are conceivable or physically possible.” Yes, they do. And worse, everything can be weaponized, from food to mouseclicks. Pinker goes even further, claiming “most historians” don’t think the atomic bombings caused Japan to surrender in three days, but rather it was the potential of Russia turning its attention from west to east.-There is a great deal of nonsense about how much cheaper life is today. The provision of a light indoors would have cost the equivalent of £40,000 in the middle ages (if anyone could read), while today, lights cost fractions of pennies. And 100 years ago it took 1800 hours’ work to afford a refrigerator (among too many more such examples). But Pinker never bothers with the other side of the coin. That today, everyone must spend $150 a month on cable, $125 on phone (after purchasing a phone every two years, with each costing more than the fridge), a $20,000 car, a mortgage, and $50,000 in school debt (none of which were factors in the cost of living in the middle ages ) or be unable to function in society. His endless comparisons are pointless.-He keeps repeating that because even the poor have flush toilets and refrigerators, they are much better off today than ever. He says even the fabulously wealthy Rothschilds didn’t have a washing machine like nearly everyone (80%) now supposedly has. Pinker dismisses ecology as a pastime of the affluent. The more educated and wealthy we become, the more eco-conscious we become, so everything works out. He completely ignores the fact we have crossed the red line. That the oceans are toxic, that there is trash and plastic everywhere, that the carbon levels are at unseemly record levels. That the Paris Accord has not dented the damage one bit. But, he says, the air over London is no longer purple every day. The book ends with an interminable bashing of religion, which Pinker considers “intellectually bankrupt”. He cites all the usual contradictions and hypocrisy, narrow-mindedness and longing for a cleaner era that never existed. Basically, religion and enlightenment are oil and water.So you can look at Enlightenment Now in two ways, according to your own various biases. Either the greater message of positivism is too important (and correct) to criticize Pinker’s maddening claims, or the maddening claims make the whole exercise suspect.David Wineberg

      7 people found this helpful