Pinker makes the claim of progress also for the extent and stability of legal environmental protections. Pinker acknowledges that we face substantial challenges but relies too much on an arguement that current problems can be viewed as similar to ones that humanity has successfully overcome in the past.
For some of his points, he seems more vulnerable to a critique of simple extrapolation into the future, at a moment when there are reasons to anticipate a discontinuity, or major regime change. In expansion of human wellbeing this includes improved measured happiness and the greater extent of democracy and rights.
In the category of harm reduction this includes much reduced incidence of wars, use of cruel and capital punishment, and violence in general. In a broad review of historical trends, Pinker discusses a range of indicators of progress. He presents data from a variety of sources showing social progress along many dimensions – a picture that specialists may take for granted but the majority of other readers are unlikely to be (fully) familiar with, including improvements in life expectancy, incidence of diseases, indicators of food insecurity, education levels, poverty, average income and working conditions. He argues that history since the Enlightenment represents improvements in essentially every human dimension, and mostly on this basis he predicts that these trends will continue. As one would anticipate, Pinker’s science-championing case for the existence of progress is evidence-based this represents about three quarters of the book. But even adding the needed nuances – and acknowledging the salience of some existential threats – still leaves a strong case for predicting continued human progress. The book has limits Pinker’s sometimes narrow reading of the economics literature leads him to underestimate the scope of challenges to addressing problems including extreme inequality. The book offers a compelling perspective on the human project of building a better world, drawing on two centuries of improvements in individual wellbeing this is placed in a contemporary social context, offering an insightful diagnosis of current social problems, and proposed applications of Enlightenment ideas as a basis for addressing them. Subsequent scientific discoveries, research and accumulated data are deployed in defense of the Enlightenment – and its associated ideas of progress in history – with great force of argument. It offers a concise summing up of ideas of the Enlightenment. Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress is a remarkable book. Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress, by Steven Pinker, New York: Viking, 2018.
0 kommentar(er)
