Steven pinker enlightenment5/13/2023 ![]() ![]() Jean-Jacques Rousseau asked them in Enlightenment Paris, the Romantic movement did the same in the chilling wake of the French Revolution, and Sigmund Freud asked them when reflecting on World War I. Do science and technology genuinely make our lives better, or fill them with new problems as we are dragged, like Charlie Chaplin, by the unstoppable machine of Modern Times? ![]() Pessimism doubts whether progress will deliver on its promise of a better tomorrow, while cynicism questions whether today is truly better than our ancestors’ yesterdays. Yet Steven Pinker argues there is a second, more profound assault on the Enlightenment’s legacy of progress, coming from within intellectual and artistic spheres: a crisis of confidence, as progress’s supporters see so many disasters, setbacks, emergencies, new wars re-opening old wounds, new structures replicating old iniquities, new destructive side-effects of progress’s best intentions. And most expect any attack on those values to come from the far right: from foes of progressivism, from anti-science religious movements, from closed minds. ![]() It is not intuitive that a case needs to be made for “Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress,” stable values that have long defined our modernity. ![]()
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