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Pinker and his critics

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Steven Pinker has attracted a fair amount of attention with a new book, Enlightenment Now, in which he argues that technology is good because it has made so many lives better, science is good because it allows for technology, science came to us from the Enlightenment, and thus the Enlightenment was good and requires revival.

It seems like a jejune thesis. Whether it makes for a worthwhile book I wil have to leave up to those who actually read the book to judge.

What interests me is that the book seems to have created a number of quite spirited responses. That is generally a good thing. Without Edmund Burke, the best known writings of Paine and Wollstonecraft would never have come about. If you can't give Burke a 'hurrah' for anything else you can spare one for that.

Pinker seems to have earned THAT sort of hurrah at the least.

As to those reviews, I'll quote just one. John Gray writing in the New Statesman says that the book is "a rationalist sermon delivered to a congregation of wavering souls. To think of the book as any kind of scholarly exercise is a category mistake. Much of its more than 500 pages consists of figures aiming to show the progress that has been made under the aegis of Enlightenment ideas. Of course, these figures settle nothing. Like Pinker's celebrated assertion that the world is becoming ever more peaceful -- the statistical basis of which has been demolished by Nassim Nicholas Taleb -- everything depends on what is included in them and how they are interpreted."




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