Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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 deli...

In 1943 Bengal was a generally accepted name for a large northeastern chunk of the British Raj. In our own day, part of that chunk is known as Bangladesh. The rest is within India, but is divided into three states: West Bengal, Tripura, and Asam. However defined, Bengal was the scene of a horrific famine in 1943. More than two million people died either of 'pure' starvation or of diseases common to the region, and seldom fatal except i n a body weakened by malnourishment.  The causes of the famine are hotly disputed. Bad harvests were part of it, but the disruption of trading patterns by the war -- which was very close by at this time -- Burma was the front line -- was also part of it. The British government kept the matter as hush-hush as they could manage. They wanted to convey an atmosphere of normalcy in British India to the extent possible. That propaganda-driven denialism surely contributed to the death toll. Beyond its humanitarian interest, the famine has ...