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

by Steven Pinker

the most consistent predictor of Trump support was pessimism.

Populist voters are older, more religious, more rural, less educated, and more likely to be male and members of the ethnic majority.

Populism is an old man’s movement.

As the philosopher Isaiah Berlin pointed out, the ideal of a perfectly just, equal, free, healthy, and harmonious society, which liberal democracies never measure up to, is a dangerous fantasy.

Moreover, among the perquisites of freedom is the freedom of people to screw up their own lives.

What predicts the denial of human-made climate change is not scientific illiteracy but political ideology.

certain beliefs become symbols of cultural allegiance. People affirm or deny these beliefs to express not what they know but who they are.

it was the sophisticated respondents who were most blinded by their politics.

As Pat Paulsen noted, “If either the right wing or the left wing gained control of the country, it would fly around in circles.”

Quoting John Stuart Mill—“He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that”—they

they called for greater political diversity in psychology, the version of diversity that matters the most (as opposed to the version commonly pursued, namely people who look different but think alike).

the anthropologists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber conclude, “Contrary to common bleak assessments of human reasoning abilities, people are quite capable of reasoning in an unbiased manner, at least when they are evaluating arguments rather than producing them, and when they are after the truth rather than trying to win a debate.”

For their part, the media could examine their role in turning politics into a sport, and intellectuals and pundits could think twice about competing.

A respect for scientific thinking is, adamantly, not the belief that all current scientific hypotheses are true.

The lifeblood of science is the cycle of conjecture and refutation: proposing a hypothesis and then seeing whether it survives attempts to falsify

The fallacy (putting aside the apocryphal history) is a failure to recognize that what science allows is an increasing confidence in a hypothesis as the evidence accumulates, not a claim to infallibility on the first try.

Indeed, this kind of argument refutes itself, since the arguers must themselves appeal to the truth of current scientific claims to cast doubt on the earlier ones.

If Nagel’s transcendental argument about the non-negotiability of reason has merit—that the act of considering the validity of reason presupposes the validity of reason—then

That means that food, comfort, curiosity, beauty, stimulation, love, sex, and camaraderie are not shallow indulgences or hedonistic distractions. They are links in the causal chain that allowed minds to come into being.

Much of what we call wisdom consists in balancing the conflicting desires within ourselves, and much of what we call morality and politics consists in balancing the conflicting desires among people.

History confirms that when diverse cultures have to find common ground, they converge toward humanism.

The first step toward wisdom is the realization that the laws of the universe don’t care about you.