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

by Steven Pinker

A challenge of our era is how to foster an intellectual and political culture that is driven by reason rather than tribalism and mutual reaction.

The claim that ethnic uniformity leads to cultural excellence is as wrong as an idea can be. There’s a reason we refer to unsophisticated things as provincial, parochial, and insular and to sophisticated ones as urbane and cosmopolitan. No one is brilliant enough to dream up anything of value all by himself. Individuals and cultures of genius are aggregators, appropriators, greatest-hit collectors. Vibrant cultures sit in vast catchment areas in which people and innovations flow from far and wide. This explains why Eurasia, rather than Australia, Africa, or the Americas, was the first continent to give birth to expansive civilizations (as documented by Sowell in his Culture trilogy and Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel).129 It explains why the fountains of culture have always been trading cities on major crossroads and waterways.130 And it explains why human beings have always been peripatetic, moving to wherever they can make the best lives. Roots are for trees; people have feet.

And the story belongs not to any tribe but to all of humanity—to any sentient creature with the power of reason and the urge to persist in its being. For it requires only the convictions that life is better than death, health is better than sickness, abundance is better than want, freedom is better than coercion, happiness is better than suffering, and knowledge is better than superstition and ignorance.