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

by Steven Pinker

If the left and right are equally stupid in quizzes and experiments, we might expect them to be equally off the mark in making sense of the world. The data on human history presented in chapters 5 through 18 provide an opportunity to see which of the major political ideologies can explain the facts of human progress. I’ve been arguing that the main drivers were the nonpolitical ideals of reason, science, and humanism, which led people to seek and apply knowledge that enhanced human flourishing. Do right-wing or left-wing ideologies have anything to add? Do the seventy-odd graphs entitle either side to say, “Bias, shmias: we’re right; you’re wrong”? It seems that each side can take some credit while also missing big parts of the story. Foremost is the conservative skepticism about the ideal of progress itself. Ever since the first modern conservative, Edmund Burke, suggested that humans were too flawed to think up schemes for improving their condition and were better off sticking with traditions and institutions that kept them from the abyss, a major stream of conservative thought has been skeptical about the best-laid plans of mice and men. The reactionary fringe of conservatism, recently disinterred by Trumpists and the European far right (chapter 23), believes that Western civilization has careened out of control since some halcyon century, having abandoned the moral clarity of traditional Christendom for a decadent secular fleshpot that, if left on its current course, w...