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

by Steven Pinker

The major enemy of reason in the public sphere today—which is not ignorance, innumeracy, or cognitive biases, but politicization—appears to be on an upswing. In the political arena itself, Americans have become increasingly polarized.50 Most people’s opinions are too shallow and uninformed to fit into a coherent ideology, but in a dubious form of progress, the percentage of Americans whose opinions are down-the-line liberal or down-the-line conservative doubled between 1994 and 2014, from 10 to 21 percent. The polarization has coincided with an increase in social segregation by politics: over those twenty years, the ideologues have become more likely to say that most of their close friends share their political views. The parties have become more partisan as well. According to a recent Pew study, in 1994 about a third of Democrats were more conservative than the median Republican, and vice-versa. In 2014 the figures were closer to a twentieth. Though Americans across the political spectrum drifted leftward through 2004, since then they have diverged on every major issue except gay rights, including government regulation, social spending, immigration, environmental protection, and military strength. Even more troublingly, each side has become more contemptuous of the other. In 2014, 38 percent of Democrats held “very unfavorable” views of the Republican Party (up from 16 percent in 1994), and more than a quarter saw it as “a threat to the nation’s well-being.” Republicans w...