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

by Steven Pinker

I have often been reminded of the need to restate the ideals of the Enlightenment (also called humanism, the open society, and cosmopolitan or classical liberalism).

“One age cannot conclude a pact that would prevent succeeding ages from extending their insights, increasing their knowledge, and purging their errors.

The era was a cornucopia of ideas, some of them contradictory, but four themes tie them together: reason, science, humanism, and progress.

It’s not just a rhetorical aspiration to say that ideas can change the world; it’s a fact about the physical makeup of brains. The Enlightenment thinkers had an inkling that thought could consist of patterns in matter—they likened ideas to impressions in wax, vibrations in a string, or waves from a boat.

Not only does the universe not care about our desires, but in the natural course of events it will appear to thwart them, because there are so many more ways for things to go wrong than for them to go right. Houses burn down, ships sink, battles are lost for want of a horseshoe nail.

Thanks to language, ideas are not just abstracted and combined inside the head of a single thinker but can be pooled across a community of thinkers.

No sooner did people step into the light than they were advised that darkness wasn’t so bad after all, that they should stop daring to understand so much, that dogmas and formulas deserved another chance, and that human nature’s destiny was not progress but decline.

Voltaire was satirizing not the Enlightenment hope for progress but its opposite, the religious rationalization for suffering called theodicy, according to which God had no choice but to allow epidemics and massacres because a world without them is metaphysically impossible.

The consequences of negative news are themselves negative. Far from being better informed, heavy newswatchers can become miscalibrated. They worry more about crime, even when rates are falling, and sometimes they part company with reality altogether: a 2016 poll found that a large majority of Americans follow news about ISIS closely, and 77 percent agreed that “Islamic militants operating in Syria and Iraq pose a serious threat to the existence or survival of the United States,”

a belief that is nothing short of delusional.14

Trump was the beneficiary of a belief—near universal in American journalism—that “serious news” can essentially be defined as “what’s going wrong.” .

Our understanding of who we are, where we came from, how the world works, and what matters in life depends on partaking of the vast and ever-expanding store of knowledge. Though unlettered hunters, herders, and peasants are fully human, anthropologists often comment on their orientation to the present, the local, the physical.

Today, education is compulsory in most countries, and it is recognized as a fundamental human right by the 170 members of the United Nations that signed the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.4

Studies of the effects of education confirm that educated people really are more enlightened. They are less racist, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic, and authoritarian.