Enlightenment Now Quotes

“If my starting offer is “I get to rob, beat, enslave, and kill you and your kind, but you don’t get to rob, beat, enslave, or kill me or my kind,” I can’t expect you to agree to the deal or third parties to ratify it, because there’s no good reason that I should get privileges just because I’m me and you’re not.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“If you walk away from a sandcastle, it won’t be there tomorrow, because as the wind, waves, seagulls, and small children push the grains of sand around, they’re more likely to arrange them into one of the vast number of configurations that don’t look like a castle than into the tiny few that do.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Foremost is reason. Reason is nonnegotiable. As soon as you show up to discuss the question of what we should live for (or any other question), as long as you insist that your answers, whatever they are, are reasonable or justified or true and that therefore other people ought to believe them too, then you have committed yourself to reason, and to holding your beliefs accountable to objective standards.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“The fact-checking site PolitiFact judged that an astonishing 69 percent of the public statements by Trump they checked were “Mostly False,”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“The schooling, together with health and wealth, are literally making us smarter—by thirty IQ points, or two standard deviations above our ancestors.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“From their position of weakness, Harari notes, what terrorists seek to accomplish is not damage but theater.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“One response to the prospect of climate change is to deny that it is occurring or that human activity is the cause. It's completely appropriate of course to challenge the hypothesis of anthropogenic climate change on scientific grounds, particularly given the extreme measures it calls for if it is true. The great virtue of science is that a true hypothesis will in the long run withstand attempts to falsify it. Anthropogenic climate change is the most vigorously challenged scientific hypothesis in history. By now, all the major challenges such as that global temperatures have stopped rising, that they only seem to be rising because they were only measured in urban heat islands, or that they really are rising, but only because the sun is getting hotter, have been refuted, and even many skeptics have been convinced. A recent survey found that exactly 4 out of 69,406 authors of peer reviewed articles in the scientific literature rejected the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming. And that the peer reviewed literature contains no convincing evidence against the hypothesis. Nonetheless, a movement within the American political right, heavily underwritten by fossil fuel interests, has prosecuted a fanatical and mendacious campaign to deny that greenhouse gases are harming the planet. In doing so, they have advanced the conspiracy theory that the scientific community is fatally infected with political correctness and ideologically committed to a government takeover of the economy. As someone who considers himself something of a watchdog for politically correct dogma in academia, I can state that this is nonsense. Physical scientists have no such agenda and the evidence speaks for itself. And it's precisely because of challenges like this that scholars in all fields have a duty to secure the credibility of the academy by not enforcing political orthodoxies.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“The fact that mean measures of environmental quality are improving does not mean that everything is ok. That the environment got better by itself or that we can just sit back and relax for the cleaner environment that we enjoy today, we must thank the arguments, activism, legislation, regulation, treaties and technological ingenuity of the people who sought to improve it in the past.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“The top five countries that still execute people in significant numbers form an unlikely club: China and Iran (more than a thousand apiece annually), Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United States. As in other areas of human flourishing (such as crime, war, health, longevity, accidents, and education), the United States is a laggard among wealthy democracies.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Here is Eisner’s one-sentence summary of how to halve the homicide rate within three decades: “An effective rule of law, based on legitimate law enforcement, victim protection, swift and fair adjudication, moderate punishment, and humane prisons is critical to sustainable reductions in lethal violence.”32 The adjectives effective, legitimate, swift, fair, moderate, and humane differentiate his advice from the get-tough-on-crime rhetoric favored by right-wing politicians.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“People in every country underestimate the proportion of their compatriots who say they are happy, by an average of 42 percentage points.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Parents get meaning from their children, but not necessarily happiness.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“A very different threat to human progress is a political movement that seeks to undermine its Enlightenment foundations.
The second decade of the 21st century has seen the rise of a counter-Enlightenment movement called populism, more accurately, authoritarian populism. Populism calls for the direct sovereignty of a country’s “people” (usually an ethnic group, sometimes a class), embodied in a strong leader who directly channels their authentic virtue and experience.
Authoritarian populism can be seen as a pushback of elements of human nature—tribalism, authoritarianism, demonization, zero-sum thinking—against the Enlightenment institutions that were designed to circumvent them. By focusing on the tribe rather than the individual, it has no place for the protection of minority rights or the promotion of human welfare worldwide. By failing to acknowledge that hard-won knowledge is the key to societal improvement, it denigrates “elites” and “experts” and downplays the marketplace of ideas, including freedom of speech, diversity of opinion, and the fact-checking of self-serving claims. By valorizing a strong leader, populism overlooks the limitations in human nature, and disdains the rule-governed institutions and constitutional checks that constrain the power of flawed human actors.
Populism comes in left-wing and right-wing varieties, which share a folk theory of economics as zero-sum competition: between economic classes in the case of the left, between nations or ethnic groups in the case of the right. Problems are seen not as challenges that are inevitable in an indifferent universe but as the malevolent designs of insidious elites, minorities, or foreigners. As for progress, forget about it: populism looks backward to an age in which the nation was ethnically homogeneous, orthodox cultural and religious values prevailed, and economies were powered by farming and manufacturing, which produced tangible goods for local consumption and for export.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Like all demonstrations of progress, reports on the improving state of the environment are often met with a combination of anger and illogic. The fact that many measures of environmental quality are improving does not mean that everything is OK, that the environment got better by itself, or that we can just sit back and relax. For the cleaner environment we enjoy today we must thank the arguments, activism, legislation, regulations, treaties, and technological ingenuity of the people who sought to improve it in the past.35 We’ll need more of each to sustain the progress we’ve made, prevent reversals (particularly under the Trump presidency), and extend it to the wicked problems that still face us, such as the health of the oceans and, as we shall see, atmospheric greenhouse gases.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“In the United States, the share of income going to the richest one percent grew from 8 percent in 1980 to 18 percent in 2015, while the share going to the richest tenth of one percent grew from 2 percent to 8 percent.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“For many people the greatest fear raised by the prospect of a longer life is dementia, but another pleasant surprise has come to light: between 2000 and 2012, the rate among Americans over 65 fell by a quarter, and the average age at diagnosis rose from 80.7 to 82.4 years.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“The nature of news is likely to distort people’s view of the world because of a mental bug that the psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman called the Availability heuristic: people estimate the probability of an event or the frequency of a kind of thing by the ease with which instances come to mind.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“As has been said about science, sometimes society advances funeral by funeral.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“technology expert Kevin Kelly has proposed that “over time, if a technology persists long enough, its costs begin to approach (but never reach) zero.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“But relentless negativity can itself have unintended consequences, and recently a few journalists have begun to point them out. In the wake of the 2016 American election, the New York Times writers David Bornstein and Tina Rosenberg reflected on the media’s role in its shocking outcome: Trump was the beneficiary of a belief—near universal in American journalism—that “serious news” can essentially be defined as “what’s going wrong.” . . . For decades, journalism’s steady focus on problems and seemingly incurable pathologies was preparing the soil that allowed Trump’s seeds of discontent and despair to take root. . . . One consequence is that many Americans today have difficulty imagining, valuing or even believing in the promise of incremental system change, which leads to a greater appetite for revolutionary, smash-the-machine change.30”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“take wisdom.” The genie waves his hand and vanishes in a puff of smoke. The smoke clears to reveal the dean with his head in his hands, lost in thought. A minute elapses. Ten minutes. Fifteen. Finally a professor calls out, “Well? Well?” The dean mutters, “I should have taken the money.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“In explaining this Somalia-to-Sweden continuum, with poor violent repressive unhappy countries at one end and rich peaceful liberal happy ones at the other, correlation is not causation, and other factors like education, geography, history, and culture may play roles.60 But when the quants try to tease them apart, they find that economic development does seem to be a major mover of human welfare.61 In an old academic joke, a dean is presiding over a faculty meeting when a genie appears and offers him one of three wishes—money, fame, or wisdom. The dean replies, “That’s easy. I’m a scholar. I’ve devoted my life to understanding. Of course I’ll”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Though it’s easy to sneer at national income as a shallow and materialistic measure, it correlates with every indicator of human flourishing, as we will repeatedly see in the chapters to come. Most obviously, GDP per capita correlates with longevity, health, and nutrition.57 Less obviously, it correlates with higher ethical values like peace, freedom, human rights, and tolerance.58 Richer countries, on average, fight fewer wars with each other (chapter 11), are less likely to be riven by civil wars (chapter 11), are more likely to become and stay democratic (chapter 14), and have greater respect for human rights (chapter 14—on average, that is; Arab oil states are rich but repressive). The citizens of richer countries have greater respect for “emancipative” or liberal values such as women’s equality, free speech, gay rights, participatory democracy, and protection of the environment (chapters 10 and 15). Not surprisingly, as countries get richer they get happier (chapter 18); more”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“A humanistic morality rests on the universal bedrock of reason and human interests: it’s an inescapable feature of the human condition that we’re all better off if we help each other and refrain from hurting each other.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“What, then, distinguishes science from other exercises of reason? It certainly isn’t “the scientific method,” a term that is taught to schoolchildren but that never passes the lips of a scientist. Scientists use whichever methods help them understand the world: drudgelike tabulation of data, experimental derring-do, flights of theoretical fancy, elegant mathematical modeling, kludgy computer simulation, sweeping verbal narrative.18 All the methods are pressed into the service of two ideals, and it is these ideals that advocates of science want to export to the rest of intellectual life.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“In 21st-century America, the control of Congress by a Republican Party that became synonymous with the extreme right has been pernicious, because it is so convinced of the righteousness of its cause and the evil of its rivals that it has undermined the institutions of democracy to get what it wants.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“The goal of maximizing human flourishing—life, health, happiness, freedom, knowledge, love, richness of experience—may be called humanism.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Because the cultures of politics and journalism are largely innocent of the scientific mindset, questions with massive consequences for life and death are answered by methods that we know lead to error, such as anecdotes, headlines, rhetoric, and what engineers call HiPPO (highest-paid person’s opinion).”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Many scholars in “science studies” devote their careers to recondite analyses of how the whole institution is just a pretext for oppression.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress