Enlightenment Now Quotes

“the most powerful contributor was science. “It is knowledge that is the key,” Deaton argues. “Income—although important both in and of itself and as a component of wellbeing . . .—is not the ultimate cause of wellbeing.”16 The fruits of science are not just high-tech pharmaceuticals such as vaccines, antibiotics, antiretrovirals, and deworming pills. They also comprise ideas—ideas that may be cheap to implement and obvious in retrospect, but which save millions of lives. Examples include boiling, filtering, or adding bleach to water; washing hands; giving iodine supplements to pregnant women; breast-feeding and cuddling infants; defecating in latrines rather than in fields, streets, and waterways; protecting sleeping children with insecticide-impregnated bed nets; and treating diarrhea with a solution of salt and sugar in clean water.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“There is still more good news. The curves in figure 5-4 are not tapestries of your life that have been drawn out and measured by two of the Fates and will someday be cut by the third. Rather, they are projections from today’s vital statistics, based on the assumption that medical knowledge will be frozen at its current state. It’s not that anyone believes that assumption, but in the absence of clairvoyance about future medical advances we have no other choice. That means you will almost certainly live longer—perhaps much longer—than the numbers you read off the vertical axis.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Then a remarkable thing happened. The rate of child mortality plunged a hundredfold, to a fraction of a percentage point in developed countries, and the plunge went global. As Deaton observed in 2013, “There is not a single country in the world where infant or child mortality today is not lower than it was in 1950.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“The case has been made in beautifully written books, some by Nobel laureates, which flaunt the news in their titles—Progress, The Progress Paradox, Infinite Progress, The Infinite Resource, The Rational Optimist, The Case for Rational Optimism, Utopia for Realists, Mass Flourishing, Abundance, The Improving State of the World, Getting Better, The End of Doom, The Moral Arc, The Big Ratchet, The Great Escape, The Great Surge, The Great Convergence.32 (None was recognized with a major prize, but over the period in which they appeared, Pulitzers in nonfiction were given to four books on genocide, three on terrorism, two on cancer, two on racism, and one on extinction.)”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“The psychological literature confirms that people dread losses more than they look forward to gains, that they dwell on setbacks more than they savor good fortune, and that they are more stung by criticism than they are heartened by praise. (As a psycholinguist I am compelled to add that the English language has far more words for negative emotions than for positive ones.)23 One exception to the Negativity bias is found in autobiographical memory. Though we tend to remember bad events as well as we remember good ones, the negative coloring of the misfortunes fades with time, particularly the ones that happened to us.24 We are wired for nostalgia: in human memory, time heals most wounds.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“The psychological literature confirms that people dread losses more than they look forward to gains, that they dwell on setbacks more than they savor good fortune, and that they are more stung by criticism than they are heartened by praise. (As a psycholinguist I am compelled to add that the English language has far more words for negative emotions than for positive ones.)23 One exception to the Negativity bias is found in autobiographical memory. Though we tend to remember bad events as well as we remember good ones, the negative coloring of the misfortunes fades with time, particularly the ones that happened to us.24 We are wired for nostalgia:”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“It’s the idea of progress that rankles the chattering class—the Enlightenment belief that by understanding the world we can improve the human condition. An entire lexicon of abuse has grown up to express their scorn. If you think knowledge can help solve problems, then you have a “blind faith” and a “quasi-religious belief” in the “outmoded superstition” and “false promise” of the “myth” of the “onward march” of “inevitable progress.” You are a “cheerleader” for “vulgar American can-doism” with the “rah-rah” spirit of “boardroom ideology,” “Silicon Valley,” and the “Chamber of Commerce.” You are a practitioner of “Whig history,” a “naïve optimist,” a “Pollyanna,” and of course a “Pangloss,” a modern-day version of the philosopher in Voltaire’s Candide who asserts that “all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Evolution left us with another burden: our cognitive, emotional, and moral faculties are adapted to individual survival and reproduction in an archaic environment, not to universal thriving in a modern one. To appreciate this burden, one doesn’t have to believe that we are cavemen out of time, only that evolution, with its speed limit measured in generations, could not possibly have adapted our brains to modern technology and institutions. Humans today rely on cognitive faculties that worked well enough in traditional societies, but which we now see are infested with bugs.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“When the Industrial Revolution released a gusher of usable energy from coal, oil, and falling water, it launched a Great Escape from poverty, disease, hunger, illiteracy, and premature death, first in the West and increasingly in the rest of the world”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Around 500 BCE, in what the philosopher Karl Jaspers called the Axial Age, several widely separated cultures pivoted from systems of ritual and sacrifice that merely warded off misfortune to systems of philosophical and religious belief that promoted selflessness and promised spiritual transcendence.17 Taoism and Confucianism in China, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism in India, Zoroastrianism in Persia, Second Temple Judaism in Judea, and classical Greek philosophy and drama emerged within a few centuries of one another. (Confucius, Buddha, Pythagoras, Aeschylus, and the last of the Hebrew prophets walked the earth at the same time.) Recently an interdisciplinary team of scholars identified a common cause.18 It was not an aura of spirituality that descended on the planet but something more prosaic: energy capture. The Axial Age was when agricultural and economic advances provided a burst of energy: upwards of 20,000 calories per person per day in food, fodder, fuel, and raw materials. This surge allowed the civilizations to afford larger cities, a scholarly and priestly class, and a reorientation of their priorities from short-term survival to long-term harmony. As Bertolt Brecht put it millennia later: Grub first, then ethics.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Information is also collected by an animal’s nervous system as it lives its life. When the ear transduces sound into neural firings, the two physical processes—vibrating air and diffusing ions—could not be more different. But thanks to the correlation between them, the pattern of neural activity in the animal’s brain carries information about the sound in the world. From there the information can switch from electrical to chemical and back as it crosses the synapses connecting one neuron to the next; through all these physical transformations, the information is preserved. A momentous discovery of 20th-century theoretical neuroscience is that networks of neurons not only can preserve information but can transform it in ways that allow us to explain how brains can be intelligent.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“It is impossible to explain why these membranes and bones and fluids and hairs are arranged in that improbable way without noting that this configuration allows the brain to register patterned sound. Even the fleshy outer ear—asymmetrical top to bottom and front to back, and crinkled with ridges and valleys—is shaped in a way that sculpts the incoming sound to inform the brain whether the soundmaker is above or below, in front or behind. Organisms are replete with improbable configurations of flesh like eyes, ears, hearts, and stomachs which cry out for an explanation.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“He believes that the shape, colour and texture of a plant can be a clue to how it will work as a medicine because God designed nature to be interpreted by mankind. He believes that it is possible to turn base metal into gold, although he doubts that anyone knows how to do it. He believes that nature abhors a vacuum. He believes the rainbow is a sign from God and that comets portend evil. He believes that dreams predict the future, if we know how to interpret them. He believes, of course, that the earth stands still and the sun and stars turn around the earth once every twenty-four hours.7”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“there’s anything the Enlightenment thinkers had in common, it was an insistence that we energetically apply the standard of reason to understanding our world, and not fall back on generators of delusion like faith, dogma, revelation, authority, charisma, mysticism, divination, visions, gut feelings, or the hermeneutic parsing of sacred texts.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“You can foster the welfare of other sentient beings by enhancing life, health, knowledge, freedom, abundance, safety, beauty, and peace. History shows that when we sympathize with others and apply our ingenuity to improving the human condition, we can make progress in doing so, and you can help to continue that progress.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“spoor,”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“El primer paso hacia la sabiduría es comprender que las leyes del universo no se preocupan de ti. El siguiente es comprender que eso no implica que la vida carezca de sentido, porque la gente se preocupa de ti, y viceversa. Tú te preocupas de ti mismo y tienes la responsabilidad de respetar las leyes del universo que te mantienen vivo, por lo que no desperdicias tu existencia.”
― Steven Pinker, En defensa de la Ilustración: Por la razón, la ciencia, el humanismo y el progreso (Contextos)

“[...] they called for a greater political diversity in psychology, the version of diversity that matters the most (as opposed to the version commonly pursued, namely people who look different but think alike).”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“On what principle is it, that when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“A modicum of anxiety may be the price we pay for the uncertainty of freedom.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“El respaldo del pensamiento científico ha de distinguirse ante todo de cualquier creencia en que los miembros del gremio profesional llamado «ciencia» son especialmente sabios o nobles. La cultura de la ciencia se basa en la creencia opuesta. Sus prácticas distintivas, entre las que figuran el debate abierto, la revisión por pares y los métodos de doble ciego, están destinadas a sortear los pecados a los que son vulnerables los científicos, como cualquier ser humano. Como dice Richard Feynman, el primer principio de la ciencia es «que no debes engañarte a ti mismo y que eres la persona más fácil de engañar».”
― Steven Pinker, En defensa de la Ilustración: Por la razón, la ciencia, el humanismo y el progreso (Contextos)

“Algunas de las amenazas a la humanidad son fantasiosas o infinitesimales, pero una de ellas es real: la guerra nuclear.”
― Steven Pinker, En defensa de la Ilustración: Por la razón, la ciencia, el humanismo y el progreso (Contextos)

“Aunque una cierta dosis de ansiedad acompañará inevitablemente la contemplación de nuestros enigmas políticos y existenciales, no tiene por qué conducirnos a la patología ni a la desesperación. Uno de los retos de la modernidad consiste en aprender a afrontar un repertorio creciente de responsabilidades sin atormentarnos en exceso. Como sucede con todos los nuevos desafíos, estamos buscando a tientas la combinación adecuada de estratagemas tradicionales y novedosas,”
― Steven Pinker, En defensa de la Ilustración: Por la razón, la ciencia, el humanismo y el progreso (Contextos)

“People are by nature illiterate and innumerate, quantifying the world by “one, two, many” and by rough guesstimates.21 They understand physical things as having hidden essences that obey the laws of sympathetic magic or voodoo rather than physics and biology: objects can reach across time and space to affect things that resemble them or that had been in contact with them in the past (remember the beliefs of pre–Scientific Revolution Englishmen).22 They think that words and thoughts can impinge on the physical world in prayers and curses. They underestimate the prevalence of coincidence.23 They generalize from paltry samples, namely their own experience, and they reason by stereotype, projecting the typical traits of a group onto any individual that belongs to it. They infer causation from correlation. They think holistically, in black and white, and physically, treating abstract networks as concrete stuff. They are not so much intuitive scientists as intuitive lawyers and politicians, marshaling evidence that confirms their convictions while dismissing evidence that contradicts them.24 They overestimate their own knowledge, understanding, rectitude, competence, and luck.25 The human moral sense can also work at cross-purposes to our well-being.26 People demonize those they disagree with, attributing differences of opinion to stupidity and dishonesty. For every misfortune they seek a scapegoat. They see morality as a source of grounds for condemning rivals and mobilizing indignation against them.27 The grounds for condemnation may consist in the defendants’ having harmed others, but they also may consist in their having flouted custom, questioned authority, undermined tribal solidarity, or engaged in unclean sexual or dietary practices. People see violence as moral, not immoral: across the world and throughout history, more people have been murdered to mete out justice than to satisfy greed.28 But we’re not all bad. Human cognition comes with two features that give it the means to transcend its limitations.29 The first is abstraction. People can co-opt their”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Si uno piensa que el conocimiento puede ayudar a solucionar los problemas, entonces es que tiene una «fe ciega» y una «creencia cuasirreligiosa» en la «superstición obsoleta» y la «falsa promesa» del «mito» de la «marcha imparable» del «progreso inevitable». Es un «animador» del «sí, podemos» con el «espíritu entusiasta» de la «ideología de la sala de juntas», «Silicon Valley» y la «Cámara de Comercio». Es un practicante de la «historia whig», un «optimista ingenuo», una «Pollyanna» y, por supuesto, un «Pangloss», una versión actual del filósofo del Cándido, de Voltaire, que afirma que «vivimos en el mejor de los mundos posibles».”
― Steven Pinker, En defensa de la Ilustración: Por la razón, la ciencia, el humanismo y el progreso (Contextos)

“No thinking person should be indifferent to our society’s disinvestment in the humanities.53 A society without historical scholarship is like a person without memory: deluded, confused, easily exploited. Philosophy grows out of the recognition that clarity”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“and logic don’t come easily to us and that we’re better off when our thinking is refined and deepened. The arts are one of the things that make life worth living, enriching human experience with beauty and insight. Criticism is itself an art that multiplies the appreciation and enjoyment of great works. Knowledge in these domains is hard won, and needs constant enriching and updating as the times change.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Un problema no es necesariamente una crisis, una plaga o una epidemia, y entre las muchas cosas que suceden en el mundo figura el hecho de que la gente soluciona los problemas afrontándolos.”
― Steven Pinker, En defensa de la Ilustración: Por la razón, la ciencia, el humanismo y el progreso (Contextos)

“(Como escribió Montesquieu: «Si los triángulos tuvieran un dios, le darían tres lados».)”
― Steven Pinker, En defensa de la Ilustración: Por la razón, la ciencia, el humanismo y el progreso (Contextos)

“El romántico movimiento verde no ve la captación humana de energía como una forma de resistir la entropía y promover la prosperidad humana, sino como un crimen atroz contra la naturaleza, que conducirá a una guerra de recursos, aire y agua contaminados y que comportará un cambio climático que acabará con la civilización.”
― Steven Pinker, En defensa de la Ilustración: Por la razón, la ciencia, el humanismo y el progreso (Contextos)