{"id":34335,"date":"2018-05-18T07:13:13","date_gmt":"2018-05-18T12:13:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=34335"},"modified":"2018-05-18T07:13:13","modified_gmt":"2018-05-18T12:13:13","slug":"steven-pinkers-ideas-about-progress-are-fatally-flawed-these-eight-graphs-show-why","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=34335","title":{"rendered":"Steven Pinker\u2019s Ideas About Progress Are Fatally Flawed. These Eight Graphs Show\u00a0Why."},"content":{"rendered":"<header class=\"entry-header\">\n<h3 class=\"entry-title\"><a href=\"https:\/\/patternsofmeaning.com\/2018\/05\/17\/steven-pinkers-ideas-about-progress-are-fatally-flawed-these-eight-graphs-show-why\/\">Steven Pinker\u2019s Ideas About Progress Are Fatally Flawed. These Eight Graphs Show\u00a0Why.<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/header>\n<div class=\"entry-content\">\n<p><em>It\u2019s time to reclaim the mantle of \u201cProgress\u201d for progressives. By falsely tethering the concept of progress to free market economics and centrist values, Steven Pinker has tried to appropriate a great idea for which he has no rightful claim.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>In <em>Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress<\/em>, published earlier this year, Steven Pinker argues that the human race has never had it so good as a result of values he attributes to the European Enlightenment of the 18<sup>th<\/sup> century. He berates those who focus on what is wrong with the world\u2019s current condition as pessimists who only help to incite regressive reactionaries. Instead, he glorifies the dominant neoliberal, technocratic approach to solving the world\u2019s problems as the only one that has worked in the past and will continue to lead humanity on its current triumphant path.<\/p>\n<p>His book has incited strong reactions, both positive and negative. On one hand, Bill Gates has, for example, effervesced that \u201cIt\u2019s my new favorite book of all time.\u201d On the other hand, Pinker has been fiercely excoriated by a wide range of leading thinkers for writing a simplistic, incoherent paean to the dominant world order. John Gray, in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.newstatesman.com\/culture\/books\/2018\/02\/unenlightened-thinking-steven-pinker-s-embarrassing-new-book-feeble-sermon\">the <em>New Statesman<\/em><\/a>, calls it \u201cembarrassing\u201d and \u201cfeeble\u201d; David Bell, writing <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thenation.com\/article\/waiting-for-steven-pinkers-enlightenment\/\">in <em>The Nation<\/em><\/a>, sees it as \u201ca dogmatic book that offers an oversimplified, excessively optimistic vision of human history\u201d; and George Monbiot, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/commentisfree\/2018\/mar\/07\/environmental-calamity-facts-steven-pinker\">in <em>The Guardian<\/em><\/a>, laments the \u201cpoor scholarship\u201d and \u201cmotivated reasoning\u201d that \u201cinsults the Enlightenment principles he claims to defend.\u201d (Full disclosure: Monbiot recommends my book, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.jeremylent.com\/the-patterning-instinct.html\"><em>The Patterning Instinct<\/em><\/a>, instead.)<\/p>\n<p>In light of all this, you might ask, what is left to add? Having read his book carefully, I believe it\u2019s crucially important to take Pinker to task for some dangerously erroneous arguments he makes. Pinker is, after all, an intellectual darling of the most powerful echelons of global society.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Steven Pinker\u2019s Ideas About Progress Are Fatally Flawed. These Eight Graphs Show\u00a0Why. It\u2019s time to reclaim the mantle of \u201cProgress\u201d for progressives. By falsely tethering the concept of progress to free market economics and centrist values, Steven Pinker has tried to appropriate a great idea for which he has no rightful claim. In Enlightenment Now: [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,6,7],"tags":[20156,16819,6996,603,13248,623,1825,1302,20041,889],"class_list":["post-34335","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-liberty","category-survival-2","tag-enlightenment","tag-jeremy-lent","tag-neoliberalism","tag-optimism","tag-patterns-of-meaning","tag-pessimism","tag-progress","tag-status-quo","tag-steven-pinker","tag-world-economic-forum"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34335","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=34335"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34335\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34336,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34335\/revisions\/34336"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=34335"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=34335"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=34335"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}