An Invitation to Optimism
Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress
by Steven Pinker
Penguin Random House, 2018, 524 pages, $35
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This is a terrific book! Steven Pinker, the Harvard cognitive psychologist whose discipline straddles natural and social science, serves us a rich menu of food for thought. He restates the core message of the Enlightenment with passion, facts and clarity: rational action and rule-bound behaviour can—indeed do—improve the human condition.
Pinker bases his argument on a dauntingly thorough survey of the analytical and empirical literature to show that the long-term trends in material wellbeing, nutrition, longevity, birth-giving and child mortality, health, individual freedom and indeed happiness show heartening improvements. Pinker rightly celebrates the fact that massive increases in per-acre productivity now allow the replanting of forests and the creation of nature reserves in many places. The…
Madam: Archbishop Fisher (July-August 2024) does not resist the attacks on his church by the political, social or scientific atheists and those who insist on not being told what to do.
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