ArtiFact #12: De-framing Steven Pinker's "Enlightenment Now" | Alex Sheremet, Joel Parrish

ArtiFact: Books, Art, Culture

Steven Pinker is a cognitive scientist who’s written a number of pop science classics: The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate, and more. In 2011, he waded into the culture (if not political) debates with Better Angels of our Nature, a text whose basic premise – that the world has been getting more peaceful for millennia, and that the advent of a powerful state can be credited here – has shaped this podcast's political thinking.

Although an excellent writer at his best, in 2014, he published a book about writing well – The Sense of Style – which was loaded with haphazard advice, and then 2018’s more explicitly political Enlightenment Now, a mixed bag that has the overall correct argument (the world gets better over time) but lots of overstatement, understatement, and poor framing of a number of issues. It also suffers from its straitjacket reliance on the Great Enlightenment as a thematic/unifying writerly tool, since Steven Pinker only superficially touches upon the movement, and ends the book with a bizarre attack on Friedrich Nietzsche as a Counter-Enlightenment anti-humanist.

In this video, we assess Steven Pinker's claims and offer up some of our own. For example: if GDP is a sloppy way to measure human development, what does GPI say? Should we prefer one criminal cartel over another? Why HAS institutional trust eroded, anyway? And many other questions, as well.

You can also watch this episode on our YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/1oSwpfcxmbM

Read the latest writing from the automachination universe: https://automachination.com

Joel's website: https://poeticimport.com

Read Alex’s (archived) essays: https://alexsheremet.com

Read Alex’s essay on Steven Pinker’s “The Sense of Style”: https://alexsheremet.com/review-of-steven-pinkers-the-sense-of-style-the-thinking-persons-guide-to-writing-in-the-21st-century/

Music sample: Lowkemia - "Lorem Ipsum" (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Timestamps:

0:00 – Steven Pinker’s Language Instinct, Better Angels of our Nature, Blank Slate, Sense of Style; where Enlightenment Now fits into his oeuvre
16:15 – What does it mean when billionaires like Bill Gates want to blurb your book?
27:46 – How Steven Pinker misuses his two opening epigraphs
40:08 – Steven Pinker primes the reader early on for the book’s least plausible arguments
53:00 – Does Steven Pinker downplay the Enlightenment’s skepticism of reason?
01:06:08 – Yes, we’re more rational than ever, but what are today’s witches and werewolves?
01:10:50 – “Misfortune may be no one’s fault”: does Steven Pinker boost the status quo?
01:17:06 – Is it true that “justice” has killed more people than “greed”? How can we even know?
01:24:40 – Why has institutional trust eroded? Is Steven Pinker’s answer satisfying?
01:36:51 – De-framing + re-framing Enlightenment Now while still accepting its core claims
01:49:48 – Have we reached “peak stuff”?
02:10:05 – Study: GDP vs. GPI to measure human progress & wealth
02:16:04 – Alex goes OFF on the childish capitalism/communism debate & Western hypocrisy
02:37:45 – What Steven Pinker gets wrong about Korea and Taiwan
02:48:50 – Income inequality, colonialism, & post-colonialism: the Steven Pinker, Bill Gates, Jason Hickel, Branko Milanovic debate
03:53:06 – How Steven Pinker depends on Friedrich Nietzsche’s arguments, then misreads him
04:28:25 – Enlightenment Now is (mostly) correct about existential threats
04:35:12 – Steven Pinker offers remarkably thin political analysis