Pinker is passionate in his tepidity, and contemptuous of anyone daring to criticize the present world order. What “Marxist professors” and racist Trump supporters have in common is that they just don’t know (or want to admit) how good they have it. Criticism of liberal capitalism is thus the provenance of hysterical populists on both the Left and the Right. Systemic critique, ideologies, and “big ideas” are downright dangerous. For Pinker, modern capitalist democracy has basically gotten things right, and activism should at most consist of pushing for minor improvements, mitigating bad symptoms around the edges. This preening tome professes a pragmatic and quantitative approach to the world’s problems. Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now is a manual for liberal self-congratulation. Review of Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (Viking, 2018).
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