A review of Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by Steven Pinker.

REVIEWED BY MICHAEL SHERMER

Viking, 2018.

576 pp. $35.

ISBN-13: 978-0525427575

How much better can you imagine the world being than it is right now? How much worse can you imagine the world being than it is right now?

For most of us, it is easier to imagine the world going to hell in a handbasket than it is to picture some rosy future, which explains why there are far more dystopian and apocalyptic books and films than there are utopian. We can readily conjure up such incremental improvements as increased Internet bandwidth, improved automobile navigation systems, or another year added to our average lifespan. But what really gets imaginations roiling are the images of nuclear Armageddon, AI robots run amok, or terrorists mowing down pedestrians in trucks.

The reason for this asymmetry is an evolved feature of human cognition called the negativity bias, explored in depth by the Harvard psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker in his magisterial new book Enlightenment Now, an estimable sequel to his The Better Angels of Our Nature, which Bill Gates called “the most inspiring book I’ve ever read.” This is not hyperbole. Enlightenment Now is the most uplifting work of science I’ve ever read. Pinker begins with the Enlightenment because the scientists and scholars who drove that movement took the methods of reason and science developed in the Scientific Revolution and applied them to solving problems in all fields of knowledge: physical, biological, and social. “Dare to know” was Immanuel Kant’s oft-quoted one-line summary of the age he helped launch, and with knowledge comes power over nature, starting with the Second Law of Thermodynamics and entropy, which Pinker fingers as the cause of our natural-born pessimism. In the world in which our ancestors evolved their cognition and emotions that we inherited, entropy dictates that there are more ways for things to go wrong than right, so our modern psychology is tuned to a world that was more dangerous in our evolutionary past than it is today. Your life depends on all systems working, so the good news of experiencing another pain-free day goes unnoticed, whereas painful catastrophic failures can spell the end of your existence, so we focus on the latter more than the former. “The Law of Entropy is widely acknowledged in everyday life in sayings such as ‘Things fall apart,’ ‘Rust never sleeps,’ ‘Shit happens,’ ‘Whatever can go wrong will go wrong,’” Pinker writes (p. 16).