Car accidents, pedestrian accidents, even lightning strikes–we are 99 percent less likely to be killed by a bolt of lightning than our ancestors were a century ago. Steven Pinker: I had not realized that every measure of safety had shown vast leaps–on the order of 95-to-99 percent reductions. Hope Reese: As you did your research for Enlightenment Now, what did you learn that was unexpected? Here is our conversation, edited for length and clarity.
I spoke with Pinker about why he sees a dark side of political correctness, the differences between men and women, and his optimism about artificial intelligence, among other topics. “Not only have we become less violent overall,” he told me, “but we have reduced global poverty, illiteracy, disease, and hunger.” The result, according to Pinker, is that we are better off than ever. In Enlightenment Now, he applies a scientific perspective to trace 15 separate measures of progress, in chapters such as “safety,” “democracy,” and “the environment” to assess where we stand. Pinker’s approach is an extension of his take on violence, which he explored at length in The Better Angels of Our Nature. In Enlightenment Now, Pinker makes the case that, despite all we think we know about the poor state of the world–from what we hear from the media, our friends, our political parties–the world is actually improving on a number of fronts. But Pinker explains that it is not progress itself that intellectuals have an aversion to, but the idea of it. Ĭoming from a top intellectual himself–a distinguished professor of psychology at Harvard University and the author of several best-sellers, including The Blank Slate and The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined –this assertion could seem odd.
“Intellectuals hate progress,” Steven Pinker states in his latest book, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.
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