Enlightenment now

Reg Naulty responds to the latest book by philosopher Steven Pinker

by Reg Naulty 8th June 2018

Steven Pinker’s latest book, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress, is an amiable, good-natured book. Reasonable optimism breaks out everywhere. The title, though, is a little misleading. It brings to mind someone like Buddha and his kind of enlightenment. It isn’t about that, it’s about the historical Enlightenment and its values: reason, science, humanism and progress. ‘The Enlightenment, after all,’ writes Steven Pinker, was ‘humankind’s emergence from its self- incurred immaturity’. If anyone suspects a hint of anti-religious polemic in that, they are right.