Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.

• Author: Whaples, Robert
• Position: Book review

* Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

By Steven Pinker

New York: Viking, 2018.

Pp. xix, 556. $35 hardcover.

* 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

By Jordan B. Peterson

Toronto: Random House Canada, 2018.

Pp. XXXV, 409. $34.95 hardcover.

It might seem odd to jointly review Enlightenment Now and 12 Rules for Life, but I am struck by the parallels between the two. Both Steven Pinker and Jordan Peterson are Canadian academics. Both are psychologists. Both have been tenured at Harvard (although Peterson later moved to the University of Toronto). Both books are best sellers (as I write this review, Pinker's book is ranked number 4 on Amazon's list of politics and social sciences titles, and Peterson's book is Amazon's number 3 best seller of 2018 across all categories). Both try to answer the same big questions about how to make the world a better place and how to escape "chaos." Peterson's volume is avowedly a "self-help" book, but (deep down) so is Pinker's. Despite these commonalities, they approach their subject using significantly different assumptions and reach conclusions that are starkly incompatible in many ways.

Pinker's central argument is that bleak assessments of the state of the world are "not just a little wrong"--in fact, they are "flat-earth wrong, couldn't-be-more-wrong" (p. xvii). Rather, we have already achieved a great deal of "enlightenment" and--if antienlightenment forces can be held at bay--are on course for unending future progress. Pinker makes this argument as a modern social scientist would--with copious data. As individuals and members of society, we are prone to faulty reasoning and pessimism. To counter this tendency, "the answer is to count" (p. 43, emphasis in the original). The book contains more than seventy figures quantifying trends in everything from life expectancy to inequality to oil spills to genocide deaths to hate crimes to literacy to leisure time to happiness. These figures are almost worth the price of the book. Pulling them together and simply demonstrating the gains that have been made over time all around the world in so many areas is Pinker's primary achievement. I found more than a dozen charts that I intend to use in my Introduction to Economics and Natural Resource/Environmental Economics courses.

Most of the chapters in the "Progress" section of the book document trends that almost any reader will agree reflect genuine progress: rising life expectancy; falling levels of dementia; improved health; declining levels of undernourishment and famine deaths; reductions in global absolute poverty; improvements in environmental quality; massive declines in violence, war, and occupational accident deaths; the spread of democracy and literacy; increases in leisure time and self-reported happiness, for example. In many of these chapters, Pinker adds significant value to the mere numbers by fleshing out the story, drawing on an amazing breadth of sources (I estimate that he cites more than one thousand references) and knowledgeably explaining diverse topics from genetically modified crops to Gini coefficients to nuclear power to the Flynn effect.

An interesting chapter on "existential threats" facing mankind discusses the dangers of too many false alarms and makes the reasonable case that worries about artificial intelligence run amok are unrealistically oversimplified. It is followed by...