Views from Crestmont Drive

Subtitled “The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress”
(Viking, Feb. 2018, xix+556pp, including 102pp of notes, references, and index.)

Posts about this book: Post 1; Post 2; Post 3; Post 4; Post 5. Expanded below.

Part I of this book outlined the ideas of the Enlightenment; Part II showed how those ideas worked. Part III defends the three other themes of this book against surprising enemies.

This post covers two of the three chapters in Part III.

The chapter on Reason addresses questions of why, since we *can* reason, we are so easily led into folly. Not so much from ignorance as affiliations with religions or other ideologies, and motivated reasoning, in-group thinking. Conservatives seem to doubt progress is even desirable, let alone possible; the certainties of traditional Christendom are preferable; Pinker rejects this resoundingly. But the left too rejects caricatures of certain ideas. Key idea: the test of empirical rationality is prediction. Some pundits are always wrong. And conservative politics is increasingly know-nothing. How to improve reasoning powers? Teach critical thinking, but it has to be hands-on teaching.

The chapter on Science exalts it as “the proudest accomplishment of our species.” Why the disdain, even from intellectuals? The fear of ‘scientism,’ the idea that science can have anything to say about CP Snow’s second culture, the humanities. But the practices of science are designed to make up for the flaws of individual human beings, and to rely on two key ideas: the world is intelligible, and we allow the world to tell us whether our ideas about it our correct. Most people are happy to accept the practical benefits of science, but reject science’s implications about the lack of truth of the world’s traditional religions and cultures — with quotes of two long paragraphs about what we know about the world through science, how many traditional ideas, from fate and karma to answered prayers, simply aren’t true, and how this underlying scientific understanding of the world necessarily grounds our approach to morality and our responsibility to take care of ourselves and our planet. With final comments about how science is treated in academia, how opponents resist quantification in favor of intuition, and how ideas of E.O. Wilson’s consilience offer more hope than the pre-Darwinian, pre-Copernican worldviews of people like Leon Wieseltier.

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Subtitled “The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress”
(Viking, Feb. 2018, xix+556pp, including 102pp of notes, references, and index.)

Here are the remaining ten chapters in the long middle section of the book that focuses on Progress. Some of these update topics from BETTER ANGELS, and remind of us to take statistical approaches to safety, terrorism, and so on. Beware headlines; look at the data. Overall, liberal values are spreading around the world. The chapter on Knowledge has two great quotes about the value of education and the awareness of one’s place in the world. Two chapters consider, if things have gotten so much better, why aren’t we happier? And concludes that the evidence we’re unhappy is unpersuasive, and the reason we’re not happier is due to humanity’s gradual maturity in an ever-more complex world. A chapter on existential threats finds most such risks unlikely. And a chapter on the future of progress worries about two threats: economic stagnation, and the rise of authoritarian populism, on the latter point specifically addressing the danger Trump represents to all the good news from the previous chapters. Recommendations: rely on the resilience of the American system; recognize that Trump voters are of the lower classes with low educations, who are older and more religious. So avoid polarizing rhetoric, and fix the election system. There will always be setbacks, but there’s a dialectic that nevertheless moves us forward.

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Subtitled “The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress”
(Viking, Feb. 2018, xix+556pp, including 102pp of notes, references, and index.)

Here are the first seven of the 17 chapters in the long middle section of the book.  The first one about “Progressophobia,” covers a range of familiar reasons from cognitive psychology why people think the past was better than the present, and the present is a mess.  Topics about life, health, sustenance, etc., are addressed simply by looking at the data (as in the later Rosling book, reviewed here). Then come two topics, inequality and the environment, about which I’m not as sanguine, in 2025, as Pinker was in 2017 when he was writing this book. As even-handed as Pinker tries to be, since he wrote the Trump administrations have steadily tried to make everything worse.

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Subtitled “The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress”
(Viking, Feb. 2018, xix+556pp, including 102pp of notes, references, and index.)

The first three chapters of this book are crisp summaries of themes shared with two or three dozen other books I’ve read and posted about here; this book is at the center of a Venn diagram of all of them. Basic ideas of reason and science, of humanism and morality; how the human mind’s ancient legacy is ill-suited for the modern world; the expansion of the circle of empathy for others; the later ideas of evolution, entropy, and information; how life and evolution are possible in zones of order despite long-term entropy; the intuitive and simplistic thinking that derives from our ancient biases, including motivated reasoning; how people would rather think they are right than know what is true; how rules and norms emerged to allow true beliefs to emerge. And then why challenges to Enlightenment values emerged, from the Romantic movement with Rousseau, to religious faith and nationalism, to notions that civilization is in decline or is merely boring compared to the glories of the past.

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