Enlightenment Who? What? Where? When? Why? How?

I was truly looking forward to Steven Pinkers new book. I enjoyed his previous work on the decline of violence. This new book was marketed as a full-throated defence of Enlightenment values against its critics on the left and right.

I expected to disagree with many of Pinkers conclusions, but I was at least expecting him to fully articulate what he believed the Enlightenment was, and how it contributed to historical progress. But alas, Pinker has not even done that. Most of the book is just a series of graphs showing how the world is improving along a number of metrics. This would be fine if Pinker was able to tell us what the Enlightenment was or how it contributed to this progress, but he simply does not do so in a satisfactory manner. He does not deal with the competing strands of thought that came out of the Enlightenment. He doesn’t tell us why strands of hyper rational utopianism from the 20th Century like central planning and Eugenics don’t show why we need to be cautious about how far reason can take us in the realm of public policy.

I confess up front that I am a history guy and view the world primarily through that lens. I see the Enlightenment as an intellectual movement that arose in a specific historical context. How it came about, what impact it had, who reacted against it and why, these questions are central to understanding any historical phenomenon. By treating the Enlightenment as something that can be separated from time and place, Pinker fails to properly understand what it was and what impact it had. I didn’t expect him to get into the very fine details, but for a book about historical progress it is shockingly devoid of historical content.

The book is not without some merits however. The chapters on public health, economic growth, and the environment are good and will be informative to the general reader. He comes at these issues with a libertarian bias but for the most part sticks to the facts. But these individual chapters on various kinds of progress feel more like a collection of Essays rather than chapters in a book that argues a single thesis.

In conclusion, Pinker delivers a disappointing follow up to The Better Angels of Our Nature. He bites off more than he can chew and delivers a book that is mostly a series of factoids about how the world is getting better with only occasional references to how any of this relates to or was caused by the Enlightenment.

Rating: 3/5