Book Review

Enlightenment Now

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

Author: Steven Pinker

Another 500-page book was completed in just over seven weeks.  It was highly readable and interesting.  The prose never felt beyond me.  The premise of the book was to investigate the effects of the Enlightenment, the philosophical movement that started in the early 1700s. Pinker uses data to show how the acceptance of rationality, science, and humanism have improved the wellbeing of humanity since the rise of the Enlightenment.  He felt the Enlightenment principles threatened contemporary society.

He shows improvement across time in Health, Sustenance, Wealth, Inequality, Environment, Safety, Terrorism, Peace, Democracy, Rights, Knowledge, and Happiness.  I read this book in conjunction with Orwell’s – The Road to Wigan Pier, and I would have to agree with him that we have made great strides in improving the quality of our societies.  However, the area that I most disagreed with him was my professional speciality in Mental Health.  Pinker believed that better drugs and cognitive behavioural therapy would lead to mentally healthier people.  I found this simplistic and lacking nuance of the issues surrounding mental health.

He often held up New Zealand as a paragon of a society produced by Enlightenment principles (he repeatedly pointed out that no society was perfect).  Being a Kiwi I know of the suffering within New Zealand society.  Back to Mental Health, I believe that suffering is the constant of the human experience.  More could be done to help and teach people to cope with the experience of suffering.  I found Pinker dismissive of organised religion, but I think embedded within the religious practice are great lessons in coping with suffering.  He misses something here, but that would be another book.  I just felt his shot at religion was cheap.  Can we not believe in the goals of the Enlightenment and a higher power?  I am biased as I have a deep faith in the unknowable, so these words were confronting.

This is not to take away from an excellent book.  The evidence presented is a lot more optimistic about humanity than in other areas of discourse (I have stopped watching the news on principle alone).  We need to hear things are good and getting better on average for everyone.  I found the book informative and provided evidence to contradict contemporary narratives (and it might be said post-modern mythology).   I support his conclusion that it is better to run societies from a secular, liberal, democratic perspective than any other known form of government.  We attempt to destroy the pillars of our society at our peril.  I prefer living in a society governed under these premises and am acutely aware of the crimes that have been committed in the name of “good”.  We need to keep these ideas at the forefront of society, but that does not mean never questioning those responsible for delivering them.