“Intellectuals hate progress,” declares Pinker at the top of his chapter on progressophobia. Indeed, throughout his book Pinker seems more concerned with obscure left-wing “progressophobes” in academia than with right-wing reactionaries in the corridors of power. Yet in Pinker’s account, what he calls “progressophobia” is not just prevalent on the right, where reactionaries long for the “good old days” and reject modernity out of hand, but on the left, where pessimistic progressives constantly deny or ignore much of the progress of the 20th century. In his new book, “Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress,” which has received rave reviews from many commentators, Pinker suggests to readers that progress is under attack on all fronts - a claim that may not sound unreasonable considering the far-right movements that have been gaining momentum across the globe in recent years. Admittedly, these material gains are so ubiquitous today that many people have difficulty imagining a time when they did not exist - but few can deny with a straight face that they are real, or that human beings on a whole live a better life today than ever before.Īccording to Harvard psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker, however, this may not be the case.
The fruits of modernity are self-evident, and modern men and women experience these fruits in their everyday lives - when they go to the pharmacy to pick up antibiotics, when they fly halfway around the world on a jet aircraft, when they turn up the heat in their home during the winter and so on. Though human beings have a tendency to romanticize the past, only true reactionaries - for instance, religious fundamentalists - fail to acknowledge or completely reject the obvious benefits of progress.
Most people would agree that progress is a good thing, and few would deny that there has been extraordinary progress over the course of human history, or that human existence has improved in innumerable ways during the modern era.
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