Download Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress AudioBook Free
The follow-up to Pinker's groundbreaking The Better Angels in our Nature presents the picture as a whole of human improvement: people you live longer, healthier, freer, and more content lives, even though our problems are formidable, the alternatives lay in the Enlightenment ideal of using reason and research. May be the world really dropping apart? May be the ideal of improvement obsolete? With this elegant diagnosis of the real human condition in the third millennium, cognitive scientist and general public intellectual Steven Pinker urges us to step back again from the gory headlines and prophecies of doom, which play to your mental biases. Instead, follow the data: In seventy-five jaw-dropping graphs, Pinker implies that life, health, success, safety, peace, knowledge, and pleasure are increasing, not simply in the Western world, but worldwide. This improvement is not the consequence of some cosmic push. It really is a present of the Enlightenment: the conviction that reason and research can enhance real human flourishing. Far from being a naïve trust, the Enlightenment, we now know, has worked. But as part of your, it needs a vigorous protection. The Enlightenment task swims against currents of real human nature--tribalism, authoritarianism, demonization, wonderful thinking--which demagogues are too ready to exploit. Many commentators, committed to political, religious, or loving ideologies, deal with a rearguard action against it. The result is a corrosive fatalism and a determination to wreck the important institutions of liberal democracy and global co-operation. With intellectual depth and literary flair, Enlightenment Now makes the circumstance for reason, research, and humanism: the ideals we have to confront our problems and continue our improvement. *Includes a Bonus PDF with charts and graphs.
