Steven Pinker (2022) | Enlightenment or Dark Age?

Are the ideals of the Enlightenment – reason, science and
humanism – and the progress they can deliver being undermined by
a cynical desire to burn it all down? Pre-eminent psychologist
Steven Pinker explains why problems are inevitable and not a
reason to destroy the institutions of modernity, with all the
resulting chaos and carnage. The use of knowledge to enhance
human flourishing will never bring about utopia, but it has given
greater life, freedom, equality, safety, peace, and enrichment to
billions, and promises still more if we rededicate ourselves to
that ideal. 


Steven Pinker is an experimental psychologist who conducts
research in visual cognition, psycholinguistics, and social
relations. Currently Johnstone Professor of Psychology at
Harvard, he has also taught at Stanford and MIT. He has won
numerous prizes for his research, his teaching, and his nine
books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind
Works, The Blank Slate, The Better Angels of Our
Nature, and The Sense of Style.