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

As the title Enlightenment Now suggests, Pinker’s work celebrates and advocates for the reason, science, and humanism rooted in the Enlightenment period of late 17th-century Europe. The most famous philosophers of this era include David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire, Adam Smith, Mary Astell, and Baruch Spinoza. While these thinkers’ interests varied, they agreed on the main points, which Pinker generalizes as “Enlightenment thinking.” He explains, “The era was a cornucopia of ideas, some of them contradictory, but four themes tie them together: reason, science, humanism, and progress” (8).

As Pinker explains, in 1600s Europe, countries were governed by monarchies, and the church held enormous influence over cultural norms and politics. Europeans had established the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and devastating poverty was the norm for most Europeans. People had very little medical knowledge and therefore few ways to effectively treat the many illnesses circulating at the time. Infant and maternal mortality rates were high. Moreover, the few rights that common men had weren’t usually afforded to women, who were generally perceived as the property of their husbands or fathers. Most children were expected to work, and very few received an education. Enlightenment thinkers questioned all these norms, instead favoring emancipation, the separation of church and state, more democratic institutions, rights for women, a sacralization of childhood, and other progressive ideas.

As Pinker explores in his work, Enlightenment ideas influenced many of our modern norms and institutions. Enlightenment thinkers were the first to articulate views that remained radical for centuries afterward but underpin our society today. For example, hundreds of years ago, Enlightenment thinkers Voltaire, Montesquieu, Bentham, and Beccaria first proposed that society shouldn’t criminalize any sexual act between consenting adults, a view that US law finally reflected beginning in the 1960s. From the concepts of privacy and consent to the separation of church and state, the immorality of slavery and child labor, and women’s equality with men, Enlightenment thinkers offered new ways of seeing the world that became foundational to most modern nations.

Enlightenment thinkers have been attacked as “effete” and sentimental by critics who consider it naive to try to better the human condition, pursue social reforms, or share prosperity across society’s classes. Because Enlightenment thinking encourages people to value sentience and view others as equals, it draws scorn from fans of romantic heroism or Nietzsche's “superman” philosophy, which favor individuals emerging from the crowd to claim power or commit great acts. In addition, Enlightenment thinking—especially science and humanism—has drawn criticism from religious thinkers and “faitheists” who defend the role of religion and spirituality in culture and politics. Pinker devotes a large part of his work to confronting these counter-Enlightenment ideas and defending the value of Enlightenment thinking as superior to its alternatives as a path to bettering society as a whole.