Random House Books for Young Readers Enlightenment Now: The Case Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

Super libre que si tienes que leerlo

I am now a fan of not just Steven Pinker, but his ability to present and process unbelievable amounts of data, and his ability to present a compelling and convincing perspective that completely shifts the dominant narrative on progress in the world. His perspective (and information) is not mainstream, but it should be!

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I have just started reading it, yet I find it very clear and comprehensible. It makes you think and it is easy to read. I went for the hard cover, I'm happy with it. If you like the genre, I highly recommend it!

This book gives a superb, extremely well-reasoned, documented argument in favor of the author's positions. Prof. Pinker is careful to delineate his position, as well as the positions of others that he sees as supplying the counterweights to his. He arguments are well-supported by statistical evidence, and the reasoning of the great philosophers and scientists who built the Enlightenment perspective he champions. I personally learned a significant amount from his clear, careful, and complex book. He supplies an excellent argument for his "team", and one intended, I think, to also help attitudes of those sympathetic to his position. I certainly gained from many of his discussions, including his comments related to psychology and philosophy. I for one have had, I think, a more pessimistic attitude than is warranted, despite the seriousness of some of the problems, like climate change, environmental degradation, human suffering, reducing chance of nuclear war, and technological disruptions with the coming improvements in weak AI, that we see now and which threaten our future. In some ways, it is clear that this book, too, represents an ongoing dialogue with his critics. He certainly does not give much, in terms of openings, to attack his positions. His brilliance, his biases, his wide and deep knowledge, make him an excellent spokesman and defender of science, reason, humanism, and progress, as advertised in the subtitle of his book. He provides extensive notes and a good list of references, so that his views can be critically assessed by anyone who wants to defend other points of view, or just explore better those he presents. This is a good book to learn from, to adapt a better perspective, and to get a picture of the modern inheritors of the Enlightenment. I can extremely strongly recommend this book, especially to people like myself that are sympathetic to Pinker's perspective. He has obviously worked very hard to get to the level of organization presented in this book, and communicate the enormous insights, many of which are quite subtle. The rise of the autocrats, as anticipated by Nietzsche concern him greatly, and he expressed obvious concern over Trump's presidency in the U.S. To a certain extent, I think that there are many constraints on Trump as a wannabe ubermensch. So it is not too clear to me as to the extent to which he represents a threat to our liberal democracy in the U.S. Nevertheless, I think Nietzsche's ideas were considered by Pinker as serious indicators of the chronic problem in the modern world of the autocrat, and Pinker's discussion of this was very good. In addition, his discussion of religion is very cogent, because it shows well that humanism does indeed offer a rational alternative, in terms of supporting ethical and moral behavior. As affluence, education and human flourishing continue to progress in the world, the strength of his views will remain clear.