I had a great many thoughts about this book as it proceeded along, but for the most part it just made me rather annoyed. It’s shot through with an obnoxious above-the-fray, holier-than-thou voice. At the same time it’s blind to its own logical flaws, some of them rather gaping. The book is meant to be a kind of defense of the Enlightenment and all its fruits across many areas of life: science, education, governance, and on and on.

That is very well, and I don’t have any particular gripe with the Enlightenment as such, so I’m not predisposed to hate the book. But let’s at least attempt to be precise! Pinker seems to equate the Enlightenment with “every event that has happened since about the 1600s.” As a result a huge chunk of the book is taken up with looking at various graphs depicting human well-being across the centuries and around the world, and invariably these graphs have lines that trend pleasantly upward and to the right. (Or downward, when we look at things like casualties from war.) That is certainly good news in many different areas, but not all of it accrues, necessarily, to the Enlightenment itself. The Romantic movement occupied the better part of the late 19th century; does it necessarily deserve credit for improved public health in the 20th century? Pinker doesn’t take up this question, though it’s not without its merits. No, we are to assume that an intellectual movement some centuries ago is solely responsible for all the wonderful things about modern life.

There is, relatedly, a failure to account for some of the ill effects of the Enlightenment. If we can chalk up the steam engine and industrialization writ large to the Englightenment (and sure why not, that seems reasonable), then we can also blame the Enlightenment for such horrors as chattel slavery, colonialization, genocide, war at a terrifying scale, etc. and so on. Pinker glosses over all of these ill effects, or at best he sweps them under the neat rug of his graphs. Yes the Holocaust was pretty bad, but if you add up all the numbers it’s actually not as bad as what we used to see so-and-so many years ago - that is the style of argument here, and it’s rather brutish. What is so repulsive about the Holocaust is not just its frightful scale - and I’m not sure that such concentrated and well-organized misery was ever possible no matter how far back in time we go. It is also precisely that it happened in an age when things seemed to be getting better, when Europe as a whole was becoming more humane. In other words, the Enlightenment has created powerful tools for us to make our lives better, but has also created powerful tools for some very bad actors to make our lives much worse than was previously thought possible.

Pinker’s real blind spot is for climate change. I don’t know his actual personal politics, but he sure tries hard to have that even-handed, pox-on-both-houses style voice that seems to beg for a place on the New York Times opinion section. It is also, alas, something like the embodiment of the banality of evil in our modern world. He is unnaturally careful to avoid blaming the forces of conservatism for anti-democratic forces and anti-scientific forces for the ill effects of climate change. The raw facts bear out that a concerted campaign of anti-Enlightenment forces has wrought havoc on democratic governance in the US, and has in turn devestated our hopes of averting climate catastrophe. What does Pinker have to say about this movement? Absolutely nothing. He blames our current predicament on the celebrities who backed the anti-nuclear-power movement of the early 80s, with no mind paid to some of the basic facts (i.e., that energy production is an important but by no means overwhelming part of the climate crisis.) This approach is cowardly in the first order, and it marks the book as inexcusably unserious. If the defender of the Enlightenment can’t actually call out the sinister forces which are undermining Enlightenment values, and in the process dimming our hopes for survival as a species… what exactly is he doing, anyway?

The book is not a total loss, because there are some fairly eye-opening facts and figures to be read here and there. And it’s not without its logical flair here and there. It makes no strong claims about the future, which I think is fair, but ultimately tries to tell our history in a way which gives hope for that future. That is all to the good and even admirable.

Still, it has some serious to explaining to do.