Enlightment Now - Steven Pinker

 Subtitle: The case for reason, science, humanism and progress.

I've enjoyed other books by Pinker and this one came highly recommended.  It makes a case for the world situation being much better than we think because we have reached and are exceeding the goals of the intellectual movement called the Enlightenment.

I read the first 100 pages, had several sticky tags, but I just couldn't keep reading.   It was laborious and repetitive and written in 2018, so pre-Covid it felt naive.  I'm putting it aside and I'll see if I can finish it some other time.

Quotes:

"conatus (effort or striving) defined as 'an endeavor to persist and flourish in one's own being' which was a foundation of several Enlightenment-era theories of life and mind."

"Human cognition comes with two features that give it the means to transcend its limitations.  The first is abstraction....the second ..is its combinatorial, recursive power."

"The nature of news is likely to distort people's view of the world because of a mental bug that psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman called the Availability heuristic: people estimate the probability of an event or the frequency of a kind of thing by the ease with which instances come to mind." 

"Autobiographical memory.  Though we tend to remember bad events as well as we remember good ones, the negative coloring of the misfortunes fades with time, particularly the one that happened to us.  We are wired for nostalgia.  Two other illusions mislead us into thinking that things ain't what they used to be: we mistake the growing burdens of maturity and parenthood for a less innocent world, and we mistake a decline in our own faculties for a decline in the times."

"As we care about more of humanity, we're apt to mistake the harms around us for signs of how low the world has sunk rather than how high our standards have risen."

Published: 2018 Read: July 2023  Genre: Social Philosophy Non-fiction