Enlightenment Now Book Summary - Enlightenment Now Book explained in key points

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Name: Enlightenment Now
Rating: 4 (224 reviews)
Author: Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker

The Case For Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

4 (224 ratings)

24 mins

Table of Contents

Enlightenment Now
summarized in 9 key ideas

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What’s in it for me? Brighten your outlook by putting today’s world in some much-needed context.

Think things are bad today? If you get all your information from the daily news, you just might think we’re living in the worst times ever. But the reality is, we occupy a period in time that’s better than any other.

If you look at the rates of violence, famine and poverty, they’re each at all-time lows, while life expectancy, overall wealth and happiness levels are at all-time highs.

Sure, the environment needs our attention, but even here, the rates of pollution are down drastically from what they were just a few decades ago. So rather than panic and despair, you actually have every reason to believe that things may continue to improve, with more diseases becoming things of the past, and even less poverty and hunger in the world.

How has all this been possible? Thank the Enlightenment, the movement that took us out of the Dark Ages and emphasized science, reason and humanism as the principles that might guide us to a better tomorrow.

In these blinks, you’ll discover

just how far life expectancy has improved since the dark ages;
why the poor in England used to be forced to grind bones; and
why you shouldn’t waste time worrying about artificial intelligence.

The Enlightenment, which began in eighteenth-century Europe, is at the heart of today’s modern cosmopolitanism.

If you’re familiar with European history, you’ve probably heard of the period known as the Enlightenment. Sometimes referred to as the “age of reason,” it was a historical watershed moment. Indeed, it profoundly influenced the future development of Western society.

The Enlightenment started in the first half of the eighteenth century and it offered a bracing antidote to the rampant ignorance, terror and paranoia to which society had previously been in thrall.

Prior to the Enlightenment, spells of bad weather were blamed on witches or angry, sky-dwelling gods; oceans and forests were the domain of evil beasts; and scores of people were tortured and killed in the name of religion. It was high time for a change. And thus four main Enlightenment themes began to take shape: reason, science, humanism and progress.

Reason means that there are things in the world that are non-negotiable – that no matter what your so-called sacred text or authoritarian leader says, only reason can dictate the ultimate right. A good example is slavery. Prior to the age of reason, slavery was seen as a fact of life, but as the values of Enlightenment spread, reason shook the foundations of this barbaric practice and eventually helped bring it down.

With the emphasis on science, people began to value knowledge, especially as it pertained to certain universal human traits. Early versions of neuroscience, psychology and cultural anthropology opened the door to humanism, which offered a secular way for people to understand and respect one another. Before this period, religious fervor had been responsible for the bloodbath of the Crusades, and humanism offered a moral footing to acknowledge that genocide and murderous conquests weren’t acceptable.

Humanism also led to what’s known as cosmopolitanism, which can be seen in today’s modern values. Cosmopolitanism is a rejection of tribalism and the narrow-mindedness that pits one group against all others. It looks at everyone as a child of the world and recognizes that just because someone was born in a different country doesn’t mean they’re less deserving of the same rights.

While many suggest that things are worse than ever, we’re still experiencing the benefits of the Enlightenment.

Though people didn’t know it at the turn of the nineteenth century, there’s a very good reason for the establishment of a cosmopolitan system of global trade and mutual benefit. Why? Because the more diverse and interconnected a system becomes, the more resilient it becomes against entropy.

Entropy is described in the second law of thermodynamics, and it says that a closed system will eventually fall apart due to the impact of outside forces. If you build a sandcastle on the beach and walk away from it, the wind and the tide, as well as animals and other people, will all but guarantee its disappearance.

Enlightenment has improved our life expectancy, health and sustenance.

At the start of the Enlightenment, in the mid-eighteenth century, the global average life expectancy was 29 years. That’s not good at all - even our hunter-gatherer ancestors are believed to have lived to around 32.5 years!

But post-Enlightenment, the life expectancy of people around the world has increased by leaps and bounds.

Enlightenment has brought the world more wealth and less inequality.

Prior to the Enlightenment, it was common for a nation’s poor people to be forced into backbreaking labor for next to no pay. In England, the poor would grind up bones for fertilizer, while in Paris, they’d be chained together and made to clean out the city’s drains.

In 1820, close to 90 percent of the world was in extreme poverty, but this is when the tools of the Enlightenment really began to take effect. Between 1820 and 1900, global income tripled.

Enlightenment has reduced violence and brought us to the safest time in history.

There’s little room for optimism in the ongoing war being waged in Syria. Very conservative estimates have put the number of deaths, in 2016 alone, at 250,000 people. But if you want an accurate assessment of how violent we are globally these days, the data shows that war is a lot less rampant than it used to be.

You might think there’s an unprecedented number of refugees today, too, but if we go back a few decades to 1971, we see that the Bangladesh War displaced 10 million people. In 1947, the shift in India’s borders turned 14 million people into refugees. And, during World War II, 60 million people were forced to flee.

Democracy, equal rights and a better quality of life are all important values that flourish thanks to Enlightenment.

In the 1970s, things didn’t look so good for democracy. In West Germany, Chancellor Willy Brandt called democracy a “peculiar holdover with no future.” But little did Brandt know that just around the corner was a huge push toward democracy that would find one nation after another adopting their own version of the Enlightenment form of government.

Democracy is very much the result of Enlightenment thinkers looking for a better form of government than the reign of terror that had plagued the world since biblical times. People were tired of slavery, torture, human sacrifices and the public mutilation of dissidents.

The environment and existential threats can be met with optimistic reason, rather than pessimism and doom.

The daily news offers no shortage of things to freak out about. But if you do some digging and uncover the real problem, there’s not as much reason to panic as you think. Case in point: terrorism.

The actions of ISIS and other terrorist organizations are abhorrent, but are Americans right in thinking that ISIS is an immediate threat to the existence of the United States? After all, this is what a majority of Americans believed in a 2016 poll.

Beware of politics and organizations that attempt to vilify science and reason.

Believe it or not, science doesn’t have an agenda, other than using information to gain knowledge. It’s not a field that exists with the intent to poke holes in your religion or belief system. And contrary to what some have suggested, science isn’t racist, sexist or responsible for the Holocaust.

It might sound absurd, but there’s a long history of science being attacked by ignorance and misunderstanding, not to mention by people trying to advance their own agenda. Since science is one of the tenets of the Enlightenment, it’s important to spot this nincompoopery and see the truth.

Despite recent upticks in populism, Enlightenment is still the path forward.

While it’s certainly distressing to see Donald Trump, who the author sees as distinctly anti-Enlightenment, win the US presidency, we can still take some small comfort in the fact that he lost the popular vote by a significant margin and has one of the lowest approval ratings of any US president.

Another advantage of democracy is that there are checks and balances in place to prevent authoritarian demagogues from wreaking too much havoc, and we’ve already seen the justice system prevent some of his attempts at overstepping his bounds.

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What is Enlightenment Now about?

Enlightenment Now (2018) offers a refreshingly optimistic take on the state of the world today. With reams of data, charts and graphs, Steven Pinker shows how much progress we’ve made since the eighteenth century, when the Age of Reason, otherwise known as the Enlightenment, shifted society away from centuries of rule by superstition and paranoia.

Best quote from Enlightenment Now

As globalization and technology have lifted billions out of poverty and created a global middle class, international and global inequality have decreased…

—Steven Pinker

Who should read Enlightenment Now?

Optimists and recovering pessimists
Students of economics and philosophy
Readers tired of negative news

About the Author

Steven Pinker is a professor of cognitive science and linguistics at Harvard University. He is also a frequent contributor to the New York Times and the Atlantic and sits on the usage panel at The American Heritage Dictionary. Many of his books on popular science have been influential cultural touchstones, including How the Mind Works and The Language Instinct.

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