Review of Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now
The critiques of Pinker that I&#x27;ve found most convincing have focused on his presentation of the Enlightenment&#x27;s intellectual side. The review by John Gray that Aaronson dismisses has some fairly convincing points, and it&#x27;s disappointing seeing him travesty Gray&#x27;s case.<p>It should be pretty obvious to someone with reasonably good reading comprehension that Gray is not saying, as Aaronson suggests he is, that Pinker supports eugenics. Gray&#x27;s point is that the thinkers who Aaronson presents as defining &quot;Enlightenment values&quot; in fact had much more ambivalent positions. The argument is that one cannot define &quot;Enlightenment values&quot; simplistically--because the Enlightenment thinkers were in disagreement about basic principles.<p>I don&#x27;t agree with all of Gray&#x27;s critique--I think Pinker&#x27;s case that things have improved over the last several centuries is reasonable--but I think this part of his argument is difficult to answer. It&#x27;s very easy to define praiseworthy &quot;values&quot; if you keep them divorced from real-world arguments, and that seems to be Pinker&#x27;s approach. Any thinker who can present Enlightenment values as simple and univocal is going to do a poor job understanding things as they are today. Deny the disagreements of the past, and you&#x27;re sure to miss the substance of today&#x27;s disagreements. Aaronson is happy to take the &quot;classic liberal&quot; label. I wonder if he&#x27;s familiar with the work of others who identify as classic liberals right now; my guess, given what I&#x27;ve seen of his writing, is that he&#x27;d disagree with many of them pretty strenuously.