A New Enlightenment | Steven Pinker

The Enlightenment "worked", says Steven Pinker. By promoting reason, science, humanism, progress, and peace, the programs set in motion by the 18th-Century intellectual movement became so successful we’ve lost track of what that success came from.

Some even discount the success itself, preferring to ignore or deny how much better off humanity keeps becoming, decade after decade, in terms of health, food, money, safety, education, justice, and opportunity. The temptation is to focus on the daily news, which is often dire, and let it obscure the long term news, which is shockingly good.

This is the 21st Century, not the 18th, with different problems and different tools. What are Enlightenment values and programs for now?

"A New Enlightenment" was given on March 13, 02018 as part of Long Now's Seminar series. The series was started in 02003 to build a compelling body of ideas about long-term thinking from some of the world's leading thinkers. The Seminars take place in San Francisco and are curated and hosted by Stewart Brand. To follow the talks, you can:

The Long Now Foundation is a non-profit dedicated to fostering long-term thinking and responsibility. Our projects include a 10,000 Year Clock, endangered language preservation, thousand year+ data storage, and Long Bets, an arena for accountable predictions.

[thetawaves]

People generally don't gauge their own happiness by comparisons with past centuries. They gauge their happiness by comparisons with their living peers.

[thetawaves]

Talk about the cost of housing compared to earlier centuries.

[Guizambaldi]

I totally buy the enlightenment ideal and the fact that we are doing better overral.

My problem is that I think we get to a point where comparisons against peers dominate objective comfort, and at this point it's much harder to evolve.

Total equality would be the obvious step forward, but it's pretty hard to think of it as possible. I guess we would need to fully manipulate genes as a starting point.

[llk]

@ 32:18 he discusses pollutants climate impact - decreased greatly.

[empathyrebel]

How would graphs look like in the domains of Number of singles or irrationality?

[davidanderson]

Take note on how all this progress and human happiness was/is OPPOSED by religion. The Enlightenment was opposed tooth and nail by the church. Had it not happened (had the church won...) we'd be living in Christian Taliban-land now. D.A., J.D. NYC

[jonrolfson]

Some portion of any population will always prefer Savonarolan cults to the possibilities offered by progress.

[hooligan]

I love how any movement that isn't establishment is "populism".

[lawsonbell]

If the host could stop moaning into his mic, that’d be great.

[SK-owvw]

OH MY GOD!! He tries to start from "so-called" first principles and makes a theory of how the work should operated. Don't fall for this witch doctor: there have been many before him and many more will follow. He is not worth listening to.

[hooligan]

Popular left wing leaders are just popular left wing leaders. Popular right wing leaders are populist leaders.
I think Steven's political biases are showing.