A Real Stinker, from Pinker By Chris Knight

     Steven Pinker is riding the waves of greatness as the latest leading thinker. No doubt in time he will be replaced by another, for academia is today much like popular music charts. Anyway, he has a new book supposedly defending Enlightenment values, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, (Viking, New York, 2018). While all of that sounds good, and we would expect a sustained critique of political correctness on the university campus, what we find instead is that Pinker defines basically Trump as the greatest threat to Enlightenment values! Yes, not postmodernism, which explicitly undermines scientific rationality, or radical Islam, but nationalists! Does he have an agenda you may ask?
  https://www.counter-currents.com/2018/03/steven-pinkers-anti-enlightenment-attack-on-white-identitarians/

     I would quote a slab of text from the Counter-currents.com site, but every time you cut and paste from them you get a block of black which is not helpful for the promotion of ideas. However, in summary … wait … a kind computer geek suggested going to print mode to overcome the block, and here is the text, straight from author Ricardo Duchesne, who is far better and more coherent that the Peterson guy, and has taken him apart, anyway:

“Pinker identifies nationalists, populists, Trump supporters, and the Alt Right as the biggest “enemy” of the Enlightenment ideals of science, reason, and humanism. He does not view Islamic peoples and radical Leftists as intrinsic enemies. Islamic nations today are embracing a “new Enlightenment” in lineage with their own “more tolerant, cosmopolitan, and internally peaceful” history, as compared to that of the  “Christian West,” which only started a liberal trajectory with the rise of modern science in the seventeenth century (p. 439). Pinker does not see Leftists as intrinsic enemies, either. Their problem is lack of appreciation for the progress the Enlightenment has brought to humanity. Leftists sometimes get out of hand in keeping conservative globalists out of universities, but we can only be thankful to “intellectual liberals” for being “at the forefront of many forms of progress . . . such as democracy, social insurance, religious tolerance, the abolition of slavery . . . the decline of war, and the expansion of human and civil rights” (p. 373).

It is the “resurgent” ideology of “authoritarian populism,” ethnic nationalism, and “political tribalism” among whites that constitute “the most insidious form of irrationality today” (p. 383). I will show in this review, however, that it is Pinker who is the enemy of the ideals of the Enlightenment, misinterpreting these ideals as if they were projects for the creation of a race-mixed humanity on European lands. He complains that the “ideals of the Enlightenment are treated by today’s intellectuals with indifference, skepticism, and sometimes contempt” (p. 6). But it is he who extemporaneously alters the definition of cosmopolitanism to mean that all white nations must become “multicultural and multiethnic.” There is nothing in the Enlightenment requiring European nationalists (who believe in peaceful cultural exchanges among nations) to welcome immigration and diversity. Pinker’s claim that European national pride and ethnic identity lead to parochialism and intellectual narrowness can be categorized as a form of irrational indoctrination obscuring the actual origins of Enlightenment ideals within ethnically homogeneous European nations.

Pinker compiles an incredible array of statistics and graphs showing that “the world is about a hundred times wealthier today than it was two centuries ago”; that “poverty among racial minorities has fallen”; that “Americans are half as likely to be murdered as they were two dozen years ago”; that “Americans became 96 percent less likely to be killed in a car accident . . . 99 percent less likely to die in a plane crash”; that 83 percent in the world can read and write today as compared to only 12 percent in the early in the nineteenth century; that Americans today work 22 fewer hours a week than they did a few decades ago; that as societies have become wealthier “they have emitted fewer pollutants, cleared fewer forests, spilled less oil, set aside more preserves, extinguished fewer species”; that the “world’s nuclear stockpiles have been reduced by 85 percent” — to list only some of the many numbers he collects from “data scientists.”

Enlightenment Now is mostly about demonstrating that “the world has made spectacular progress in every single measure of human well-being” (p. 52). Pinker is at his best in this effort. We identitarians, however, respect the standards of rationality too much to believe that this progress was an achievement “of all of humanity.” We disagree that it is “tribalist rather than cosmopolitan” to emphasize that Enlightenment ideas came uniquely from Europe. It is Pinker, not us, who can be legitimately accused of disrespect against the standing scholarship when he cavalierly writes that “Enlightenment ideals have been articulated in non-Western civilizations at many times in history” (p. 29).

     That sinks it as far as I am concerned. To see the radical Left and radical Islam as not threats to the Enlightenment program goes against a large amount of thinking. We should thus reject this book as more globalist/cosmopolitan propaganda. In fact, as argued above, the book is anti-Enlightenment, so it refutes itself!