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Showing posts with the label "Steven Pinker"
Pinker is, after all, an intellectual darling of the most powerful echelons of global society. He  spoke to the world’s elite  this year at the World’s Economic Forum in Davos on the perils of what he calls “political correctness,” and has been named one of  Time  magazine’s “100 Most Influential People in the World Today.”  His new book is Bill Gates' favourite book of all time! Pinker claims to respect science, yet he blithely ignores fifteen thousand scientists’ desperate warning to humanity.  It should be added that Pinker is an apologist of the US imperialist violence and he is Islamophobic. The grim takeaway ... is that racist violence against African Americans has not declined at all, as Pinker suggests. Instead, it has become institutionalized into U.S. national policy in  what is known as  the school-to-prison pipeline. Pinker  unquestioningly propagates one of the great neoliberal myths of the past several decades: that “a rising tide lifts all the boats”—a phr
"There has been a shift in the mood of liberals. Less than a decade ago, they were confident that progress was ongoing. No doubt there would be periods of regression; we might be in one of those periods at the present time. Today, liberals have lost that always rather incredible faith. Faced with the political reversals of the past few years and the onward march of authoritarianism, they find their view of the world crumbling away. What they need at the present time, more than anything else, is some kind of intellectual anodyne that can soothe their nerves, still their doubts and stave off panic. This is where Pinker comes in. Enlightenment Now is a rationalist sermon delivered to a congregation of wavering souls." John Gray's review of Steven Pinker's "embarrassing book".

The Enlightenment of Steven Pinker

"For the sceptical reader the whole strategy of the book looks like this. Take a highly selective, historically contentious and anachronistic view of the Enlightenment. Don't be too scrupulous in surveying the range of positions held by Enlightenment thinkers - just attribute your own views to them all. Find a great many things that happened after the Enlightenment that you really like. Illustrate these with graphs. Repeat. Attribute all these good things your version of the Enlightenment. Conclude that we should emulate this Enlightenment if we want the trend lines to keep heading in the right direction. If challenged at any point, do not mount a counter-argument that appeals to actual history, but choose one of the following labels for your critic: religious reactionary, delusional romantic, relativist, postmodernist, paid up member of the Foucault fan club." The Enlightenment of Steven Pinker And also a review of  Pinker's previous book on "the decline of