Coming February 6, 2024 . . .
MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE
by Michael Wolraich
Pre-order at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop
Coming February 6, 2024 . . . MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE by Michael Wolraich Pre-order at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop |
In his new book, Steven Pinker is curiously blind to the power and benefits of small-town values.
By Alison Gopnik @ TheAtlantic.com, online now for April print issue
Good critical arguments concerning the philosophy of Stephen Pinker's new book, Enlightenment Now, The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress. Like:
If things are so much better, why do they feel, for so many people, so much worse?
Why don’t people experience the progress that Pinker describes? Pinker doesn’t spend much time focusing on this question, and he gets a little tetchy when he does. Skepticism about Enlightenment values, in his view, comes from leftist humanities professors and highbrow-magazine editors who have read too much Nietzsche, or from theocrats on the right.
Yet there’s a deeper reason that ordinary, well-meaning people may feel that something has gone wrong, despite so much evidence to the contrary.
It’s crucially important to distinguish these sorts of local attachments from nationalism and racism—ideas that, as Pinker points out, have had and continue to have devastating effects. The claim that social bonds are rooted in common origin or blood or skin color is profoundly wrong, both scientifically and morally. And there is no reason that loyalty to people you know should make you hostile to people you don’t. But scientific as well as intuitive evidence suggests that tribalism can be seductive when people feel that their local connections are under threat. At the same time, the Enlightenment emphasis on the autonomous, rational individual can also lead to alienation and isolation, which make tribalist mythology all the more appealing.