Reddit reviews Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

His book The Better Angels of Our Nature changed my life, and my entire outlook on the world. I've given away 4-5 copies since then, and I encourage everyone to read it. I also loved The Blank Slate. About to start his new book, Enlightenment Now.

If you'd like to read a book that will demonstrate the ways that our world has improved with empirical data, check out Enlightenment Now by Stephen Pinker.

I'm almost done reading it myself. It's very easy to get lost in the day-to-day bad news. This book takes the long view how nearly everything in our lifetime has gotten significantly better in spite of what we're constantly bombarded with in the media.

I’ve been reading Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B073TJBYTB/) and he makes some plausible arguments for how inequality, while bad, is not the metric to measure the health of our society. Poverty, which has been ever decreasing, is the measure for how successful our programs and approaches are, with inequality as a secondary metric to measure and work on. So we can take heart that many of the programs and progress of the last 70 years have truly increased the quality of life for most Americans. A corollary to this is: don’t rail to pull money from the richest; instead, take steps to make the poorest less poor.

I’m massacring his point, I’m sure, but it is interesting. Thinking of it not in terms of a zero sum game is worthwhile. My take was: it’s not the whole “a rising tide lifts all ships” schtick; it’s more about fixating less on the Waltons and their ilk, and more focusing on everyone else. There will be peaks when some people make off with a vulgar amount of cash/wealth, but as long as overall quality of life continues to rise for everyone, we’re doing well.

Worth thinking about.

Not OP, just helping out with some formatting (and links!) because I like these suggestions.

> 1) The Magic Of Reality - Richard Dawkins
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> 2) The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins
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> 3)A Brief History Of Time - Stephen Hawking
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> 4)The Grand Design - Stephen Hawking
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> 4)Sapiens - Yuval Noah Harari (Any Book By Daniel Dennet)
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> 5)Enlightenment Now - Steven Pinker
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> 6)From Eternity Till Here - Sean Caroll (Highly Recommended)
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> 7)The Fabric Of Cosmos - Brian Greene (If you have good mathematical understanding try Road To Reality By Roger Penrose)
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> 8)Just Six Numbers - Martin Reese (Highly Recommended)

> I’m not sure if there is any truth to that, but it is interesting to think about.

"Truth" in this case is complicated. It is true that some things, like oil, are scarce now. That doesn't mean we don't have plenty of it, but like /u/ARandomBlackDude said, it's not because we don't know where to find it, it is just that it is more difficult to get at.

That is true of most of the resources that people worry about: It's not that we are running low, it's just that we will have to spend more in the future.

But that is not necessarily as bad as it sounds. Oil is great for energy because it is cheap and packs a lot of energy by weight. But it's also dirty and polluting, and recovering it is really bad for the environment, so the higher it's price goes, the more it drives people to alternative fuels like electric or hydrogen.

And again, this is true of most things. If we really do start to run low, we can find an alternate.

None of this is intended to argue against conservation at all, but the people who push the "if we ever get hit with a spot of bad luck we are totaled as a species" lines are really not looking at the issue dispassionately.

Another thing to consider is that, contrary what you might think, most people are actually using substantially fewer resources today then we have in the past. Stephen Pinker talks about it in his book Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress:

> All these processes are helped along by another friend of the Earth, dematerialization. Progress in technology allows us to do more with less. An aluminum soda can used to weigh three ounces; today it weighs less than half an ounce. Mobile phones don’t need miles of telephone poles and wires. The digital revolution, by replacing atoms with bits, is dematerializing the world in front of our eyes. The cubic yards of vinyl that used to be my music collection gave way to cubic inches of compact discs and then to the nothingness of MP3s. The river of newsprint flowing through my apartment has been stanched by an iPad. With a terabyte of storage on my laptop I no longer buy paper by the ten-ream box. And just think of all the plastic, metal, and paper that no longer go into the fortyodd
consumer products that can be replaced by a single smartphone, including a telephone, answering machine, phone book, camera, camcorder, tape recorder, radio, alarm clock, calculator, dictionary, Rolodex, calendar, street maps, flashlight, fax, and compass—even a metronome, outdoor
thermometer, and spirit level.

> Digital technology is also dematerializing the world by enabling the sharing economy, so that cars, tools, and bedrooms needn’t be made in huge numbers that sit around unused most of the time. The
advertising analyst Rory Sutherland has noted that dematerialization is also being helped along by changes in the criteria of social status. The most expensive London real estate today would have seemed impossibly cramped to wealthy Victorians, but the city center is now more fashionable than the suburbs. Social media have encouraged younger people to show off their experiences rather than their cars and wardrobes, and hipsterization leads them to distinguish themselves by their tastes in
beer, coffee, and music. The era of the Beach Boys and American Graffiti is over: half of American eighteen-year-olds do not have a driver’s license.

> The expression “Peak Oil,” which became popular after the energy crises of the 1970s, refers to the year that the world would reach its maximum extraction of petroleum. Ausubel notes that because of the demographic transition, densification, and dematerialization, we may have reached Peak
Children, Peak Farmland, Peak Timber, Peak Paper, and Peak Car. Indeed, we may be reaching Peak Stuff: of a hundred commodities Ausubel plotted, thirty-six have peaked in absolute use in the United States, and another fifty-three may be poised to drop (including water, nitrogen, and electricity), leaving only eleven that are still growing. Britons, too, have reached Peak Stuff, having reduced their annual use of material from 15.1 metric tons per person in 2001 to 10.3 metric tons in 2013.

> These remarkable trends required no coercion, legislation, or moralization; they spontaneously unfolded as people made choices about how to live their lives. The trends certainly don’t show that environmental legislation is dispensable—by all accounts, environmental protection agencies, mandated energy standards, endangered species protection, and national and international clean air and water acts have had enormously beneficial effects. But they suggest that the tide of modernity does not sweep humanity headlong toward ever more unsustainable use of resources. Something in the nature of technology, particularly information technology, works to decouple human flourishing from the exploitation of physical stuff.

I don't think it's real, but Steven Pinker has written two books with basically the same message:

The Better Angels of Our Nature

Enlightenment Now