[Note. This is a follow-up essay to my many recent posts about human progress.]
Nicholas Kristof of the NY Times publishes a column at the end of every year with the same idea as Pinker’s book … and a lot of the same data points. Continue reading More On “Is The World Better Than Ever?”
By Ed Gibney
For the last five posts, we have been discussing the question of whether the world is getting better or not. I’d like to give Ed Gibney the last words (for now?) on the topic: Continue reading Society May Be Better But Is It Also More Fragile?
I was preparing a critique of Jeremy Lent’s views on our lack of progress but an email from my collegue Francis Heylighen beat me to it. Here is what he wrote. Continue reading On Balance There Has Been Human Progress
Steven Pinker
Yesterday’s post was of Jeremy Lent’s critique of Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by Steven Pinker. The essay was long so here is a summary of Lent’s positions. Continue reading Summary of Lent’s Arguments Against Pinker
By Jeremy Lent (Originally published at Open Democracy. Published here unchanged under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.
My previous post discussed the thesis that the world is dramatically better than at any other time in history. Among those who share this view is Steven Pinker. But Jeremy Lent has offered a critique of Pinker’s arguments. Continue reading Steven Pinker’s ideas are fatally flawed
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