![]() ![]() Who isn't worried that the world is going to hell in the proverbial handbasket? But Steven Pinker believes that our collective despair has become a kind of cultural default position, and it's as dangerous as it is wrong. And he believes it's now time to champion Enlightenment values once again: rationality, verifiability, and above all: the ideal of progress itself. He argues that the Enlightenment has given us so much that we can hardly see its gifts anymore: longer lifespans, safer societies, the establishment of human rights. ![]() But Harvard psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker is having none of it. It may be tempting to think human civilization is on the verge of collapse: environmental degradation, the rise in authoritarianism, ballooning income disparities. **This episode originally aired May 18, 2018. ![]()
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