That’s the question Steven Pinker of Harvard addressed in a short lecture I saw him deliver back in June at the annual Breakthrough Dialogues in Marin County, and I am delighted that Breakthrough has now posted video of his ten-minute talk.
This is an except of Pinker’s book forthcoming next spring, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. You might think these aren’t controversial ideas, but in fact the heart of leftist post-modernism is an attack on Enlightenment rationality. So although Pinker is mostly a liberal in conventional terms, he’s an ally in arms against the nihilist cultural left.
Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.