HUMILITY NOW

mr pinker, in his poorly titled Enlightenment Now, has based his optimism on some dubious assumptions, the principal one being that mankind and the earth will both be well-served by humans becoming about ninety percent urban and that is where we are heading.

in this work there are a number of unsupported declarative sentences about the future (example: the sun will expand in a billion years). this book is better (but not unarguably better) at portraying the past, but in conceiving of the earth and humanity as a single economic system (though he is not an economist) and assuming the future is inevitable, he has polluted the entire roster of conclusions and remedies that might have made a book of this scope useful. real solutions lie elsewhere:
reducing the production of useless things to satisfy aggrandizing humans' consumption of both energy and material; reducing runaway expectation in favor of more thoughtful lives, more peaceful lives; reducing on a personal level one's own carbon footprint (something you can do alone without the need of meetings and endless talk). 

the problems are not technological. humans are great at technology. when humans fail, the failure is ultimately one of intent, of understanding what life is; the errors are philosophical and the remedies can be found in scientific enquiry.

nuclear powerplants cannot fix this planet. everyone living in cities, removed from the natural world, cannot secure this planet or its people a future, at least not a future free of catastrophe. we should not blithely assume that large-scale problems will abate spontaneously, that markets somehow have a magic quality of super-intelligence. we need a different kind of attitude, a different more inquisitive, more open and patient response to our self-created problems. we need, not to tell the earth what we will do, more to ask the earth what we should do. and that inquiry, that is the real role of science, which predates and postdates the enlightenment with its emphasis on humanism. unless humanism is widened to include all life — something that was not done during the enlightenment and is not yet done today — it is itself just another form of blindness. 

the most satisfying part of this book is the section on science. the least satisfying part is the section on the environment. mr. pinker wants us to feel good about doing nothing, or doing the wrong things because they are generated spontaneously without informed guidance. if one really internalizes the assumptions of Enlightenment Now — that life on earth is all about humans — we are dooming all life here to oblivion. you could argue that one little nuclear picnic or a fatally polluted planet in the cosmos is a trifle of no importance on the grand scale of events, but i don't think that will comfort many in their quest for reasons to remain optimistic in the face of existential threats.