![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Pessimism doubts whether progress will deliver on its promise of a better tomorrow, while cynicism questions whether today is truly better than our ancestors’ yesterdays. Yet Steven Pinker argues there is a second, more profound assault on the Enlightenment’s legacy of progress, coming from within intellectual and artistic spheres: a crisis of confidence, as progress’s supporters see so many disasters, setbacks, emergencies, new wars re-opening old wounds, new structures replicating old iniquities, new destructive side-effects of progress’s best intentions. And most expect any attack on those values to come from the far right: from foes of progressivism, from anti-science religious movements, from closed minds. It is not intuitive that a case needs to be made for “Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress,” stable values that have long defined our modernity. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |