![]() ![]() Just so, his atheism may put him in company with Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris, but he would doubtless say that it’s the only logical conclusion to come to, and Pascal’s wager be damned. Pinker’s protestations are progressive, though the academically orthodox will find him an apostate. Those ideals, “products of human reason,” hinge on-well, reason, and science, the latter the “refining of reason to understand the world.” Against these are what Pinker characterizes as manifestations of delusional thinking, including religious faith and the “hermeneutic parsing of sacred texts,” the “suffocating political correctness” on campus, the “disaster of postmodernism” that has devastated humanistic thought, and the “identity-protective cognition” that has made political discourse so soul-killing. “Explaining the meaning of life is not the usual job description of a professor of cognitive science,” he writes-before gamely proceeding to answer that very question from a variety of stances, all resting on the assumption that life is best endowed with meaning if only we remember our Enlightenment ideals. “Why should I live?” So asked one of the author’s students. The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, 2011, etc.). ![]() ![]() So writes eternal optimist Pinker (Psychology/Harvard Univ. The bomb? The plague? Trump? Not to worry things are getting better. ![]()
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