📔 Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

Quotes from this book

People have long given thought to the causes of danger and how they might be forfended. By the way, the nonmonotonicity of social data provides an easy formula for news outlets to accentuate the negative. Far from being better informed, heavy newswatchers can become miscalibrated. The dataphobic mindset (“It's not like that in Burkina Faso”) can lead to real tragedy. The political philosopher John Gray, an avowed progressophobe, has described the contemporary societies of Western Europe as “terrains of violent conflict” in which “peace and war [are] fatally blurred. Should we worry about a world of stodgy multicentenarians who will resist the innovations of ninety-something upstarts and perhaps ban the begetting of pesky children altogether? Cancer therapies can be narrowcasted to the unique genetic signature of a tumor instead of poisoning every dividing cell in the body. Another is the rise of technophilanthropists. Instead of just writing checks for the naming rights to concert halls, they apply their ingenuity, connections, and demand for results to the solution of global problems. Some tyrannophiles were Marxists, working on the time-honored principle "He may be an SOB, but he's our SOB." Though the programs will surely get better, there are no signs of foom. The age rolloff isn't surprising, since we saw in chapter 15 that in the 20th century every birth cohort has been more tolerant and liberal than the one that came before (at the same time that all the cohorts have drifted liberalward).