Boston Review — Morgan Meis and S. Abbas Raza: Violence and Human Progress

Boston Review — Morgan Meis and S. Abbas Raza: Violence and Human Progress: The degree to which Pinker is willing to celebrate the joys of bourgeois life is refreshingly honest. He is fully aware that such celebration looks uncouth to many. “A loathing of modernity,” he writes,

is one of the great constants of contemporary social criticism. Whether the nostalgia is for small-town intimacy, ecological sustainability, communitarian solidarity, family values, religious faith, primitive communism, or harmony with the rhythms of nature, everyone longs to turn back the clock. What has technology given us, they say, but alienation, despoliation, social pathology, the loss of meaning, and a consumer culture that is destroying the planet to give us McMansions, SUVs, and reality television?

But that’s not the way it really is, Pinker explains. In fact, “unsentimental history and statistical literacy” can take our blinders off and show us that even the negative aspects of modernity are a huge improvement over the ways we used to live. This applies not only to brute matters such as the decline of violence and the greater access to material goods, but also to the finer things as well, such as beauty, knowledge and truth. We are, in short, experiencing progress in almost every way imaginable.