Conversations: with Steven Pinker, Professor of Psychology at Harvard University
John Anderson: Conversations
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The Disturbing Developments of the Enlightenment
The ideals of the Enlightenment that I extolled in my book Enlightenment now aren't particularly intuitive. We humans, we naturally think that outside our everyday experience, is there petrol in the car? Are the kids ready to go out of school? are concrete here and now in existence? That's what I would consider to be the major lesson of the Enlightenment. But it isn't the way we naturally think. And so it will naturally push back at something that was never particularly natural begin with,. namely the enlightenment conviction that we can understand the world and we ought to do so.
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