140 / The Grand Narrative of Progress / Jeremy Lent

Author and integrator Jeremy Lent returns to the podcast. Jeremy is the author of The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity’s Search for Meaning, and the founder of the nonprofit Liology Institute, an organization “dedicated to fostering an integrated worldview, both scientifically rigorous and intrinsically meaningful, that could enable humanity to thrive sustainably on the earth.” We begin our conversation discussing Jeremy’s excellent critique of cognitive psychologist, linguist, and popular science author Steven Pinker’s recent book Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. Jeremy initially presented his critique in his widely shared article, Steven Pinker’s Ideas About Progress Are Fatally Flawed. These Eight Graphs Show Why, which we delve into in this episode. Jeremy unpacks the underlying assumptions implicit in Pinker’s ideas, in particular Pinker’s defense, through cherry-picking of data, of the capitalist neoliberal economic order, and more broadly of the “progress narrative” that justifies or outright ignores the widespread ecological devastation implicit in the expansion and maintenance of industrial civilization and the institutions that uphold it. // Episode notes: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/jeremy-lent-2 // Sustain + support: https://www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness // Donate: https://www.paypal.me/lastbornpodcast