The genre it most closely resembles, with its breezy style, bite-size chapters, and impressive visuals, is not 18th-century philosophie so much as a genre in which Pinker has had copious experience: the TED Talk (although in this case, judging by the book’s audio version, a TED Talk that lasts 20 hours). It also gives readers the spectacle of a professor at one of the world’s great universities treating serious thinkers with populist contempt. It is a dogmatic book that offers an oversimplified, excessively optimistic vision of human history and a starkly technocratic prescription for the human future. Enlightenment Now has few of these qualities. They appreciated complexity, rarely shied away from difficulty, and generally had a deep respect for the learning of those who had preceded them. They had a taste for irony, an appreciation of paradox, and took delight in wit. The great writers of the Enlightenment, contrary to the way they are often caricatured, were mostly skeptics at heart.
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