Steven Pinker comes off as a fool, a high-IQ moron…

 

"Writes Berman: “We need to consider the endless propaganda that surrounds us on a daily basis, broadcasting the notion that our lives are so much better than they were in previous times.

“We are literally soaking in this ideology of progress (or more accurately, ‘progress’) which is so pervasive that we don’t realize that it’s an ideology…

“Most of the citizens of modern industrial society experience their lives as oppressive, a rat race, the ‘daily grind’. They live for weekends (TGIF), holidays, retirement, and call this ‘life'”. [18]

He points to Steven Pinker as one particularly insidious propagandist for the modern ideology, with works such as The Better Angels of Our Nature and Enlightenment Now.

Berman remarks: “The latter book was pretty much reduced to ashes by the British philosopher John Gray, who pointed out that ‘the message of Pinker’s book is that the Enlightenment produced all the progress of the modern era and none of its crimes’. [19]
“Pinker (pictured) comes off as a fool, a high-IQ moron… Not surprisingly, he has a large following, including Bill Gates, another non-historian, who has praised Pinker’s work to the skies”. [20]

Underlying all the propaganda is the assumption that modern industrial society, sometimes called “the West”, is the pinnacle of human achievement, as opposed to those lowly parts of the world that are said to be “underdeveloped”.

Berman refers to Muslim intellectual Shahid Bolsen’s view that this “is a term that the West likes to apply to those countries that lag behind the West in terms of economic and technological expansion and industrial growth, which are seen as the purpose of life.

“But these, Bolsen argues, are not the only possible yardsticks, or criteria, of development. The West, he tells us, is underdeveloped in terms of morality, spirituality, ethics, equality, sustainability, community, and so on. It seems hard to argue with this”. [21]

[19] John Gray, ‘Unenlightened thinking: Steven Pinker’s embarrassing new book is a feeble sermon for rattled liberals’, New Statesman, 22 February 2018, cit. p. 92.
[20] p. 92.
[21] pp. xv- xvi.

From A book* review by Paul Cudenec
* Morris Berman - Against Civilization: The Anthropological Critique of Modernity

https://winteroak.org.uk/2025/12/27/breaking-free-from-this-modern-hell/