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“Our understanding of who we are, where we came from, how the world works, and what matters in life depends on partaking of the vast and ever-expanding store of knowledge. Though unlettered hunters, herders, and peasants are fully human, anthropologists often comment on their orientation to the present, the local, the physical. To be aware of one's country and its history, of the diversity of customs and beliefs across the globe and through the ages, of the blunders and triumphs of past civilizations, of the microcosms of cells and atoms and the macrocosms of planets and galaxies, of the ethereal reality of number and logic and pattern—such awareness truly lifts us to a higher plane of consciousness. It is a gift of belonging to a brainy species with a long history.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“In his airport bestseller from 2018, Enlightenment Now, Steven Pinker, the leading voice in the choir of bourgeois optimism, revelled in the ‘conquest of infectious diseaseâ€� all over the globe â€� Europe, America, but above all the developing countries â€� as proof that ‘a rich world is a healthier worldâ€�, or, in transparent terms, that a world under the thumb of capital is the best of all possible worlds. â€� “Smallpox was an infectious diseaseâ€� â€�, Pinker read on Wikipedia â€� ‘yes, “smallpox wasâ€� â€�; it exists no more, and the diseases not yet obliterated are being rapidly decimated. Pinker closed the book on the subject by confidently predicting that no pandemic would strike the world in the foreseeable future. Had he cared to read the science, he would have known that waves from a rising tide were already crashing against the fortress he so dearly wished to defend.

He could, for instance, have opened the pages of Nature, where a team of scientists in 2008 analysed 335 outbreaks of ‘emerging infectious diseasesâ€� since 1940 and found that their number had ‘risen significantly over timeâ€�.”
― Andreas Malm, Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century

“Social democracy as we now know it underwent its moment of speciation when Eduard Bernstein began to question the orthodoxy of revolution. His essential postulate was the absence of crises. The Steven Pinker of socialism, he pointed to the empirical fact that no serious crisis had rocked the capitalist economy for the past two or three decades, which invalidated the Marxian prophecy of a system trending towards collapse. Since it was not prone to malfunctioning, the idea of seizing power, smashing decrepit capitalism and installing a completely different order had become redundant; instead social democracy could continue to grow in strength, extract piecemeal reforms and gradually lift the working class out of the mire. Rosa Luxemburg very famously objected that the crisis tendencies had merely been postponed. In the near future, they would burst forth with even more dreadful violence. Ignoring her prognosis, the social democrats in the making went ahead and presently gave their first demonstration of how they dealt with catastrophe: by expediting it through consent.”
― Andreas Malm, Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century

“Many artists and scholars have pointed out that ultimately art depends on human nature.”
― Steven Pinker

“Pinker quotes Chomsky’s remark that ‘ignorance can be divided into problems and mysteriesâ€� and continues: ‘I wrote this book because dozens of mysteries of the mind, from mental images to romantic love, have recently been upgraded to problems (though there are still some mysteries too!)â€� Well, cheerfulness sells books, but Ecclesiastes got it right: ‘the heart of the wise is in the house of mourning.”
― Jerry Fodor