Contra Pinker

John Gray on Steven Pinker's new book "What if the Enlightenment’s future is not in the liberal West, now almost ungovernable as a result of the culture wars in which it is mired, but Xi Jinping’s China, where an altogether tougher breed of rationalist is in charge? It is a prospect that Voltaire, Jeremy Bentham and other exponents of enlightened despotism would have heartily welcomed." Many of the stats used to show progress by the new new enlightenment crowd are based on progress in China. . . so Gray is not so off-field

Unenlightened thinking: Steven Pinker’s embarrassing new book is a feeble sermon for rattled liberals

To think of this book as any kind of scholarly exercise is a category mistake. The purpose of Pinker’s laborious work is to reassure liberals that they are on “the right side of history”.

newstatesman.com