In analyzing political pieces (especially one so concerned with The Enlightenment), it's important to go deeper than content. What moved someone to put so much effort into this thought specifically? Nietzsche, critic of enlightenment, would ask: "which kind of will-to-power is expressed here?"
Steven Pinker is popular among accomplished people, and there's no conspiracy about this: rational optimism just gets that crowd going. Maybe it's because they don't have much better to worry about!
Reading this kind of writing is like eating a bag of candy. I eat one saccharine piece of "{X} good thing has grown by {Y}%", and then I grasp for the next morsel before I've finished chewing the first.
This comment is a text book case of projection. Everything written above is 100% true of the comment itself. Critical but without substance. Looks down their nose but not realizing they are lying on their back and actually lookup UP.
The original article and Pinker are quite clear: there are HUGE problems to be solved. Theirs is not a philosophy of complacency, but of hard work. REAL hard work that can actually SUCCEED. Unlike complaining, and unlike just ignoring the problem, and unlike pretending everything is getting worse when we know it isn't.
> Pinker are quite clear: there are HUGE problems to be solved
That's... not the impression I get from reading Pinker. On the contrary, he has an infuriating habit of presenting "x is getting better" shortly after bashing a straw man version of the groups working hardest to make x better. Everyone from civil rights activists to software developers who worked on on the Millennium Bug were, in Pinker's eyes, committing the cardinal sin of Availability Bias rather than focusing on all those nice comforting trend lines pointing in the right direction.
Steven Pinker is popular among accomplished people, and there's no conspiracy about this: rational optimism just gets that crowd going. Maybe it's because they don't have much better to worry about!
Reading this kind of writing is like eating a bag of candy. I eat one saccharine piece of "{X} good thing has grown by {Y}%", and then I grasp for the next morsel before I've finished chewing the first.