12 Steven Pinker Quotes on Progress That Reframe How You See the World
A cognitive scientist makes the slow, unglamorous case that things have actually gotten better.
These Steven Pinker quotes on progress push back against the gloom that dominates most headlines. Pinker, the Harvard psychologist behind Enlightenment Now (2018), argues that human progress is real, measurable, and badly underreported. His angle on reason and science is reflective rather than cheerful: he wants you to look at the data before you despair.
Progress is not utopia, but the gradual improvement of human flourishing through reason, science, and humanism.
The world has made spectacular progress in every single measure of human well-being. Here is a second shocker: almost no one knows about it.
Steven Pinker Enlightenment Now, 2018
His core complaint is an awareness gap: the data improves while the mood sours.
Intellectuals hate progress. Intellectuals who call themselves progressive really hate progress.
Steven Pinker Enlightenment Now, 2018
A pointed jab at the idea that pessimism is the mark of seriousness.
Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker
We will never have a perfect world, and it would be dangerous to seek one. But there is no limit to the betterments we can attain if we continue to apply knowledge to enhance human flourishing.
Steven Pinker Enlightenment Now, 2018
He treats perfectionism as a hazard and steady improvement as the realistic goal.
Bad things can happen quickly, but good things aren't built in a day, and as they unfold, they will be out of sync with the news cycle.
Steven Pinker Enlightenment Now, 2018
This is his cleanest explanation for why progress feels invisible.
As the world has gotten more rational, it has gotten less cruel.
Steven Pinker The Better Angels of Our Nature, 2011
His decline-of-violence thesis ties moral gains directly to the spread of reason.
The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker
The decline of violence may be the most significant and least appreciated development in the history of our species.
Steven Pinker The Better Angels of Our Nature, 2011
A bold claim, and the kind he insists you measure rather than feel.
Poverty has a thousand causes, but wealth has only one.
Steven Pinker Enlightenment Now, 2018
He means that prosperity is something humans create with knowledge, not a default state.
Knowledge is growing exponentially; knowledge needed to fend off our problems is growing faster than the problems.
Steven Pinker Enlightenment Now, 2018
His answer to despair is a race between solutions and trouble that he thinks we're winning.
Rationality by Steven Pinker
Pessimism is so reflexively expected of an intellectual that the way to flaunt your sophistication is to wear a long face.
Steven Pinker Enlightenment Now, 2018
He treats fashionable gloom as a status game rather than an honest reading of the world.
Progress consists of deploying knowledge to allow all of humankind to flourish in the same way that each of us seeks to flourish.
Steven Pinker Enlightenment Now, 2018
Notice the scope: not your tribe flourishing, but everyone, which is the humanist part.
Enlightenment ideals are timeless, but their realization at any moment is the strenuous achievement of nations.
Steven Pinker Enlightenment Now, 2018
Progress here is effort, not destiny, which is why he calls himself a possibilist instead of an optimist.
Pinker's point isn't that everything is fine. It's that the long arc of evidence shows real gains worth defending. Read these slowly, then go check the numbers yourself.
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Pinker frames progress as a slope, not a finish line, which is why it rarely makes the news.