These things have made us wealthier, smarter, healthier, and more leisurely. Pinker argues that the causes of progress, depicted above, are the ones in his title: Reason, Science, Humanism and the practices and institutions that have emerged from them – namely democratic governments, liberal economies, hospitals, research institutes, and schools/universities. Pinker is none of these things, and now we know that neither is Bill Gates. We are a group of root cause specialists of cultural particularists, of historical contextualists. Our collective goals are to make disaster preparedness, response, and risk reduction more sensitive to cultural, historical, and contextual specificities. I am part of a collective of anthropologists and practitioners called the Culture and Action Disaster Network (CADAN). What Gates thinks about the “spreading” of the Enlightenment, about the intellectual veracity of “tribal” cultures, and about the role of the West in global development is paramount, especially for me. It’s unclear whether Pinker’s ideas will have any impact on Gates as a computer guru, but Gates is now of course one of the foremost philanthropists and development strategists in the world.
This would have casually rolled around the edges of my conscious mind, and then promptly fallen out, until a piece in the New York Times came out titled: The Mind Meld of Bill Gates and Steven Pinker, in which Gates claimed that Enlightenment Now is his favorite book of all time.
Image adapted from “Weimar’s Courtyard of the Muses,” by Theobald von Oer (1860).Ĭognitive Psychologist, Steven Pinker, wrote a book called Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.
0 kommentar(er)
