Imagine if someone called themselves an expert on anime because they watched fan parodies and top ten anime compilation videos on YouTube. That is Pinker's relationship to the enlightenment.
Pinker wants us to believe that he carries the spirit of the enlightenment on his back, but it's hard to tell if he's spent any serious time thinking about any of the enlightenment thinkers.
Marx, for one, did, and he drew out the natural conclusion: if you want to fulfil the promise of the enlightenment (i.e. The world is knowable and by knowing the world we can create a more rationally ordered society) then you have to take the struggle for socialism seriously. But Pinker is more interested in using a caricature of the enlightenment to fight campus battles rather than doing any thing real with it.
A serious engagement with enlightenment thought could lead you to understanding why liberal radicalism failed on its own terms and why Marx was necessary in history. Pinker is more interested in defending modern capitalism, which would have made Adam Smith shoot himself in the head. Capitalism today is not what any of those guys like Smith or Rousseau wanted. Marx takes up their project, pulls out the contradictions in them, and goes beyond them.
Basically, there is a tradition of conceited liberal academics who try to use anthropological research to construct social theories that justify colonialism, imperialism, and the capitalist world order, despite not being anthropologists themselves. Because they're not anthropologists and because they're too arrogant and politically motivated to properly engage with anthropology, their theories are dogshit, but because they're cheerleaders for capitalism they're taken seriously by the media and their "research" ends up overshadowing actual anthropology in the popular discourse.
Steven Pinker is one of these academics, he's a famous professor who wrote books such as " The Better Angels of our Nature " and " Enlightenment Now " that try to argue that human society has steadily improved and become less violent over time because of the development of the state, capitalism, etc.
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Pinker: "U say the world is in bad shape but a higher percentage of people than ever can afford TVs!"
Graeber: "U are a reddit ass nerd"
Pinker: "Also please don't bring up the pictures of me hanging out with Epstein or testimony from his victims describing me as one of his clients."
Imagine if someone called themselves an expert on anime because they watched fan parodies and top ten anime compilation videos on YouTube. That is Pinker's relationship to the enlightenment.
Pinker wants us to believe that he carries the spirit of the enlightenment on his back, but it's hard to tell if he's spent any serious time thinking about any of the enlightenment thinkers. Marx, for one, did, and he drew out the natural conclusion: if you want to fulfil the promise of the enlightenment (i.e. The world is knowable and by knowing the world we can create a more rationally ordered society) then you have to take the struggle for socialism seriously. But Pinker is more interested in using a caricature of the enlightenment to fight campus battles rather than doing any thing real with it.
A serious engagement with enlightenment thought could lead you to understanding why liberal radicalism failed on its own terms and why Marx was necessary in history. Pinker is more interested in defending modern capitalism, which would have made Adam Smith shoot himself in the head. Capitalism today is not what any of those guys like Smith or Rousseau wanted. Marx takes up their project, pulls out the contradictions in them, and goes beyond them.
deleted by creator
Basically, there is a tradition of conceited liberal academics who try to use anthropological research to construct social theories that justify colonialism, imperialism, and the capitalist world order, despite not being anthropologists themselves. Because they're not anthropologists and because they're too arrogant and politically motivated to properly engage with anthropology, their theories are dogshit, but because they're cheerleaders for capitalism they're taken seriously by the media and their "research" ends up overshadowing actual anthropology in the popular discourse.
Steven Pinker is one of these academics, he's a famous professor who wrote books such as " The Better Angels of our Nature " and " Enlightenment Now " that try to argue that human society has steadily improved and become less violent over time because of the development of the state, capitalism, etc.