Last Born In The Wilderness

I speak with Jeremy Lent, integrator, author of The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity’s Search for Meaning, and the founder of the nonprofit Liology Institute. In this conversation, we start off discussing Jeremy’s excellent critique of cognitive psychologist, linguist, and popular science author Steven Pinker’s recent book, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. Jeremy initially presented his brilliant critique in his widely shared article, Steven Pinker’s Ideas About Progress Are Fatally Flawed. These Eight Graphs Show Why, which we delve into in this episode. Jeremy unpacks the underlying assumptions implicit in Pinker’s ideas presented in his work, in particular regarding Pinker’s defense (through cherry-picking of data) of the capitalist neoliberal economic order, and more broadly of the “progress narrative” that justifies (or outright ignores) the widespread ecological devastation implicit in the expansion and maintenance of industrial civilization and