Steven Pinker. Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress

      Steven Pinker calls his values of New York-Boston-Montreal intellectual "enlightened" and dismisses everything else as irrational, parochial and provincial. Though the book puts forward some occasional sane ideas on climate and nuclear energy but, otherwise, it is Fukuyama-light. For instance, he castigates as unenlightened and irrational people clinging to the old notions of the home country and patriotism and calls their views a reactionary romanticism. Did it ever occur to him that in the twentieth century, there were two utopian projects: one succeeding beyond wildest expectations, the other spectacularly failed? State of Israel pursued its state nationalism single-minded (some would say, ruthlessly) and triumphed. Soviet Union began with denial of the ethnic and national boundaries and practiced an early version of affirmative action in the form of the "national cadres" and perished. Nor it can be explained by "Communism". Chinese and Vietnamese leaders combined single-party rule with unabashed nationalism and traditional Confucian values and they are doing very well, thank you.

      Especially entertaining is his glorification of the "color revolutions" in Georgia and Kyrgizstan. In Kyrgizstan, a club-armed tribal mob ransacked government buildings and installed their ringleader as the new leader of the country. After a year or two of bloody mess, the Russian Army installed more pliable leader and nobody heard of Kyrgizstan ever since. Another perfect idea of enlightened values was Mikheil Saakashvili's coup in Georgia. While the crime wave under his predecessor Shevardnadze was out of control, Mikheil brought it down by the age-honored enterprises of police torture and death squads. His memory is so revered that now he is an exile from the country he once ruled as "democratically elected" president.

       Methodologically, he correctly ridicules derivation of casual connections from mere statistics but then uses this method throughout his book for good and bad measure. Not that some of his conjectures are unsympathetic to this author: a secular decline of violence and warfare, and the growth in public welfare. But the grave deficiencies of his book cannot allow calling him an oracle of rational, enlightened values, just an outspoken hack in service of neocon agenda carefully stripped of the US messianic agitprop.