The enlightenment of Steven Pinker: Eco-modernism as rationalizing the arrogance (and violence) of empire

by Vijay Kolinjivadi

Steven Pinker’s latest book Enlightenment Now celebrates modern technological progress at all costs, and in doing so it ignores the violence of colonialism’s subjugation of people and nature, and promotes a mechanistic understanding of progress and human-environment relations. Instead, we need a radical project of decolonization that values non-Western ideals of what liberation and emancipation of the human spirit could also mean.