LET’S BE RATIONAL

Maybe we’re just not thinking clearly. Maybe the problems in our lives and the chaos of the world have the same root cause: ignorance, folly, a global pandemic of unreason. And maybe the cure to all this foolishness lies within our own minds. Maybe we can heal ourselves, and everything will come right if we stop and think things through calmly, logically and rationally.

Back in 2011, Steven Pinker, Harvard psychologist and the eminent author of many bestselling books on language and the mind, swerved out of his academic lane to write The Better Angels of Our Nature, a polemical work of interdisciplinary social science. It argued that although many of us believed the world was growing ever more violent and dangerous, if you looked at the data the reverse was true: people living in developed nations enjoyed a level of peace that was unprecedented in human history. He cited archaeological studies showing that most pre-modern societies were characterised by constant warfare and endemic violence.

We were wrong about the past, Pinker argued, wrong about the modern world and wrong about the future, which would be utopian rather than dystopian. And, he explained, our safe and happy lives were all thanks to the modern state, free-market capitalism, increased literacy and scientific rationalism.

Pinker’s new work is slightly less