INTEGRAL WORLD MAILING LIST 
http://www.integralworld.net

Newsletter Nr. 714
Amsterdam, May 18th, 2018


STEVEN PINKER, INTEGRAL, AND THE CULTURE WARS - JOSEPH DILLARD

Integral seems to be strangely silent about Steven Pinker’s monumental and ground-breaking works, The Better Angels of Our Nature,[1] in which he shows how the march of reason, science, humanism, and sympathy have systematically reduced violence world-wide, and Enlightenment Now, which documents major improvements in just about every standard of human well-being.[2] Why has his work been either ignored or met with disdain by the liberal left? Why has this scholarly yet highly readable work apparently made little impression on Integral? Is it because Pinker’s analysis, although heavily fact-based, is easily dismissed as mid-personal rationality combined with late personal humanism and therefore not transpersonal? Is it resentment that he has appropriated the term “enlightenment,” following the modernist tradition, for secular purposes?

Read more:
http://www.integralworld.net/dillard15.html