“Knowledge is growing exponentially; knowledge needed to fend off our problems is growing faster than the problems.”
Steven Pinker · Enlightenment Now, 2018
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Pessimism is so reflexively expected of an intellectual that the way to flaunt your sophistication is to wear a long face.
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About this quote
Meaning
Pinker is pointing out a social performance that often masquerades as depth. Within intellectual and academic circles, expressing gloom about the state of the world has become a kind of status signal. By wearing a long face and emphasizing everything that is wrong, a thinker implies that they see clearly what cheerful optimists miss. Pinker's observation is that this pose can be just as unreflective as naive positivity; pessimism becomes a reflex, a costume worn for approval, rather than a conclusion honestly earned from examining evidence.
Context
This observation appears in Enlightenment Now, published in 2018, where Pinker mounts a sustained defense of optimism based on empirical data about human welfare. One of his recurring arguments is that intellectual culture has developed a systematic bias toward negative interpretations of modernity. Critics of progress, he suggests, are treated as profound thinkers, while those who point to genuine improvements are dismissed as shallow or naive. This line captures that dynamic sharply. He is not arguing that problems should be ignored, but that pessimism itself deserves scrutiny as an intellectual habit.
About the author
Steven Pinker is a cognitive psychologist and author known for bringing scientific thinking to large questions about human nature and civilization. He has held prominent academic positions in the United States and written several widely read books for general audiences. His public persona is built on challenging received wisdom, whether that means questioning certain assumptions in linguistics, evolutionary psychology, or, as in Enlightenment Now, the cultural fashion for civilizational despair.
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