Welcome to the Colette Podcast. My name is Claire Lehman and I am editor and chief of Colette.

Colette is where Free Thought lives. We are an independent grassroots platform for heterodox ideas and fearless commentary.

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This is Jonathan Kay, Canadian editor for Quillette.com.

Welcome to the Quilat podcast.

A year ago, renowned Harvard Psychology Professor Stephen Pinker published Enlightenment Now, the case for reason, science,

humanism and progress. The book was lauded by the New York Times as, quote,

lucidly written, timely, rich and data, and eloquent in its championing of a rational humanism that it turns out is really quite cool.

Now, a year later, Pinker has written an essay for Colette in which he examines and confronts the many reactions that his book elicited.

He also spoke to me by phone from his office at Harvard.

Here are excerpts from that interview. Were you prepared for the scope of the response that was generated by Enlightenment now over the last year?

I knew that it would be controversial I had not anticipated a number of the

responses I don't think there would be quibbling over who deserves to be

counted as part of the Enlightenment and that there would be an objection to the very idea of

endorsing Enlightenment ideals on the grounds that there are a bunch of different guys during the Enlightenment era who disagreed with each other.

Therefore you can't say anything about what the Enlightenment ideals were because those guys didn't all the same thing. I had

taken it for granted that the term Enlightenment ideals or Enlightenment

...