Editorial To Vima: Between the Dark Ages and the Enlightenment

Recently, the famed thinker and experimental psychologist Steven Pinker, motivated by the Dark Ages-style disputations of science and the wave of vaccine deniers internationally in the middle of a surge in the COVID-19 pandemic, has published a new book entitled Enlightenment Now: The case for reason, science, humanism, and progress.

The author highlights, with 75 characteristic diagrams, the progress made over the centuries in the Western world and humanity in general, achieving longevity, health, prosperity, security, knowledge, and happiness.

He explains that progress is a "gift" of the Enlightenment, which, guided by logic, science, and humanism, defeated the Dark Ages, demonisation, denial, magic, eschatological prophecies, and authoritarianism, which was grounded in all of that and kept people trapped in dogmas of ignorance, fear, and denial.

Sensing that these fundamental principles of the Enlightenment are once again being disputed, threatening to plunge the world into a new cycle of backwardness, he urges everyone with the admonition "Dare to know" to defend them once again.

A simple look at the circles in which deniers lurk demonstrates that the prospect of backpedaling is patently obvious, especially in smaller societies.

In villages and towns, deniers of vaccines, of science, and of rationalism are linked to religious fanaticism, religious Old Calendar dogmatism, Golden Dawn ideology, extreme nationalism, and supposedly invincible deniers who believe, for example, that by drinking the alcoholic beverage tsipouro they will not be infected.

For all these people, either the pandemic does not exist or it is a "curse from God" that does not concern them because they are faithful.

Nothing could be more false, as they...