Asked who the most overrated author was in a recent interview, Steven Pinker, Harvard psychologist-at-large extraordinaire, named Friedrich Nietzsche. He explained, “It’s easy to see why his sociopathic ravings would have inspired so many repugnant movements of the 20th and 21st centuries, including fascism, Nazism, Bolshevism, the Ayn Randian fringe of libertarianism, and the American alt-right and neo-Nazi movements today.”
For Pinker, the British analytical philosopher Bertrand Russell got Nietzsche right in his 1945 book A History of Western Philosophy when he pointed out that he would rather have lived in the Athens of Pericles or the Florence of the Medici than today. That he would rather live in the past than the present – and in eras known respectively for the birth of democracy and the Renaissance no less – is, according to Pinker, suspect, because on every measure human life has today become longer, healthier, safer, happier, more peaceful, more stimulating and more prosperous (he has made 75 graphs to prove it). “If one wanted to single out a thinker who represented the opposite of humanism (indeed, of pretty much every argument in this book), one couldn’t do better than the German philologist Friedrich Nietzsche,” Pinker writes at the end of Enlightenment Now. “Drop the Nietzsche” is his recommendation.
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