No, they mean a culmination of "prominent intellectuals" who, recently, "argue that...the vision of the Enlightenment needs a vigorous defense from" various (modern) opponents, rather than a culmination of Kant.

The main two problems with the article is that it 1) falls into the same trap as Pinker does by homogenizing 'The Enlightenment' (despite first acknowledging its inner intellectual tensions and ideological heterogeneity), thus providing an inadequate explanans to the explanadum: how did social, economic, and scientific progress from the early 19th century to present day, and 2) incoherently argues that there is a rising new scientist intelligentsia, who are "quasi-religious" in their political correctness, to the detriment of scientific fact. Here, the two authors argue that this new coterie systemically denounce any scientist or scientific writers who promote any science that could be considered sexist or racist. As examples, they mention Google engineer, James Damore, who wrote the Google Memo on diversity and was subsequently fired for it, and ex-New York Times' science writer, Nicholas Wade, who wrote A Troublesome Inheritance in 2004, which was critically panned by the relevant scientific community. Despite the fact that neither Damore or Wade are biological scientists, or the fact that the scientists who authored the studies/research that Damore and Wade reference stated that they misunderstood or were simple inaccurate, the article's authors nevertheless claim that it was actually due to moral opprobrium, instead of scientific illiteracy that requires correcting.

Of course that's just the tip of the iceberg.

2) incoherently argues that a rising new scientist intelligentsia, who are "quasi-religious" in their political correctness, to the detriment of scientific fact. — Maw

Yeah, I noticed that too. And then how the author stated his own personal favourite approach to the problem was through the lenses of psychedelics and occultism... which is at the very least a bit of a random comment given how it wasn't further expanded upon?

Painting Damore as a martyr is one sure-fire way to show your bias. Why don't conservatives and right-winger decries the use of company ressources to push down a social agenda in a way that completely show disregard to company authority or assigned duties?

If James Howard Kunstler doesn't depress you enough, another good writer is John Michael Greer (What's with using all three of one's names--is this a trend). He has been recommended to me for years, and I have always avoided him largely because of his "Arch Druid" blog schtick.

I'm reading now Star's Reach: A Novel Of The Deindustrial Future which is very good post post-apocalyptic fiction. I'm not recommending this, unless you have nothing better to do with your time.

I think writers like Kunstler and Greer take one of their tasks as convincing people that the multidimensional crises we face are very real. People who already know this don't need to be reminded every 15 minutes; maybe just once every other day is enough.

I find a great deal of hope in Kunstler's and Greer's depictions "after the eco-apocalypse" life styles which are basically those of the 19th century. Their solutions are, of course, post apocalypse. We aren't going to be feeding 9 billion people with kitchen gardens and home canning. Naturally, people who enjoyed pre-apocalypse life aren't going to much like post-apocalypse life much, at first anyway. It will be mostly hard work to eke out a living.

Another post-apocalypse book I liked very much, and which is hope-filled (a plague wiped out 99.99% of the earth's human population) is Earth Abides by George Stewart, I especially liked it because many of the appurtenances of our lives (TV, cell phones, computers, freeways, etc.) are absent. The main character drives across the US to see if other people survived the plague aside from the handful he knows about (just a few). He takes Route 66. At first I thought it odd he would opt for an old highway, then I remembered--oh, right - the book was published in 1949: no freeways yet.

I’ve been an admirer of JMG’s blog for a while. I notice one of the books is titled ‘Collapse Now, and Avoid the Rush’. I do contemplate the idea of a tree-change lifestyle whereby we sell up our city property and buy a place freehold and ‘off the grid’, although at the moment it is a bit of a fantasy. Although we do have a solar plant on our house, our last two quarterly electricity bills have been well under $200.00.

[reply="Wayfarer;158550" Great title, "collapse now and avoid the rush"

"Going off the grid" is an interesting project. There is a short-of-post-collapse, or pre-collapse study group -- can't remember its name, there's a bunch of them scattered around the country. Many in the groups (the groups aren't actually big enough to have many anything) are planning on going off the grid to "survive".

I'm not a big fan of individual families going out on their own to survive the collapse. Very, very few families would have enough talents among them to succeed at really living off the grid, especially once it was no longer an option. For instance, if I killed a deer, I don't know how to preserve it (off the grid) so that we all wouldn't drop dead of food poisoning. I don't know how to turn a deer skin into a usable piece of hide. I don't know how to can (again, the food poisoning problem) assuming I had heat, a pressure cooker, glass jars, lids, rings, and lots of canning vegetables and fruits. My mechanical skills are poor to non-existent. Rig up a windmill to pump water or grind corn? I can theoretically imagine what that might look like; building it would be out of the question for me, even with all the power tools and metal one would need.

I could learn some of the skills, of course, but I'm hoping too be dead just in time to miss going off the grid. If not, I'll be very disappointed.

Even living off the grid with a truck full of supplies that doesn't get looted out from under one... don't lose the can opener.

Low-grade post-apocalyptic writers assume that people will revert to cannibalism 15 minutes after they discover the Internet is gone for good. They exaggerate. I hope. I think there is a fairly good chance, though, that a few people who were well supplied for 6 months and scattered around the countryside, would become objects of pretty intense begging and forced benevolent giving.

Better, I think, is to follow a community approach and band together to have more talent to pool, and a better chance of surviving. One would need a mix of ages (old people with more experience and young people with more energy. One would need a wide selection (and multiples) of hand tools. Forget about medication. If somebody is insulin dependent, they are just not going to make it. Ditto for all the other meds for chronic and acute (like infection) conditions. Need antidepressants? Anti-anxiety meds? Anti-psychotics? Fear not. The stress of the apocalypse with either kill you in short order, or it will cure you.

Most people in Europe and North America are going to have to learn to get along without caffeine and chocolate, bananas, pineapple, guavas, mangos, oranges, grapefruit, coconut, palm oil, olives and olive oil, cinnamon, cloves, black and white pepper, nutmeg, and the like. Cocaine, and other popular recreational drugs too will disappear, though opium poppies and marijuana can be grown even in Minnesota, so... might be a supply. Hallucinogens can be grown. So your post-apocalypse can be at least a little trippy.

I agree and I am thankful to academics like Steve Pinker and Jordan Peterson for having the courage to literally put everything on the line — Dachshund

Bigotry is risky business, for sure.

and how much time they wanna allocate to family versus career and so on — Dachshund

Just because bringing up children with certain gender-coloured expectations, which naturally affects their answers as adults on poorly constructed polls like this one , it doesn't mean that there is some kind of DNA-predetermined inclination for one gender to desire and aspirate to certain things in life over the other.

And terrorism, go to the Global Terrorist data base, and you find that worldwide the overwhelming majority of suicide terrorist attacks are committed by Islamic extremist groups — Dachshund

Depends on how far back you wanna go. The crusades were extreme form of religious terrorism committed by Christians.