Arts Tickets

NHMU Presents Dr. Steven Pinker: Progress in a Time of the Pandemic

The keynote speaker of the Natural History Museum of Utah's 2022 lecture series, Steven Pinker will discuss progress during the pandemic. There's no question that COVID has set humanity back: the pandemic, reminders of racial injustice, threats to democracy, and an economic recession to rival that of the 1930's. Yet, despite the setbacks the year has brought, we must not overlook the astonishing progress that humanity has made in health, wealth, happiness, peace, freedom, tolerance, and safety, argues Harvard psychologist and New York bestselling author Steven Pinker. "Progress is invisible to most people because they don't get their understanding of the world from numbers; they get it from headlines. Journalism by its very nature conceals progress, because it presents sudden events rather than gradual trends."