[Editor’s note: this piece is part of a five-part review of Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5]
Steven Pinker’s new book Enlightenment Now, released February 2018, purports to be a defense of the Enlightenment circa 1760s against its steadily growing list of enemies, but in fact reads more like a defense of Star Trek techno-liberalism circa 1960s (who’s the goddamn reactionary here?).
In the book, Pinker comes across less like an Enlightenment philosopher and more as a Henry Ford-type voicing disappointment over the tunes kids are listening to these days and urging them to listen to the music of his youth. In Greenfield Village, Ford built a reproduction of the small town America of which he himself had contributed to the demise; Pinker, the intellectual, is trying to rebuild the intellectual environment of his youth in the 1960s, an environment that gave birth to the current climate from which he feels so alienated.
To the Boomers, it is always or should always be the 1960s, and it turns out that the important issues today are exactly what were important to 1960s liberals. In fact, the book reads like a cry of “can’t we just keep debating the same things we did in the 60s?” The main threat is still Christian conservative creationists who are always on the brink of going too far. The multicultural disasters of Rotterdam, South Africa, Malmo, and Paris are nowhere to be found. All we need is more education and some 1960s-style integration programs. (Remember how in the 60s we did integration, and it worked so well that there are now no racial issues in politics?) But equally, Pinker doesn’t like how the Left has moved on from the 60s: away from individualism to identity politics, away from free speech and towards banning unpopular views, away from modernism and towards post-modernism.
The stated argument of the book is that the Enlightenment values of reason, science, and humanism produced great improvements to human welfare, but those values and the benefits they bestow are under threat from both the Left and Right, and so we must rededicate ourselves to protecting these values and fighting against their foes. Other reviewers have provided terrific evaluations of Pinker’s arguments. For examples, see here and here for great reviews.
This essay isn’t so much a review as a rejoinder. To first appearance, Pinker seems to be demolishing foe after foe. However, on deeper analysis his arguments start to appear as a sleight-of-hand to dazzle the reader while the implied conclusions are slipped in under their cover. To go through every argument would require a book just as long, but to take one example, in chapter 21 on the subject of reason, it appears as though Pinker is firing on all cylinders, quoting philosophers, studies in the social sciences, and amusing anecdotes to drive home his point; but what exactly is Pinker showing? The chapter on reason appears to just be a modest appeal to be aware of the ways in which biases and passions may distort reasoning. The advice is mostly sound, but the conclusion as to what reason demands is put off until the final chapter.
There are a number of ways in which someone might be said to be governed by reason and Pinker doesn’t disambiguate them. His examples are all cases of how public policy should be informed by discoveries in the sciences. That is one possible way of being governed by reason. However, in the final chapter, he adopts Spinoza’s dictum: “Those who are governed by reason desire nothing for themselves which they do not also desire for the rest of humankind” (p. 410). Pinker has jumped from the modest claim to beware of biases to the strong claim that we can and should be governed by reason, and that those governed by reason will adopt such and such moral views. But chapter 21 showed no such thing as is here being implied.
The classic Enlightenment-era debates on the powers of reason (or lack thereof) to reveal moral truths are nowhere to be found. The skepticism about the nature of reason which Pinker appears to be attacking was always about whether reason could be employed to prove some particular point: whether you could deduce the nature of thing-in-themselves, or whether pure reason could prove existence, infer effects from causes, generate moral imperatives or ultimate ends. These classic instances of skepticism about the powers of reason are not addressed. Pinker’s avoidance of Hume’s arguments and uncritical adoption of Spinoza is a glaring omission.
In fact, the entire book, not just a single chapter, follows this pattern. What is being proven in chapter 1? That there was a thing called the Enlightenment? On reading chapter 1, which refuses to enter into the heated debates of the Enlightenment, or discuss where major Enlightenment figures disagreed, I was sure that it must be just an overview and that he would return to state and defend a specific thesis of a particular Enlightenment thinker, but he never does. Take chapter 2. Here Pinker reviews what he takes to be the three major intellectual developments that have occurred since the Enlightenment: entropy, Darwinism, and information theory, abbreviated as entro, evo, info. Upon reading this, I thought we might have something really valuable, namely that Pinker was going to use these three tools to resolve enduring debates. But when he does return to these three ideas to put them to work in chapter 23, the book really goes off the rails, as I will argue in future installments of this book review.
The longest section of the book, section 2, points out all of the ways life has improved and is getting better. But it all can be summed up as the claim that there have been great improvements in technology, and that we have further used this technology to cure diseases, increase crop yields, and exploit fossil fuels for economic growth which reduces competition for resources. Again, I can’t see that anyone would deny this, (except on the topic of declining violence where Pinker has faced criticism). I suppose one could argue that the thesis that technology should be put to work improving human welfare is an Enlightenment value, but does anyone today deny this? Who is he arguing against?
And this is the fallacy that lies at the heart of the entire book:
Enlightenment = science/technology + liberalism.
Technology has produced improvements to human welfare.
Therefore, liberalism produces improvements to human welfare.
Most revealingly, in chapter 23 on humanism, in just a few pages Pinker dispenses with the debates between utilitarianism vs. deontology, the argument from cosmological constants, and the nature of consciousness without making any original points. I don’t want to criticize Pinker for failing to resolve ancient and difficult issues, and wouldn’t if he didn’t act like they had all been solved. He must know his easy dismissal of these difficult debates is not going to convince anyone who has studied these issues in any depth, so why are these issues present at all?
The chapter on reason won’t convince those who study reason, the chapter on morality won’t convince those who study morality, so for whom is this book intended? This question reveals what Enlightenment Now is really about; it isn’t a book about the history of the Enlightenment, progress, or political theory. It is an exercise in political rhetoric, in frame control. As John Gray writes in his review, “To think of this book as any kind of scholarly exercise is a category mistake. The purpose of Pinker’s laborious work is to reassure liberals that they are on ‘the right side of history.’” These easy dismissals of difficult issues are there to sway the easily swayable and reassure the wavering.
This book is clearly aimed at a mass audience. By design, a casual reader will be swayed by Pinker’s barrage of studies, even if they don’t quite see exactly how his moral and political conclusions follow from his arguments. He’s got all these charts in the middle chapters, so he must be proving what he asserts in the later chapters! After all, Pinker himself comes across as supremely confident in the validity and importance of his positions, and he is a professor at Harvard. In this light, the entire book comes across as an attempt to create a cover story for a political program and should be judged on its success towards this end, and not as a work in the history of ideas.
It seems clear that Pinker was very disturbed by the phenomena of Brexit and mass support of Donald Trump, and decided that these movements needed to be dismantled. The book would have been far better if it were more of a dispassionate analysis of the arguments made on behalf of Trump and Brexit, but Pinker jumps to the conclusion that Trump is a danger to the Enlightenment itself! Trump is a “neo-theo-reactionary-populist” nationalist (p. 450). To Pinker, the biggest threats are, as always, theoconservatives (p.448) and romantic militarism/fascism (p. 449). In reality, Trump is of course closest in spirit to a 1980s Democrat, and Pinker is being ridiculously paranoid. Fired up by the 2016 election while writing, Pinker failed to heed his own warning about political passions distorting good reasoning.
Thus, there are two themes running through the book. Primarily, the plan of the book is to claim certain theses as the Enlightenment view, show how these have worked spectacularly in improving life, and to answer challenges to these positions. On the other hand, the secondary theme involves a diagnosis of where the problem of recent populist revolts originates and a prescription on how defeat it. As for the origin of this scourge, Pinker runs through a number of possible explanations such as economic pressure (p. 339), racism (p. 340), education (p. 339), and settles on cultural backlash as the primary driver of “the regressive, authoritarian, tribal populism pushing back” (p. 341). Pinker never deems it necessary to actually read the writings of these people and is happy to look at leftists’ own explanations which of course see the worst motives. I will provide my own explanation in part 3 of this series.
As for how to defeat authoritarian populism, surely we should use the Enlightenment ideals of open debate and rational discourse in order to reach the truth? No, suddenly reason is nowhere to be found, and the strategies Pinker mentions are all ways to achieve the goals of leftists in the more subtle ways. First, shut up about talking too loudly about true motives, sneak them in quietly, and don’t say anything to inflame the opposition: “Cultural backlash does seem to be a driver, so avoiding needlessly polarizing rhetoric, symbolism, and identity politics might help to recruit, or at least not repel, voters who are not sure which team they belong to” (p. 342).
Secondly, let urbanization and demographics overwhelm the opposition (p.343). Finally, and most importantly, use the media to paint a picture of positivity and happiness (p. 343). Negativity, subjectivity, and relativism work to take down an enemy, but with America effectively dismantled, the message is that liberalism should switch to a new public relations campaign of positivity.
But relentless negativity can itself have unintended consequences, and recently a few journalists have begun to point hem out. In the wake of the 2016 American election, the New York Times writers David Bornstein and Tina Rosenberg reflected on the media’s role in its shocking outcome:
Trump was the beneficiary of a belief–near universal in American journalism–that “serious news” can essentially be defined as “what’s gone wrong”… For decades journalism’s steady focus on problems and seemingly incurable pathologies was preparing the soil that allowed Trump’s seeds of discontent and despair to take root.
Bornstein and Rosenberg don’t blame the usual culprits (cable TV, social media, late-night comedians) but instead trace it to the shift during the Vietnam and Watergate eras from glorifying leaders to checking their power (P. 50).
Why is it all of a sudden so important for the news media to start painting an optimistic picture after so many decades of negativity? What’s implied is that the media, having succeeded in its 60-year campaign to take down traditional America, needs to switch from negativity to a propaganda campaign of just how great modern America is. The 1960s liberals are now the conservatives arguing for the status quo.
Along these lines, Pinker sees the necessity of the return to the strategy of claiming the right to rule by the masters of reason. Pushing the knife in with post-modern anti-realism has finally met with resistance, and so as to prevent the enemy from pulling the knife out, it is time to change back to claiming the right to rule based on possession of superior reason, and its bestowal on the best reasoners, academia, with the power to reveal prescriptive moral truth. True, Pinker is not saying that scientists should directly rule:
For the same reason, a call for everyone to think more scientifically must not be confused with a call to hand decision-making over to scientists… It doesn’t matter, because we’re not talking about which priesthood should be granted power; we’re talking about how collective decisions can be made more wisely” (P. 390 – 391).
Although he claims to be merely arguing that people should be taught to reason better, he consistently then jumps to inform us as to the conclusions of this better reasoning which should be adopted. Then, in order to get everyone to adopt these conclusions, academia should spread them through proxies like the media and universities:
[E]ntire populations can shift when a critical nucleus of persuadable influencers changes its mind and everyone else follows along… Across the society as a whole the wheels of reason turn slowly and it would be nice to speed them up. The obvious places to apply this torque are in education and the media [emphasis mine]” (P. 377-378).
So, Harvard should pass down its decrees to the education, media, and entertainment complex, which will then distribute its worldview to the masses via its network of influencers. Somebody claimed that this is how things work and had a name for it, but I can’t remember who at the moment. Forgive me if I am skeptical in 2018 of the ability to academia and the media to be impartial distributors of politically neutral truth. Leftists saw long ago that the way things work is that the universities tell us what truth demands, and then advise the state and distribute its finding to the people–thus, the necessity of the long march through the institutions. I have no problem with universities advising on pure science, but the social sciences and X-studies departments have taken control of moral education using the prestige universities enjoy to claim the right to distribute completely unscientific socially destructive ego fulfillment fantasies.
Wake me when all the social sciences and X-studies departments have been dismantled and the remnants moved over to their rightful place as sub-fields of the biology department.
[Proceed to part 2.]