[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]
What comes out most clearly from Enlightenment Now is Pinker’s disdain for traditional Americans and their traditions.
In Pinker’s eyes, any emotional attachment or preference for one’s homeland, nation, people, ancestors—the attachments that make us who we are—are the result of a failure to be sufficiently impartial and the result of ignorance or evil. In a passage that reads like a parody of a cosmopolitan seeking his next hotel, Pinker claims a nation is nothing more than a condominium complex: “When a “nation” is conceived as a tacit social contract among people sharing a territory, like a condominium association, it is an essential means for advancing its members flourishing” (p. 31).
But if a nation is thought of as directed towards anything more substantial, such as the protection of a distinctive people’s homeland, way of life, traditions, or birthright, Pinker would strongly disapprove. And if you have been shaped by that nation’s history and you cherish its soil more than any other because you have been formed from it and your ancestors have have lived on and spilled blood, sweat, and tears on its behalf, and if you want to preserve it for your people, well, Pinker would again strongly disapprove.
No one would fight for and die for their condo complex (which might be a feature not a bug to Pinker). I can’t see Churchill declaring, “We shall prove ourselves once again able to defend our condo complex, to ride out the storm of war… to defend the condo complex, aiding each other like good comrades to the utmost of their strength… we shall defend our condo complex, whatever the cost may be.”
If you are in any way disturbed by the prospect that your people are disappearing from the land they have occupied for generations, centuries, or millennia, if your neighborhood goes from being Irish or Italian to Mexican or Chinese seemingly overnight, if you feel any sense of loss, tragedy, or anger at this prospect, if you would like to urge your people to take steps to continue to exist, this is viewed as unacceptable. You have no justification to complain or feel a sense of loss. It’s just a condo complex. It makes no difference who lives there, and if you don’t like what’s going on, move to another complex with higher property values.
In reality, neither reason, nor science demands the shedding of attachments to one’s people, traditions, religion, or homeland to become deracinated cosmopolitans. Actually, I don’t think Pinker knows what it is to truly love a country, to love its individual distinctiveness and its history as the history of your people. To Pinker, a nation is just colors on a map (p. 31). He seems to lack both sympathy and empathy for those whose might place a special kind of importance on the patch of color one’s ancestors have built, fought, and died for. And since he perhaps doesn’t have access to that psychological state, he can’t understand how others might feel that way. They must be irrational (but love of one’s children is irrational as well).
“Trump voters” commit the greatest offense of all: they love America (or England, or France, or Germany, etc.), and not because of its adherence to universal values, but because of its irreplaceable distinctiveness and the sacrifices made on its behalf. They see that its unique distinctiveness is the soil out of which their own unique distinctiveness grew; they know that there is more to being an American or Englishman or Frenchman than merely residing there.
Pinker once titled a previous book from Lincoln’s “the better angels of our nature,” but ignores that it was “The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave” that inspired those angels, not just adherence to abstractions. The traditional Americans who built and love this country are treated worse than Boxer the horse from Animal Farm who labored in true faith to build the farm but then was discarded. (At least Boxer was honored on the farm before being sent off to the glue works.) Pinker is positively gleeful at the prospect of their death. “How might one counter the populist threat to Enlightenment values?…As has been said about science, sometimes society advances funeral by funeral” (p. 342 – 343).
Pinker acts as though the recent surge of populism across the Western world is tantamount to a reincarnated Nazi death cult bent on world destruction rather than it being comprised of moderate liberals who simply think that immigration levels should be reduced and, maybe, horror-of-horrors, that it is a rightful role of the state to ensure the continued existence of its particular constituent ethnic group, something everyone accepted as common knowledge until in very recent history. None of this constitutes a threat to “Enlightenment values.”
Pinker’s argument for cosmopolitanism is essentially:
It is individuals, not groups, who are sentient—who feel pleasure and pain, fulfillment and anguish. Whether it is framed as the goal of providing the greatest happiness to the greatest number or as a categorical imperative to treat people as ends rather than means, it was the universal capacity of a person to suffer and flourish, they said, that called on our moral concern.
Fortunately, human nature prepares us to answer that call. That is because we are endowed with the sentiment of sympathy called benevolence, pity, and commiseration. Given that we are equipped with the capacity to sympathize with others, nothing can prevent the circle of sympathy from expanding from the family and tribe to embrace all of humankind, particularly as reason goads us into realizing that there can be nothing uniquely deserving about ourselves or any of the groups to which we belong. We are forced into cosmopolitanism: accepting our citizenship in the world (p. 10 – 11).
First of all, Pinker is willing to sacrifice the welfare of the working class in developed nations to improve the welfare of those in developing nations (p. 112). Is that how sympathy works? It’s permissible to sacrifice the welfare of some, so long as you feel moderately bad and can then feel good about feeling bad about it?
Second, it is just not true that “it was the universal capacity of a person to suffer and flourish, they said, that called on our moral concern.” The “they” in the passage seems to refer to Enlightenment thinkers as whole, but this certainly doesn’t apply to Locke or Kant for whom it was the capacity to reason that made an individual a subject of moral concern.
Thirdly, whatever happened to inclusive fitness? I thought it was kin selection that made us care for family and reciprocal altruism that made us concerned with unrelated cooperators, our friends, or tribe? Doesn’t this predict that the “circle of sympathy” will not expand beyond these limits?
Fourth of all, where is that Enlightenment titan Hume’s view that reason alone cannot motivate behavior? All of a sudden reason can goad us or force us into behavior? Fifth of all, even if sympathy is an evolved characteristic (and not a disguised self-interest, say, a drive for social approval), it is incredibly weak and nowhere to be found when massacres, stonings, lynchings, rapes, and the rest of the horrible list of atrocities happen. Sympathy is a luxury good and only seems to operate when an individual is in a state of secured plenty, when they don’t see others as a competitor or threat, when they feel completely secure in their situation and perceive no prospect of future insecurity.
Unfortunately, most people, maybe not Harvard professors, but most people, are worried about their jobs, their ability to support their family, and the safety of their loved ones. They do feel that others are competitors for their jobs and wages, and are in a supply-and-demand struggle. Then there are those who are moved to rob, assault, rape, or murder. For those not in a privileged state of plenty, it is often, and perhaps primarily, fear, fear of the police, or fear of falling into poverty, not sympathy, that motivates forbearance. Finally, there is something uniquely deserving about the groups to which we belong, and that is that only we can perpetuate them, and it is our feelings of pride, love, patriotism, and affection which motivate people to do what it takes to see that their nation or group persists.
Pinker makes the following points when trying to take down the resurgent nationalisms:
First, the claim that humans have an innate imperative to identify with a nation-state (with the implication that cosmopolitanism goes against human nature) is bad evolutionary psychology… People undoubtedly feel solidarity with their tribe, but whatever intuition of “tribe” we are born with cannot be a nation state, which is a historical artifact of the 1648 Treaties of Westpahlia. (Nor could it be a race, since our evolutionary ancestors seldom met a person of another race.) (p. 450).
This is analogous to saying a rat could never develop an aversion to toxic chemicals because it never encountered toxic chemicals in its evolutionary history (this example is from Millikan’s “Truth Rules, Hoverflies, and the Kripke-Wittgenstein Paradox”). People are perfectly capable of learning they belong to a race, religion, or ethnicity and that they must do certain things in order for their kind to persist.
Pinker, further:
People see themselves as belonging to many overlapping tribes: their clan, hometown, native country, adopted country, religion, ethnic group, alma mater, fraternity or sorority, political party, employer, service organization, sports team, even brand of camera equipment. (If you want to see tribalism at its fiercest, check out a “Nikon vs. Canon” Internet discussion group) (p. 450).
It is passages like these that caused John Gray to call the book “embarrassing.” Pinker thinks he can get away with a straight face and an exasperated tone, but it comes off as the intellectual equivalent of John Stewart making faces at the camera. Can he seriously think that these are all equivalent? It is really dishonest to slip “ethnic group” in with the other mentioned groups and then claim they are all equivalent because people can see themselves as belonging to them all. Does he truly believe that if the Canon users group died out it is equivalent to the English dying out?
One cannot choose belonging to a racial or ethnic group with the same fluidity one chooses to join the other groups. Most importantly, new members are added to racial and ethnic groups largely by birth, not by posting on Reddit.
Nationalists do not claim that their nation-state is the one and only group to which they belong, or that there can’t be conflicts of loyalty. But if a nation-state does have the purpose of protecting the existence of its ethnic or religious group, it does give a person a reason to support their nation and reduce conflicts of loyalties between nation and ethnic group, or between ethnic groups within a nation, unlike if a nation treats its people as fungible and does not give a damn whether its historical population endures. There is an entirely different attitude towards the state that comes from thinking of one’s country as protecting and serving the interests of one’s people, rather than considering the country an entirely indifferent, neutral arbiter.
Next Pinker writes: “The claim that ethnic uniformity leads to cultural excellence is as wrong as an idea can be… Vibrant cultures sit in vast catchment areas in which people and innovations flow from far and wide” (p. 450). Perhaps Pinker has heard that there is a thing called the internet, and before that books and letters, by which ideas can travel? I hear Japan is a peaceful, prosperous, and technologically advanced country.
Finally, let’s not forget why international institutions and global consciousness arose in the first place. Between 1803 and 1945, the world tried an international order based on nation-states heroically struggling for greatness…The result, as we saw in chapter 11, has been seventy years of peace and prosperity in Europe and, increasingly, the rest of the world (p. 451).
None of the current moderate nationalists has been arguing for militant expansionist nationalism. If anything, moderate nationalists have been arguing against other groups expanding into their states. Also, these 70 years were before the current waves of mass migrations, where de-facto ethno-nationalism held, and would be an argument in favor of strong borders, not against them. If Pinker is against the recent revival of nationalism, then he should be in favor of the strong borders that held during this time and against the mass migrations and the removal of borders that have inflamed resurgent nationalism.
[Proceed to part 3]