[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]
In the last part of the review of Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now, the final question under consideration is how to best promote human flourishing. Imagine how things would change were it declared that 1) what counts as human flourishing is a matter of human nature and so is objective, and 2) the purpose of civilization is the cultivation of human flourishing. I think Pinker subscribes to both these theses, but doesn’t see how their adoption would destroy contemporary liberalism as we know it. It is sometimes said that the essence of liberalism is that the state must remain neutral on conceptions of the good, and so if you subscribe to 1) and 2), you have lost your liberal credentials. (Whether this is an accurate account of liberalism is another question. I don’t think it is.)
The idea that what counts as human flourishing is objective certainly has the potential to upset many, given that, for example, a women who has the character to find and keep a loving husband, and have and nurture virtuous children is a better instance of human flourishing than a childless woman focused on career pursuits. Civilization exists to nurture this form of life in the highest degree, not respect all conceptions of the good equally, as society must not remain neutral on various “lifestyle choices.” Civilization exists for the good life, and we are not obligated to treat others conceptions with equal consideration, worth, or value; we are allowed to structure society to nurture, favor, and promote this form of life to the exclusion of others.
The first thing to notice is that our society is not currently dedicated to human flourishing; it is dedicated to “the pursuit of happiness.” Now, if you simply define happiness as flourishing or the result of flourishing, which is a very common idea, there is little problem. Flourishing—doing well at school and work, attracting and keeping a mate, having children, providing them with a good environment in which to grow—normally does produce happiness. In fact, we are designed to receive happiness for accomplishing these things. But this phrase has been subjectivized and relativized and captured by the ego, so that today the culture teaches that happiness entails not having to repress a single desire out of concern for its effect on others. (See: “Allow Me To Explain The Darkness Of The Human Soul.”)
Our selfish and social natures are in constant conflict about how to act. Selfishly, we wish to be able to defect yet receive the benefits of cooperation: to be fat yet still be found attractive, lazy and not have to work yet receive wealth, liked without having to be likable, loved without being lovable, and so on. It is the preferences of others which motivate us to put in the effort required for virtue, not pure reason. But popular culture, as I have mentioned, urges us to defect and listen to our selfish nature; it pronounces repressing the urges of the selfish ego to be weakness or inauthenticity and calls success at avoiding this happiness.
The view that happiness means flourishing is not particularly radical. Even today most people seek to get married, have children, and work hard to support their family as best they can. Women and men understand that they should try to demonstrate attractive traits when seeking a mate. We understand that children need to develop skills to succeed in life, we provide tax benefits for those with children, and so on. Society in many ways already supports and nurtures the living of the good life.
Where trouble comes in is when people either come to believe the claims that 1) this life concept is in no way preferable or privileged over any other, 2) we have to respect other conceptions as equally valid, 3) vice is just individuality or self-expression, or when one tries to live the form of a human life while actually following advice from the Cathedral, which is guaranteed to produce dissatisfaction, frustration, and dysfunction. What I mean by this, for example, would be a marriage where the wife believes the feminist dogma that a man should love her unconditionally for who she is on the inside. She thus allows herself to become fat and unattractive and yet attacks any suggestion that she should put in effort for the happiness of her spouse. Her husband is thus dissatisfied and so defects as well, thinking that she should love him unconditionally, resulting in mutual dissatisfaction. Another example would be a man who becomes bitter towards women because they prefer confident jocks rather than sensitive wimps and thinks they should find him attractive instead. Or someone with a gender studies degree who think they should be paid the same as a CEO, and on and on.
Now, it would be absurd to claim that conditions today are a hellish nightmare. As Pinker wonderfully documents, capitalism and technology have undeniably produced great improvements to the state of mankind. I can’t deny that things are pretty good (if mediocre compared to the heights humanity is capable of achieving) in Bellmont but I just see far too many lives ruined in Fishtown by the degenerate values of liberal culture. The presence of so much despair and dysfunction shows that technology alone is not sufficient for flourishing. As Charles Murray pointed out in Coming Apart, one part of America preaches liberalism, but practices something more akin to lifestyle conservatism. It is when we try to genuinely live liberalism that we do not flourish and instead become full of vice, dysfunction, and social problems.
So, if we make it explicit that human flourishing is our mission statement, how does that alter our understanding of society, and how this end is to be achieved? This is not a new problem; in fact, it is the problem faced by civilization itself. For most of human history, during pre-civilization, kin selection, reciprocal altruism, and harsh environmental conditions were sufficient to motivate us to repress our ego imperatives in order to receive the benefits of group cooperation. Locke said that humans enter civil society because of the “inconveniences” of the state of nature. But humans lived successfully in this state for hundreds of thousands of years and could have continued to do so for hundreds of thousands more. The problem only arises with the rise of a sedentary, agriculturally-based, high population, high-density environment (the actual list of conditions that produce civilization is still much debated). And this is the problem with contract theorists: they missed that there is a state in-between the state of nature and civil society. I’ll call this “the abnormal state” (in homage to Millikan) because the environment has changed from the conditions under which hunter/gatherers functioned successfully.
The problem of civilization is how to allow human flourishing in this large, sedentary, high-density, agriculturally based, population where people dwell among and need to practice restraint towards those outside kin and clan networks. When people live in such an environment with only kin and clan loyalty as a guide you get the violent disasters of American inner cities or European no-go zones. Kin and clan alone restricting human behavior in the abnormal state is bad, bad, bad. Civilization is one of Pinker’s “circumscribed zones of order.”
When energy is poured into a system, and the system dissipates that energy in its slide towards entropy, it can become poised in an orderly , indeed beautiful, configuration” (p. 18).
In the case of civilization, what is pulling it down is the undertow of human nature’s drive to return to rule by kin and clan alone, as we see in American inner cities, failed states, or European no-go zones where the rule of law no longer operates. Civilization needs to fight a never-ending battle against this undertow and has come up with two great innovations to address this problem: church and state. They add the necessary additional motivations for restraint where kin and clan are no longer sufficient.
A civilization is a large-scale teleofunctional institution designed to solve the problem of how to allow the living of a good human life in the abnormal state. Thus, church and state are separate in the way that the State Department and the Defense Department are separate—yes they’re separate but they are not ultimates. Rather, they are both part of something larger, namely the United States government in this case. Similarly, the cultivation of human flourishing in the abnormal state is the purpose of civilization, and church and state are its two great arms serving this one shared purpose. (I am thinking of civilization as an individual in the way we used to speak of British civilization, or Hittite civilization, or Egyptian civilization.) This notion that a civilization is the ultimate unity to which we belong and church and state are its arms remains alive, for example, in the symbolic role of the British monarch as head of both state and church.
However, whenever the state attempts to promote virtue it is disastrous; I am convinced that the state cannot improve the character of the people. As I look back at the history of human civilization, it seems clear to me that it is the function of centralized religion to motivate the people to restrain their socially destructive impulses. I can’t see how Pinker can miss that the core mission of religion is teaching people to fight against their selfish impulses. In the great monotheistic religions, the primary battle is against sin as putting self first in gluttony, pride, greed, vanity, sloth, envy; the ancestor worship religions motivate its adherents to avoid acting on their selfish impulses so as to not bring shame on their ancestors; and even Buddhism, which is often hard to categorize with other religions, offers nirvana as a reward for the cessation of desires. In all of them, the point is to motivate people to not act on their selfish impulses. But Pinker just sees religion as harmful superstition.
To take something on faith means to believe it without good reason, so by definition a faith in the existence of supernatural entities clashes with reason. Religions also commonly clash with humanism whenever they elevate some moral good above the well-being of humans, such as accepting a divine savior, ratifying a sacred narrative, enforcing rituals and taboos, proselytizing other people to do the same, and punishing and demonizing those who don’t” (p. 30).
If religion were truly a parasitic meme virus and harmful to its adherents, its harms would have quickly been perceived and it would have been discarded like communism, but it endures. Richard Dawkins’ thesis that religion harms its “hosts” must be one of the worst ideas of a major thinker in recent decades. In fact, a case could be made that if the mental capacity to reason evolved via natural selection, then its ultimate purpose is to aid us to survive and reproduce by producing true beliefs about the empirical world. Likewise, religion may have evolved (culturally or genetically) to aid us to survive and reproduce by producing metaphysical beliefs. (And since religious people have more children than secular, and since modern liberal states all produce below replacement levels of fertility, it might be that religion is better at doing that job than reason is.)
My view is that high religion evolved in order to produce altruism beyond kin and clan by asking us to believe in divine commands and inescapable punishments. Even if there is no afterlife, a high-population, high-density civilization requires altruism beyond kin and clan. And belief in divine commands produces the beneficial effects in this life that make civilization possible. (Plus, it may actually be that God caused the Big Bang, controls the collapse of the quantum waveform so as to allow miracles, that there is no multiverse and so the argument from cosmological constants is valid, that qualia is non-physical and so can survive the death of the body, or that human psychology contains certain features—subjectivity, free will, and true altruism—that defy naturalistic explanation.)
The great religions do this job by acting as the central controlling source and distributor of the social emotions. You might think of it as that in the abnormal state society needs to switch to a server/client model from the peer-to-peer of kin and clan (a metaphor I worry will get me into trouble, but what the heck.) This controlling source centralizes the telling of stories that provide moral instruction, it distributes these stories from the source through a network, teaches people as to what behaviors result in the removal of reciprocity/ostracism, and instruct them to enforce these teachings on one another. In religious societies the central religious order distributes the stories and lessons to the priesthood which distributes them to the nodes of the followers.
(I am certainly not in favor of a theocracy where a religion has the power to punish violators. Instead, a religion that paints such a powerful picture of the glory and love of God such that people willingly choose to resist the urgings of their ego and pursue virtue and morality willingly is best. But I worry that such an arrangement is always proves short-lived and will be subverted by ego rationalizations.)
Now, if I look around today at who controls the telling of stories, has a distribution system for sending them out to the nodes, educates the people as to what behaviors are praiseworthy and which result in ostracism and excommunication, and demonstrates to the people how to remove the benefits of reciprocal altruism towards violators, it seems obvious that the controlling source is the media. Hollywood controls which stories are told, distributes them over its network of TV and movie screens, and through its stories educates the people as to what behaviors result in ostracism and instructs the people to enforce this denial of the benefits of reciprocal altruism on each other.
The Right thought it would fight the culture war through the use of the religious establishment in its traditional role to disseminate its views, while the Left used Hollywood to disseminate theirs. We know how this turned out. Funyuns outsold Responsibilityuns for 60 years. The religious establishment saw the threat of Hollywood right from the beginning and managed to get the Hayes code passed. Even after the code was lifted, Hollywood was afraid for decades to challenge and stir up religious sensibilities. It wasn’t until the 1990s that Hollywood felt sufficiently secure to mock religion and openly declare itself to be the controlling source of social emotions. And the lesson it teaches is not one of virtue and human flourishing, but unbridled pursuit of the ego and ostracism towards any who say otherwise. Thus, the central source which is supposed to instruct people to resist the urges of the ego, now teaches us to attack anyone for suggesting we do so.
It is often said that the failure of communism showed that propaganda can not overcome human nature. However, one must be awestruck by the ability of Hollywood to change public opinion seemingly at will. If propaganda can’t get us to act against self-interest—to sacrifice our own well-being for the good of the state, for example—it sure can get us to act on our worst impulses. To promote human flourishing, we would need this central controlling source of social emotions, namely the media/education complex, to educate people that human nature is real, not all lifestyle choices are equal, and that, as a social animal, in order to live a good human life to the highest possible degree we need to restrain our selfish impulses so as to produce good relationships with our fellow humans. Pinker spends a lot of time in Enlightenment Now criticizing the news media; he can have it if he gives me the entertainment media.
We will always be torn between our selfish desires and social needs. In order to balance these conflicting impulses, we need the message to be about restraining our appetites, cultivating attractive masculinity and femininity, overcoming inertia so as to thrive in our education and work. We need to see that the culture praises the loving family, not the individual career, as the highest expression of human flourishing, while illustrating how to detect and avoid omnipresent negative influences—promiscuity, drugs, vice, crime, careerism, envy, vanity—which lure us away from the living of a good human life. What motivates virtue is the prospect of producing negative social relationships through vice. But our current liberal culture wants to practice vice yet receive the benefits of virtue; they demand the right to not repress a single urge and yet receive the benefits of virtue. The desire to defect and yet receive the benefits of cooperation exists in all time periods, but some are better able to inoculate against it, to teach the people to detect and shun it in others and themselves, unlike ours, which manufactures rationalizations on an industrial scale so as to justify it.
Vice would again be subject to censure, not in a cruel way, but as was the traditional practice, when people understand what flourishing entails and can detect the desire to free ride in themselves and others, they learn to not grant the rewards of virtue to the vicious. Nor would society be neutral on various lifestyle choices, but also wouldn’t enforce or penalize failure. Instead, pity given to those who fail to live out a full life would be the norm as, for example, was the traditional way to see an old maid. Society would need to discard the existentialist view that freedom requires the throwing off of all impediments to the will and come to re-learn the value of restraint. Marriage especially would need to undo decades of feminist degradation and cease to be about being able to defect, while still receiving the benefits of cooperation. The idea of unconditional love should be discarded in favor of a dedication to nurturing mutually attractive traits. And perhaps there would even be a newfound respect for religious notion of sin as the giving in to our selfish drives to the detriment of living of a good life.
Can the controlling source function without metaphysical beliefs as the foundation? I don’t know, but the fact that this was the solution to the problem for thousands upon thousands of years makes me think that it can’t. Can we just get by with no controlling source at all and just let people live as they please? The 1960s generation tried to throw off religion and other social pressures but immediately just built a new controlling source in the media. Again, the fact that civilizations always have one—and when they try to get rid of one just end up building another—makes me think that they are necessary. The controlling source is never all-powerful, there are always competitors looking to knock it off the throne (how to do this is another interesting story), but there always seems to be one dominant source and it guards its power jealously.
Ideally, I’d like to achieve this through open debate and education. People could come to understand human nature and what flourishing entails, learn to detect when others are acting under the influence of their ego imperatives, see how these destructive tendencies are pushed by the media, come to mock and reject them, and via market mechanisms, the media would respond by providing the content people demand. But when in a darker mood, I come to worry either the current state of affairs did not itself result from market forces (conservative channels or shows are not allowed to even try to compete and Hollywood was taken over by leftists who used it to push an agenda). Or even worse, perhaps the current state of affairs did result from the marketplace of ideas, and when people are allowed to choose, they will inevitably purchase from those who promise they should rightfully be able to defect, yet receive the benefits of cooperation.
Education and the media are already a propaganda operation controlled by a small number of voices that blast a unified message relentlessly from cradle to grave on all 500 channels, and people don’t seem to mind too much. For a time, it seemed that perhaps the internet would allow us to bypass the media, but now it appears that the mega-Silicon Valley controllers of social media are doing everything they can to clamp down on any such efforts and retain their role as source and controller.
Pinker opens Enlightenment Now by giving advice to a young woman seeking purpose in life; I will close this series with the Dark Enlightenment answer.
You have been designed by nature or nature’s God. You will find the most satisfaction in life by taking up the purpose for which you have been designed. As a social creature, your greatest source of joy and happiness will be through your loving relationships with other people, especially your spouse and children. Have many children. To receive this satisfaction from others, you need to produce it in them in turn. Thus, inculcate in yourself the qualities that will aid you in living a good life to the highest degree. Don’t envy those who are able to do better, and don’t look down on those who don’t do as well. Don’t give the rewards deserved for the virtuous to those who practice vice, and reserve your scorn for those who praise ugliness, envy, and vice and so lead people away from the good life. Know where you, your family, your people, your values, your traditions came from.
Be loyal and proud of your traditions and people; teach your children to be loyal and proud of them, as well. If religion helps you in following the path, good; if you are having problems in life, look for religion to give you your missing sense of purpose. We live in a technologically marvelous age. Unless you are foolish, you should be able to avoid the pitfalls of drugs, violence, crime, and extreme poverty. The biggest obstacle will be your own ego which will constantly tempt you to take the easy path of selfishness, and will provide endless rationalizations for doing so, and so come to ruin your meaningful relationships with others.
None of this is particularly radical. It counted as common sense not that long ago. The main question is whether these points can once again be adopted by the usual means of education and public debate.