Dark Enlightenment Now, Part 4

[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]

We now turn to the moral and political views Pinker espouses. Primarily, I wish to claim that Pinker’s liberal cosmopolitanism is not the best way to pursue his goal of human flourishing.

Pinker claims to be in favor of promoting human flourishing (p. 264, 412) and approves of utilitarianism as the means by which this is to be done. Pinker’s positive statements about morality are all quite general, and it is somewhat difficult to pin down specifics. He claims to be in favor of utilitarianism, but nowhere in Enlightenment Now does Pinker promote a simple act-utilitarianism. He certainly hasn’t flown off to Bangladesh to labor on behalf of the extremely poor where he could produce the greatest happiness for the greatest number. Pinker’s examples are all of natural human drives that he feels should not be impeded: “food, comfort, curiosity, beauty, stimulation, love, sex, and camaraderie” (p. 414). However, other aspects of human nature, namely “tribalism, authoritarianism, demonization, zero-sum thinking” (p. 333) according to Pinker are bad and need to be thwarted. But then again, “human nature, with its messy needs for beauty, nature, tradition, and social intimacy” (p. 12) should be respected.

Pinker’s examples of active promotion of human welfare are all undertaken by the state, and so it seems humanism, cosmopolitanism, and utilitarianism are all combined in a morality of Kantianism-lite, with the utilitarian promotion of human welfare being the domain of the state. By “Kantianism-lite,” I mean the view that the entirety of morality is to 1) not use others as a means to an end they do not themselves share, and 2) tolerate any behavior that does not violate this rule, ignoring Kant’s belief that we have positive duties to ourselves and others. This seems to be a pretty close approximation of the standard modern liberal view.

When describing what human flourishing entails, Pinker writes:

The physical requirements that allow rational agents to exist in the material world are not abstract design specifications; they are implemented in the brain as wants, needs, emotions, pains, and pleasures. On average, and in the kind of environment in which our species was shaped, pleasurable experiences allowed our ancestors to survive and have viable children, and painful ones led to a dead end. That means that food, comfort, curiosity, beauty, stimulation, love, sex, and camaraderie are not shallow indulgences or hedonistic distractions. They are links in the causal chain that allowed minds to come into being. Unlike ascetic and puritanical regimes, humanistic ethics does not second-guess the intrinsic worth of people seeking comfort, pleasure, and fulfillment—if people didn’t seek them, there would be no people [my emphasis] (p. 414).

Pinker is so close to seeing Gnon here. (Of course, the same argument applies to kinds like ethnic and racial groups; if their members don’t do certain things, they cease to exist). Despite outright stating “pleasurable experiences allowed our ancestors to survive and have viable children, and painful ones led to a dead end,” I refuse to believe he actually could be saying this. Fear and anger allowed our ancestors to survive as well, but they are not pleasurable. He must be arguing for the lesser conclusion that avoidable pain that doesn’t serve its designed purpose is harmful, and pleasures are not bad if they do what they were designed to do. Does he really think that hairshirt wearing extreme ascetics are a bigger problem than hedonists today?

As with his discussion of reason, despite only making a modest point, he then goes on to act as if he’s proved a major one. He acts as if he’s made the larger point that human flourishing means the maximizing of pleasurable experiences over the course of one’s life and avoiding unpleasurable ones. But maximizing pleasurable experiences is not what humans did that was selected for. Something like fear of ostracism was selected for precisely because being in a cooperative community was advantageous. The benefits of cooperation were the ultimate effect of the fear of ostracism or loneliness, not the acquisition of pleasure. If people could take a pill to get pleasure whenever they felt fear of ostracism, instead of actually working to get the benefits of cooperation, they would eventually be out-competed by those who did actually get the benefits of cooperation.

What Pinker is missing is that these mental states all have distinct etiologies and intermediate functions before the ultimate function of survival and reproduction. In writing “pleasurable experiences allowed our ancestors to survive and have viable children, and painful ones led to a dead end,” Pinker jumps straight from pleasure to survival and reproduction. Pinker says that “They are links in the causal chain that allowed minds to come into being” but doesn’t look at the individual chain of each mental state. It’s not that the desire for food directly produced more people, and the desire for camaraderie directly produced more people, and the desire for comfort directly produced more people, as if when you experience comfort a baby pops out of you.

Desires, emotions, pleasures, and pains are designed to induce the organism to perform certain behavior—just as hunger is supposed to get us to procure food to keep our body supplied with energy, so that we may survive to have and support children. Pinker should be looking at what behavior and ends these mental states have been selected for their ability to produce, not the accompanying pleasures and pains, as it is the benefits of successful behavior that the other links are ultimately designed to produce. What this leads us to is that these traits, pleasurable and painful alike, contribute to the successful living of a distinctively human life, and it is this form of live which replicates, due to the successful functioning of these mental processes.

For example, how does human flourishing differ from say, salmon flourishing, or elm tree flourishing? The answer comes from the distinctive way humans evolved to live (as opposed to how salmon or elm trees evolved). A human life, like a salmon’s life, or an elm tree’s life, or any other living organism, has a form. In the case of humans, this is to develop intellectual, physical, and social skills when young, attract the best mate possible, have children, work cooperatively with others, and nurture your children in the best environment possible. Human flourishing would be the cultivation to the highest degree of the traits that allow us to live out the human life as excellently as possible. But to say that human morality involves the cultivation of traits that contribute to the living of a good distinctively human life takes us into the realm of virtue ethics, the third great tradition of Western ethics (along with utilitarianism and deontological ethics) that Pinker completely ignores. (See “Restoring a Virtue-Based Ethics For The 21st Century” for details).

However, virtue ethics arguably has certain implications which would clash with Pinker’s liberalism. Pinker wrote the book on “the modern denial of human nature,” but I don’t think he realizes how deeply the existentialist “existence precedes essence” denial has penetrated the culture in the past 60 years, and how radically things would have to change were the promotion of human flourishing taken seriously. For example, on Kantianism-lite liberalism or libertarianism, someone who enters prostitution in order to finance their drug habit can in no way be criticized, so long as they were doing so of their own free will and engaged in voluntary transactions. Could someone who is fat, lazy, short-tempered, vain, envious, and greedy, who cannot attract a mate, and never has children, be said to be flourishing as an instance of the human species? Can an 18-year-old girl documenting on Tumblr her promiscuous sadomasochistic proclivities be said to be flourishing? Pinker might agree that someone who lives such a life is not flourishing. But under what principle can he condemn these patterns of living?

Imagine what it would take in this day and age for a society to take human nature seriously and to re-dedicate itself to human flourishing by the inculcation of virtue. My great concern is for my students and other young people who are constantly taught the message that 1) there is no purpose to human life other than what you create (“existence precedes essence”), and 2) don’t give a damn about what anyone else thinks in the pursuit of your desires. The ideal that is pushed in popular culture is to pursue a life where you never have to repress a desire out of concern for what someone else thinks, and the greatest sin in our society is to judge that someone ought not act on some impulse that does not directly harm another. If someone wants to spend their life in front of the TV that is their lifestyle choice and is as equally valid as any other. Don’t care about what any one else thinks about you; do what you want. Don’t repress a single desire in order to please others, and don’t suggest that someone else not act as they please. How dare you fat-shame or slut-shame? How dare you have beauty standards in your sexual preferences? And recently, how dare you have sexual preferences at all? And on and on, endlessly taught in the schools and relentlessly blasted through the media. Every piece of popular culture blasts the same message.

The dominant, existentialist view is that liberation involves the lifting of all external impediments to the will: other people’s preferences, societal expectations, religious admonishments, and even, in the extremes of the “thug life” and “stop snitching” movement, the rule of law. Sometimes it is thought that there is a beautiful “true-self” waiting to be freed from all these outside strictures; sometimes it is thought that there is nothing underneath at all but an empty will waiting to create itself once freed from external impositions. But if the human mind evolved via natural selection, what really lies behind human consciousness are the selfish genes producing mental imperatives to further their interests. There is no radical autonomy to be unleashed by the lifting of repressions; the human mind can not create itself in an act of existential self-creation, as it has already been created to serve a purpose. (See “Allow Me To Explain The Darkness Of The Human Soul“). Instead, it is through restrictions on our selfish impulses caused by the need to produce good relations with others—attract a mate, raise a family, work together, and ensure social harmony—that allows for human flourishing. Humans are torn between our selfish and social nature and virtue is the acting on our social impulses and repressing our selfish drives so as to receive the advantages of cooperation. This is the complete opposite of the liberal view that it is the lifting of all restrictions which is the end of human life. And so to the extent that liberalism is about lifting restrictions on the ego it is opposed to genuine human flourishing.

And so the root of my disagreement with Pinker comes down to these points:

Different views of what human flourishing entails. Human flourishing means living out the form of a human life as excellently as possible. For Pinker it seems to be the attempt to maximize our pleasurable experiences (“food, comfort, curiosity, beauty, stimulation, love, sex, and camaraderie”) (p. 414) combined with a sense of purpose in working to allow others the maximum experience of these pleasures.
Pinker seems to think that reason alone can motivate behavior. But I’d say the dominant view today is that Hume was right and that reason can not produce behavior or by itself control the appetites and emotions.
However, what motivates restraint is care for others and the fear of negative social consequences; human flourishing requires restraint of our appetites and emotions so as to produce mutually beneficial relationships. Pinker seems to think if human nature is left unimpeded and tolerated (excepting tribalism, authoritarianism, rationalization, demonization, and zero-sum thinking) people will naturally pursue flourishing; I think the result has been a culture where people scorn any suggestion that they should restrain their appetites and do what they can to avoid doing so.
Social liberalism is the attempt to remove social consequences for acting on one’s appetites and emotions, and so is against human flourishing. For Pinker, this problem doesn’t arise because to him people naturally will pursue flourishing if left alone and human nature is allowed to work (with the exception of the prevention of violence by the state). But our nation of obese, meth-addicted, tatted-up, porn-obsessed, unmarried or divorced, slobs argues otherwise. These people are just doing what the culture tells them is the correct path; they’re not caring what anyone else thinks about them and doing what they want.