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Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

Steven Pinker

Viking Press; 556 pages

Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker

September 3, 2018

Scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson may make up the stuff of internet memes, and Dr. Phil may be counseling's version of Judge Judy, but Steven Pinker reigns as the world's most widely read scientist. He doesn't have a television series or host a call-in radio talkshow; he has yet to become the background of a science (or hair-related) meme. Rather, his forte is writing books that non-scientists buy in droves, read, and recommend to their non-scientist friends. He's a cognitive scientist at Harvard and writes on psychology and a host of other areas, particularly history. His previous book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined marshaled copious amounts of data to demonstrate that violence has enjoyed a steady decline over time. His most recent is no less relentless in its use of data. With some 75 easy-to-digest, x/y graphs that any 8 year-old could understand, Enlightenment Now establishes that reason, science and humanism form the foundation upon which progress is built, and, that lacking this triumvirate, progress would remain an elusive treasure.

For this reviewer, Pinker makes such a powerful case that it'd be all but futile to argue with the mounds of empirical data with which Pinker presents readers. The sheer volume of data should be enough to dispirit any of Pinker's detractors. One would have to dig through all the surveys, academic studies represented in all 75 graphs to cast doubt on the idea that progress, as measured by Pinker, isn't actually happening. One could try and work around the empirical measures of progress by defining progress in terms different from those of Pinker. But what terms besides those empirical ones Pinker cites could Pinker's opponent employ? Perhaps abstract/philosophical measures that, holding history at arm's length, argue for the failure of liberalism (see, Patrick Deenan's Why Liberalism Failed); perhaps one could cite a religious/apocalyptic test of progress, one that says with certainty the end is neigh but doesn't specify the date. But to go the route of abstract or religious is to critique Pinker's argument in terms of something he doesn't care much about, and about which he doesn't use to establish his argument. 

To argue contrary to Pinker's contention, one must do so on Pinker's terms, and he happens to measure progress in terms of the following, empirically established facts that have unfolded with particular rapidity over the passed 100 years: lessened social inequality, increased safety on roads, in construction fields, and so on; broadened and increased human rights; decreased extreme poverty, greater wealth (for the overwhelming majority of the world's population); better health, greater access to health care, and improved health care; less terrorism; growth in the number of democracies; lessened pollution; better child mortality, and so on. If anyone cares to dispute Pinker's empirical claims by, say, quibbling over the data per se, or his use of data, she's likely to be crushed under the hours such a herculean task would require. No one I know of has either the time or resources necessary. Best get a team and pay them a lot of money.

Throughout his book, Pinker resists the pull of partisanship. He criticizes from the vantage point of neither left nor right, and observes and renders opinions from the lofty position of objectivity. He is unsparing in his critique of those who deny progress is happening, and with few exceptions, remains unaffected by emotional outrage and is quick to condemn the often catastrophic "solutions" such outrage motivate.

As a case in point, Pinker derides the radical (and, according to him, deluded) environmental movement as greenism, a quasi-religious, misanthropic ideology faintly resembling Nazi belief in its description of humans as vermin.  The solution for such ideology is to embrace the importance of protecting the environment while recognizing that

it's time to retire the morality play in which modern humans are a vile race of despoilers and plunderers who will hasten the apocalypse unless they undo the Industrial Revolution, renounce technology, and return to ascetic harmony with nature.

As with most of his proposals in the book, Pinker's approach to the environment is practical and even-keeled: maximize care of the environment and minimize its harm within the context of real-life political, economic and humanitarian concerns. He never strikes a strident tone and levels criticism in such a way as to mitigate the toxicity that accompanies the environmental (and nearly all) debates.

Level-headed interlocutors cannot help but appreciate Pinker’s attempt to restore sanity to debates about real problems, including those surrounding the environment, overpopulation, pollution and the like. The solutions to these problems, unfortunately, have played second fiddle to political grandstanding, indignant moralizing and the exhausting preening of those with certain knowledge and categorical remedies.

Where Pinker stumbles from his perch of objectivity is in his dismissal of religion, particularly arguments for God's existence. I studied philosophy of religion and taught it at the college level, so you can understand the standards I set on anyone opining on the subject. In most cases I dismiss those commenting, knowing that they know very little of what they speak. However, when someone goes out of their way to tackle the subject and, to do so as part of a thoroughly researched book on everything it touches, I found it difficult to cut Pinker any slack. Pinker's appraisal, much as the New Atheists' bungling of religion, would strike even atheistic philosophers as amateurish and embarrassing (I also imagine that Pinker's appraisal would puzzle an undergrad who took a philosophy of religion class or who read a single chapter in any philosophy of religion text book on arguments for God's existence). By way of exploding 2,000 years of arguments for God's existence (ah heck, let's confine it to the last 70 years), Pinker guides us toward the appendix to Rebecca Goldstein's novel, Thirty-Six Arguments for the Existence of God, as well as to Richard Dawkins' smug and moronic The God Delusion. Pinker informs the reader that both the Cosmological and Ontological arguments (there are actually Cosmological arguments and Ontological arguments) are logically invalid, and that the Argument from Design (once again, not a single argument) was long-along proven false. That a writer of Pinker's magnitude would fail to provide a single citation of the "theologians" (actually, philosophers of religion) who perpetuate these supposedly also-ran arguments and to cite a novelist and amateur philosopher as the foundation for dismissing arguments against God's existence does, in my mind, grossly belie Pinker's irrational bias against religion (or, should I say, philosophy?). Had Pinker taken his own advice, he would have consulted the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, looked up the entry on Philosophy of Religion, scrolled down to Arguments for the Existence of God and bothered to note that Richard Dawkins and Rebecca Goldstein do not offer the kinds of arguments any philosopher - theist, atheist or anything in between - take seriously. Pinker would have also noted that since the 1950's there's been plenty of literature that ought to deflate the smug attitude exuded by the New Atheists and their cadres of first and second-year philosophy students.

Aside from this last (and I agree, small) bit of nonsense, Enlightenment Now is a fantastic book well worth its weight in reading gold. It will function as tonic for undue pessimism and the foolish fixes such pessimism gives rise to.

← The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics by Mark LillaA Distant Mirror, by Barbara Tuchman →
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