Abstract
Steven Pinker,
Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress
(New York, NY: Viking, 2018); 556 pp.: 9780525427575, $35 (hbk)
Steven Pinker’s latest book is a vigorous defence of five things: progress, humanism, science, reason, and the Enlightenment. The vast majority of the book – Chapters 4 to 20 – is dedicated to the first of these, the next three get a chapter each, and the Enlightenment is the icon or the organizing ideology under which the other four sit. The book is successful in direct proportion to this division of labour.
Pinker is assiduous in his vigorous defence of progress. On the basis that our answer to the question of progress should be determined by counting, he presents graphs on life expectancy, child mortality, maternal mortality, infectious diseases, calorie intake, food availability, wealth, poverty, extreme poverty, deforestation, oil spills, protected areas, war, violence, homicides, battle deaths, famine deaths, pedestrian deaths, plane crash deaths, occupational accident deaths, natural disaster deaths, deaths by lightning, human rights, state executions, racism, sexism, homophobia, hate crimes, violence against women, liberal values, child labour, literacy, education, IQ, hours worked, years in retirement, utilities and homework, the price of light, disposable spending, leisure time, travel, tourism… and (impossible as it may be to believe if you have read this far in the paragraph) much else besides.
All of these, he shows, are travelling in the right direction. It’s an impressive and invigorating story, and if we think it’s surprising, Pinker is equally good on why we think it’s surprising. We are misled by the ‘availability heuristic’ – the fact that ‘people estimate the probability of an event… by the ease with which instances come to mind’. We seem hardwired for nostalgia. Scaremongering sells newspapers. People dread losses more than they look forward to gains. We don’t like to tempt fate. Intellectuals confuse pessimism for profundity. The result is that we don’t know how well off we are. In Pinker’s own italicized original: ‘The world has made spectacular progress in every single measure of human well-being. [And] almost no one knows about it.’
So far, so persuasive. Pinker’s data should make even the most ardent ‘progressophobe’ think again, and even if there are a few reservations with his data (‘any dataset is an imperfect reflection of reality’), they amount to little more than footnotes to his narrative. Pinker’s case for progress is well-evidenced and convincingly argued.
The same cannot really be said of where he thinks this progress originates. His proximate answer is ‘science’, ‘reason’ and ‘humanism’, each of which has its roots in (and certainly not beyond) his ultimate reason, namely ‘the Enlightenment’.
On the face of it, this is motherhood and apple pie. Who exactly is going to mount a vigorous campaign against science, reason and humanism. Once you lift the crust, however, you find a somewhat less appetizing dish. Pinker’s science, reason and humanism are simplified, ahistorical, unambiguous things, each one rooted in an Enlightenment that is little more than a caricature. The fact that science was born in the Scientific Revolution, which predates the Enlightenment; that leading Enlightenment thinkers such as Hume and Kant were explicitly critical and sceptical of reason’s capacity; and that ‘humanism’ can be located in the Enlightenment only by means of Pinker’s highly dubious definition of it is immaterial.
The only Enlightenment figure who has anything more than a walk-on role is Kant (and even his appearances on stage are fleeting). Pinker offers no clarification about whether he is talking about the British, French or American forms of the Enlightenment, as identified by Gertrude Himmelfarb, or about the radical or moderate Enlightenments, as Jonathan Israel has distinguished them, or whether something as arcane as the Catholic Enlightenment might be included under the rubric. The Enlightenment encompasses Locke and Diderot, Voltaire and Helvétius, Hume and Bentham, and they did not all sing from the same song sheet.
Whatever it might actually be, Pinker’s Enlightenment is ‘A Good Thing’, and, by definition, is incapable of being implicated in any of humankind’s sins. One does not have to go as far as Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Michel Foucault or Zygmunt Bauman – all mentioned (briefly) by Pinker – in claiming that the Enlightenment’s ‘instrumental reasoning’ or its secularized eschatology was responsible for the Holocaust or the Gulags to recognize that its legacy is mixed. Jeremy Bentham was an archetypal Enlightenment thinker, exhibiting many of the qualities of which Pinker approves. He loved evidence. He was an inveterate counter, an inordinate measurer, and an inexhaustible systematizer. He had no time for the hocus-pocus of metaphysics, still less theology. He sought human betterment and he knew that human betterment meant more happiness and pleasure, and less misery and pain. He championed many causes of which Pinker clearly approves, such as the case against criminal punishment and the death penalty. But it was also his commitment to counting, systematizing and ordering, and to the twin measurable masters of pleasure and pain, that lay behind the 1832 Anatomy Act, which made the bodies of people too poor to pay for their own funerals available to medical schools for dissection, and the 1834 New Poor Law, which sought to solve social ills by making state ‘welfare’ so unattractive to the destitute that only the most desperate would seek it out. The workhouses were as quintessential an Enlightenment achievement as the challenge to dare to know.
In a similar fashion, just as nothing bad came from the Enlightenment, nothing significantly good came before it. Just because people’s lives before 1800 were usually short, Pinker seems to think that they were necessarily also nasty and brutish.
And yet, as an increasing number of historians and political scientists have pointed out, many of the ‘inclusive institutions’ that lie at the heart of a nation’s path to peace and prosperity were in place before Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason – and, in some cases, long before. To quote Larry Siedentop: The roots of liberalism were firmly established in the arguments of philosophers and canon lawyers by the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries: belief in a fundamental equality of status as the proper basis for a legal system; belief that enforcing moral conduct is a contradiction in terms; a defence of individual liberty, through the assertion of fundamental or ‘natural’ rights; and, finally, the conclusion that only a representative form of government is appropriate for a society resting on the assumption of moral equality.
1
Pinker’s Enlightenment ignores all of this. Instead, he claims that the brainchildren of the Enlightenment included ‘nonviolence, cooperation, cosmopolitanism, human rights, and an acknowledgement of human fallibility’; or that peace was ‘another Enlightenment ideal’; or that ‘the institutions of modernity’ include ‘schools, hospitals, charities [and] international organisations’. None of this is tenable, and in the end it mars a book three-quarters of which is impressive.
Reviewing Enlightenment Now in The Times Literary Supplement, David Wootton observed: ‘The only major claim not supported by a graph (or indeed much evidence of any kind) is the assertion that all this progress has something to do with the Enlightenment.’ This is a sad irony, given how much emphasis Pinker places on careful measuring and evaluation when writing about progress. For all that he writes winsomely in the book about the cognitive biases from which people suffer, he seems not to have noticed the one in his own eye.