Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker, Allen Lane, 576pp, £25
Ironically, given its subject matter, this book contains very little in the way of reasoned argument. It is so bad that at times I found myself wondering whether Pinker might not be a double agent dispatched by the very counter-Enlightenment forces he decries in order to discredit us.
Yes, “us” – for I am very much on Pinker’s side. When I began reading this book, I was concerned that it might preach to the choir but accomplish little else. That would have been an improvement. Rather, this is the sort of sermon that makes the choir tip-toe out in mortification. The various nouns listed in the subtitle – Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress – are very good things. Alas, Pinker shows no evidence that he is equipped to comprehend the meaning of those words, let alone muster a defence of them in this dreadful and interminable book.
Pinker tells at least one story adequately: for millennia, the lot of mankind was one of grinding poverty, death in childbirth, children stunted by disease or malnutrition, and utter helplessness in the face of periodic floods, famines and pestilence. The interesting question, as Pinker rightly observes, is not why these conditions persist in certain places, but how it is that any people anywhere were able to escape them, for it is the natural condition of our world.
The answer could form the heart of the greatest heroic epic never written: a story of our species’ subjugation of nature, our conquest of disease, and our mounting triumph over a thousand and one forms of death. Rather than an epic, Pinker’s treatment of this topic resembles an overlong TED talk, with countless charts and graphs. Still, he gets the essential point across, and it is an important one.
Sadly, these pragmatic fruits of liberalism are far too thin a gruel for any system to sustain itself. George Orwell saw as much when he wrote, in his prophetic review of Mein Kampf, that “human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working hours, hygiene, birth control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty parades”. Man, in other words, does not live by GDP growth alone.
Worse, the very systems that enabled us to escape the nightmarish reality of pre-industrial civilisation have a tendency to eat away at the pre-political sources of loyalty and affection that hold society together. In so doing, they cannibalise the political and social conditions that allow for their operation, the results of which we see today.
Pinker clearly wishes that people didn’t have such atavistic desires (but here he might consult a marvellous book called The Blank Slate, which debunks utopian theories of the malleability of human nature. It was written a decade or so ago … by a Steven Pinker). So, unable to do without drums and flags entirely, Pinker tries to enlist them in the service of “Enlightenment”. No longer are reason, liberality and inquisitiveness considered either as personal virtues or as instrumental technologies that enable human flourishing. Now they are sources of identity – hence cultic objects that must be defended at all costs without particular attention to their actual nature.
It’s at this point that the book takes a turn for the worse. Exasperation drips from the end of every sentence: “Do these ideals really need a defence?” Well, evidently they do, as Pinker has attempted to provide one. But the most this book can manage is to restate the various “counter-Enlightenment” perspectives over and over again in the most hackneyed and condescending way – yet never actually mustering an argument against them, as if merely presenting them in all their grotesquerie were argument enough.
For a book that extols reason, there is remarkably little of it on offer here. You will go dozens of pages without seeing an argument, let alone a syllogism. In their place is all manner of furious gesturing. Ah but, you see, Pinker writes that “opposing reason is, by definition, unreasonable”. Well, that settles it, then.
All of this is a revealing glimpse into a profoundly uncurious mind. Pinker does not seem to understand any of the positions he argues against, and appears either not to realise this or not to care. At times the results are unintentionally hilarious. If you have the misfortune to read this book, be sure not to miss page 416, where Pinker attempts (apparently without irony) to dismiss all non-consequentialist systems of ethics in a single paragraph, armed only with first-year undergraduate thought experiments. A few pages later he breezily claims to refute most outstanding questions in the philosophy of mind (apparently the Hard Problem is not so hard!) before wrapping up the Euthyphro question in a sentence or two.
Part of me envies Pinker’s serenity. One imagines the man, his mind untroubled by great questions, getting up from his writing desk after a tiring few hours spent solving all the problems of philosophy and thinking to himself: “Now, I wonder what all that fuss was about.”
William Wilson is a writer and software engineer based in Washington DC
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