Have We Been Saved by the Enlightenment?

Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker is not merely an important psychologist. He is an important public intellectual. He has gotten into the mind of Microsoft founder Bill Gates and has recruited the billionaire to lend credence to ideas that have little or nothing to do with science. Pinker pretends to use science to advance a liberal political and cultural agenda. 

One understands the billionaire software developers are barely conversant with great ideas. Thus, they are especially vulnerable to any intellectual who comes along with a Siren Song that convinces them that, being very, very rich, they deserve entrance into the pantheon the great philosophers. Many of the high tech oligarchs have had their minds seduced by left thinking intellectuals... to the eventual detriment of their companies. 

Now, Pinker has a new book about the glories of the Enlightenment, the age of Reason when dogmas and superstitions were replaced by democracy, diversity, environmentalism and human rights. He credits the Enlightenment with all of the progress that human beings have made since the late eighteenth and confidently predicts its continuation.

In a Wall Street Journal essay Pinker piles up the evidence about the progress the world has made over the past two plus centuries, and happily ignores the horrors that have befallen the human species. He is not doing science but trying to establish himself as a prophet of the new atheism.

I have not read the book, but the essay itself contains several obvious flaws. First, there was not one Enlightenment, but two. The Enlightenment in Great Britain and the Enlightenment in France and Germany were not at all the same thing. David Hume and Adam Smith were pragmatic, empirically minded thinkers. Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant were idealists, people who rejected empirical science because it did not correspond to their ideas about reason and justice and equality. One recalls that the French Revolution was fought in the names of liberty, equality and fraternity. Apparently, the weight of these Enlightenment ideals did not suffice to prevent a bloodbath of historical proportions.

Those who would like a more serious analysis of the two major traditions in Western intellectual life, the idealism promoted by Plato and the empiricism promoted by Aristotle should read Arthur Herman’s wonderful book: The Cave and the Light. I recommend it highly.

And, to be blindingly obvious, Pinker grants all credit to liberal ideas and neglects to mention the Industrial Revolution and the advent of free enterprise economics. True enough, far fewer citizens of the world are suffering from extreme poverty these days, but the principal reason is that the government of China turned away from Communism and toward capitalism in the late 1970s. They reduced their extreme poverty rate from over 80% to under 10%. They did not do it by adopting Enlightenment ideals, caring for the environment, respecting human rights, promoting free expression or having the people vote. Even today, it was recently reported, the people of China have more confidence in their authoritarian leaders than many other nations do in their democratically elected leaders. Today, China remains authoritarian and if anything is doing its best to avoid being contaminated by what it considers to be Western ideals. After all, it tried Western ideals under Mao Zedong. How did that work out? 

Strangely much of the progress that Pinker touts comes to us from China. We have often noted that nations around the world are comparing the Chinese model with the Western model and are turning away from the Western model.

Pinker speaks glowingly of new advances in medicine and sanitation, but these were produced by the Industrial Revolution. They work equally well in countries where people do not vote. Besides, scientific research is not conducted according to democratic principles. You do not take a vote to decide whether a hypothesis is true or false. 

One must keep in mind that Pinker is writing a polemic. He is not doing science and is not exercising empirical thinking. He is agitated that President Trump has pulled out of the Paris Climate Accord and denies climate change. And yet, his rose colored lenses have prevented him from seeing the blatant realities that would cast doubt on his modern dogma.

For example, if you want to argue that the Enlightenment has made the world a much better place, it would be good to pay some attention to the twentieth century. It is not that long gone and does not present a picture of human flourishing. The wars fought in that century were not little skirmishes. They were world wars, and killed tens of millions of people. Communism itself killed more than a hundred million people, most of them from starvation. And then there were the epidemics, the Spanish flu first among equals. We recall the nuclear weapons were used for the first time in the Enlightened twentieth century and that thousands of them are still lying around. Would you want to wager that they will never be used again? It takes a special form of naïveté  to imagine that no one will ever again use a nuclear weapon.

To say that the movement of history from the late eighteenth century up to now has been a glorious progression is naive and disingenuous. It is also deceptive-- I hope, not willfully.

As I said, Pinker is writing a polemic. And when you write a polemic you must ignore facts that would tend to disprove or discredit your ideas and must emphasize the facts that tend to prove them. Of course, if you can find enough people who are willing to be duped into thinking that the only facts that matter are the ones you have presented, good luck to you.

And Pinker is also a modern atheist. He is promoting the Enlightenment because he believes that it overthrew the reign of religion, of God, of Godliness, of dogma and of superstition. He even seems to suggest that the Enlightenment has been our salvation, that it rescued us from religion. As you recall, Carl Becker wrote an important book The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers where he explained that these anti-religious thinkers were wallowing in Biblical tropes.

Pinker does not seem to recognize that the nations that made the most radical attempts to rid their culture of God and to establish new atheist cultures, the Soviet Union and Communist China, were among the worst and most destructive in human history. 

One suspects that Pinker, as with other promoters of modern atheism, would never admit that Communism was the true face of atheism as a culture, but the Enlightenment cultures he touts were based on religion, not on atheism. In fact, the notion of free will, so important as an Enlightenment value, comes to us from the book of Genesis, through the intermediation of St. Augustine. The basis of harmonious social relations—do unto others as you would have others do unto you—comes to us from the Bible, not from the French Enlightenment. As for the reign of Reason, aka the god Apollo, we all know that no less than Aristotle first argued for the rationality of human creatures and that St. Thomas Aquinas brought Reason into Western thought by explaining the rational basis for faith. And let's not forget Max Weber's thesis, namely that we owe the advent of capitalism to the Protestant work ethic.

To imagine that we are faced with an either/or between faith and reason is to show a lack of philosophical and theological sophistication. And yet, this does not prevent Pinker from presenting himself as a prophet. He is effectively trying to induce us to give atheism another try. Since he refuses to think that Communism definitively showed that atheism was very bad news indeed, we may safely declare that his prophetic works are ways to recruit people into a cult. They are not about advancing the progress of peoplekind.