Steven Pinker's Enlightenment

Steven Pinker is drooling over the Enlightenment in his new book, now an Amazon best seller. We wish him all the best and much success.

As mentioned, when I offered some preliminary comments about it in a prior post, I have not read the book. Happily for people like me the Guardian has published a substantial excerpt. In it Pinker explains what he means by Enlightenment. We are happy to know. Yet, he still makes significant mistakes. Since no one seems interested in pointing them out, the task falls to me.

Pinker sees the Enlightenment originating with Immanuel Kant at the end of the eighteenth century. He says that it arose from the Scientific Revolution and the Age of Reason… but does not give any pride of place to the Industrial Revolution… at least not in the sections that I read.

He offers this synopsis:

The Enlightenment is conventionally placed in the last two thirds of the 18th century, though it flowed out of the Scientific Revolution and the Age of Reason in the 17th century and spilled into the heyday of classical liberalism of the first half of the 19th. Provoked by challenges to conventional wisdom from science and exploration, mindful of the bloodshed of recent wars of religion, and abetted by the easy movement of ideas and people, the thinkers of the Enlightenment sought a new understanding of the human condition. The era was a cornucopia of ideas, some of them contradictory, but four themes tie them together: reason, science, humanism and progress.

Let’s state the obvious. Kant critiqued reason in a book called the Critique of Pure Reason. He did his best to undermine the scientific method because he did not believe in facts. Being an heir to Platonic idealism, he believed in appearances. More precisely, he believed in phenomena, in things as they appear and as they are interpreted. 

This anti-scientific approach animated the thinking of Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger, not one of whom had any use for facts or science, all of whom believed that we only know appearances. These thinkers were more interested in logic than in reason. They were all fabulators, mythmakers, fiction builders who believed that the value of their narratives lay in their coherence and consistency, not in whether they corresponded with reality. They believed that the more logical their stories the greater the likelihood that history would prove them to be right in the end. They were prophets, not scientists running laboratory experiments or even pragmatists testing their ideas in human societies.

Most intellectual historians understand that German idealism, of whom those four are the Four Horsemen, gave us Marxism, Communism, Fascism and Naziism. All are efforts to overcome Judeo-Christian civilization, at times by promoting neo-paganism and at times by promoting an atheist culture.

One understands that Pinker must ignore these historical facts… because when you are trying to persuade people to believe something that is manifestly untrue, you do best to ignore facts. Amazingly, Pinker argues that the Enlightenment did not really take hold until after World War II… which is a necessary fiction and an historical absurdity. It manages to leave atheistic Communism out of the mix. True enough, Kant did favor peace… good for him… which means precisely nothing if his philosophy, when put into practice, led to destruction and carnage.

Pinker continues, with a sentence that is so peculiar that I don’t really know what to do with it:

Foremost is reason. Reason is non-negotiable. As soon as you show up to discuss the question of what we should believe (or any other question), as long as you insist that your answers, whatever they are, are reasonable or justified or true and that therefore other people ought to believe them too, then you have committed yourself to reason, and to holding your beliefs accountable to objective standards.

If rational thought involves empirical testing of hypotheses, the German idealists had no use for it. While Pinker is correct to see that rationality means that your belief be held to objective standards of proof, it is peculiar for him to see it in terms of beliefs and about persuading people to believe what you believe. A belief is not really the same as a hypothesis. Dogmas are beliefs, too. Great theologians like St. Thomas Aquinas argued persuasively that belief in dogma was rational, thus, that dogmas were not vulgar superstitions.

I do not get what he means when he says that reason is non-negotiable. Reason is the basis for negotiation... and it comes down to us from the god of Reason, that would be Apollo.

Dare we mention, in our enlightened age where everyone bows down to the Goddess of Science, we are being forced to accept that a boy who believes he is a girl is really a girl. It is not science. It is a form of idealism, where the human mind shapes and interprets reality… where it does not have to negotiate with reality. While we are here, we note that climate change dogma is more dogma than science. Settled science, as has often been mentioned, is not science… since science is always built on skepticism. Skepticism is not about belief.

Pinker declares that the non-scientific idealists who produced the Enlightenment were rejecting everything and anything associated with religion. In so saying they paved the way for Communism, but Pinker has nothing to say about that:

If there’s anything the Enlightenment thinkers had in common, it was an insistence that we energetically apply the standard of reason to understanding our world, and not fall back on generators of delusion like faith, dogma, revelation, authority, charisma, mysticism, divination, visions, gut feelings or the hermeneutic parsing of sacred texts.

It’s easy to caricature religion. But, this word salad means very little. Authority, one of the bad things that the Enlightenment supposedly overcame, is essential to the human condition. A teacher whose authority is not respected in the classroom will not be able to teach. Good order and discipline requires authority, even in secular organizations as armies. As for charisma, Pinker and most left thinking people have formed a cult to the charismatic figure of Barack Obama and they worship at the altar of America’s first great charismatic president, John F. Kennedy.

Enlightenment thinkers were supposedly all humanists. They weren’t, but don’t let that bother you. Famed empirical thinker David Hume-- who had nearly nothing in common with Kant-- famously observed that while science is about things as they are, ethics is about what people should or should not do. To imagine that you can devise ethical principles on the basis of science is to miss the point entirely… and perhaps intentionally.

Pinker touts the virtue of humanism and tries to define it as a concern for the individual, as defined separately from group membership. This will lead him to thinking that we are all citizens of the world. This is yet another piece of nonsense, the kind that leads to open borders and the horrors that poor immigration policies has visited on Western Europe. The term, citizen of the world, is intellectually incoherent. There is no such thing. All human beings belong to groups. Their memberships means that they do not belong to other groups.  And that gives the game away. This so-called scientific and rational theory is yet another fiction, one that is at clear variance with the facts. After all, didn’t Aristotle explain that no human being cut off from the state or from social groups can possibly survive? Pinker’s Enlightenment is based on a fictional being, living as the citizen of the world:

They laid that foundation in what we now call humanism, which privileges the wellbeing of individual men, women, and children over the glory of the tribe, race, nation or religion. It is individuals, not groups, who are sentient – who feel pleasure and pain, fulfillment and anguish. Whether it is framed as the goal of providing the greatest happiness for the greatest number or as a categorical imperative to treat people as ends rather than means, it was the universal capacity of a person to suffer and flourish, they said, that called on our moral concern.

Privileging the individual over the group, placing the good of the individual ahead of the good of the group renders people dysfunctional. It makes people into self-centered, selfish, self-sufficient louts, people whose behavior is not determined by rules of proper conduct— which rules are not a function of religion—but by sentiment, by sympathy, by empathy, by fellow feeling. Ethics shows you how to do the right thing to remain a member in good standing of your group. If we are all human beings, there is nothing you can do that will make you a member of the human species or that will cause you to be expelled from it. Humanism is at heart a recipe for amorality. It's great to imagine that we all love each other for being human, but Pinker must know that some of the worst violence the world has seen was committed by humanists who declared certain peoples to be subhuman.

Strangely enough, and I will leave the point as a question, this theory systematically rejects all rules for social interactions, all social roles, everything from courtesy to politeness to decorum to propriety. It does not tell us whose feelings we should and should not share. Paul Bloom, after Adam Smith, argued persuasively that one will normally feel empathy towards someone who is unjustly insulted and offended, and that this empathy will lead us to want to retaliate against the offending party. It's not a formula for peace. Of course, no one pays much attention to the thoughts of great Enlightenment thinker, Adam Smith.

Without going further into it Pinker seems to have lit on Martin Heidegger’s attempt to define all human interactions in terms of feeling care for others, in German Sorge. We recall that Heidegger was not exactly enlightened. He was a staunch supporter of the Third Reich.

What is because we are endowed with the sentiment of sympathy, which they also called benevolence, pity and commiseration. Given that we are equipped with the capacity to sympathise with others, nothing can prevent the circle of sympathy from expanding from the family and tribe to embrace all of humankind, particularly as reason goads us into realising that there can be nothing uniquely deserving about ourselves or any of the groups to which we belong. We are forced into cosmopolitanism: accepting our citizenship in the world.

Since Pinker declares Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence the apotheosis of Enlightenment thought, we cannot fail to notice that this same Jefferson gloried in the Reign of Terror that was occurring in France during his tenure as Secretary of State. The peace-loving oh-so-sympathetic Jefferson had no problems with the mass murder because he believed that the tree of liberty needed to be fertilized with the blood of martyrs. So much for peace.

Yet, Pinker is thrilled to see that the Enlightenment thinkers promoted peace. One might say that their hopes were clearly dashed during the twentieth century… which saw some of the worse wars in human history. Pinker will not credit it, but the French enlightenment and the thinking of famed Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau gave us the French Revolution, the reign of Terror and the Napoleonic Wars. No less a great philosopher than Hegel was thrilled to see Germany invaded by Napoleon’s armies… because he thought that they were bringing liberty.

Here is Pinker’s naïve attempt to distort the facts, to take idealistic yearnings for fact. It’s nice to promote great ideas. But, sometimes we need to see what they have produced in reality. The reality, the facts, tell a completely different story.

This brings us to another Enlightenment ideal, peace. War was so common in history that it was natural to see it as a permanent part of the human condition and to think peace could come only in a messianic age. But now war was no longer thought of as a divine punishment to be endured and deplored, or a glorious contest to be won and celebrated, but a practical problem to be mitigated and someday solved. In Perpetual Peace, Kant laid out measures that would discourage leaders from dragging their countries into war. Together with international commerce, he recommended representative republics (what we would call democracies), mutual transparency, norms against conquest and internal interference, freedom of travel and immigration and a federation of states that would adjudicate disputes between them.

Kant might have imagined that he wanted Perpetual Peace. Yet, he lived in Germany. His thinking influenced German culture… for the worse, certainly not for the best. Pinker is trafficking in belief, even in dogmatic belief. His beliefs are based on a fiction, on a narrative, on a story. None of this even resembles science or rational thought.