The Anomie Factor

Now, Alison Gopnik joins those who have taken Steven Pinker to task for the distortions and confusions in his book Enlightenment Now. However much you want to buy Pinker’s fascination with gauzy ideals like reason and humanity, he is wrong to blame an optimism deficit for the fact that people are not lining up to become atheists. In truth, people have paid a price for progress.

Gopnik places it on the Enlightenment’s account. For my part I prefer to say, as I have long said, that the Industrial Revolution produced the social turmoil and dislocations. Transformations in the way nations produced goods and services, added to advances in transportation and communication broke communities, causing a loss of social capital and a pervasive anomie.

Gopnik does not use the terms. Yet, she grasps the problem in an example. She shows what happens when she, a scientist, tries to encourage young women to enter her field. They all understood that that career path will detach them from home and hearth, from family and community. If I wanted to be churlish I would add that these functioning small town communities barely exist anymore, but I will leave that for another day.

She writes:

The young woman replies, “That sounds fantastic! But there’s just one thing. I love this town. I have a boyfriend who also wants to be a scientist, and I’d like to get married and have a bunch of kids here soon. My parents are looking forward so much to being grandparents, and my own grandparents need me to look after them. My family and friends are all nearby, and I’d like my kids to live in my community and take part in the same traditions I grew up with. Can I do that and be a scientist too?”

She continues:

The honest answer? “If you join us, the chances are very slim that you’ll end up living in your hometown. You’ll move around from place to place unpredictably, from college to graduate school to postdoc research to professorship, until you’re 40 or so. You’ll be separated from your partner for long stretches of time. You’ll have to wait to have kids, and you may not have them at all. If you do, they almost certainly won’t be able to grow up with their grandparents. But there’s always Skype.”

To be more honest, we would note that this scenario has been generated by the advent of contemporary feminism. It assumes that the young woman wants to have a career equal to that of her husband and that she will willingly risking losing domestic harmony and children in order to follow that rainbow.

Gopnik is brutally honest. And it’s well and good that young women hear the price of having a career just like a man. I would have preferred that she identify feminist theory as one of the causes of the pervasive social anomie. 

From there she continues to critique Pinker’s book:

The weakness of the book is that it doesn’t seriously consider the second part of the conversation—the human values that the young woman from the small town talks about. Our local, particular connections to just one specific family, community, place, or tradition can seem irrational. Why stay in one town instead of chasing better opportunities? Why feel compelled to sacrifice your own well-being to care for your profoundly disabled child or fragile, dying grandparent, when you would never do the same for a stranger? And yet, psychologically and philosophically, those attachments are as central to human life as the individualist, rationalist, universalist values of classic Enlightenment utilitarianism. If the case for reason, science, humanism, and progress is really going to be convincing—if it’s going to amount to more than preaching to the choir—it will have to speak to a wider spectrum of listeners, a more inclusive conception of flourishing, a broader palette of values.

One understands that serious intellectuals feel obliged to use awkward locutions like “a more inclusive conception of flourishing,” but Gopnik is really concerned about the social anomie produced by rapid industrialization. I think that she is arguing, correctly, that Enlightenment idealism has failed to provide the moral basis for new forms of community, new ways to solidify community ties.

Where Pinker believes that people are simply blinded by their own pessimism—a theory debunked in other places, and even on this blog—Gopnik suggests that if people feel pessimistic perhaps they are reacting to something that Pinker ignores. Rather than address the problem, Pinker blames a few convenient scapegoats:

But if things are so much better, why do they feel, for so many people, so much worse? Why don’t people experience the progress that Pinker describes? Pinker doesn’t spend much time focusing on this question, and he gets a little tetchy when he does. Skepticism about Enlightenment values, in his view, comes from leftist humanities professors and highbrow-magazine editors who have read too much Nietzsche, or from theocrats on the right.

Pinker recommends that we all identify as members of the human species. Yet, this detaches us from social organizations. Humanity is not a social group. It does not have rules for entry and rules that cause expulsion. Being a member of the human species is a biological fact, but it does not confer group membership:

Pinker’s graphs, and the utilitarian moral views that accompany and underlie them, are explicitly about the welfare of humanity as a whole. But values are rooted in emotion and experience as well as reason, in the local as well as the universal.

What does it mean to belong to a group? Gopnik explains her reasoning:

In most mammals, a “tend and befriend” brain system—which involves the neurotransmitter oxytocin, among others—plays an important role in the bonding between mothers and babies. In humans, with our distinctive capacity for cooperation, this system of attachment has been expanded to apply to a much broader range of relationships, from pair-bonded partners to friends and collaborators.

Of course, to have a community you cannot keep it all in the family. Communities are alliances between families. Moreover, you cannot have a community that interacts with other communities if you see them all as dangerous strangers. The thought, for the record, comes to us from the Book of Leviticus and the Gospels—it’s presented as the injunction to befriend strangers and to love you enemy.

Anyway, Gopnik suggests:

In fact, the economist Robert Frank and the philosopher Kim Sterelny have proposed exactly the opposite view. The feelings that go with attachment—such as love, trust, and loyalty—allow people who have different capacities and clashing short-term interests to cooperate in a way that benefits everyone in the long run. Parents versus children, wives versus husbands, hunters versus gatherers—all of these relationships inevitably involve tension and conflict. Rationality and contractual negotiation alone can’t resolve the differences that arise. If individuals all just pursue their own interests, even in coordination with others, they may end up worse off. But emotions can help. Sterelny argues that attachments act as “commitment mechanisms.” They ensure that partners won’t just walk out of an argument or renege on an agreement when it becomes inconvenient.

In other words, it’s not just about oxytocin and empathy. It’s about rules and precepts, ethical principles, the sort that have been taught by religions. But that do not belong to the notably atheistic Enlightenment.

In the absence of religion we have far more difficulty dealing with the social dislocations caused by the Industrial Revolution. The more detached we feel the more we will be drawn to cults… now called tribes.

In Gopnik's words:

But scientific as well as intuitive evidence suggests that tribalism can be seductive when people feel that their local connections are under threat. At the same time, the Enlightenment emphasis on the autonomous, rational individual can also lead to alienation and isolation, which make tribalist mythology all the more appealing.