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For some strange reason Fareed Zakaria does not mention Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker. It would have been a perfect fit. Zakaria has chosen to commemorate the end of World War I, by reminding us that in the run up to that world historical catastrophe the world was filled with Pollyannas like Pinker running through the streets proclaiming that progress had won and that the world could only get better.
Pinker has become a celebrity intellectual for claiming that the advent of the Enlightenment, the defeat of religion and the triumph of atheism would lead to a happy, more prosperous and more peaceful future.
Beyond the fact that he did not seem to understand that different countries had different versions of the Enlightenment, Pinker failed to see that the most ambitious attempts to produce atheist cultures-- those being totalitarian Communism-- produced misery, calamity and a prodigious body count. He does not understand that the great wars of the first half of the twentieth century were produced by enlightened cultures.
He happily quotes German philosopher Immanuel Kant and certainly owes a debt to Georg Hegel… without noting that the application of their thinking produced a monstrous German culture. And Pinker does not seem to know that prophecy is not science. When he gives the Enlightenment credit for all the good that has happened and blames the counter-enlightenment for all the bad, he is simply playing with loaded dice.
As for his prophecy that the world will continue to get better, it’s not a scientific fact… not even close. Pinker seems to think that he has prophetic powers, powers to predict the future. If so, he is saying that World History is following a script and that it necessarily ends up with a happy ending.
Zakaria notes the upcoming anniversary:
On Sunday — at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month — we will commemorate the 100th anniversary of the end of the largest and bloodiest conflict the world had ever seen. World War I marked a turning point in human history — the end of four massive European empires, the rise of Soviet communism and the entry of the United States into global-power politics. But perhaps its most significant intellectual legacy was the end of the idea of inevitable progress.
If only…. We recall, for those who have forgotten, that the peoples of Europe greeted the outbreak of what was called the Great War with cheers. Those who opined about why this should be the case seemed to agree with a thought, to my recollection, that we owe to Herbert Croly. Namely, that the Industrial Revolution had so thoroughly disrupted traditional social structures that a population suffering from anomie was happy to see order imposed by a mass mobilization. It became a war about mindless, senseless carnage. It began as a way to reorganize society. Unfortunately, Enlightenment philosophers did not understand the importance of social order.
At the turn of the twentieth century, prophets were coming forward to explain that things were going to continue to get better. Like Pinker, Norman Angell became a cult celebrity for predicting everlasting progress:
In 1914, before the war began, people had lived through a world much like ours, defined by heady economic growth, technological revolutions and increasing globalization. The result was that it was widely believed that ugly trend lines, when they appeared, were temporary, to be overwhelmed by the onward march of progress. In 1909, Norman Angell wrote a book explaining that war between the major powers was so costly as to be unimaginable. “The Great Illusion” became an international bestseller, and Angell became a cult celebrity (and was later awarded the Nobel Peace Prize). Just a few years after the book was published, a generation of Europeans was destroyed in the carnage of war.
We ought to mention that World War I was a tragedy caused in large part by political malfeasance. Theodore Roosevelt wrote a slew of op-ed columns excoriating the Wilson administration for not entering the war sooner, thus, for putting an end to it before it got out of control. Winston Churchill once opined that only one man could have prevented it from happening.
Zakaria offers a similar reflection about today’s historical juncture. He especially wants us to reject the notion that progress is inevitable, and that history is a Hollywood movie or, as I would put it, a Hegelian narrative:
Things are not simply going to work themselves out while we watch. History is not a Hollywood movie.
10 comments:
The impact of WWI on Western civilization: Erich Maria Remarque's novel "The Road Back" follows a group of German veterans in the aftermath of the war that killed most of their classmates and fellow enlistees. Ernst, the protagonist, has accepted a job teaching school in a small village:
"There sit the little ones with folded arms. In their eyes is still all the shy astonishment of the childish years. They look up at me so trustingly, so believingly–and suddenly I get a spasm over the heart.
Here I stand before you, one of the hundreds of thousands of bankrupt men in whom the war destroyed every belief and almost every strength…What should I teach you? Should I tell you that in twenty years you will be dried-up and crippled, maimed in your freest impulses, all pressed mercilessly into the selfsame mould? Should I tell you that all learning, all culture, all science is nothing but hideous mockery, so long as mankind makes war in the name of God and humanity with gas, iron, explosive, and fire?…Should I take you to the green-and-grey map there, move my finger across it, and tell you that here love was murdered? Should I explain to you that the books you hold in your hands are but nets in which men design to snare your simple souls, to entangle you in the undergrowth of fine phrases, and in the barbed wire of falsified ideas?
…I feel a cramp begin to spread through me, as if I were turning to stone, as if I were crumbling away. I lower myself into the chair, and realize that I cannot stay here any longer. I try to take hold of something but cannot. Then after a time that has seemed to me endless, the catalepsy relaxes. I stand up. “Children,” I say with difficulty, “you may go now.”
The little ones look at me to make sure I am not joking. I nod once again. “Yes, that is right–go and play today–go and play in the wood–or with your dogs and your cats–you need not come back till tomorrow–“"
The book is nowhere near as well-known as the author's "All Quiet on the Western Front", but it should be. I reviewed it here:
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/21350.html
Another thought-provoking book on the societal impact of the war is Paul Fussell's "The Great War and Modern Memory."
Religious order, just one example:
French Wars of Religion => estimated 3,000,000 dead.
Secular order:
"Pinker failed to see that the most ambitious attempts to produce atheist cultures-- those being totalitarian Communism-- produced misery, calamity and a prodigious body count... He does not understand that the great wars of the first half of the twentieth century were produced by enlightened cultures. "
Obviously BOTH are efficient killing machines... So they must share something in common that makes them so.
"Normal" Angell?
Anon 10:39AM "Obviously BOTH (religion and atheist cultures) are efficient killing machines... So they must share something in common that makes them so."
Arthur Koestler, himself a former Communist, on Closed Systems:
"A closed system has three peculiarities. Firstly, it claims to represent a truth of universal validity, capable of explaining all phenomena, and to have a cure for all that ails man. In the second place, it is a system which cannot be refuted by evidence, because all potentially damaging data are automatically processed and reinterpreted to make them fit the expected pattern. The processing is done by sophisticated methods of casuistry, centered on axioms of great emotive power, and indifferent to the rules of common logic; it is a kind of Wonderland croquet, played with mobile hoops. In the third place, it is a system which invalidates criticism by shifting the argument to the subjective motivation of the critic, and deducing his motivation from the axioms of the system itself. The orthodox Freudian school in its early stages approximated a closed system; if you argued that for such and such reasons you doubted the existence of the so-called castration complex, the Freudian’s prompt answer was that your argument betrayed an unconscious resistance indicating that you yourself have a castration complex; you were caught in a vicious circle. Similarly, if you argued with a Stalinist that to make a pact with Hitler was not a nice thing to do he would explain that your bourgeois class-consciousness made you unable to understand the dialectics of history…In short, the closed system excludes the possibility of objective argument by two related proceedings: (a) facts are deprived of their value as evidence by scholastic processing; (b) objections are invalidated by shifting the argument to the personal motive behind the objection. This procedure is legitimate according to the closed system’s rules of the game which, however absurd they seem to the outsider, have a great coherence and inner consistency.
The atmosphere inside the closed system is highly charged; it is an emotional hothouse…The trained, “closed-minded” theologian, psychoanalyst, or Marxist can at any time make mincemeat of his “open-minded” adversary and thus prove the superiority of his system to the world and to himself."
"Winston Churchill once opined that only one man could have prevented it from happening."
Himself? Roosevelt?
TR would have prevented it from getting out of control. I have always assumed he was talking about Woodrow Wilson.
"The trained, “closed-minded” theologian, psychoanalyst, or Marxist can at any time make mincemeat of his “open-minded” adversary and thus prove the superiority of his system to the world and to himself."
^
mind shattered
Malfunction. OPEN system is now CLOSED.
Progress is in no way inevitable. Collapse likely is.
"Progress is in no way inevitable. Collapse likely is."
'Progress' halted for the highly expendables such as you, myself, and most others? Maybe.
...But FOR the *financial and intellectual elite* (and whatever infrastructure they require to man their limited-hangout ship)? Never!
Progress for *them* is guaranteed. They can easily get rid of anything that challenges them or is preemptively deemed a threat. Hence, I would never advise challenging them, questioning their policies no matter how uncomfortable, or even insulting them. Bending over on command is the only path to victory (aka. not-dying-prematurely)!
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