TWO KINDS OF HUMANISM
Political liberal and internationalist though I am, had I read Pinker’s book the night before the last US election, I would probably have voted for Trump the next day. I don’t suppose there’s any likelihood the author will ever read this. If he does, he should take good note. He claims to be in favour of reason and progress. So he ought to be interested in the objective effect his book has on readers who do not set out from the same principles as himself.
Enlightenment Now took me back to a conversation I overheard at a party shortly after Brexit. A former civil servant and ardent ‘remainer’ was speaking to a fellow guest about the backwardness and short-sighted obstinacy of North Sea fishermen. What difficulties she had had in getting them to take a longer view of their situation and accept rational environmental regulation! The other person replied that, given the bleak future of the fishing industry, perhaps their attitude was understandable. Wasn’t their traditional livelihood under threat – and, with it, everything that had given their lives meaning and purpose? The civil servant responded to the effect that it was her job to ensure that the longer view always prevailed over blinkered local perspectives. But then added, with a rueful smile: ‘but then they pay you back by voting Brexit and cutting the ground from beneath your political feet!’
Humanism adrift in the age of Trump
Like my civil servant, Pinker wants American voters to take a more optimistic view of human progress over the longer term. He attempts to shift the focus of public attention from the bad news stories that dominate the media to the good news story of steady incremental progress in the human condition over recent decades – not only in the direction of improved health and longevity, but towards freedom from violence and insecurity, and, above all, greater humaneness. This, Pinker claims, is the story of the advancement of ‘Enlightenment goals’ of ‘Reason, science, humanism and progress’. For this he offers statistical evidence in plenty garnered from the work of analysts like Hans Rossler. If only we, the public, could be brought to pay proper attention to this deeper, longer-term narrative of human development, then we might be less shaken by the gusts of contemporary populism, with their radical pessimism and negativity.
Also like my civil servant, Pinker shows no inclination to engage with human aspirations that might be in tension or in competition with his ‘Enlightenment goals’. Instead, he prefers to dismiss them from consideration altogether as counter-Enlightenment and reactionary.
Individualist humanism vs. collectivist tribalism
Why? The answer, I think, has a lot to do with Pinker’s over-intellectualized and dualistic understanding of history as a battle between progressive and reactionary ideas. The Enlightenment thinkers of the eighteenth century are rather too inclined to claim, following Archimedes: ‘Give us a place to stand, and we’ll move the whole world by the leverage of our ideas!’ Pinker seems to share this tendency. Scientific progress, he claims, is ultimately the fruit of eighteenth century ideas with their prioritization of ‘the welfare of the individual over the interests of collectivities’. Conversely, all that stands in its way is also attributable to ideas: those of reactionary ideologues. Hence, just as two centuries of scientific progress are ultimately the fruit of the eighteenth century Enlightment (Voltaire; Diderot; d’Alembert), so our incapacity to give such ideals their due is down to the representatives – past and contemporary – of Romantic progressophobia (Rousseau; Herder; Schelling). Above all, Pinker’s characterization of the content of humanism as ‘the prioritization of the welfare of the individual over collective interests’ goes along with the characterization of obsurantist Romanticism as the idea that the human ‘is a part of a whole – a culture, race, nation, religion, spirit, or historical force’. Pinker is implacably opposed, therefore, to what he terms ‘collectivist organicism’ – the idea that ‘that reason cannot be separated from emotion, and that individuals cannot be considered apart from their culture …. or that values do not apply across all times and places’. All of which views Pinker holds to be self-evidently wrong-headed.
It follows that Pinker’s Enlightenment humanism is an entirely individualist creed – at least, in the negative and restrictive sense that it refuses to give any space to the collective dimension of human existence. The thinkers of the Age of Reason, he argues, laid their secular foundation for morality ‘in what we now call humanism, which privileges the well-being 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, fulfilment and anguish’. The enemies of this way of thinking include all forms of ‘tribalism’, including religion, nationalism, and left-wing and right-wing political ideologies which have become ‘secular religions, providing people with a community of like-minded brethren and a catechism of sacred beliefs’.
Why we are not more grateful to science
But I come now – and for the rest of this review – to the fundamental question posed by Pinker throughout his book: why we are not more grateful for human progress. Why do we not offer up daily prayers of thanksgiving for the benefits of the Enlightenment? Personally, I am inclined to think that we should. Like Pinker, I was brought up by my engineer father on a diet of biographies of great scientific and technological pioneers. Only, this did not lead, in our case, to the abandonment of the Christian faith or incline us to the culture of scientism. Rather, I have a memory of childhood prayers with my father consisting in the petition that God should ‘bless’ our teachers, shop-keepers, and all who ‘helped’ us in our everyday lives – a group that may, for all I can remember, have been extended to include technologists and engineers on occasion. However, I agree with Pinker that most of us are deficient in respect to our failure to feel sufficient gratitude to the achievements of science – and I think it is fairly evident why.
The reason is this. It is one thing for us to feel lucky to be living in the age we do, quite another to be grateful or indebted to the Enlightenment – or even just science and modernity in general. To feel grateful or indebted is a more active state of relation to the benefits we enjoy, and requires a sense of ownership or participation in those benefits – which is not just a matter of being blessed by random circumstance. As the French novelist-aviator Antoine de St-Exupery puts it – in the context of his defence of a very different kind of ‘humanism’ from anything Pinker has to offer:
‘We belong to those (things or persons) to which we give’ (i.e. sacrificially).
In other words, we will take things (e.g. progress or science) for granted so long we don’t make them ours by means of the kind of imaginative identification that can involve us in moral struggle on their behalf. Such imaginative identification is likely to be expressed through those collective narratives that Pinker would prefer to banish on the grounds of their ‘tribal’ and ‘anti-Enlightenment’ character. It makes little sense to speak of gratitude to ‘science’ in the abstract. But we can readily be induced to feel a gratitude to great scientists when we perceive them to be ‘ours’ – on grounds of shared nationality or culture. A current example would be Alan Turing of the recent film who saved ‘us Brits’ from the Germans, and with whom we additionally identify nowdays on account of his persecuted sexual identity. I am reminded of how my school history lessons, and debating society, fostered a sense that democracy was somehow ‘ours’. Our schoolboy speeches were larded with citations from Edmund Burke, Thomas Macaulay and Walter Bagehot. We knew that ‘our’ British institutions were unique – and were quite unlike continental political institutions which, as George Orwell put it, you could buy ‘like so many pounds of cheese’. This point of view may have been unfair to the rest of the world; but we did come to attach a high value to democratic institutions – in a way, I would venture to say, that today’s schoolchildren, entirely innocent of the ‘whig’ view of history, do not.
One is tempted, cynically, to wonder whether, from a purely stategic point of view Pinker’s goals would be far better served, not by repudiating tribalism, but by claiming Enlightenment ideals as the exclusive legacy of our Western/Protestant/Anglo-saxon/Roman Catholic/American (pick your narrative) civilization. Of course, it is entirely to Pinker’s credit that he does not. He would probably argue, quite rightly, that the political regimes quickest to assert territorial claims over science and progress have hardly been the ones with the most robust democratic traditions. In the democratic West we leave science to itself, rather than seeking to appropriate it for some collective political narrative. The fact remains that Pinker’s principled rejection of any kind of socio-political collectivism leaves him altogether high and dry when it comes to situations requiring moral or political exertion. For the most part, Pinker’s discussion prioritizes the impartial gifts of scientic progress over the benefits anyone might have to struggle for. On the whole, he manages to skirt around the areas where the latter kind of benefits are at issue. Yet there is one area that cannot be bypassed by any study of human progress – that of global warming and environmental degradation. Environmentalists have recently been tearing their hair out over how to translate scientific ideals into political actions that are anything like commensurate with the gravity and urgency of the situation as scientists understand it. Pinker’s response is typical of his intellectualism, and evidently quite inadequate to the problems that confront us. They are, essentially that: i. we need to be more statistically educated; ii. we need to lose our faith in the efficacy of sacrifice. It is characteristic of Pinker that the only kind of sacrifice he is capable of envisaging is the kind of conscience-salving exercise that serves an alibi for tackling the real problem (‘Just recycle a few more plastic bags’). That the solution to our environmental problems might call for ‘real’ (as against pretend) sacrifice is not something Pinker is prepared to contemplate.
2 kinds of humanism
The words of St-Exupery cited above are taken from his account of what was practically a suicide mission by pilots spying over German territory in the days of France’s catastrophic defeat by Germany in the early phase of the Second World War. St-Exupery’s pilot, miraculously returned from Arras, reflects on the changing nature of his commitment to France and the ideals for which it stood. Unconvinced at the outset, like Pinker, of the value of futile heroism, he comes to appreciate by the end of the book, that his earlier attitude went along with the failure to appreciate the difference between values (‘principles’) and mere pious ideals (in practice notions of freedom, equality and fraternity, which, like Pinker’s, go back to the Enlightenment).
I advocated Democracy, with no notion that I was thus articulating not a set of principles governing the qualities and the destiny of man, but a set of wishes. I wished men to be fraternal, free and happy. Of course. Who would disagree. …. It seemed to me that what I was evoking had a natural self-evidence. There is no natural self-evidence. A squad of fascists and a slave market are also communities of men. … High over Arras I took responsibility for this crowd of people beneath me now. I am bound only to those to whom I give. I can understand only those whom I first embrace.
Exupery’s ‘victorious’ pilot hero discovers a new ‘kinship’ with those to whom he has given. Pinker’s problem is that, along with notions of sacrificial participation and community, he rejects any possibility of assuming a similar posture in relation to humanity. This makes for a poor kind of humanism. Yes, I suppose one could participate in his kind of intellectualist ideal by pursuing science. But for those not associated with the intellectual project? Well, like the Uncle Quentin of Blyton’s children stories, Pinker wants us to behave and play quietly – and above all not make a hullabaloo or start throwing our toys around.
Political action requires sacrificial participation
Ultimately, where Pinker goes wrong is in the idea that humanism or any other effectual creed can be all about knowledge. (And it is probably the case that the Enlightenment thinkers were also inclined to think in such terms). St Exupery’s humanism is more effectual and ultimately more democratic because sacrificial heroism is the calling of everyone; while there are many not called to be knowledgeable. Of course, this makes for an awkward relationship between intellectuals and the rest of society. Yes, society needs to respect the experts; but intellectuals, for their part, need to know their place.
Also, Pinker fails to appreciate that sacrificial community does not have to be tribal; Exupery’s pilots, we are told, were not just fighting for France. But community does have to begin somewhere – at one particular place in space and time, because that is what it is to be embodied human beings: we need first to belong somewhere in order to be ‘citizens of the world’. This is what theologians call the scandal of particularity. God begins his design for humanity, not with Enlightenment universalism, but with a particular family inhabiting a small stretch of territory into which, one day, all the world would be adopted. Not a community without boundaries (a universalist impossibility), but a bounded community expanding to incorporate all mankind. Such were the democratic ideals of the founders of what was to become the European Union, who apparently looked to Jacques Maritain, a Catholic internationalist and democrat with a worldview perhaps not so dissimilar from St Exupery’s.
Would I give Enlightenment Today to non-Christian friends?
Absolutely not. The concluding chapter does a creditable job of marshalling all the traditional philosophical arguments against theistic belief – in a manner that makes it clear Pinker has no experience whatever of what it is to be a part of a Christian community. My impression from reading the book is that Pinker’s own roots may be Jewish. If so, his early experiences of Judaism must have been very negative – or else they have faded in his memory. This book offers a kind of echo-chamber to a fashionable scientistic common-sense which is absolutely not what the world needs to hear. Like offering gin and tonics to an alcoholic. Fortunately, it also expresses a kind of deep-rooted intellectualist elitism that will hopefully limit the book’s appeal. The casuality in all this is Pinker’s really very heart-felt appeal for us to appreciate what we owe to the progress the world has made since the Enlightenment towards a humaner and more civilized society. This argument needs to find a less narrow-minded exponent.
Would I give it to Christians?
Maybe. In general, I don’t think Pinker’s variety of naïve atheism represents the most serious challenge that Christianity faces. More prevalent amongst open-minded people, and harder to contend with, I suspect, is the ‘spiritual, but not Christian’ strand of anti-religious thinking. The latter is often allied with expressivist individualism, which is a remote legacy of the Romanticism that Pinker hates with such a vengeance. People who think like this are not going to be especially attracted by this book. The fact remains there are evidently people around who profess themselves intellectually satisfied with the narrowness and aridity of Pinker’s Enlightenment ‘ideals’. In their regard, Enlightenment Now usefully demonstrates the problematic incompatibility of such a worldview with any kind of political or social activism. The benefits of science fall to us (or fail to do so) indiscriminately and from on High like the gentle dews of Heaven, without any particular striving on our part beyond that of our own self-interest. All we need to do is to ‘educate’ (= ‘inform’) ourselves. It also demonstrates the implicit elitism of such a worldview – though this may also constitute part of its appeal to a certain kind of reader.
Pinker does somewhat cut the ground from under the N.T.Wright-style Christian apologetic that begins with a characterization of ‘sin’ as communal and political ‘brokenness’ and offers the Kingdom as a remedy. (One thinks of the introductory gambit of the Jehovah’s witness on the doorstep who begins, in my experience, by asking ‘How we think the world is going?’) Wright’s approach has much to recommend it, but it does suggest that there are intrinsic limitations on any human-originated movement towards progress and peace. While this may be the case, I can understand why, given the overwhelming optimism of those who think like Pinker, this could fall on deaf ears. This is worth bearing in mind.
Evidently, Pinker’s humanism is not individualist in the more positive sense of the Romantic ideology which makes the creative artwork the paradigm of personal realization. This expressivist individualism (also very current in today’s world) retrieves elements of the Enlightenment within a spiritualized Romantic frame, and disrupts Pinker’s straightforward face-off between Enlightenment ideals and Romantic obscurantism.
JORDAN PETERSON: 12 RULES OF LIFE
DAVID GRAEBER: THE DAWN OF EVERYTHING
TERRY EAGLETON: RADICAL SACRIFICE
JOHN GRAY: SEVEN TYPES OF ATHEISM
REZA ASLAN: GOD, A HUMAN HISTORY
JONATHAN HAIDT: THE REVENGE OF THE RIGHTEOUS MIND
Great post!