Enlightenment now
Reg Naulty responds to the latest book by philosopher Steven Pinker
Steven Pinker’s latest book, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress, is an amiable, good-natured book. Reasonable optimism breaks out everywhere. The title, though, is a little misleading. It brings to mind someone like Buddha and his kind of enlightenment. It isn’t about that, it’s about the historical Enlightenment and its values: reason, science, humanism and progress. ‘The Enlightenment, after all,’ writes Steven Pinker, was ‘humankind’s emergence from its self- incurred immaturity’. If anyone suspects a hint of anti-religious polemic in that, they are right.
The book is about how Enlightenment values are faring now. Stephen Pinker proves beyond reasonable doubt that they continue to deliver the goods. Prophets of doom are buried beneath mountains of data. The following is a sample of how the argument proceeds:
Since the Enlightenment unfolded in the late 18th century, life expectancy across the world has risen from 30 to 71, and in the more fortunate countries to 81. When the Enlightenment began, a third born in the richest parts of the world died before their fifth birthday; today that fate befalls 6% of the children in the poorest parts…
The parade of Enlightenment successes goes on:
Not only are richer people in a given country happier, but people in richer countries are happier, and as countries get richer over time, their people get happier.
Steven Pinker has the data to prove it. Nor is there anything crude about his analyses. For example, he makes an important distinction between happy people who live in the present, and those with meaningful lives who have a narrative about their past and a plan for their future. And his figures are right up to date. He writes that populism is an old man’s movement, shown by the fact that in all three of its recrudescences – Donald Trump, Brexit and European populist parties – voter support falls with year of birth. Steven Pinker can justifiably conclude:
…more than two centuries [after the Enlightenment] we can say that it has worked: we have seen six dozen graphs that have vindicated the hope of progress by charting ways in which the world has been getting better.
Nevertheless, Steven Pinker is open to challenge on a number of points, especially in his account of humanism, in which he holds that the mind is the brain. That invites the following objection. Once I dreamed that I was close to a bushfire and was impressed by the vivid orange of the flames. No one looking into my brain at the time would have seen them. They were not in physical space; they were, as we say, in my mind. Steven Pinker acknowledges that there is a problem here, but he contends that it is a conceptual problem. It is not. It is a problem about what is real. The orange flame was an appearance, but it was real, and it was beyond physical space.
Steven Pinker is a scientific triumphalist in that he expects scientific explanations to prevail. They may, but they may do so with entities that are not material. There is a trend in that direction already: gravitational and magnetic fields are not material, photons have zero rest mass, and space-time is not made of wood or steel or any other material. It is not that kind of thing. He insists that the universe is indifferent to humanity. He is denying that there is a power directing the universe for our good.
In his great novel, The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov asserts that everything will be as it should be; that is how the world is made. There is a huge amount of human experience behind that view.
Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress by Steven Pinker is published by Allen Lane.
