STEVEN PINKER has been called one of the most influential thinkers of our age. At the end of January, the professor of psychology at Harvard University was mingling with world leaders at the Davos World Economic Forum in Switzerland.
Not surprisingly, his latest book Enlightenment Now is a rebuke to overly partisan critics of Western liberal democracy. It is time, he says, to recognise the widespread improvements in health, living standards and welfare that those liberal principles help create. Our risks may include global warming and nuclear war, but rational, evidence-based approaches will prove successful at reducing them.
With that in mind, dozens of graphs in the book and on his linked website show declining global risks of disease, violence and poverty, and improvements in longevity, literacy and calorific intake. In these trends, Pinker sees Enlightenment economist Adam Smith’s invisible hand of self-interest leading to the continual progress of industrial capitalism, and to the peace envisioned by philosopher Immanuel Kant through representative democracy and international discourse.
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Three cheers are surely due to defenders of Enlightenment values at a time when experts and intellectualism are under attack. So it is with reluctance one must point to serious flaws in Pinker’s book. He is a bestselling author, so it is crucial he is on solid ground.
The central theme hangs round one key question: why do people worry about the future of the world, when history is replete with human advances? The average concerned citizen might respond with frustration at the slow pace in tackling the many miseries still outstanding. But Pinker treats such concerns as examples of illogicality.
He has a different explanation, based on two innate psychological tendencies of perception that experiments show sway our interpretation of the world. These are the “availability heuristic”, which explains why we choose information close at hand, and the “negativity bias”, which shows how negative indicators are more influential than positive ones.
You would expect Pinker to seek these kinds of explanation when you consider that his research relies on evolutionary psychology that seeks to uncover innate behaviours and thought patterns persisting from natural selection in the past. The precursor of evolutionary psychology was 1970s’ sociobiology, with its simplistic “gene versus meme” dichotomy. Since then, this claim has been fairly hollowed out by an immense range of scientific discoveries. Decoding the genome only served to further underline the messy complexity that lies beneath the impulses of daily life – all the way from intracellular environments, intrauterine growth patterns and early life experience through to the culture of individual environments, social roles and political exposure.
“Sociobiology’s simplistic dichotomy of gene vs meme has been hollowed out by many discoveries”
Other factors are now known to influence the mental states with which we confront problems, such as immediate states of health, stress, risk, diet and shelter. Pinker offers no thoughts on such matters, leaving a key premise unexamined.
Instead, he believes that proof of his long, steady march, during which the rational triumphs over the innate, will be found in numbers. He applies his method to the move from hunter-gatherer to agriculturist some 10,000 years ago. This “multiplied the availability of calories from cultivated plants and… animals, freed a portion of the population from the demands of hunting and gathering, and eventually gave them the luxury of writing, thinking, and accumulating their ideas”.
It is difficult to think of a more misleading formulation. Among archaeologists working globally, it is well established that the quality of diet deteriorated appallingly in the transition, and that disease and hard labour increased. Even Pinker’s “multiplied” calories weren’t available for most, and the widely varied diet eaten by the ancestors of early agriculturalists was reduced to little more than a daily bowl of a staple grain.
Those “freed” from manual labour in early city states were the autocrats and officials. Early writers weren’t poets, but bookkeepers enforcing a long epoch of mass austerity. There was no incremental progress in human welfare, rather a catastrophic setback. Some anthropologists have even argued that, in many respects, all of history is in fact the effort to overcome this austerity.
Pinker can be at odds with himself, too. In his book, he posits the Enlightenment as a reliable, relatively complete ideological project. Yet at Davos he reportedly said: “Human beings are highly fallible. Most of the things we think are right, history will show to be wrong. A lot of human progress was advanced when people voiced heterodox opinions in the face of opposition.”
It is as if, in searching for a more nuanced approach, he finds himself merely flip-flopping between antagonistic certainties of his own making. It is an exaggeration, of course, to say that most things we think true today will be proved wrong in the future: in fact, his defence of scientific reasoning seeks to show the opposite. And while he is right to suggest that heterodox opinions have been essential to the development of knowledge, opinions that survive are only the ones that explain reality better.
The mark of these progressive heterodoxies is an appetite to carry ideals beyond the power to realise them at any given time. But the optimism on which progress historically depends has been sceptical, error-prone, error-correcting and disputatious. Pinker’s optimism seems to risk falling into complacency.
He also repeatedly professes a deep distaste for philosophical literature on contradiction, including some that emerged during the Enlightenment itself. It was Kant who posed the key idea of the irreconcilable opposition of thesis/antithesis. This opened the door to the German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s synthesis, which began a deeper enquiry into how contradictions are resolved in nature and in thought.
“Of course we should value Enlightenment values that still resonate. But history teaches a tougher lesson”
The mental leap forward here involves intensifying contradiction when we think about a problem in order to resolve it. For example, Copernicus had to hold the baffling movements of the stars and planets together for him to reach a simpler universal solution: that the sun was at the centre of the system. This principle can be applied to social sciences too. But Pinker barely mentions economics, and his history contains no conflicting interests of social classes.
The two world wars make for terrible reversals in those of Pinker’s graphs that extend back before 1950. When Pinker discusses the rise of the Nazis, he doesn’t mention the governance failures that led to the signing of the Treaty of Versailles at the end of the first world war, nor the Depression. No, it was the fault of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and his “will to power”. Elites seized the idea and used it to assert that humanity’s main driving forces were achievement, ambition and the striving for the highest possible position in life. But Pinker has no comment on the social conditions that made Nietzsche popular, or where such conditions could ever return.
Historians often ascribe the end of the Enlightenment to the Terror following the French Revolution. The advocates of reason vying for leadership failed to address the practical difficulties of feeding the population and economic reorganisation, and they ended up in the hands of unreason. After all, if people are to think straight, they need decent economic conditions and security.
Of course we should value those Enlightenment values that still resonate. But history teaches a tougher lesson. When leaders and intellectuals suggest worriers just “keep calm and carry on”, it can signal a floundering at the top and that critical analysis needs to be cranked up. If Pinker’s book can deliver fresh thinking, it will have been a success despite itself.
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This article appeared in print under the headline “The rise and fall of progress”
