What is progress? You might think that the question is so subjective and culturally relative as to be forever unanswerable. In fact, it’s one of the easier questions to answer. Most people agree that life is better than death. Health is better than sickness. Sustenance is better than hunger. Abundance is better than poverty. Peace is better than war. Safety is better than danger. Freedom is better than tyranny. Equal rights are better than bigotry and discrimination. Literacy is better than illiteracy. Knowledge is better than ignorance. Intelligence is better than dull-wittedness. Happiness is better than misery. Opportunities to enjoy family, friends, culture, and nature are better than drudgery and monotony. All these things can be measured. If they have increased over time, that is progress.The subtitle of Enlightenment Now is: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, and as someone who has benefitted from all of these – in all of the ways enumerated in the opening quote – I don't know to what extent I needed the “case to be made” for these values. The difficulty I had is that while author Steven Pinker does define and defend each of these principles throughout the book, he is actually attempting to make the case for optimism – as though the entire world today has progressed in the direction of betterment (to greater or lesser degrees), as a direct result of Enlightenment thinkers, and as there isn't any problem facing us that can't be solved by doubling down on Enlightenment thinking and the advancement of science and technology, anyone who tends to pessimism (whether over the environment, existential angst, or the rise of populism and despotism) simply needs a long history lesson about all the ways in which things have gotten better and better. Pinker includes more than seventy graphs with pleasing curves (trending up or down over time, depending on whether they're tracking positive or negative metrics), he provides double, or even triple, digit footnotes for each chapter (assuring me that every statement he makes is backed by published sources), and with thirty fine-print pages of references at the end, I couldn't possibly track them all down in order to reach my own conclusions about the state of the world. The reader is repeatedly asked to take Dr. Pinker's word for it that everything is progressing well (towards a place of measurable betterment for humanity), and as I found myself often squirming with the uneasiness of not just wanting to take his word for it, and as I also found myself without the informational/philosophical background from which to dispute his arguments, I couldn't always follow where Pinker wanted to lead me; often as impatient with myself as with him. I'm glad I read this book – at least in an effort to understand what the big debates of our time might be – but I just don't have the knowledge base to properly respond to Pinker's arguments; three stars reflects my not taking a stand on this one.
So, I'll make an aesthetic judgment: Pinker stretched my concentration with his frequent philosophical references to hermeneutics, dialectics, ontological this and that, but when he would descend to informal/hippie references to presumably lighten things up (many retirees are happy “seeing the national parks in a Winnebago, or dandling Vera, Chuck, and Dave in a cottage on the Isle of Wight”; drivers safely enjoy the pleasures of “seeing the USA in their Chevrolet, or just cruising down the streets, feeling out of sight, spending all their money on a Saturday night”), I found the writing forced, or worse, anachronistic. And I grew impatient with Pinker's smugly rhetorical strawman-punchline gags:
There is no law of complex systems that says that intelligent agents must turn into ruthless conquistadors. Indeed, we know of one highly advanced form of intelligence that evolved without this defect. They’re called women.Or:
Of course, one can always imagine a Doomsday Computer that is malevolent, universally empowered, always on, and tamperproof. The way to deal with this threat is straightforward: don't build one.Other ideas that made me squirm: Pinker stresses the need for rational thinking and the belief that the scientific method is the only way of measuring the world (using that, at a stroke, to dismiss human consciousness as a mere byproduct of evolution and the nonexistence of gods as an accepted fact). History progresses in one direction, and so long as we continue to embrace Enlightenment thinking and turn to science to solve our problems, there will be no environmental doomsday, no nuclear wars, no real terrorist threat to democracy, no Singularity (no “foom”). Pinker insists that science is politically bipartisan and he takes swipes at the anti-progressivism of the left (those who are reflexively anti-GMO, anti-vaccine, anti-nuclear) and the anti-intellectualism of the right (those who are creationists, anti-immigration, protectionist), and while that might make him seem a neutral party, Pinker never misses an opportunity to name President Trump as the anti-Enlightenment bogeyman who could reverse centuries of human progress.
And since, as I pointed out, I don't feel qualified to confront Pinker on his facts, here is some of the professional response to Enlightenment Now (note: I chose to share reviews from left-slanting sources in order to prevent partisan fakenewsmanship):
From the (officially bipartisan but purportedly leftwing) Australian public broadcaster, ABC –
Pinker never seems to see the force of the question: How do we know that all this did not take place in spite of, rather than because of, the Enlightenment? In fact, he doesn't even pretend to go to the trouble of establishing a causal connection between his contentious version of the Enlightenment and the various improvements that he imagines follow in its wake. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc seems to be the operative principle.From New Statesman, a British newsmagazine that self-describes as having a “liberal, sceptical political position” –
Judged as a contribution to thought, Enlightenment Now is embarrassingly feeble. With its primitive scientism and manga-style history of ideas, the book is a parody of Enlightenment thinking at its crudest. A more intellectually inquiring author would have conveyed something of the Enlightenment’s richness and diversity. Yet even if Pinker was capable of providing it, intellectual inquiry is not what his anxious flock demands. Only an anodyne, mythical Enlightenment can give them what they crave, which is relief from painful doubt.From The Globe & Mail, a decidedly progressive Canadian daily newspaper –
Pinker's gripe is largely aesthetic. A prominent egghead who writes and composes himself with Spock-like coldness and clarity, he seems annoyed at the frenzy (and so, irrationality) of "editorialists," "climate justice warriors," "relativists," and the "politically correct" left. What Pinker never substantially considers is that such frenzy – whether deployed as a deliberate political tactic, or manifesting as the sputtering incoherence of the true believer – may help mobilize the spirit of change and progress; dams and ditches of passion that channel the turbulent tides of Enlightenment.And from one such “frenzied climate justice warrior” at The Guardian, the British daily that famously tilts left –
Pinker insults the Enlightenment principles he claims to defend. Could he have succumbed to the motivated reasoning these principles are supposed to suppress? If the environmental crisis cannot be so easily dismissed, it threatens his argument that life is steadily improving. What looks like a relentless enhancement in human welfare could emerge instead as an interlude between one form of deprivation and the next.The bottom line: I slogged through this long read, encouraged by its optimism, but unconvinced by its argument. I was further annoyed by my own inability to articulate my increasingly negative response to Pinker's thesis, and recognise that as my own failing; I remain uncertain that I've adequately outlined my objections even with the addition of other reviewers' voices. Even so, I'm glad to have read this book and would recommend it to anyone interested in what “the eggheads” are talking about.
