Ambassadors of “Progress”: the Rosy Agenda of Steven Pinker

[I]f you want a description of our age, here is one: the civilization of means without ends.
Richard Livingstone, On Education (1956)

We can no longer afford to take that which was good in the past and simply call it our heritage, to discard the bad and simply think of it as a dead load which by itself time will bury in oblivion.
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)

Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!
Charles Dickens, Hard Times (1854)

The most recent best-seller by cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now (2018), is not only Bill Gates’ new “favourite book of all times”. It is also full of facts. Facts, numbers, percentages, charts – all employed “to restate the ideals of the Enlightenment in the language and concepts of 21^st century” (p. 5). After examining a wide set of “variables” – such as freedom, health, peace, safety, democracy, equal rights, literacy, knowledge, intelligence and happiness – Pinker explains that these variables “can be measured. If they have increased over time, that is progress” (p. 51).
As simple as that: “progress” can be embedded into a formula as if it represented a measurable, observable variable of the physical world. Since all these parameters have increased over time, the conclusion is, indeed, a wonderful piece of news (you may have overlooked it). The Enlightenment “has worked – perhaps, the greatest story seldom told. And because this triumph is so unsung, the underlying ideals of reason, science and humanism are unappreciated as well” (p. 6).

The fact that the “greatest story seldom told” includes a century (the twentieth, of course) which, for all its amazing scientific and technological progress, has been a furious bloodbath in almost every corner of the globe does not matter. Similarly, the fact of risking an environmental collapse (driven by climate crisis, plastic, chemical and air pollution and wildlife mass extinction) over the next decades can be kept out of that amazing picture for being nothing more than a side effect.

Pinker’s book sounds intellectually pretentious and theoretically shallow not only for its evident partisanship, but also for its incapacity (or unwillingness) of thinking outside of the dominant paradigm of our time – the science-technology-economy triad. His approach to “reason, science, humanism and progress” is not open and critical, but closed and blind: in his view, the many, grave problems still affecting Western civilization are, for the most part, the unfortunate outcome of the counter-Enlightenment and of that “appeal of regressive ideas” (p. 452) that has brought Donald Trump to the White House and is spreading all over the world, from Brazil to Europe. But do not worry – problems can be solved:

That does not mean that they will solve themselves, but it does mean that we can solve them if we sustain the benevolent forces of modernity that have allowed us to solve problems so far, including social prosperity, wisely regulated markets, international governance and investments in science and technology. (p. 155)

Writing of “wisely regulated markets” ten years after the unfolding of a systemic crisis that drove the world to the brink of a financial meltdown may sound naïve to most people, but not to Pinker, for whom sustaining the “benevolent forces of modernity” is sufficient to address and solve basically any possible issue. What I am criticizing, here, is not the optimistic (and widely debatable) idea that humankind can overcome any problem. What I am criticizing is the way in which Pinker suggests this can be achieved.

Simple answers to highly complex problems
Let’s consider, for instance, climate change. Pinker, who acknowledges the gravity of such issue, provides an “enlightened” (but not very original) response: to tackle climate crisis, we need “to figure out how to get the most energy with the least emission of greenhouse gases” (p. 142). This implies, for example, the adoption of carbon taxes, the widespread production of nuclear energy, the creation of new forests and the use of advanced geoengineering technologies. Pinker ignores society and offers solutions that are merely economic and technical: from his arguments, one might infer that, once identified the best “set of tools” to employ, climate crisis will be properly managed and solved.

If one suggests simple solutions to highly complex issues, there are usually two possibilities: this person is either a populist or someone who has not grasped the matter sufficiently to understand it. I would argue that Pinker belongs (mainly) to the second category of people. This is not only a problem of ignorance. This is also – and above all – an epistemic and ideological problem.

Evidence is not enough
As a cognitive scientist who appears to have embraced the Enlightenment principles in their “maximalist” version (for which rejecting the “darkness of ignorance” does not lead simply to a critical, open-ended search for knowledge, but to the statement of a specific set of ideas and values and to the refusal of traditional religion), Pinker refers obviously to the natural science paradigm.

According to this paradigm (and here I am simplifying), there is a Real World out there that can be observed and studied to discover regularities, patterns or laws independent of the observer; what is discovered contributes, over time, to the cumulative construction of a body of knowledge which has to be explicit (understandable by any reasonable being), universal (it works for all places and times), abstract (does not need to be related to specific examples), discrete (context-independent), systematic (constituted of elements connected to each other by laws or rules) and both complete and predictive (specifying its range of variation and able to make reliable, precise predictions) (Flyvbjerg, 2001).

An alternative epistemic paradigm is represented by constructivism, according to which the observer and its object cannot be separated since the former, together with society and its dynamics, do play a role in constructing the identified patterns. Even if the naturalist model is still dominant also in social sciences (Moses & Knutsen, 2012), constructivism may offer an answer to the dilemma frequently facing social scientists when they follow the natural science paradigm: to be worthy and general, a new theoretical contribution must be context-independent, but social sciences cannot usually exclude the context for the simple fact that – as argued by Pierre Bourdieu – “context defines the type of phenomenon which the theory encompasses” (Flyvbjerg, 2001, p. 47). This dilemma helps to understand the great limits of social sciences founded on the naturalist model: explanations and predictions often prove to be wrong because the necessity of constructing a universal theory obliges to get rid of contexts without which it is only possible to create flawed conceptual abstractions (such as the homo economicus) that do not work in the real world. It is not accidental that economic models are frequently unable to provide reliable predictions. And it is not accidental that, according to Aristotle, political science cannot be practiced as episteme (a concept corresponding, more or less, to what we consider universal, abstract, scientific knowledge).

When Steven Pinker addresses the problem of climate change, he considers only the natural-science perspective. But climate crisis, in its totality, is not simply a phenomenon that can be isolated and studied within the boundaries of a laboratory experiment: its ramifications involve society, politics, power relations, energy sources and supplies, water and food supplies, migration, safety and security, urban planning, transports and so on. Here, we face one of the most misleading aspects of the problem: in its essence, climate change is indeed a natural-science issue that must be studied through the naturalist paradigm to be properly explained and predicted; but when it comes to consider how the world can respond to it in an effective manner, that paradigm becomes insufficient and needs to be integrated with constructivist inputs. A perfect example is represented by the political polarization surrounding climate change in the United States: the fact that the majority of Republicans are deniers while the majority of Democrats are on the side of science is not caused by the use of conflicting evidence; it is caused by different ways of framing the very same problem – in other words, by different social constructions of the same reality.

Unfortunately, that of Pinker is also the (losing) approach that has turned out to be dominant in the scientific and political world over the last three decades: trying to involve the lay public and fighting deniers with nothing more than scientific evidence. Deniers, properly rewarded by the fossil fuel industry, just needed to create stories more convincing than the plethora of scientific data produced by their adversaries. They bet on doubt (“it is not 100% sure”) as well as on credibility (“it is a global hoax perpetrated by greedy scientists”) and eventually won. Between a set of truthful but dreadful data and a convincing, comforting story, people will always buy the latter.

The Prophets of Doom
On an ideological level, Pinker appears to be quite rigid (and blind) in his positions – a “maximalist” advocate of the Enlightenment from whom one might expect an analytical discussion of the reasons that have led him to reject what he calls “regressive ideas” (just stating they are “regressive” is not really sufficient). As a matter of fact, Pinker does not offer a definition of the word “reason”, nor does he propose a clear description of the concept of Enlightenment. He is much more interested in showing the benefits of the progress that Enlightenment has made possible than in explaining why it is the latter to represent the primary cause of such progress – and, therefore, why it is worth claiming that the twenty-first century still needs to rely on enlightened principles.

When he addresses his adversaries – philosophers such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, Schmitt, Foucault, Adorno, Horkheimer, Schopenhauer, Sartre, Marcuse and Benjamin – Pinker labels all of them as “prophets of doom” (p. 39) but, instead of offering solid counter-arguments to back such claim, he just proposes brief, superficial and blunt judgements. Adorno and Horkheimer? They “proclaimed that ‘the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant”; Foucault? He “argued that the Holocaust was the inevitable culmination of a ‘bio-politics’ that began with the Enlightenment, when science and rational governance exerted increasing power over people’s lives” (pp. 396-397); Heidegger and Schmitt? They were “gung-ho Nazis and Hitler acolytes” (p. 447).

Is this the way in which an “enlightened” scientist should deal with great intellectuals holding different views of the world? A negative label and a sentence are sufficient to get rid of great thinkers that have deeply influenced modern and contemporary philosophy?
Just to offer a counter-example, Fleischacker (2013), a scholar very far from being an “enemy” of the Enlightenment, holds a very different view on Adorno and Horkheimer, who

were well aware that totalitarian states posed a far greater and more naked threat to humanities than liberal societies; Horkheimer, in particular, made that clear in a number of his writings (…). But they felt that these differences should not blind us to the fact that many of the dehumanizing tendencies at work in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia were alarmingly evident in American society as well, or to the degree to which the totalitarian states of the twentieth century embraced the same obsession with technology, and bureaucratic rationality, as their liberal opponents. (p. 107)

As for Foucault,

[his] real target is not Kant, but Kant’s maximalist heirs. It is the utopia of a perfectly rationalized world that he thinks has led to the stifling quality of the post-Enlightenment world (p. 117). I think he is more interested in waking us up from our dogmatic acceptance of such rosy views than in rejecting them entirely. (p.110)

Such evaluations can certainly be criticized, but sound much more reasonable, balanced and informed than those proposed by Pinker. The difference is that, while Fleischacker invites the reader to understand and explore in more depth what those thinkers were arguing, Pinker wants the reader to ignore them and to embrace without hesitation the astounding marvels of the Age of Reason. This is also proved by the fact that, even when Pinker approaches the Enlightenment itself, he ends up being incredibly superficial in his analysis. Since he wants to get rid of faith, dogma, revelation, authority, charisma, mysticism, divination, visions and gut feelings – which are just “generators of delusion” (p. 8) – he points out that the thinkers of the Age of Reason “saw an urgent need for a secular foundation for morality” (p. 10). True, but he forgets to explain that, by the middle of the eighteenth century, those thinkers found themselves in a theoretical cul-de-sac: the hard choice between “the inscrutable and the intolerable” (Hampson, 1968, p. 127) – or, in other words, between “total scepticism and its apparent opposite, total determinism, which appeared to be the only tenable position left to the rational man” (p. 124). The issue was never really solved: it was simply bypassed by relying on the individual conscience (as done by Rousseau and Kant) and/or on the optimistic assumption of a benevolent Providential order (see Mandeville, Montesquieu and the famous “invisible hand” of Adam Smith). Even the idea of progress, that Pinker relates to the Enlightenment in a direct, simplistic manner, was not uniformly and uncritically shared by all the philosophes, who actually held different views. As pointed out by Pollard (1968), Diderot “was certain of evolution, but no more than hopeful of future human progress” (p. 37); Montesquieu was mainly concerned with maintaining a satisfactory balance and postponing decline (Hampson, 1968); d’Holbach “seemed to envisage life as a perpetual flux rather than as evolution in any particular direction” (Hampson, 1968, p. 150); more in general, many French writers “were inclined to think that the way forward would also be the way down” because “the current age was regarded as a kind of culminating point” (p. 150). Why are these aspects completely overlooked by Pinker?

Advancing agendas is different from informing the public
I think that Enlightenment Now is much more about selling and advancing a think-tank liberal agenda than about proposing serious, solid arguments to reaffirm and adapt enlightened principles to the needs of our century. Incidentally, professor Pinker collaborates with the Breakthrough Institute, whose founding principles include the following:

• We believe that technology and modernization are at the foundation of human progress.
• We believe that human prosperity and an ecologically vibrant planet are not only possible, but also inseparable.
• We believe the market is a potent force for change, but that long-term government investment is required to accelerate technological progress, economic growth, and environmental quality.

In the Real World, such principles may unpleasantly collide with icebergs like climate change – what if we discover that human prosperity and an “ecologically vibrant planet” are not so “inseparable” as we expected? It is not therefore surprising to discover that, in a recent past, the Institute’s attitude towards climate crisis has been quite ambiguous, to say the least. As for Pinker, he may be fully sincere when acknowledging the gravity of climate change, but the way in which he frames the whole matter contributes to downplay it. The (purely ideological) frame he uses implies that the political, technological and economic paradigms and models on which progress has been founded over the last two centuries are part of the solution – and that there is no reason to question them. To Pinker, what we are witnessing right now is not the crisis of a paradigm (that of liberal and social democracy), but a clash between the progressive forces of Good represented by the Enlightenment and the regressive forces of Evil embodied by Trump. Much simpler to sell and much easier to accept, but quite far from reality.

If communism is dead, socialism is very sick and liberalism is not much better. As pointed out by the historian Yuval Noah Harari (2018), “the liberal elites, who dominated so much of the world in recent decades, have entered a state of shock and disorientation” (p. 5), and “liberalism has no obvious answers to the biggest problems we face: ecological collapse and technological disruption” (p. 16). It goes without saying that “[w]ithout criticising the liberal model, we cannot repair its faults or go beyond it” (Harari, 2018, p. xv): if Pinker reasoned as a scientist, he would be ready to analyze such faults. But, in this case, he would have written a very different book.

Means without ends
Pinker defines “humanism” as the “goal of maximizing human flourishing – life, health, happiness, freedom, knowledge, love, richness of experience” (p. 410). Such goal entails an idea of progress, embedded in economic development and prosperity, which is closer to the liberal optimism of the rising bourgeoisie of the nineteenth century than to the thought of the Enlightenment philosophers.
If there is a point about which Pinker is quite close to the latter, that is the incapacity of offering any meaningful answer to the nature of being. As Voltaire wrote in Philosophe ignorant (1766):

Who are you? Where do you come from? What are you doing? What will become of you? This is a question one must put to every creature in the universe, but none of them gives us any answer.

According to Pinker, one should live because “as a sentient being, you have the potential to flourish” (p. 3). The following questions should be: “Flourish to do or become what? Why is flourishing so important?” But these questions happen to be irrelevant, for the means is the end: you have to flourish in order to… flourish. Martin Heidegger had very solid reasons when, back in 1927, he decided to open his masterpiece, Being and Time, by posing some fundamental questions:

Do we in our time have an answer to the question of what we really mean by the word “being”? Not at all. So, it is fitting that we should raise anew the question of the meaning of Being. But are we nowadays even perplexed at our inability to understand the expression “Being”? Not at all.

If we really want to counter-balance the “regressive forces” that have led Trump and Bolsonaro to lead the US and Brazil, we should consider that simplistic, one-sided approaches like that of Pinker represent exactly what we must abandon, for it ends up nurturing (and strengthening) what it would pretend to defeat. For all their undeniable benefits, science, technology and economic development should never be accepted as absolute, not questionable values, but constantly challenged.
We do not need think-tank agendas to follow, as we do not need mainstream scientists using their fame to advance those agendas. We need instead to address critically and constantly questions such as: What do we want to be? Where are we going? Is this desirable? What should be done? Who really gains and who loses?

I cannot imagine a better way to end these reflections than reporting a recent comment by journalist and writer Bill McKibben. Steven Pinker would define him a “prophet of doom”. I think he is a wise man raising wise questions.

For the past few years, a tide of optimistic thinking has held that conditions for human beings around the globe have been improving. Wars are scarcer, poverty and hunger are less severe, and there are better prospects for wide-scale literacy and education. But there are newer signs that human progress has begun to flag. In the face of our environmental deterioration, it’s now reasonable to ask whether the human game has begun to falter—perhaps even to play itself out.

Post Scriptum. Obviously, mainstream media are in love with fairy tales told by best-selling authors.

Opening image: Hans Holbein the Younger, The Ambassadors (1533), oil on oak.

Readings
Fleischacker, S. (2013). What is Enlightenment?. London: Routledge.
Flyvbjerg, B. (2001). Making social science matter: Why social inquiry fails and how it can succeed again. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hampson, N. (1968). The Enlightenment. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Harari, Y. N. (2018). 21 lessons for the 21st century. London: Jonathan Cape.
Pollard, S. (1968). The idea of progress: History and society. London: Watts.