Friday, May 25, 2018

Jeremy Lent — Steven Pinker’s Ideas About Progress Are Fatally Flawed. These Eight Graphs Show Why.

In Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, published earlier this year, Steven Pinker argues that the human race has never had it so good as a result of values he attributes to the European Enlightenment of the 18th century. He berates those who focus on what is wrong with the world’s current condition as pessimists who only help to incite regressive reactionaries. Instead, he glorifies the dominant neoliberal, technocratic approach to solving the world’s problems as the only one that has worked in the past and will continue to lead humanity on its current triumphant path.
His book has incited strong reactions, both positive and negative. On one hand, Bill Gates has, for example, effervesced that “It’s my new favorite book of all time.” On the other hand, Pinker has been fiercely excoriated by a wide range of leading thinkers for writing a simplistic, incoherent paean to the dominant world order. John Gray, in the New Statesman, calls it “embarrassing” and “feeble”; David Bell, writing in The Nation, sees it as “a dogmatic book that offers an oversimplified, excessively optimistic vision of human history”; and George Monbiot, in The Guardian, laments the “poor scholarship” and “motivated reasoning” that “insults the Enlightenment principles he claims to defend.” (Full disclosure: Monbiot recommends my book, The Patterning Instinct, instead.)
In light of all this, you might ask, what is left to add? Having read his book carefully, I believe it’s crucially important to take Pinker to task for some dangerously erroneous arguments he makes. Pinker is, after all, an intellectual darling of the most powerful echelons of global society. He spoke to the world’s elitethis year at the World’s Economic Forum in Davos on the perils of what he calls “political correctness,” and has been named one of Time magazine’s “100 Most Influential People in the World Today.” Since his work offers an intellectual rationale for many in the elite to continue practices that imperil humanity, it needs to be met with a detailed and rigorous response.
Besides, I agree with much of what Pinker has to say. His book is stocked with seventy-five charts and graphs that provide incontrovertible evidence for centuries of progress on many fronts that should matter to all of us: an inexorable decline in violence of all sorts along with equally impressive increases in health, longevity, education, and human rights. It’s precisely because of the validity of much of Pinker’s narrative that the flaws in his argument are so dangerous. They’re concealed under such a smooth layer of data and eloquence that they need to be carefully unraveled. That’s why my response to Pinker is to meet him on his own turf: in each section, like him, I rest my case on hard data exemplified in a graph....
The big problem with the 18th century Enlightenment as a paradigm for the 21st century is that it is, well, 18th century. Most of the assumptions are unscientific and culture-bound. Somethings can be rescued from the past, but the past cannot be prolonged beyond its expiration date without deterioration.

Patterns of Meaning
Steven Pinker’s Ideas About Progress Are Fatally Flawed. These Eight Graphs Show Why.
Jeremy Lent |  founder of Liology Institute, author of The Patterning Instinct and Requiem of the Human Soul, and  founder of NextCard.


See also
"It's not 1997 anymore."
Stumbling and Mumbling
Corbyn: the heir to Blair
Chris Dillow | Investors Chronicle

8 comments:

Kaivey said...

When I first came across Steve Pinker years ago I never did like his theories. Too much genetic determinism.

Detroit Dan said...

I like Pinker -- a lot of who we are is built-in. But I agree with the criticism of this, his latest book.

Ryan Harris said...

Steven Pinker's world view antagonizes Tom Hickey's favored Russian dark world view on MNE.

Apocalyptic vs Golden Age

Extreme pessimism vs Naive Optimism.

It IS sort of amusing but Xi and Putin's narrative about how we need to abandon liberalism for enlightened technocratic authoritarianism isn't entirely inconsistent with Pinker. Pinker acknowledges that the masses simply fail to understand basic facts and lack perspective and understandings about the world. That misunderstanding leads to the Hickey premise that people need enlightened leadership to take the reigns.

Tom Hickey said...

That misunderstanding leads to the Hickey premise that people need enlightened leadership to take the reigns.

My premise is that the people need to be enlightened to take the reins and reign. However, the 18th century "Enlightenment" is an expression of bourgeois liberalism as to feudalism, where the reins are passed to the ownership class from the landlord class.

Add to this the 19th century view that conflates naturalism with materialism and elevates scientism and secular humanism as superior to theological dogmatism.

This world view is contra to perennial wisdom, which holds that a prerequisite for ideal society is enlightened governance and that governance is a reflection of the level of collective consciousness of the society.

Brian Romanchuk said...

Most of our material progress came courtesy of fossil fuels, either directly, or indirectly. (Try building a computer without materials mined using diesel-powered machinery.) One can argue that “Western civilisation” was structured to allow harnessing that energy.

We are now on the wrong side of depletion curves. Extrapolating past experience on “progress” is dangerous...

Tom Hickey said...

Most of our material progress came courtesy of fossil fuels, either directly, or indirectly.

Some hockey stick charts.

Global warming could have a bigger and quicker influence on fossil fuel use than depletion.

Ryan Harris said...
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Ryan Harris said...
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