Steven Pinker's technocratic liberalism has nothing to do with the radical spirit of the
          Enlightenment:
          
          Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now is a manual for liberal self-congratulation. This
          preening tome professes a pragmatic and quantitative approach to the world’s
          problems. For Pinker, modern capitalist democracy has basically gotten things
          right, and activism should at most consist of pushing for minor improvements,
          mitigating bad symptoms around the edges

Fluss, Harrison

Frim, Landon

PhilPapers

10/24/2018 Steven Pinker: False Friend of the Enlightenmenthttps://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/10/steven-pinker-enlightenment-now-review 1/8Steven Pinker: False Friend of theEnlightenmentBYLANDON FRIM / HARRISON FLUSSSteven Pinker's technocratic liberalism has nothing to do with the radical spirit of theEnlightenment.Review of Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, andProgress (Viking, 2018).Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now is a manual for liberal self-congratulation. Thispreening tome professes a pragmatic and quantitative approach to the world’sproblems. For Pinker, modern capitalist democracy has basically gotten thingsright, and activism should at most consist of pushing for minor improvements,mitigating bad symptoms around the edges.Systemic critique, ideologies, and “big ideas” are downright dangerous. Criticismof liberal capitalism is thus the provenance of hysterical populists on both the Leftand the Right. What “Marxist professors” and racist Trump supporters have incommon is that they just don’t know (or want to admit) how good they have it.10/24/2018 Steven Pinker: False Friend of the Enlightenmenthttps://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/10/steven-pinker-enlightenment-now-review 2/8Pinker is passionate in his tepidity, and contemptuous of anyone daring to criticizethe present world order.Superficially, Enlightenment Now is compelling to the fair-minded reader, as it ischock full of statistics and graphs ostensibly demonstrating the march of progresssince the Age of Reason. Liberals will applaud Pinker’s frequent praise of socialprograms and the welfare state as necessary supplements to the “free market.” Atthe same time, reading Pinker gives one a subtle but persistent feeling of nauseathat surfaces every time he excoriates “social justice warriors” or cites capitalistfundamentalists like Friedrich von Hayek.The Enlightenment is shorn of its most egalitarian and democratic elements — itno longer resembles the intellectual ferment of the French Revolution. Instead,Pinker’s “Enlightenment” mimics the hierarchy, conservatism, andauthoritarianism of the ancien régime — that historical enemy of RadicalEnlightenment.But this muddying of the ideological waters is part of Pinker’s deliberate strategy.Even when he covers historical figures, he makes a point of throwing togetherradical rationalists like Baruch Spinoza alongside classical conservatives likeEdmund Burke. The ideologies of these figures are thus blunted, confused, andmade absolutely malleable in his hands. Pinker does not so much celebrateEnlightenment Reason as repackage it for his neoliberal agenda. He limits reason tomake room for the market.Pinker’s WorldviewThe hero of Pinker’s tale is the human subject — but only certain human subjects.These are the scientist and educator, but all the more importantly, the quantitative10/24/2018 Steven Pinker: False Friend of the Enlightenmenthttps://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/10/steven-pinker-enlightenment-now-review 3/8analyst, the entrepreneur, and the pro-market politician. No wonder the dustjacket of Enlightenment Now boasts that it is Bill Gates’s “new favorite book of alltime.” Pinker’s heroes are the creators, the music-makers, or (to continue quotingthat other magnate, Willy Wonka), the “dreamers of dreams.”What Pinker valorizes is the heroic creation of businesses, markets, ideas, andinformation as against a universe that tends towards blandness, sameness, and“uninteresting” monotony. These creative-types are valuable precisely in theirstruggle against a world which is hostile, or at least indi erent, to human needs andflourishing. This is the sense in which Pinker is, surprisingly to most, a sort ofpessimist.It is human e ort and will that must create their own salvation against the direbackdrop of cosmic meaninglessness. Pinker is a cheerleader for science andtechnology. He opposes the irrationalism of the eco-pessimist, and their desire toprostrate themselves before Gaia.Pinker’s fundamental, guiding principle is that of “entropy.” Borrowed from thesecond law of thermodynamics, entropy is the idea that in closed systems thingsbecome less ordered and more chaotic over time. Human organization and cultureare thus a Sisyphean battle, where human e ort hits up against the unyieldinggravity of existence. Here, the values are inverted, and instead of bemoaning thatpeople are killing Mother Earth, Earth is trying desperately to kill us. He meansthis in a deep way — not a fear of the Earth’s ecosystem, but a metaphysical dreadof the universe itself.A cognitive psychologist, Pinker is fond of importing scientific concepts in order tobolster his political arguments. In this case, Pinker employs an accepted law ofphysics and proceeds to wildly elevate it to a metaphysical first principle — and,more bizarrely, makes it the cornerstone of his politics. Not only are closed,physical systems entropic, but so is existence itself, including the human condition.10/24/2018 Steven Pinker: False Friend of the Enlightenmenthttps://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/10/steven-pinker-enlightenment-now-review 4/8In Pinker’s estimation, Being-as-such tends toward chaos and disorder. His view ofthe universe is no less “fallen” than that of the most disenchanted existentialist orreligious penitent. The result of all this is that human endeavor must be conceivedas essentially “heroic.” We are always fighting against the encroaching night of ahostile universe. “Enlightenment” is thus almost a literal word for Pinker, and isequated with the search for (or creation of) information.That this is indeed Pinker’s viewpoint is demonstrated by his statements onpoverty, war, and human ignorance. For example, Pinker maintains that povertyneeds no explanation at all. It is the natural (entropic) state of things. We are bornpoor, dumb, and violent, and it is only through great e ort — e ort that runsagainst the grain of nature itself — that we can hope, however tentatively, toemerge from this fallen first position.Politically, this has pernicious implications. Pinker, for instance, is quite explicitthat we needn’t blame anyone for the inequality that marks our economic andfinancial lives. Again, it’s merely “natural.” Neither should we aim for equality as aprimary good. Pinker’s law of entropy, after all, identifies absolute equality with asort of “heat death” in which variation and interesting organization evens out into agray, bland, nothingness.Pinker is eager to explain why he thinks that inequality is not harmful in itself, butrather an occasional cause of subjective unhappiness at worst. In any case, hispolitical program is clear: Marxism, socialism, and indeed any form ofegalitarianism are ultimately equated with the heat-death of society, and so thesecount as existential threats to civilization.Human beings are therefore both the heroes and villains of Pinker’s story. Goodpeople humbly face an entropic and fallen universe, and try their best topragmatically improve their chaotic circumstances. Bad and dangerous people tryto understand the Whole — they develop ideologies and metaphysics, what Pinkerderides as “Big Ideas.” These bad people, drunk on their own hubris, next search10/24/2018 Steven Pinker: False Friend of the Enlightenmenthttps://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/10/steven-pinker-enlightenment-now-review 5/8for ultimate “root causes” for society’s ills, rather than doing the sensible thing andmerely treating symptoms as they pop up.The “Social Justice Warrior” is therefore not merely a hysterical complainer, forPinker, but is afflicted with the mortal sin of pride. They zealously want to makeHeaven on Earth, and in doing so risk “megadeath revolutions,” gulags, andreeducation camps as necessary expedients for their moral crusades. At the veryleast, these SJWs constantly piss o  good, humble, salt-of-the-earth folk with theirmoralistic protestations. They throw elections to right-wing populists and breedlongstanding resentments and social division.For all of Pinker’s assertion that “ideas matter,” he also thinks it far better that suchsocially conscious activists just shut up. After all, in his view, the irresistible tide ofmarket-driven progress will expand social investment, increase literacy, andeliminate homophobia, racism, and sexism automatically. Never mind the pivotalrole played by such “infantile SJW initiatives” as the Civil Rights Movement,feminist movements, anti-apartheid struggles, and campaigns for workers’ rights.Pinker’s resistance to thinking about “root causes” is essential to his anti-Marxism.Central to Marxist economics is the insight that inequality is not the result ofmaldistribution of wealth, but rather occurs at the point of production. It is the veryfact of making things for a profit that requires workers to be underpaid for theirlabor — otherwise, there would be no profit to be had for the capitalist.This situation is what breeds massive stratification and inequality today. There arethe exploiters and the exploited — those who extract the labor of others for profit,and those who own no capital themselves, and so must sell their labor for less thanit’s worth. So it is not a question of rich versus poor (the “symptom”) so much as afundamental question of exploitation itself (the “root cause”).Pinker will have none of this. Stubborn in his belief that we are all just individuals,he derides class consciousness as just another form of tribalism, no di erent fromethnic, racial, or religious chauvinism. Allegiance to the proletariat is simply a form10/24/2018 Steven Pinker: False Friend of the Enlightenmenthttps://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/10/steven-pinker-enlightenment-now-review 6/8of bad faith, where a person resigns their individuality to become part of what hecalls a “superorganism.” This is to echo Margaret Thatcher’s dictum that “there’sno such thing as society.” Despite eschewing libertarian excesses, Pinker followsthe Austrian School of Economics’ criticism of socialism faithfully.Pinker wants to see the world as it really is, apart from any meta-narratives or grandideologies. But from the beginning, this is a doomed project. Humans are notoptical scanners that passively take in isolated data points; we necessarily narrateour perceptions into some intelligible worldview. So the question is not whether todo metaphysics — to develop some narrative to explain the world — but onlywhether our metaphysics is any good, and can be sufficiently argued for. Whilecriticizing Big Ideas, Pinker’s work is nonetheless shot through with a number of apriori assumptions of his own. “Fallenness” and “Heroism” are interlockingmystical principles that cannot be derived from quantitative analysis.The best we can do, according to Pinker, is to put our blind faith into the equallyblind mechanisms of the marketplace; for they determine, better than the humanintellect ever could, the proper price of things, what sort of labor is valuable, whatsort of education is necessary, and what sorts of commodities should be produced,and for whom.This faith in exchange mechanisms is supplemented by an equally blind faith inelites. For in Pinker’s mythology, the market does not work entirely on its own, butmust be constantly revitalized by any number of creative gods. Without the sparksof genius from a Peter Thiel or an Elon Musk, exchange could not occur because novalue would be created. Value, here, is not the product of common e ort, but ratherindividual inspiration, vision, and will.Pinker and Peterson10/24/2018 Steven Pinker: False Friend of the Enlightenmenthttps://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/10/steven-pinker-enlightenment-now-review 7/8If Pinker sounds more like a romantic Existentialist than an Enlightenmentthinker, this is no coincidence. His book has sparked enthusiasm from anotherascendant public intellectual, Jordan Peterson. Peterson, who courts controversyfar more openly, sees his colleague’s book as performing the same basic function ashis own bestseller, 12 Rules for Life; namely, it is an “antidote to chaos.”It’s telling that a Nietzschean conservative like Peterson would have such an easytime praising a seemingly wishy-washy, quant-liberal like Pinker. What they shareis a fundamental rejection of activist politics and the worldview of resentment thatthey see underwriting it. What they share too is high praise for humility, and aconstant invocation of human limits — both epistemic and moral.But this odd bromance is more than a one-o  peculiarity. It is indicative of a long-standing tendency of liberals and authoritarian reactionaries to embrace oneanother in times of political upheaval. Pinker voices the standard liberalreservations about Peterson, especially his faith-based philosophy and anti-humanism. At the same time, he is quick to defend Peterson against critics on theLeft. What they share is a primal fear, not of elitist hierarchy, but instead of rabidpopulism from below.To stave o  this zombie apocalypse, Pinker — and many other centrist liberals —will be willing to reach across the aisle and form alliances with the right wing.“Bipartisanship,” and a valorization of individualism and humility, are made theenemies of mass democratic politics.But the center cannot hold on its own, and necessarily gives ground to the Right.For on the entropic, fallen worldview, order must be created ex nihilo. Pinker’stechnocratic liberalism is inadequate to this task; this is a premodern, even mysticala air. For the creation of values, what is required is some transcendent authority, alaw-giving Father to rule and to judge us. The liberal will tell us that the self-organization of the masses is both futile and dangerous. But this is merely a10/24/2018 Steven Pinker: False Friend of the Enlightenmenthttps://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/10/steven-pinker-enlightenment-now-review 8/8negative warning. The reactionary will positively insist that the masses must beruled with a firm hand, and that hierarchy is a good in itself.The liberal-bourgeois conceives a monarchy without a monarch — the need forauthority without the final answer as to who that authority will be. Their NewAtheist–style agnosticism prevents them from venturing any particular answer. Inthis vacuum of indecision, the reactionary steps up with a definitive answer of theirown and picks up the crown.ABOUT THE AUTHORLandon Frim is assistant professor of philosophy at St. Joseph’s College-New York.Harrison Fluss is a corresponding editor with Historical Materialism and a lecturer in philosophy at St. John's University andManhattan CollegeFILED UNDERIDEOLOGY / SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY  / BOOKSTECHNOCRACY / SCIENCE / IDEOLOGY / ENLIGHTENMENT

Steven Pinker: False Friend of the Enlightenment

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Steven Pinker: False Friend of the Enlightenment

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