resilience | It’s time to reclaim the mantle of “Progress” for progressives.
By falsely tethering the concept of progress to free market economics
and centrist values, Steven Pinker has tried to appropriate a great idea
for which he has no rightful claim.
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 elite this
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.
This discussion is particularly needed because progress is, in my
view, one of the most important concepts of our time. I see myself, in
common parlance, as a progressive. Progress is what I, and others I’m
close to, care about passionately. Rather than ceding this idea to the
coterie of neoliberal technocrats who constitute Pinker’s primary
audience, I believe we should hold it in our steady gaze, celebrate it
where it exists, understand its true causes, and most importantly,
ensure that it continues in a form that future generations on this earth
can enjoy. I hope this piece helps to do just that.
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