Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This book earns one or two stars at the most, and only that for the voluminous compilation of statistics which Pinker collects here in support of his primary thesis. Unfortunately this is about the only redeeming feature of the book. Steven Pinker may well believe that the world is improving. The world may in fact be improving. And I even agree with him that, on balance the transition from pre-modern to modern forms of living does count as a net improvement in the human condition. Why so down on the book then? Several reasons, and none of them trivial. I don't have much to say about Pinker's compiled data, which composes most of Part II. His thoughts on humanistic ethics, in Part III, demand a response. But as the majority of the final chapter (on humanist ethics) is concerned with the by now boring back-and-forth between mainly American evangelical Christians and so-called New Atheists. I'm happy to leave part II to the statisticians and leave Part III for the theologians -- although the concluding chapter is a mirror image of the errors Pinker makes in the opening chapters -- read on for more on that. My area of specialty is ethics and moral philosophy, the topics that form the first three chapters of the first part of the book. And here it is quite clear that Pinker has little familiarity with the thinkers and ideas that he discusses. Since his analysis of the philosophical concepts behind our present systems of moral beliefs and political institutions makes up the foundation of the book's thesis, a failure here cannot but ramify into more serious consequences down the line. I want this review to stay brief so I will limit this to a few egregious examples. In the first chapter, Pinker begins by telling us that figures as diverse as "Montesquieu, Hume, Smith, Kant, Nicolas de Condorcet, Denis Diderot, Jean-Baptiste d’Alembert, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Giambattista Vico" not only were in full agreement that there is "such a thing as universal human nature, and that it could be studied scientifically", but that they were "cognitive neuroscientists" and "evolutionary psychologists". (location 36.3 in the epub version) We could write this off as a simple rhetorical flourish -- surely he isn't *seriously* arguing that there were neuroscientists at a time when there was no real medical understanding of the brain, or evolutionary theorists a century before Darwin? But statements like this seem to be more than rhetorical flourishes: "They were cognitive neuroscientists, who tried to explain thought, emotion, and psychopathology in terms of physical mechanisms of the brain. They were evolutionary psychologists, who sought to characterize life in a state of nature and to identify the animal instincts that are “infused into our bosoms.”" (36.3) Never mind the dubious claim about "studying the physical mechanisms of the brain"; if you squint really hard and aren't too concerned about the details, you might get this out of Hobbes and other materialists. But Descartes? Locke? Hume? Kant? We can even skip past the study of life in nature and our animal instincts, a program that predates Darwin by at least a few thousand years. The problem with looking at "the Enlightenment" with 20/20 hindsight is that it leads to this careless lumping together of a wide variety of different thinkers, who all held in, in many cases, very different views about human nature and how to go about studying it. This carelessness pervades the entire book, and becomes especially egregious whenever Pinker has to discuss ethical ideas at any level beyond a crude boosterism for Reason and Science. It is worth noting at this early stage only because it will recur throughout the book. This anticipates one serious flaw in Chapter 3's discussion of the "Counter-Enlightenment", to point out one conspicous example. Most, if not everything on this list of the virtues of the Enlightenment can also be said about many of the Romantics, even though he takes them to task there. Moving on to the topic of humanism, where the ethical issues come to the fore, we find this odd claim: "The thinkers of the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment saw an urgent need for a secular foundation for morality" (37.4) Did they? I wonder who he means. Of all the well-known and lesser-known names around this era, in the countries of Northern Europe where Enlightenment thought took hold, only Hume stands out as an overt atheist among the moral philosophers. This is an interesting claim for two further reasons. One cannot readily speak of the Enlightenment nor the powers of reason without mentioning Immanuel Kant, whose influence on the ideals Pinker valorizes is even more profound than Hume's. Kant's three Critiques go into painstaking details about the nature and limits of human powers of reason. Famously, the second Critique's inquiry into the powers of pure practical reason -- the form of thinking which has questions of action -- *what ought I do?* -- as its aim -- leads Kant to argue that, while theoretical reasoning cannot make any pronouncements on the metaphysical concepts of God, free will, or the immortality of the soul, we cannot get by as morally rational agents without employing these concepts. Whatever else we can say about Kant, he was not after a secular morality. Throughout most of the book the ethical position he defends seems drawn straight from Hume and Smith, but he insists on assimilating "the Enlightenment" to this position. Consider this: "Whether it is framed as the goal of providing the greatest happiness for the greatest number or as a categorical imperative to treat people as ends rather than means, it was the universal capacity of a person to suffer and flourish, they said, that called on our moral concern." (37.4) No one who has read Kant could write this about the categorical imperative with a straight face. Kant certainly acknowledged that human beings have a capacity to suffer -- he was highly inspired by the moral sense theorists including Hume, Smith, Hutcheson, and Shaftesbury -- but he most certainly did not say that "the universal capacity of a person to suffer and flourish" is the basis of morality. This is just sloppy. It's the kind of mistake you wouldn't make after an undergraduate course on early-modern European philosophy or reading the preface to Kant's *Groundwork*. This is the kind of mistake you wouldn't make after skimming the Stanford Encylopedia article on Kant's moral theory. There's no excuse for it here. The comment about secular morality could point in a different direction, to the French thinkers like Voltaire. But that leads uncomfortably close to an inconvenient point for his thesis. It brings us around to Saint Simon and Helvetius, to the Jacobins, and to the revolutionaries in France -- all of whom were fanatical believers in the use of reason and science to improve the human condition. We do not need to venture into simplistic name-calling here, but it is no simple accident that social engineering in a broad scale, in the name of progress and improvement, has so reliably and routinely led to authoritarianism and bloodshed. Marx and Lenin were not the first to argue these ideas. (Isaiah Berlin's *Freedom and It's Betrayal* is a worthy read on this topic.) Pinker has a response ready for one version of this criticism. None of these thinkers were *really* interested in progress and certainly not working from a humanistic ethic. The perilous territory of No True Scotsman left aside for now, this is exactly the point: there is no simple way to distinguish humanistic ethical ideals as Pinker defines them -- the use of reason and scientific knowledge to improve human social affairs -- from the unexpected dysfunctional consequences of enacting those very changes in social life. It's as if I ask you to draw me a triangle but *not* a figure with three sides. So Pinker tells us that the "high modernism" of the 20th century was not a *true* humanism because it left behind the basic features of human nature, our "messy needs for beauty, nature, tradition, and social intimacy". (40.3) Fair enough point. But two problems quickly emerge. The first thing just repeats the earlier problem, Pinker's curious blindness to the origins of his own ideals. The second is not simple ignorance. Within the space of a few paragraphs Pinker (rightly) notes (i) that human beings have a range of needs, and a viable ethic ought to account for this. But he *also* says (ii) that human institutions "like governments, laws, schools, markets, and international bodies are a natural target for the application of reason to human betterment". But hang on a second. What if the human needs in (i) contradict or conflict with the ethical demands of these newly-organized insitutions in (ii), or with the kinds of social upheavals that will be required to bring them off? Pinker is in the camp that believes (ii) trumps (i) -- he wants to defend human needs, yes, but he also belives that they are the source of a primordial and tragic evil within us. He doesn't use the term "evil", precisely, but it is evident that he thinks humans without Reason and Science are little more than uncultured brutes, worthy of our sympathies if not our respect. The rational engineering of social life (ii) takes priority over the needs of human life (i). The primacy of (ii) is both a good in itself, delivering us from our brute nature and its provincialism, and the very thing that should *coerce* or even *change* human nature. Human nature is both the rational foundation for Pinker's humanist ethics *and at the same time* the playthings of reason and science. This is dangerous territory indeed; the fact that Pinker is, apparently, oblivious to this fact is only the beginning of a very slippery slope. Imagine telling a housefly that it could improve its fly-condition by walking on the ground and observing the acrobatics of a swallow, only to reiterate, in the very next sentence, that its fly-nature is the grounding of its powers of flight. Is fly-nature something valuable in itself, or is it only valuable for getting past itself and doing it more like the birds? And what if the swallow is hungry? It's not *exactly* a vicious circle, but it will only take a nudge to fall into contradiction. And, speaking historically, this is roughly the path that Reason's aim for perfection took to create so many horrors. ------ These are far from the only errors here -- this only takes us through some of the more conspicuous bumps on the road through the first chapter. Chapter 2 runs a rather bizarre line from the second law of thermodynamics through the tragic struggle revealed by evolutionary theory and somehow concludes that these, joined with information theory, provide the ultimate purposes of the cosmos and human life. No, he does not say how the "is" of the scientific description metamorphoses into the "ought" of *human* purposes. This is not to say that one could not make an argument for the reality of values, even as natural properties, but *that* argument looks very different than Pinker's superstitious fascination with entropy, evolution, and information. One is left with the very strong impression that these terms substitute for God in Pinker's world-view. Oh, he believes he is ruthlessly secular and naturalistic. The point is that the basic *structure* of his account, right down to his bewilderment in the face of the sublime facts revealed by science, remains virtually unchanged from what G.E.M. Anscombe once called the law conception of ethics. Thermodynamics and evolution and information science stand in for God at the top of the hierarchy, issuing forth edicts that command the human will -- and require no further explanation. Although he would doubtless bristle at the comparison, the fact that he doesn't seem to even *recognize* that that there is a serious and well-known problem in logically connecting factual descriptions to practical considerations and actions suggests that some heavy-duty handwaving is going on at this step in the argument. He doesn't seem to even realize that there is a question mark here, let alone one demanding an answer. Chapter 3 turns to the "Romantic" thinkers of the Counter-Enlightenment (RCE for short). This chapter deserves a treatment far larger than the entire review I've already written here. It will have to suffice to say that Pinker understands these figures even less than he understands "the Enlightenment". The chapter starts off by begging the question against the RCE, who become frightening boogeymen who for no reason at all hate science and reason and progress. The imagery of the forces of light standing against the darkness of barbarism does not help this impression. The dualism Pinker spies here is positively Manichean; it carries all the force of an ideologue's fanaticism, right down to the slanderous lack of charity extended to his opponents. One point that I wish I had space to expand on is the rather baffling inclusion of Rousseau here. Not only did Pinker list him among the Good Guys in Chapter 1 -- rightly, as Rousseau's influence on what we now call liberalism is well known -- but it is difficult to see how one could speak ill of Rousseau's concept of reason and freedom without also indicting those of Kant. And one who calls himself a fan of the Enlightenment just does not indict Kant on the matter of autonomy and reason. A more nuanced inquiry would recognize that there are important differences to draw here beyond the banal opposition between Reason and silly things you hoo-mans call "feelings". Pinker does not deign to give us this. Nor does he bother to do basic fact-checking, or at least pay his graduate students to do it right. If you want a sentimentalist polemic against "non reason" that will do little to convince a skeptic, or really do anything more than assure those who already Believe, then this is your book. Pinker spends serious time convincing his readers that human beings are irrational, egoistic, self-interested creatures who defend their tribe and throw rocks at the Other, making this the great irony of the book. Pinker may know this; I'm not sure if that makes it better or worse. If you want to understand what is truly valuable in the ideals of the Enlightenment and its legacy into our day, if you want to understand why these ideals have not lead to a world of roses and sunshine and singing like in that picture at the It's a Small World ride, if you want, in short, a serious inquiry into the history of modern moral and political ideals which can even embrace their faliings, you will have to look elsewhere.