As I write this, I’m reading Stephen Pinker’s Enlightenment Now. I’ve read at least five of his previous books. I’ve always found his work thought provoking, and this one is too. I recommend it, with a major caveat.
The basic theme of the book is that we need to return to Enlightenment values; that the Enlightenment thinkers had it right, that we have, in fact, progressed remarkably even in the past few years, and that our general discourse is far too pessimistic. He maintains that in spite of that sort of general pessimism, we can solve our problems, and, in fact, some of them are being solved right in front of our faces, but we’re just not aware of it.
In fact, if we assume his basic facts are correct (and they seem well documented), the world as a whole has, indeed, progressed. Extreme poverty is down, as is famine, infant mortality, child abuse, war, violence etc. Diseases that have killed millions in the past have been eradicated. He’s quite right that these developments don’t get headlines, primarily because they don’t happen all at once, but gradually evolve in the background.
The caveat has to do with the fact that the book is infested with a depressing both siderismthat I would maintain is not something that truly exists in the world out there. He spends a lot of time debunking both the “extreme left” and the “extreme right”, never acknowledging that when it comes to the left, there’s not much bunking going on. The discussion of climate change is a good example. According to Pinker, the extreme left is dominated by a movement dedicated to solving the climate crisis by, basically, pushing us back to the Middle Ages. According to him, progressives, who once championed rural electrification and economic development are now advocating for impoverishing rich nations by, for example, switching back to “labor intensive agriculture”. I would challenge him to name a single self identified progressive politician who would take that position. He also cites the fact that whackjob Naomi Klein, who we are to take as an exemplar of the left, teamed up with the (um..right wing) Koch Brothers to defeat a ballot initiative in Washington State that would have imposed a carbon tax in that state. He fails to mention that the proposal itself was a creature of the political left, for this hyper-sane idea is anethema to the right, as the Koch involvement shows.
There are some movements that are simply not situated anywhere on the political spectrum, and back to nature, rejection of technology type thinking is one of them, just like the vaccination causes autismdelusion. The actual political left is really quite comfortable with trying to use technology to deal with climate change, though it (along with others all over the spectrum) may be a bit uncomfortable with some of the technological solutions advanced by Pinker. He makes a strong case for nuclear power as a key ingredient in fighting climate change, and he may well be right. But at the moment, there isn’t much support in this country for nuclear power anywhere on the political spectrum, since the Koch Brothers sell oil, so that’s not a left-right issue at the moment either. In any event, it’s those of us on the left that are pumping for technologies such as solar, while those in the right are trying to quash them.
False equivalency rears its head when a tiny cadre of environmental extremists are contrasted with the huge numbers of the political right. I could easily compile a list of a hundred members of Congress who are climate deniers, and all of them would be Republicans. The head of NASA, also a Republican, is a climate denier. The person who occupies the position of President of the United States is a climate denier. Climate deniers have their own television network. It is simply a distraction to compare some fringe people hardly anyone has heard of to the right wing political machine.
I’ve focused on the climate change argument, but the book as a whole suffers from this defect. It’s the same “both siderism” to which our media is still wedded, despite the massive evidence that there is only one side that is truly wreaking havoc.
Nonetheless, the book is well worth reading. It is important that we be aware of the broader currents of progress that are indeed out there, and remember that the core Enlightenment values of, as Pinker puts them, “Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress” are as pertinent today as they were in the days of Jefferson, Franklin, and Hamilton, et. al. It helps to be reminded that progress is not only possible, but happening. We on the left, who never abandoned the Enlightenment, welcome Pinker to the ranks of those who think continued progress is both possible and desirable.
