* * *
Lest you have lost the trail that connects this intellectual history to current events, bear in mind that in 2017 Trump decided to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate accord under pressure from Bannon, who convinced him that cooperating with other nations is a sign of surrender in the global contest for greatness.125 (Trump’s hostility to immigration and trade grew from the same roots.) With the stakes this high, it’s good to remind ourselves why the case for neo-theo-reactionary-populist nationalism is intellectually bankrupt. I have already discussed the absurdity of seeking a foundation for morality in the institutions that brought us the Crusades, the Inquisition, the witch hunts, and the European wars of religion. The idea that the global order should consist of ethnically homogeneous and mutually antagonistic nation-states is just as ludicrous.
First, the claim that humans have an innate imperative to identify with a nation-state (with the implication that cosmopolitanism goes against human nature) is bad evolutionary psychology. Like the supposed innate imperative to belong to a religion, it confuses a vulnerability with a need. People undoubtedly feel solidarity with their tribe, but whatever intuition of “tribe” we are born with cannot be a nation-state, which is a historical artifact of the 1648 Treaties of Westphalia. (Nor could it be a race, since our evolutionary ancestors seldom met a person of another race.) In reality, the cognitive category of a tribe, in-group, or coalition is abstract and multidimensional.126 People see themselves as belonging to many overlapping tribes: their clan, hometown, native country, adopted country, religion, ethnic group, alma mater, fraternity or sorority, political party, employer, service organization, sports team, even brand of camera equipment. (If you want to see tribalism at its fiercest, check out a “Nikon vs. Canon” Internet discussion group.)
It’s true that political salesmen can market a mythology and iconography that entice people into privileging a religion, ethnicity, or nation as their fundamental identity. With the right package of indoctrination and coercion, they can even turn them into cannon fodder.127 That does not mean that nationalism is a human drive. Nothing in human nature prevents a person from being a proud Frenchman, European, and citizen of the world, all at the same time.128
The claim that ethnic uniformity leads to cultural excellence is as wrong as an idea can be. There’s a reason we refer to unsophisticated things as provincial, parochial, and insular and to sophisticated ones as urbane and cosmopolitan. No one is brilliant enough to dream up anything of value all by himself. Individuals and cultures of genius are aggregators, appropriators, greatest-hit collectors. Vibrant cultures sit in vast catchment areas in which people and innovations flow from far and wide. This explains why Eurasia, rather than Australia, Africa, or the Americas, was the first continent to give birth to expansive civilizations (as documented by Sowell in his Culture trilogy and Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel).129 It explains why the fountains of culture have always been trading cities on major crossroads and waterways.130 And it explains why human beings have always been peripatetic, moving to wherever they can make the best lives. Roots are for trees; people have feet.
Finally, let’s not forget why international institutions and global consciousness arose in the first place. Between 1803 and 1945, the world tried an international order based on nation-states heroically struggling for greatness. It didn’t turn out so well. It’s particularly wrongheaded for the reactionary right to use frantic warnings about an Islamist “war” against the West (with a death toll in the hundreds) as a reason to return to an international order in which the West repeatedly fought wars against itself (with death tolls in the tens of millions). After 1945 the world’s leaders said, “Well, let’s not do that again,” and began to downplay nationalism in favor of universal human rights, international laws, and transnational organizations. The result, as we saw in chapter 11, has been seventy years of peace and prosperity in Europe and, increasingly, the rest of the world.
As for the lamentation among editorialists that the Enlightenment is a “brief interlude,” that epitaph is likelier to mark the resting place of neo-fascism, neo-reaction, and related backlashes of the early 21st century. The European elections and self-destructive flailing of the Trump administration in 2017 suggest that the world may have reached Peak Populism, and as we saw in chapter 20, the movement is on a demographic road to nowhere. Headlines notwithstanding, the numbers show that democracy (chapter 14) and liberal values (chapter 15) are riding a long-term escalator that is unlikely to go into reverse overnight. The advantages of cosmopolitanism and international cooperation cannot be denied for long in a world in which the flow of people and ideas is unstoppable.
* * *
Though the moral and intellectual case for humanism is, I believe, overwhelming, some might wonder whether it is any match for religion, nationalism, and romantic heroism in the campaign for people’s hearts. Will the Enlightenment ultimately fail because it cannot speak to primal human needs? Should humanists hold revival meetings at which preachers thump Spinoza’s Ethics on the pulpit and ecstatic congregants roll back their eyes and babble in Esperanto? Should they stage rallies in which young men in colored shirts salute giant posters of John Stuart Mill? I think not; recall that a vulnerability is not the same as a need. The citizens of Denmark, New Zealand, and other happy parts of the world get by perfectly well without these paroxysms. The bounty of a cosmopolitan secular democracy is there for everyone to see.
Still, the appeal of regressive ideas is perennial, and the case for reason, science, humanism, and progress always has to be made. When we fail to acknowledge our hard-won progress, we may come to believe that perfect order and universal prosperity are the natural state of affairs, and that every problem is an outrage that calls for blaming evildoers, wrecking institutions, and empowering a leader who will restore the country to its rightful greatness. I have made my own best case for progress and the ideals that made it possible, and have dropped hints on how journalists, intellectuals, and other thoughtful people (including the readers of this book) might avoid contributing to the widespread heedlessness of the gifts of the Enlightenment.
Remember your math: an anecdote is not a trend. Remember your history: the fact that something is bad today doesn’t mean it was better in the past. Remember your philosophy: one cannot reason that there’s no such thing as reason, or that something is true or good because God said it is. And remember your psychology: much of what we know isn’t so, especially when our comrades know it too.
Keep some perspective. Not every problem is a Crisis, Plague, Epidemic, or Existential Threat, and not every change is the End of This, the Death of That, or the Dawn of a Post-Something Era. Don’t confuse pessimism with profundity: problems are inevitable, but problems are solvable, and diagnosing every setback as a symptom of a sick society is a cheap grab for gravitas. Finally, drop the Nietzsche. His ideas may seem edgy, authentic, baaad, while humanism seems sappy, unhip, uncool. But what’s so funny about peace, love, and understanding?
The case for Enlightenment Now is not just a matter of debunking fallacies or disseminating data. It may be cast as a stirring narrative, and I hope that people with more artistic flair and rhetorical power than I can tell it better and spread it farther. The story of human progress is truly heroic. It is glorious. It is uplifting. It is even, I daresay, spiritual. It goes something like this.
We are born into a pitiless universe, facing steep odds against life-enabling order and in constant jeopardy of falling apart. We were shaped by a force that is ruthlessly competitive. We are made from crooked timber, vulnerable to illusions, self-centeredness, and at times astounding stupidity.
Yet human nature has also been blessed with resources that open a space for a kind of redemption. We are endowed with the power to combine ideas recursively, to have thoughts about our thoughts. We have an instinct for language, allowing us to share the fruits of our experience and ingenuity. We are deepened wi
th the capacity for sympathy—for pity, imagination, compassion, commiseration.
These endowments have found ways to magnify their own power. The scope of language has been augmented by the written, printed, and electronic word. Our circle of sympathy has been expanded by history, journalism, and the narrative arts. And our puny rational faculties have been multiplied by the norms and institutions of reason: intellectual curiosity, open debate, skepticism of authority and dogma, and the burden of proof to verify ideas by confronting them against reality.
As the spiral of recursive improvement gathers momentum, we eke out victories against the forces that grind us down, not least the darker parts of our own nature. We penetrate the mysteries of the cosmos, including life and mind. We live longer, suffer less, learn more, get smarter, and enjoy more small pleasures and rich experiences. Fewer of us are killed, assaulted, enslaved, oppressed, or exploited by the others. From a few oases, the territories with peace and prosperity are growing, and could someday encompass the globe. Much suffering remains, and tremendous peril. But ideas on how to reduce them have been voiced, and an infinite number of others are yet to be conceived.
We will never have a perfect world, and it would be dangerous to seek one. But there is no limit to the betterments we can attain if we continue to apply knowledge to enhance human flourishing.
This heroic story is not just another myth. Myths are fictions, but this one is true—true to the best of our knowledge, which is the only truth we can have. We believe it because we have reasons to believe it. As we learn more, we can show which parts of the story continue to be true, and which ones false—as any of them might be, and any could become.
And the story belongs not to any tribe but to all of humanity—to any sentient creature with the power of reason and the urge to persist in its being. For it requires only the convictions that life is better than death, health is better than sickness, abundance is better than want, freedom is better than coercion, happiness is better than suffering, and knowledge is better than superstition and ignorance.
NOTES
PREFACE
1. “Mothers and children” from Donald Trump’s inaugural speech, Jan. 20, 2017, https://www.whitehouse.gov/inaugural-address. “Outright war” and “spiritual and moral foundations” from Trump chief strategist Stephen Bannon’s remarks to a Vatican conference in the summer of 2014, transcribed in J. L. Feder, “This Is How Steve Bannon Sees the Entire World,” BuzzFeed, Nov. 16, 2016, https://www.buzzfeed.com/lesterfeder/this-is-how-steve-bannon-sees-the-entire-world. “Global power structure” from “Donald Trump’s Argument for America,” final television campaign ad, Nov. 2016, http://blog.4president.org/2016/2016-tv-ad/. Bannon is commonly credited with authoring or coauthoring all three.
2. CUDOS: Merton 1942/1973 called his first virtue “communism,” though it is often quoted as “communalism” to distinguish it from Marxism.
PART I: ENLIGHTENMENT
1. S. Maher, “Inside the Mind of an Extremist,” presentation at the Oslo Freedom Forum, May 26, 2015, https://oslofreedomforum.com/talks/inside-the-mind-of-an-extremist.
2. From Hayek 1960/2011, p. 47; see also Wilkinson 2016a.
CHAPTER 1: DARE TO UNDERSTAND!
1. What Is Enlightenment? Kant 1784/1991.
2. The quotations are blended and condensed from translations by H. B. Nisbet, Kant 1784/1991, and by Mary C. Smith, http://www.columbia.edu/acis/ets/CCREAD/etscc/kant.html.
3. The Beginning of Infinity: Deutsch 2011, pp. 221–22.
4. The Enlightenment: Goldstein 2006; Gottlieb 2016; Grayling 2007; Hunt 2007; Israel 2001; Makari 2015; Montgomery & Chirot 2015; Pagden 2013; Porter 2000.
5. The nonnegotiability of reason: Nagel 1997; see also chapter 21.
6. Most Enlightenment thinkers were non-theists: Pagden 2013, p. 98.
7. Wootton 2015, pp. 6–7.
8. Scott 2010, pp. 20–21.
9. Enlightenment thinkers as scientists of human nature: Kitcher 1990; Macnamara 1999; Makari 2015; Montgomery & Chirot 2015; Pagden 2013; Stevenson & Haberman 1998.
10. Expanding circle of sympathy: Nagel 1970; Pinker 2011; Shermer 2015; Singer 1981/2010.
11. Cosmopolitanism: Appiah 2006; Pagden 2013; Pinker 2011.
12. Humanitarian Revolution: Hunt 2007; Pinker 2011.
13. Progress as a mystical force: Berlin 1979; Nisbet 1980/2009.
14. Authoritarian High Modernism: Scott 1998.
15. Authoritarian High Modernism and blank-slate psychology: Pinker 2002/2016, pp. 170–71, 409–11.
16. Quotes from Le Corbusier, from Scott 1998, pp. 114–15.
17. Rethinking punishment: Hunt 2007.
18. Wealth creation: Montgomery & Chirot 2015; Ridley 2010; Smith 1776/2009.
19. Gentle commerce: Mueller 1999, 2010b; Pagden 2013; Pinker 2011; Schneider & Gleditsch 2010.
20. Perpetual Peace: Kant 1795/1983. Modern interpretation: Russett & Oneal 2001.
CHAPTER 2: ENTRO, EVO, INFO
1. Second Law of Thermodynamics: Atkins 2007; Carroll 2016; Hidalgo 2015; Lane 2015.
2. Eddington 1928/2015.
3. The two cultures and the Second Law: Snow 1959/1998, pp. 14–15.
4. Second Law of Thermo = First law of psycho: Tooby, Cosmides, & Barrett 2003.
5. Self-organization: England 2015; Gell-Mann 1994; Hidalgo 2015; Lane 2015.
6. Evolution versus entropy: Dawkins 1983, 1986; Lane 2015; Tooby, Cosmides, & Barrett 2003.
7. Spinoza: Goldstein 2006.
8. Information: Adriaans 2013; Dretske 1981; Gleick 2011; Hidalgo 2015.
9. Information is a decrease in entropy, not entropy itself: https://schneider.ncifcrf.gov/information.is.not.uncertainty.html.
10. Transmitted information as knowledge: Adriaans 2013; Dretske 1981; Fodor 1987, 1994.
11. “The universe is made of matter, energy, and information”: Hidalgo 2015, p. ix; see also Lloyd 2006.
12. Neural computation: Anderson 2007; Pinker 1997/2009, chap. 2.
13. Knowledge, information, and inferential roles: Block 1986; Fodor 1987, 1994.
14. The cognitive niche: Marlowe 2010; Pinker 1997/2009; Tooby & DeVore 1987; Wrangham 2009.
15. Language: Pinker 1994/2007.
16. Hadza menu: Marlowe 2010.
17. Axial Age: Goldstein 2013.
18. Explaining the Axial Age: Baumard et al. 2015.
19. From The Threepenny Opera, act II, scene 1.
20. Clockwork universe: Carroll 2016; Wootton 2015.
21. Innate illiteracy and innumeracy: Carey 2009; Wolf 2007.
22. Magical thinking, essences, word magic: Oesterdiekhoff 2015; Pinker 1997/2009, chaps. 5 and 6; Pinker 2007a, chap. 7.
23. Bugs in statistical reasoning: Ariely 2010; Gigerenzer 2015; Kahneman 2011; Pinker 1997/2009, chap. 5; Sutherland 1992.
24. Intuitive lawyers and politicians: Kahan, Jenkins-Smith, & Braman 2011; Kahan, Peters, et al. 2013; Kahan, Wittlin, et al. 2011; Mercier & Sperber 2011; Tetlock 2002.
25. Overconfidence: Johnson 2004. Overconfidence in understanding: Sloman & Fernbach 2017.
26. Bugs in the moral sense: Greene 2013; Haidt 2012; Pinker 2008a.
27. Morality as a condemnation device: DeScioli & Kurzban 2009; DeScioli 2016.
28. Virtuous violence: Fiske & Rai 2015; Pinker 2011, chaps. 8 and 9.
29. Transcending cognitive limitations through abstraction and combination: Pinker 2007a, 2010.
30. Letter to Isaac McPherson, Writings 13:333–35, quoted in Ridley 2010, p. 247.
31. Collective rationality: Haidt 2012; Mercier & Sperber 2011.
32. Cooperation and the interchangeability of perspectives: Nagel 1970; Pinker 2011; Singer 1981/2010.
CHAPTER 3: COUNTER-ENLIGHTENMENTS
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1. Declining trust in institutions: Twenge, Campbell, & Carter 2014. Mueller 1999, pp. 167–68, points out that the 1960s were a high-water mark for trust in institutions, unsurpassed before or after. Declining trust in science among conservatives: Gauchat 2012. Populism: Inglehart & Norris 2016; J. Müller 2016; Norris & Inglehart 2016; see also chapters 20 and 23.
2. Non-Western enlightenments: Conrad 2012; Kurlansky 2006; Pelham 2016; Sen 2005; Sikkink 2017.
3. Counter-Enlightenments: Berlin 1979; Garrard 2006; Herman 1997; Howard 2001; McMahon 2001; Sternhell 2010; Wolin 2004; see also chapter 23.
4. Inscription in John Singer Sargent’s 1922 painting Death and Victory, Widener Library, Harvard University.
5. Irreligious defenders of religion: Coyne 2015; see also chapter 23.
6. Ecomodernism: Asafu-Adjaye et al. 2015; Ausubel 1996, 2015; Brand 2009; DeFries 2014; Nordhaus & Shellenberger 2007; see also chapter 10.
7. Problems with ideology: Duarte et al. 2015; Haidt 2012; Kahan, Jenkins-Smith, & Braman 2011; Mercier & Sperber 2011; Tetlock & Gardner 2015; and see much more in chapter 21.
8. An adaptation of a quotation by Michael Lind on the back cover of Herman 1997. See also Nisbet 1980/2009.
9. Eco-pessimism: Bailey 2015; Brand 2009; Herman 1997; Ridley 2010; see also chapter 10.
10. A pastiche by the literary historian Hoxie Neale Fairchild of phrases from T. S. Eliot, William Burroughs, and Samuel Beckett, from Religious Trends in English Poetry, quoted in Nisbet 1980/2009, p. 328.