Enlightenment Now

  11. On the numbering of the Two Cultures, see chapter 3, note 12.

  12. D. Linker, “Review of Christopher Hitchens’s ‘And Yet . . .’ and Roger Scruton’s ‘Fools, Frauds and Firebrands,’” New York Times Book Review, Jan. 8, 2016.

  13. Snow introduced the term “Third Culture” in a postscript to The Two Cultures called “A Second Look.” He was vague about who he had in mind, referring to them as “social historians,” by which he seems to have meant social scientists; Snow 1959/1998, pp. 70, 80.

  14. Revival of “Third Culture”: Brockman 1991. Consilience: Wilson 1998.

  15. L. Wieseltier, “Crimes Against Humanities,” New Republic, Sept. 3, 2013.

  16. Hume as cognitive psychologist: See the references in Pinker 2007a, chap. 4. Kant as cognitive psychologist: Kitcher 1990.

  17. The definition is from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Papineau 2015, which adds, “The great majority of contemporary philosophers would accept naturalism as just characterized.” In a survey of 931 philosophy professors (mainly analytic/Anglo-American), 50 percent endorsed “naturalism,” 26 percent endorsed “non-naturalism,” and 24 percent indicated “other,” including “The question is too unclear to answer” (10 percent), “Insufficiently familiar with the issue” (7 percent), and “Agnostic/undecided” (3 percent); Bourget & Chalmers 2014.

  18. No “scientific method”: Popper 1983.

  19. Falsificationism versus Bayesian inference: Howson & Urbach 1989/2006; Popper 1983.

  20. In 2012–13, the New Republic published four denunciations of scientism, and others appeared in Bookforum, the Claremont Review, the Huffington Post, The Nation, National Review Online, the New Atlantis, the New York Times, and Standpoint.

  21. According to the Open Syllabus Project (http://opensyllabusproject.org/), which has analyzed more than a million university syllabuses, Structure is the twentieth most assigned book overall, well ahead of The Origin of Species. A classic book with a more realistic take on how science works, Karl Popper’s The Logic of Scientific Discovery, is not in the top 200.

  22. Kuhn controversy: Bird 2011.

  23. Wootton 2015, p. 16, note ii.

  24. The quotes come from J. De Vos, “The Iconographic Brain. A Critical Philosophical Inquiry into (the Resistance of) the Image,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, May 15, 2014. This was not the researcher I heard (a transcript of his talk is not available), but the content was essentially the same.

  25. Carey et al. 2016. Similar examples may be found in the Twitter stream New Real PeerReview, @RealPeerReview.

  26. From the first page of Horkheimer & Adorno 1947/2007.

  27. Foucault 1999; see Menschenfreund 2010; Merquior 1985.

  28. Bauman 1989, p. 91. See Menschenfreund 2010, for analysis.

  29. Ubiquity of premodern genocide and autocracy, and their decline after 1945: See the references in chapters 11 and 14, and in Pinker 2011, chaps. 4–6. On Foucault’s neglect of totalitarianism before the Enlightenment, see Merquior 1985.

  30. Ubiquity of slavery: Patterson 1985; Payne 2004; see also Pinker 2011, chap. 4. Religious justifications for slavery: Price 2006.

  31. Greeks and Arabs on Africans: Lewis 1990/1992. Cicero on Britons: B. Delong, “Cicero: The Britons Are Too Stupid to Make Good Slaves,” http://www.bradford-delong.com/2009/06/cicero-the-britons-are-too-stupid-to-make-good-slaves.html.

  32. Gobineau, Wagner, Chamberlain, and Hitler: Herman 1997, chap. 2; see also Hellier 2011; Richards 2013. Many misconceptions about the link between “racial science” and Darwinism were spread by the biologist Stephen Jay Gould in his tendentious 1981 bestseller The Mismeasure of Man; see Blinkhorn 1982; Davis 1983; Lewis et al. 2011.

  33. Darwinian versus traditional, religious, and Romantic theories of race: Hellier 2011; Price 2009; Price 2006.

  34. Hitler was not a Darwinian: Richards 2013; see also Hellier 2011; Price 2006.

  35. Evolution as Rorschach test: Montgomery & Chirot 2015. Social Darwinism: Degler 1991; Leonard 2009; Richards 2013.

  36. The misapplication of the term social Darwinism to a variety of right-wing movements was begun by the historian Richard Hofstadter in his 1944 book Social Darwinism in American Thought; see Johnson 2010; Leonard 2009; Price 2006.

  37. An example is an article on evolutionary psychology in Scientific American by John Horgan entitled “The New Social Darwinists” (October 1995).

  38. Glover 1998, 1999; Proctor 1988.

  39. As in the title of another Scientific American article by John Horgan, “Eugenics Revisited: Trends in Behavioral Genetics” (June 1993).

  40. Degler 1991; Kevles 1985; Montgomery & Chirot 2015; Ridley 2000.

  41. Tuskegee reexamined: Benedek & Erlen 1999; Reverby 2000; Shweder 2004; Lancet Infectious Diseases Editors 2005.

  42. Review boards abridge free speech: American Association of University Professors 2006; Schneider 2015; C. Shea, “Don’t Talk to the Humans: The Crackdown on Social Science Research,” Lingua Franca, Sept. 2000, http://linguafranca.mirror.theinfo.org/print/0009/humans.html. Review boards as ideological weapons: Dreger 2007. Review boards bog down research without protecting subjects: Atran 2007; Gunsalus et al. 2006; Hyman 2007; Klitzman 2015; Schneider 2015; Schrag 2010.

  43. Moss 2005.

  44. Protecting suicide bombers: Atran 2007.

  45. Philosophers against bioethics: Glover 1998; Savulescu 2015. For other critiques of contemporary bioethics, see Pinker 2008b; Satel 2010; S. Pinker, “The Case Against Bioethocrats and CRISPR Germline Ban,” The Niche, Aug. 10, 2015, https://ipscell.com/2015/08/stevenpinker/8/; S. Pinker, “The Moral Imperative for Bioethics,” Boston Globe, Aug. 1, 2015; H. Miller, “When ‘Bioethics’ Harms Those It Is Meant to Protect,” Forbes, Nov. 9, 2016. See also the references in note 42 above.

  46. See the references in chapter 21, notes 93–102.

  47. Dawes, Faust, & Meehl 1989; Meehl 1954/2013. Recent replications: Mental health, Ægisdóttir et al. 2006; Lilienfeld et al. 2013; selection and admission decisions, Kuncel et al. 2013; violence, Singh, Grann, & Fazel 2011.

  48. Blessed are the peacekeepers: Fortna 2008, p. 173. See also Hultman, Kathman, & Shannong 2013, and Goldstein 2011, who credits peacekeeping forces with much of the post-1945 decline of war.

  49. Ethnic neighbors rarely fight: Fearon & Laitin 1996, 2003; Mueller 2004.

  50. Chenoweth 2016; Chenoweth & Stephan 2011.

  51. Revolutionary leaders are educated: Chirot 1994. Suicide terrorists are educated: Atran 2003.

  52. Trouble in the humanities: American Academy of Arts and Sciences 2015; Armitage et al. 2013. For earlier lamentations, see Pinker 2002/2016, opening to chap. 20.

  53. Why democracy needs the humanities: Nussbaum 2016.

  54. Cultural pessimism in the humanities: Herman 1997; Lilla 2001, 2016; Nisbet 1980/2009; Wolin 2004.

  55. The framers and human nature: McGinnis 1996, 1997. Politics and human nature: Pinker 2002/2016, chap. 16; Pinker 2011, chaps. 8 and 9; Haidt 2012; Sowell 1987.

  56. Art and science: Dutton 2009; Livingstone 2014.

  57. Music and science: Bregman 1990; Lerdahl & Jackendoff 1983; Patel 2008; see also Pinker 1997/2009, chap. 8.

  58. Literature and science: Boyd, Carroll, & Gottschall 2010; Connor 2016; Gottschall 2012; Gottschall & Wilson 2005; Lodge 2002; Pinker 2007b; Slingerland 2008; see also Pinker 1997/2009, chap. 8, and William Benzon’s blog New Savanna, new.savanna.blogspot.com.

  59. Digital humanities: Michel et al. 2010; see the e-journal Digital Humanities Now (http://digitalhumanitiesnow.org/), the Stanford Humanities Center (http://shc.stanford.edu/digital-humanities), and the journal Digital Humanities Quarterly (http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/).

  60. Gottschall 2012; A. Gopnik, “Can Science Explain Why We Tell Stories?”
New Yorker, May 18, 2012.

  61. Wieseltier 2013, “Crimes Against Humanities,” which was a reply to my essay “Science Is Not Your Enemy” (Pinker 2013b); see also “Science vs. the Humanities, Round III” (Pinker & Wieseltier 2013).

  62. Pre-Darwinian, pre-Copernican: L. Wieseltier, “Among the Disrupted,” New York Times, Jan. 7, 2015.

  63. In “A Letter Addressed to the Abbe Raynal,” Paine 1778/2016, quoted in Shermer 2015.

  CHAPTER 23: HUMANISM

  1. “Good without God”: From the 19th century, revived by the Harvard Humanist chaplain Greg Epstein (Epstein 2009). Other recent explanations of humanism: Grayling 2013; Law 2011. History of American Humanism: Jacoby 2005. Major Humanist organizations include the American Humanist Association, https://americanhumanist.org/ and the other members of the Secular Coalition of America, https://www.secular.org/member_orgs; the British Humanist Association (https://humanism.org.uk/); the International Humanist and Ethical Union, http://iheu.org/; and the Freedom from Religion Foundation (www.ffrf.org).

  2. Humanist Manifesto III: American Humanist Association 2003. Predecessors: Humanist Manifesto I (mainly by Raymond B. Bragg, 1933), American Humanist Association 1933/1973. Humanist Manifesto II (mainly by Paul Kurtz and Edwin H. Wilson, 1973), American Humanist Association 1973. Other Humanist manifestoes include Paul Kurtz’s Secular Humanist Declaration, Council for Secular Humanism 1980, and Humanist Manifesto 2000, Council for Secular Humanism 2000, and the Amsterdam Declarations of 1952 and 2002, International Humanist and Ethical Union 2002.

  3. R. Goldstein, “Speaking Prose All Our Lives,” The Humanist, Dec. 21, 2012, https://thehumanist.com/magazine/january-february-2013/features/speaking-prose-all-our-lives.

  4. The rights declarations of 1688, 1776, 1789, and 1948: Hunt 2007.

  5. Morality as impartiality: de Lazari-Radek & Singer 2012; Goldstein 2006; Greene 2013; Nagel 1970; Railton 1986; Singer 1981/2010; Smart & Williams 1973. The “impartiality” umbrella was articulated most explicitly by the philosopher Henry Sidgwick (1838–1900).

  6. For an exhaustive (if eccentric) list of Golden, Silver, and Platinum rules across cultures and history, see Terry 2008.

  7. Evolution explains the existence of mind despite entropy: Tooby, Cosmides, & Barrett 2003. Natural selection is the only explanation of nonrandom design: Dawkins 1983.

  8. Curiosity and sociality as concomitants of the evolution of intelligence: Pinker 2010; Tooby & DeVore 1987.

  9. Evolutionary conflicts of interest within and among people: Pinker 1997/2009, chaps. 6 and 7; Pinker 2002/2016, chap. 14; Pinker 2011, chaps. 8 and 9. Many of these ideas originated with the biologist Robert Trivers (2002).

  10. The Pacifist’s Dilemma and the historical decline of violence: Pinker 2011, chap. 10.

  11. DeScioli 2016.

  12. Evolution of sympathy: Dawkins 1976/1989; McCullough 2008; Pinker 1997/2009; Trivers 2002; Pinker 2011, chap. 9.

  13. Expanding circle of sympathy: Pinker 2011; Singer 1981/2010.

  14. For example, T. Nagel, “The Facts Fetish (Review of Sam Harris’s The Moral Landscape),” New Republic, Oct. 20, 2010.

  15. Utilitarianism, for and against: Rachels & Rachels 2010; Smart & Williams 1973.

  16. Compatibility of deontological and consequential meta-ethics: Parfit 2011.

  17. Track record of utilitarianism: Pinker 2011, chaps. 4 and 6; Greene 2013.

  18. From Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson 1785/1955, p. 159.

  19. Unintuitiveness of classical liberalism: Fiske & Rai 2015; Haidt 2012; Pinker 2011, chap. 9.

  20. Greene 2013.

  21. The importance of philosophical thinness: Berlin 1988/2013; Gregg 2003; Hammond 2017.

  22. Hammond 2017.

  23. Maritain 1949. Original typescript available at the UNESCO Web site, http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0015/001550/155042eb.pdf.

  24. Universal Declaration of Human Rights: United Nations 1948. History of the Declaration: Glendon 1999, 2001; Hunt 2007.

  25. Quoted in Glendon 1999.

  26. Human rights not particularly Western: Glendon 1998; Hunt 2007; Sikkink 2017.

  27. R. Cohen, “The Death of Liberalism,” New York Times, April 14, 2016.

  28. S. Kinzer, “The Enlightenment Had a Good Run,” Boston Globe, Dec. 23, 2016.

  29. ISIS more appealing than Enlightenment: R. Douthat, “The Islamic Dilemma,” New York Times, Dec. 13, 2015; R. Douthat, “Among the Post-Liberals,” New York Times, Oct. 8, 2016; M. Kahn, “This Is What Happens When Modernity Fails All of Us,” New York Times, Dec. 6, 2015; P. Mishra, “The Western Model Is Broken,” The Guardian, Oct. 14, 2014.

  30. Universality of proscriptions of murder, rape, and violence: Brown 2000.

  31. God as enforcer: Atran 2002; Norenzayan 2015.

  32. Fatal flaws in arguments for the existence of God: Goldstein 2010; see also Dawkins 2006 and Coyne 2015.

  33. Coyne draws in part on arguments from the astronomer Carl Sagan and the philosophers Yonatan Fishman and Maarten Boudry. For a review, see S. Pinker, “The Untenability of Faitheism,” Current Biology, Aug. 23, 2015, pp. R1–R3.

  34. Debunking the soul: Blackmore 1991; Braithwaite 2008; Musolino 2015; Shermer 2002; Stein 1996. See also the magazines Skeptical Inquirer (http://www.csicop.org/si) and The Skeptic (http://www.skeptic.com/) for regular updates.

  35. Stenger 2011.

  36. The multiverse: Carroll 2016; Tegmark 2003; B. Greene, “Welcome to the Multiverse,” Newsweek, May 21, 2012.

  37. A universe from nothing: Krauss 2012.

  38. B. Greene, “Welcome to the Multiverse,” Newsweek, May 21, 2012.

  39. Easy and hard problems of consciousness: Block 1995; Chalmers 1996; McGinn 1993; Nagel 1974; see also Pinker 1997/2009, chaps. 2 and 8, and S. Pinker, “The Mystery of Consciousness,” Time, Jan. 19, 2007.

  40. Adaptive nature of consciousness: Pinker, 1997/2009, chap. 2.

  41. Dehaene 2009; Dehaene & Changeux 2011; Gaillard et al. 2009.

  42. For an extended defense of this distinction, see Goldstein 1976.

  43. Nagel 1974, p. 441. Nearly four decades later, Nagel changed his mind (see Nagel 2012), but like most philosophers and scientists, I think he got it right the first time. See, for example, S. Carroll, Review of Mind and Cosmos, http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2013/08/22/mind-and-cosmos/; E. Sober, “Remarkable Facts: Ending Science as We Know It,” Boston Review, Nov. 7, 2012; B. Leiter & M. Weisberg, “Do You Only Have a Brain?” The Nation, Oct. 3, 2012.

  44. McGinn 1993.

  45. Moral realism: Sayre-McCord 1988, 2015. Moral realists: Boyd 1988; Brink 1989; de Lazari-Radek & Singer 2012; Goldstein 2006, 2010; Nagel 1970; Parfit 2011; Railton 1986; Singer 1981/2010.

  46. Examples are the European wars of religion (Pinker 2011, pp. 234, 676–77) and even the American Civil War (Montgomery & Chirot 2015, p. 350).

  47. White 2011, pp. 107–11.

  48. S. Bannon, remarks to a conference at the Vatican, 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.

  49. Nazis sympathetic to Christianity and vice versa: Ericksen & Heschel 1999; Hellier 2011; Heschel 2008; Steigmann-Gall 2003; White 2011. Hitler was not an atheist: Hellier 2011; Murphy 1999; Richards 2013; see also “Hitler Was a Christian,” http://www.evilbible.com/evil-bible-home-page/hitler-was-a-christian/.

  50. Interview with Richard Breiting, 1931, published in Calic 1971, p. 86. According to Hathaway & Shapiro 2017, p. 251, this quote was attributed to Mein Kampf by the Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt. For similar quotations, see the references in the preceding note.

  51. Sam Harris, The End of Faith (2004); Richard Dawkin
s, The God Delusion (2006); Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell (2006); Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great (2007).

  52. Randall Munroe, “Atheists,” https://xkcd.com/774/.

  53. The claim that people treat scripture allegorically (for example, Wieseltier 2013) is untrue: A 2005 Rasmussen poll found that 63 percent of Americans believed that the Bible is literally true (http://legacy.rasmussenreports.com/2005/Bible.htm); a 2014 Gallup poll found that 28 percent of Americans believed that “the Bible is the actual word of God and is to be taken literally, word for word,” and another 47 percent believed it was “the inspired word of God” (L. Saad, “Three in Four in U.S. Still See the Bible as Word of God,” Gallup, June 4, 2014, http://www.gallup.com/poll/170834/three-four-bible-word-god.aspx).

  54. Psychology of religion: Pinker 1997/2009, chap. 8; Atran 2002; Bloom 2012; Boyer 2001; Dawkins 2006; Dennett 2006; Goldstein 2010.

  55. Why there is no “God module”: Pinker 1997/2009, chap. 8; Bloom 2012; Pinker 2005.

  56. Community participation, not religious belief, explains the benefits of religious belonging: Putnam & Campbell 2010; see Bloom 2012 and Susan Pinker 2014 for reviews. For a recent study finding the same pattern for mortality, see Kim, Smith, & Kang 2015.

  57. Regressive religious policies: Coyne 2015.

  58. God and climate: Bean & Teles 2016; see also chapter 18, note 86.

  59. Trump support from Evangelicals: See New York Times 2016 and chapter 20, note 34.

  60. A. Wilkinson, “Trump Wants to ‘Totally Destroy’ a Ban on Churches Endorsing Political Candidates,” Vox, Feb. 7, 2017.

  61. “The Oprah Winfrey Show Finale,” oprah.com, http://www.oprah.com/oprahshow/the-oprah-winfrey-show-finale_1/all.

  62. Excerpted and lightly edited from “The Universe—Uncensored,” Inside Amy Schumer, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6eqCaiwmr_M.

  63. Hostility to atheists: G. Paul & P. Zuckerman, “Don’t Dump On Us Atheists,” Washington Post, April 30, 2011; Gervais & Najle 2017.

  64. From the World Christian Encyclopedia (2001), cited in Paul & Zuckerman 2007.

  65. Global Index of Religiosity and Atheism: WIN-Gallup International 2012. The Index’s sample of countries in 2005 was smaller (thirty-nine countries) and more religious (68 percent still identifying themselves as religious in 2012, as opposed to 59 percent in the full 2012 sample). In the longitudinal subset, the percentage of atheists grew from 4 to 7 percent, a 75 percent increase in seven years. It would be dubious to generalize this multiplier to larger samples, because of the nonlinearity of the percentage scale at the low end, so in estimating the increase in atheism in the fifty-seven-country sample over this period, I assumed a more conservative 30 percent increase.