The PowerPoint Philosophe: Waiting for Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment
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Still, it's odd to me that so many reviews of this book apparently go beyond simply pointing out the flaws of the book in order to take a swipe at the man.
Do I smell schadenfreude?
https://www.firstthings.com/article/2012/01/the-precious-ste...
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/feb/14/enlightenment-...
https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/john-gray-steven...
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/11/25/what-comes-nat...
Also, I had the dubious pleasure of attending one of Pinker's talks. Let's just say that him coming off as unintelligent is an understatement. He seemed to be both completely unfamiliar with the very subject he had written about as well as incapable of forming any kind of interesting or novel insight about it. He just paraphrases well-worn anti-intellectual sentiments using what appears to the untrained ear as intellectual jargon. His audience in that particular talk happened to be mostly university professors, all of whom did their best not to laugh, as he was clearly the least-informed person in the quite-large room about the very subject on which he'd written a best-selling book!
My insults about this joke-of-an-intellectual are a much-watered-down version of how he's perceived by people who actually know the subject matter. Of course, these are the very people he critiques for this very reason. He can present them as his "opponents" and thus discard their actually-informed criticism as ideological opposition, saving him the trouble of actually studying the material.
That said, I do think that the further he strays from neuroscience and psychology, the more overconfident and shaky his claims seem to get. You could call it the Jared Diamond fallacy, a kind of high-brow cousin of the Dunning Kruger effect: scientists trained to be interdisciplinary who think that this training makes them competent historians as well. It doesn't.
I've been thinking about writing a rebuttal to Pinker's main claims in this book and Better Angels but I think the job has already been done by a combo of this review from the humanities realm (David Bell is a superb historian of the French Enlightenment) and the issues raised by people well-versed in statistics, like Taleb, who I personally find deeply unappealing as a thinker but who nevertheless is clearly skilled at this sort of critique.
Jared Diamond, with all his faults, is head and shoulders above Pinker. He, too, provides an overarching, overconfident narrative, but at least he more-or-less knows what he's talking about and, most importantly, has something interesting to say. It is not surprising that historians at least consider his thesis something to think about, while Pinker is considered a sad joke, and is more talked-about as a phenomenon (of the uneducated popular intellectual) than for the inanities he spews.
Pinker may be out of his depth when it comes to the bigger concepts but within the narrow constraints of materialism the data is incontrovertible. Pointing to a review written by Gray of Pinker's work when Gray is _explicitly_ in the camp which opposes the Polyannas of progress is bad sportsmanship.
What you should be asking yourself is how we can synthesise a worldview that incorporates both optimists and pessimists. I wholeheartedly agree that more nuance is needed but I also think that Pinker has done an excellent job at framing one side of the debate. The fact that he thinks there is only one side of the debate only means that he has as hard a time as the rest of us taking in the enormous sweep of human history and science.
I very much doubt you could write a decent rebuttal of either of his last two works.
Do yourself a favour and develop a sense of proportion.
When those problems were created by use of science (or, more precisely, technology) in the first place, and when people don't take serious steps to fix them, then what you say is the last thing we want to do.
Instead we should panic, and stop believing we can abuse the environment as much as we want and "science" will magically solve our problems (as if we have some contract with science or nature).
> What, for instance, about climate change? Pinker is no climate-change denier, and admits that “the challenge is daunting.” But then he quickly pivots from his position that things are getting better and better to say that we can avoid the looming doom if only we start taxing carbon emissions, increase the use of nuclear power, and engage in deliberate climate engineering to lower global temperatures.
> He largely disregards the fact that the political will to move in any of these directions is wholly lacking and will remain so as long as the party that controls the White House and Congress refuses to admit that a problem even exists. When it comes to his favored technological solution, nuclear power, Pinker also seems determined to ignore the problem that the people who manage plants do not always follow their own safety procedures and cannot plan for every possible natural disaster (as Fukushima showed all too dramatically). The industry, he insists, has learned from its mistakes. But has it?
I haven't read the book so I can't comment on how accurate this portrayal is
The economic implications aren't as clear as you make them. Companies may make less profit right away, but assuming the amount of work needed is the same, that gap would need to be filled by innovation or manual labor.
Problem is in science 99% of the time in complex systems the experiments turn out something unexpected. Odds we'll accelerate doom instead of postponing it are pretty significant.
And all that just because we refuse to reign-in a socio-economic system in which the safe and assured solution, abstinence, is impossible to achieve as there is no single party making 'a profit' on it.
=)
Within the U.S., how about economic inequality and political partisanship, to name two?
Note that Pinker's argument is global, but not total, and not strictly monotonic.
We can probably point to a time when things were better for the average white male.
this has been done by cirillo and taleb [1], and the results are sobering: there is no evidence for a drop in violence. in fact, there isn't sufficient data for any kind of claim (intuition: major conflicts account for the majority of deaths; the inter-arrival time of a major conflicts is 100 years (ballpark); therefore 60 years of relative peace are not sufficient).
EDIT: removed preaching, since not relevant to the parent comment.
"Are the millions incarcerated in the vast American prison system and the millions more who live under parole included in the calculus that says human freedom is increasing?
If we are to congratulate ourselves on being less cruel to animals, how much weight should be given to the uncounted numbers that suffer in factory farming and hideous medical experiments – neither of which were practised on any comparable scale in the past? "
Pinker isn’t making the point that there is no injustice. Or that there is no violence. Just that there is less injustice and less violence. Significantly less than previously in history.
To answer your question, yes. Yes, the prisons of the US are included.
It seems odd to me to refute wide scale increasing demographic statistics with narrative examples.
The GP was explicitly requesting a specific negative. I wouldn't find that odd. Gray's article doesn't give any detailed statistics in response but questions it broadly by asking good questions. Another question he has asked is whether, given that the number of military deaths in war has dropped, whether the number of casualties has too, or if it also counts civilians affected, made homeless, forced to migrate away from home, had their lives ruined. Or whether the changing nature of warfare is any less violent (e.g. proxy wars in far away countries). Personally, I find them interesting, not odd, questions to ask.
I'm less convinced about Grays critique of Pinker's views on the Enlightenment (e.g. paraphrasing.. many of the founders of the Enlightenment were explicit racists and eugenicists - their rationality has more in common with Maoism). I think that the Enlightenment has changed in meaning over the years.
So looking for a broad metric, not an example of something that is worse now (prison system).
Which is just a hazy and lazy estimation. Which we then takes to mean we're in some ever-progressing path.
Meanwhile the 20th century saw some of the biggest horrors, worse than the "middle ages".
His larger point is that taking the larger arc of history into account, the world is on the whole less horrible than it once was. He doesn't claim we can't or won't regress.
This is what I found interesting as my understanding was the general consensus that 20th century was bad but the data shows otherwise.
Genocide occurred frequently, it just wasn’t reported on and wasn’t thought of as bad. Pinker goes into quite a bit how violent primitive tribes were in genocide. These examples weren’t large in absolute terms as the tribes were small, but relative were huge as they were close to 100%.
Also covers the violence in pre-history with violence rates of 30% from fossil record (not sure if this is the right term for 100k human ancestor remains as I don’t think they are fossils).
That's assuming (and it's already wrong) that the "past decades" are representative of a general trend (and we can't eg. regress to WWII levels in a hurry).
But he will still say that "oh, but we are having less violent deaths". Well, possibly. But deaths never came so fast from single individuals/actions/operations.
You always lose when the other part sets the metrics and they cannot be discussed.
That is what I did.
Nassim Taleb argued successfully against his previous "Better Angels"book
Is it possible you have misunderstood Pinker's work?
Is it?