Pinker’s book, “Enlightenment Now,”

Pinker’s book, “Enlightenment Now,”

Violence has gone way down, and people have always been better educated, fed, and healthier than they ever had before. This assertion is line with Pinker’s book, “Enlightenment Now,” which argues that humans have never had it so good. The general idea of Pinker is that society is really moving forward and that people are supposed to ignore the pessimists. On the other hand, “Liberal” (as Deneen puts it) is the post-Machiavelli project whose intention is to release people from religious powers and to concentrate politically on the rights of individuals, as well as the improvement of material conditions for humans. Deneen disputes no advancement or has objections about the liberal order’s triumph as described by Pinker. In fact, it is incontrovertible. Whatever he does seem more thought-provoking: he suggests that liberalism has been unsuccessful primarily because of its success; that is, Deneen and Pinker both seem to be right, but Deneen is more comprehensive.

Indeed, as humans have advanced assuredly and gradually, they have lost something that underlies it: sense, unity and joy, which are distinct from that of their needs here, on Earth. People have disremembered the human abundance that emanates from their collective sense of virtue and their nature-driven concept of virtue. This resides in a particular historical, pre-liberal understanding of freedom, and it is the essence of Deneen’s claim. Freedom from an individual’s material needs and natural interests was, for most antiquities, freedom. It was founded upon a mastery of those profound, natural urges to discipline, self-control, and virtue education. This put the society— the polis— beyond the persons and could not genuinely conceive of the individuals apart from the culture in which they were raised. They would look at the liberty of others and look at their disquiet, anarchy, oppression and wishful thinking. Moreover, they would expect suffering for them and not joy.

To this statement Pinker’s sole reaction— as much as he understands it— is to cite statistics that show a growing sense of well-being worldwide. Indeed, that is a point that is real. Nevertheless, the notion of ambiguity, irony or inadvertent consequences seems to be inaccessible to Pinker. He has no way to explain why, for instance, in the most developed liberal societies, there is a lot of deep dissatisfaction, despair, drug abuse, poverty, loneliness and addiction. His reaction to the sixth large-scale Earth’s species extinction by humans is that it will, in any event, be overcome by better environmental engineering— just as medicines can fix unhappiness. Pinker claims that life is just a collection of “problems,” which can be “solved” by reason and has been resolved. To justify her case, she states, “Two other illusions mislead us into thinking that things aren’t what they used to be: we mistake the growing burdens of maturity and parenthood for a less innocent world, and we mistake a decline in our own faculties for a decline in the times (4).”

What Pinker’s work perhaps does not really deal with is that these solutions to problems inevitably never comes to an end; that people adapt themselves to new standards of material comfort and continuously need to be satisfied; that none of these addresses human mortality’s fundamental reality; and that nothing of this offers spiritual support or sense. Yes, a sense may be much harder to achieve, which is why modern souls have difficulties. Pinker has disdain for religion — which is unusual for a psychologist of creation, as his area of expertise includes the study of evolutionary and genetic origins for religion. Likewise, he sees absolutely no problem for an evolutionary psychologist that human beings have built a world utterly different to that in which men have lived nearly 99% of their time on the planet over the past 500 years (and more intensively in the previous century).

Humans are species founded on tribal lines, but they live more and more on their own in such enormous and populated communities that their ancestors do not know; they are species premeditated for scarcity and live today by a vast amount of people. Humans are a species constructed on religious rituals to alleviate their existential angst. It suggests that Deneen and Pinker are both correct; however, Deneen is profound in her argument. In human Deneen sees mystery, even disaster, he values the insight of the aeons that Pinker is only reassured people have outpaced. Nevertheless, Pinker does not seem to understand, given his immense intellect and erudition. For instance, Pinker has no way of understanding humans’ actual collective rage— how is all human beings not delighted at the tremendous and ongoing “progress?” — except for the fact that he faults… the poor media for people’s ugliness and sorrow and dissatisfaction. It is the responsibility of every intellectual and journalist to persuade people that they are sad when they are, in fact, splendidly contented!

And the state of government, alteration, the collapse of democracy or the petition of tyrants is flawing in Pinker’s “Enlightenment Now.” Undeniably, Pinker has a faltering understanding of politics. His perception of history is practically self-satire, so profoundly Whiggish. His comprehension of the Enlightenment, as remarked by XXX, surgically obliterated Rousseau Jean-Jacques, its most common representative, who saw the paradoxes of reason and liberty from the very beginning and Burke Edmond, who immediately identified the awful vacuum of modernity and the wrath it might unlock over humans. However, people are where they are, based on Deneen’s understanding. There is no one to escape. Besides, God is dead to human’s civilization and advancement. Impact and implication are pointless, apart from the fulfilment of people’s content and can at best become a source of appreciation for insignificance. Absent materialism, people have no shared concept of human wealth, and they, therefore, stand single-handedly. Perhaps they will tangle over this way always, and eventually, they will be numbed or discontinuously changed.

But this peculiar distortion in human history – at most a few decades compared to 200 thousand years – is quite likely a massive error that will be mercilessly corrected at one moment or another. It is also entirely possible that our world, in current habits, will become dilapidated to most of its inhabitants, due to the justification and materialism that the Pinker embraces, that the technology will make people useless for the tasks that their species have always described themselves by.

On the losing end, after all, we have mass destruction weapons that are imperfectly regulated and people have never developed weapons that we did not use (including nuclear weapons, of course). It is also true that human beings have never been unfaithful, or moral or rational to reconcile us with the suffering and the death before. Then why should the disagreement go on forever? This is a problem, beyond Pinker, which is still terribly open. Each line, for Pinker, is sharply upward forever. But without an equally sudden decline, I have never seen such a surprisingly quick scaling. Perhaps I am a mere doomster. But a remarkably powerful range of blinkers needs to be considered unlikely.