In the end, what Pinker calls a “decline of violence” in modernity actually has been, in real body counts, a continual and extravagant increase in violence that has been outstripped by an even more exorbitant demographic explosion. Well, not to put too fine a point on it: So what? What on earth can he truly imagine that tells us about “progress” or “Enlightenment”””or about the past, the present, or the future? By all means, praise the modern world for what is good about it, but spare us the mythology.
And yet, oddly enough, I like Pinker’s book. On one level, perhaps, it is all terrific nonsense: historically superficial, philosophically platitudinous, occasionally threatening to degenerate into the dulcet bleating of a contented bourgeois. But there is also something exhilarating about this fideist who thinks he is a rationalist. Over the past few decades, so much of secularist discourse has been drearily clouded by irony, realist disenchantment, spiritual fatigue, self-lacerating sophistication: a postmodern sense of failure, an appetite for caustic cultural genealogies, a meek surrender of all “metanarrative” ambitions.
Pinker’s is an older, more buoyant, more hopeful commitment to the “Enlightenment”””and I would not wake him from his dogmatic slumber for all the tea in China. In his book, one encounters the ecstatic innocence of a faith unsullied by prudent doubt. For me, it reaffirms the human spirit’s lunatic and heroic capacity to believe a beautiful falsehood, not only in excess of the facts, but in resolute defiance of them.
I love Hart’s writing, and here he is in usual fine form. His book “Atheist Delusions” was just masterful. What I like about him is that he doesn’t try to refute atheists’ arguments point by point, as if we have an answer for all the tough questions they ask us. Instead, he points out the assumptions they make and won’t let them frame the debate in a way that ignores their own a priori faith commitments. We aren’t debating reason vs. faith, but rather what are the best assumptions from which we should begin our reasoning. Very helpful in my own response to doubt.
Stephen+
What a lovely article. One of the most pleasurable elements of Mr. Hart’s writing is that he is, so very often, funny. It is most unusual in the small world of serious, all too serious, philosophical theologians.