{"id":87557,"date":"2019-12-16T08:00:52","date_gmt":"2019-12-16T13:00:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=87557"},"modified":"2019-12-16T09:02:11","modified_gmt":"2019-12-16T14:02:11","slug":"larb-jessica-riskin-steven-pinkers-pollyannish-philosophy-and-its-perfidious-politics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=87557","title":{"rendered":"(LARB) Jessica Riskin–Steven Pinker\u2019s Pollyannish Philosophy and Its Perfidious Politics"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cINTELLECTUALS HATE REASON,\u201d \u201cProgressives hate progress,\u201d \u201cWar is peace,\u201d \u201cFreedom is slavery.\u201d No, wait, those last two are from a different book, but it\u2019s easy to get mixed up. Steven Pinker begins his latest \u2014 a manifesto inspirationally entitled Enlightenment Now<\/em> \u2014 with a contrast between \u201cthe West,\u201d which he says is critical of its own traditions and values, and \u201cthe Islamic State,\u201d which \u201cknows exactly what it stands for.\u201d Given the book\u2019s title, one expects Pinker to be celebrating a core Enlightenment ideal: critical skepticism, which demands the questioning of established traditions and values (such as easy oppositions between \u201cthe West\u201d and \u201cthe bad guys\u201d). But no, in a surprise twist, Pinker apparently wants us over here in \u201cthe West\u201d to adopt an Islamic State\u2013level commitment to our \u201cvalues,\u201d which he then equates with \u201cclassical liberalism\u201d [1]<\/a> (about which more presently). You begin to see, reader, why this review \u2014 which I promised to write last spring \u2014 took me all summer and much of the fall to finish. Just a few sentences into the book, I am tangled in a knot of Orwellian contradictions.<\/p>\n

Enlightenment Now<\/em> purports to demonstrate by way of \u201cdata\u201d that \u201cthe Enlightenment has worked<\/em>.\u201d [2]<\/a> What are we to make of this? A toaster oven can work or not by toasting or failing to toast your bagel. My laser printer often works by printing what I\u2019ve asked it to print, and sometimes doesn\u2019t by getting the paper all jammed up inside. These machines were designed and built to do particular, well-defined jobs. There is no uncertainty, no debate, no tradition of critical reflection, no voluminous writings regarding what toaster ovens or laser printers should do, or which guiding principles or ideals should govern them.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, uncertainty, debate, and critical reflection were the warp and woof of the Enlightenment, which was no discrete, engineered device with a well-defined purpose, but an intellectual and cultural movement spanning several countries and evolving over about a century and a half. If one could identify any single value as definitive of this long and diverse movement, it must surely be the one mentioned above, the value of critical skepticism. To say it \u201cworked\u201d vitiates its very essence. But now the Enlightenment\u2019s best-selling PR guy takes \u201cskepticism\u201d as a dirty word; if that\u2019s any indication, then I guess the Enlightenment didn\u2019t work, or at any rate, it\u2019s not working now. Maybe it came unplugged? Is there a paper jam?<\/p>\n

Read it all<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n

By eliminating skepticism from his rendition of the Enlightenment, Pinker has done the equivalent of removing every second word of a book: what\u2019s left behind is not half the sense of the original, but just nonsense. https:\/\/t.co\/CmV7TpwaUJ<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2014 Ntina Tzouvala (@ntinatzouvala) December 16, 2019<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n