Steven Pinker is a professor of psychology at Harvard, and one of the top public intellectuals in the world. In many ways, Enlightenment Now can be seen as a rebuttal of the arguments advanced by another famous psychologist, Jordan Peterson.
In 12 Rules for Life, Peterson writes:
“People, unsettled by their vulnerability, eternally fear to tell the truth, to mediate between chaos and order, and to manifest their destiny. In other words, they are afraid to walk with God. That’s not particularly admirable, perhaps, but it’s certainly understandable. God’s a judgmental Father. His standards are high. He’s hard to please…
Why should anyone take care of anything as naked, ugly, ashamed, frightened, worthless, cowardly, resentful, defensive and accusatory as a descendant of Adam? Even if that thing, that being, is himself?...
You’re bad enough, as other people know you. But only you know the full range of your secret transgressions, insufficiencies and inadequacies…
And with this realization we have well-nigh full legitimation of the idea, very unpopular in modern intellectual circles, of Original Sin…
Perhaps Man is something that should never have been. Perhaps the world should even be cleansed of all human presence, so that Being and consciousness could return to the innocent brutality of the animal…
So, here’s a proposition: perhaps it is not simply the emergence of self-consciousness and the rise of our moral knowledge of Death and the Fall that besets us and makes us doubt our own worth. Perhaps it is instead our unwillingness – reflected in Adam’s shamed hiding – to walk with God, despite our fragility and propensity for evil…
But every person is deeply flawed. Everyone falls short of the glory of God…
Heaven, after all, will not arrive of its own accord. We will have to work to bring it about, and strengthen ourselves, so that we can withstand the deadly angels and flaming sword of judgment that God used to bar its entrance…”
Contrast this with Pinker’s Enlightenment values:
“The goal of maximizing human flourishing - life, health, happiness, freedom, knowledge, love, richness of experience – may be called humanism, which promotes a non-supernatural basis for meaning and ethics: good without God…
What does an appeal to a supernatural lawgiver add to a humanistic commitment to make people better off? The most obvious add-on is supernatural enforcement, the belief that if one commits a sin, one will be smitten by God, damned to hell, or inscribed on the wrong page of the Book of Life. As with Santa Claus, he sees you when you’re sleeping, he knows when you’re awake, he knows if you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness’ sake…
It’s not just that there is almost certainly no God to dictate and enforce moral precepts. It’s that even if there were a God, his divine decrees, as conveyed to us through religion, cannot be the source of morality. The God of the Old Testament murdered innocents by the millions, commanded the Israelites to commit mass rape and genocide, and prescribed the death penalty for blasphemy, idolatry, homosexuality, adultery, talking back to parents, and working on the Sabbath, while finding nothing particularly wrong with slavery, rape, torture, mutilation and genocide. All this was par for the course in Bronze and Iron Age civilizations.”
In a series of fact-filled chapters, Pinker demonstrates convincingly that humanistic Enlightenment values have resulted in increases in human life, health, sustenance, wealth, peace, safety, democracy, equal rights, knowledge, quality of life, and happiness.
According to the World Values Survey, the countries with the most “enlightened” and postmaterialist values in the world are 1. Sweden 2. Denmark 3. Norway 4. Iceland 5. Australia 6. Netherlands 7. Andorra 8. Finland 9. Canada 10. Switzerland.
According to the Social Progress Index, the countries with the highest social progress are 1. Denmark 2. Finland 3. (TIE) Iceland and Norway 5. Switzerland 6. Canada 7. Netherlands 8. Sweden 9. (TIE) Australia and New Zealand.
According to the World Happiness Report, the happiest countries in the world are 1. Norway 2. Denmark 3. Iceland 4. Switzerland 5. Finland 6. Netherlands 7. Canada 8. New Zealand 9. Australia 10. Sweden.
And according to the Reputation Institute survey, the countries with the best reputation in the world are 1. Canada 2. Switzerland 3. Sweden 4. Australia 5. New Zealand 6. Norway 7. Finland 8. Denmark 9. Netherlands 10. Ireland.
However, Pinker acknowledges the dark moment the world is going through right now:
“In 2016 there was a brief hope that the Christian virtues of humility, temperance, forgiveness, propriety, chivalry, thrift, and compassion toward the weak would turn Evangelicals against a casino developer who was vainglorious, sybaritic, vindictive, lewd, misogynistic, ostentatiously wealthy, and contemptuous of the people he called ‘losers,’ But no: Donald Trump won the votes of 81 percent of white Evangelical and born-again Christians, a higher proportion than of any other demographic.”
How to explain Trump, if cultural evolution has been moving slowly but surely to Enlightenment?
In his article “Trump and the Xenophobic Populist Parties", based on the World Values Survey, Dr. Ronald Inglehart suggests that:
“Support for populist authoritarian parties is motivated by a backlash against the cultural changes linked with the rise of progressive, postmaterialist values, far more than by economic factors. The proximate cause of the populist vote is anxiety that pervasive cultural changes and an influx of foreigners are eroding the cultural norms one knew since childhood. The most common theme of populist authoritarian parties on both sides of the Atlantic is a reaction against immigration and cultural change. Economic factors such as income and unemployment rates are surprisingly weak predictors of the populist vote.”
And in his article “Understanding Trump”, George Lakoff suggests that there are two worldviews in conflict: Enlightenment “Nurturing Parent” morality, vs. Trump’s “Strict Father” morality:
“In the Strict Father family, father knows best. He knows right from wrong and has the ultimate authority to make sure his children and his spouse do what he says, which is taken to be what is right. When his children disobey, it is his moral duty to punish them painfully enough so that, to avoid punishment, they will obey him (do what is right) and not just do what feels good. What if his children don’t prosper? That means they are not disciplined, and therefore cannot be moral, and so deserve their poverty. The poor are seen as lazy and undeserving, and the rich as deserving their wealth. What you become is only up to you; society has nothing to do with it…
The Strict Father logic extends further. The basic idea is that authority is justified by morality (the Strict Father version), and that, in a well-ordered world, there should be (and traditionally has been) a moral hierarchy in which those who have traditionally dominated SHOULD dominate. The hierarchy is: God above Man, Man above Nature, The Disciplined (Strong) above the Undisciplined (Weak), the Rich above the Poor, Employers above Employees, Adults above Children, Western culture above other cultures, America above other countries. The hierarchy extends to Men above women, Whites above nonwhites, Christians above nonChristians, Straights above gays.”
Whether the Trump-Peterson moment is a passing fad or the beginning of a deeper cultural backlash, Pinker’s Enlightenment Now, as well as Inglehart’s Cultural Evolution, are invaluable guides to the world in which we live.
Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress
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