A liberal thinker is an oxymoron

I have a confession to make, and please don’t judge me too harshly. Much as I flap my wings every time a conservative writer is cancelled, I myself have embarked on a one-man cancelling mission.

I’m about to banish from my reading list the American academic Steven Pinker, or rather his book Enlightenment Now. Unlike woke cancellers, however, I first made an effort to find out and judge dispassionately the nature of the argument he puts forth.

To that end I read the first 100 pages or so, and only concerns for my own mental health and blood pressure prevented me from reading the book to the end. I have, however, scanned it to the end, which was enough to grasp Prof. Pinker’s gist. It was also sufficient to reinforce my cherished belief expressed in the title above.

Prof. Pinker is a passionate advocate of the Enlightenment that, according to him, replaced superstition with Reason (always implicitly capitalised), thereby making us all better-off. Yet his own reasoning is proof of the damage the Enlightenment has inflicted on that very faculty.

He devotes hundreds of pages to scientific-looking illustrations complete with charts and graphs proving that over the past couple of centuries people have become healthier, wealthier, more comfortable and longer-lived.

That, argues Prof. Pinker, is enough to discredit any “negativist” and “declinist” who points out the rapid degeneration of the West. And of course we have the Enlightenment to thank for our well-being. But for Messrs Hume, Voltaire and Diderot, we’d be eating slops, drinking swills, using snake oil salesmen instead of doctors and consequently dying at 40.

That line of reasoning is a classic rhetorical fallacy of post hoc, ergo propter hoc – averring that if something happened after an event, it happened because of it. For Prof. Pinker’s argument to make any sense at all, he’d have to resort to the Subjunctive Mood.

That’s generally a thankless task, and in this case a hopeless one. For he’d have to argue that, but for Messrs Hume, Voltaire and Diderot, science, and hence technology, would have frozen at their 18^th century level. Thus today we wouldn’t have painless dentistry, modern drugs, rapid transportation, computers and all those things that, according to Prof. Pinker, define progress.

I see no sensible justification for that view. To begin with, the scientific revolution of the 17^th century, which adumbrated scientific and technological progress, happened without any contributions from Messrs Hume, Voltaire and Diderot. Moreover, the men largely responsible for that revolution, such as Newton and Leibnitz, weren’t atheists, which conviction Prof. Pinker sees as a sine qua non of any progress.

There is absolutely no reason to believe that science would have stopped developing at that point. There’s every reason to believe that it would have continued to do so in pretty much the same way and at pretty much the same pace. This subjunctive argument sounds more convincing than its opposite.

Natural sciences developed not in spite of Christianity but because of it. Only after Christian thinkers corrected what R.G. Collingwood calls the metaphysical error of the Hellenic world did science truly get off the ground. Scientists began to believe in the existence of universal and rational laws governing the world of matter, which equipped them to direct their inquiry into the right conduits.

If we were at trial, with Prof. Pinker representing the progress junkies and me the ‘declinists’, I’d spare him the trouble of drawing up all those graphs. I’d simply stipulate that, in purely material terms, our lives are indeed better than they were 300 years ago.

Prof. Pinker partly defines progress in purely materialist terms because, he explains, material well-being is all that matters to most people. Again, so stipulated. Uninteresting if correct.

But since when is truth subject to a show of hands? This is yet another rhetorical fallacy, argumentum ad populum: because many people hold a certain view, it must be true. Really, for someone who worships at the altar of Reason, Prof. Pinker is rather lacking in intellectual rigour.

Progress in the toys man surrounds himself with isn’t tantamount to progress in man himself. And looking at the development of Western man since the Enlightenment, it’s hard not to notice that he has degenerated in every faculty, except those required to keep himself fed, clothed, treated and entertained. In fact, ever since the destruction of Christendom, Western man’s material acumen has been growing in inverse proportion to his ability to maintain his culture and civilisation.

To be fair, Prof. Pinker doesn’t reduce his arguments merely to trinkets. He also insists that, as a direct result of Enlightenment atheism, man acquired a hitherto absent ability to feel sympathy, empathy, sensitivity and all such markers of morality. As Tocqueville showed, post-Enlightenment documents replaced sentiment with sentimentality, morality with moralising, and righteousness with self-righteousness.

Prof. Pinker’s supposition has to languish at the level of superstition, being too weak to qualify even for an honest belief.

The Enlightenment declared war on Christendom, with its every tradition, practice and thought. That war was fought for the sake of empty slogans but, alas, it wasn’t fought just with slogans.

The Enlighteners announced their victory by perpetrating a wholesale massacre of whole classes that were trying to shield their eyes from the dazzling light of pseudo-Reason. And the Enlighteners started as they meant to go on.

More people died violent deaths in the 20^th century, the first atheist one from beginning to end, than in all the prior centuries of recorded history combined. Many were killed with the products of technological progress so dear to Prof. Pinker’s heart, but most were dispatched by expedients long in the public domain: executions, artificial famines, torture, neglect.

Even honest atheists acknowledge the restraining power of Christianity to keep human bestiality down to a manageable level. Not down to zero, of course: because people are sinful they have always had the propensity to kill one another. Contrary to Prof. Pinker’s unfounded insistence, war is an integral part of the human condition.

But the way societies functioned in Christendom, that propensity to kill was limited by any number of factors. One such was that kings and princes had difficulty recruiting large numbers. Because young men were needed to till the land, monarchs had to beg their vassals to spare some of their subjects to go into battle.

The Enlightenment removed such restraints in one fell swoop by introducing the concept of all-encompassing citizenship and, eventually and inevitably, democracy. Universal citizenship presupposes universal conscription, and towards the end of the Enlightenment 18^th century, the French army, to name just one, grew ten-fold overnight.

Wars got to be fought not between armies but between populations, which turned civilians into military targets. That at a stroke added many zeroes to casualty statistics.

Also, pre-Enlightenment wars were typically fought for territory and dynastic interests. But post-Enlightenment wars have pitted against one another various ideologies, a word and concept invented in the late 18^th century.

The most prominent of them were socialism and nationalism, both owing their birth to Prof. Pinker’s favourite period. These ideologies have amply realised their cannibalistic potential. They caused more deaths by several orders of magnitude in just one century than all those religious wars, Inquisitions and other Christian burrs under Prof. Pinker’s blanket managed in almost two millennia.

Contrary to what he seems to believe, man’s essence can’t be reduced to his material products and surroundings. An animal man may be, but he isn’t just an animal and certainly a unique one. Alone in the world’s fauna he is endowed with a soul, mind, spirit, which you are welcome to treat as separate faculties or one and the same.

It’s impossible even to begin talking about progress without being able to show a positive development in such faculties. This neither Prof. Pinker nor anyone else is able to do.

Quite the opposite, when outward and inner developments are vectored in opposite directions, a catastrophe beckons. Physicists invent weapons capable of wiping out life on earth, doctors stage diabolical experiments on people, computers are used to empower the state over the individual, planes transport bombs rather than passengers.

Also, post-Enlightenment modernity has effectively replaced culture with cults. These words may be cognates, but they denote incompatible phenomena.

Western culture was created by men of genius as a medium for communicating with God and glorifying Him. Western music, arts, architecture all trace their roots to ecclesiastical beginnings. And all of them have largely lost their cultural value, turning instead into illustrations to variously pernicious ideologies. The Enlightenment pushed the button for culture breaking up into cults.

Looking just at music for brevity’s sake, it’s hard not to notice the purely cultish appeal of pop din to immature minds and underdeveloped souls. Prof. Alan Bloom was the first to observe 40 years ago that worship of various pop groups had become the principal self-identifier of his students.

Yet even in classical music the worship of cultish performers has replaced any true appreciation of music and those who reveal its divine mysteries. This tendency started in the 19^th century with the appearance of the first cultish performers, Liszt and Paganini. Yet they were great musicians too, a requirement that has since fallen by the wayside.

I invite Prof. Pinker to listen to the performance of the same piece first by, say, Gieseking, Gilels or Gould, then by Yuja Wang, Lang Lang or even Trifonov – and then continue to shill for progress on that comparative basis.

He’d also be called upon to make the same claim by comparing St Bartholomew’s church with the Lloyd’s building, J.M.W. Turner’s work with Tracy Emin’s, Elizabethan poetry with today’s – and I’m stacking the odds in his favour by using British examples only.

Offered his book as Exhibit 1 in my imaginary trial, any sensible jury would find for the ‘declinist’ prosecution. If that’s the level of thought the Age of Reason produces, can we please go back to the Age of Faith?

And yes, we’d still be able to keep all those things Prof. Pinker holds so dear. They too owe their existence to Christendom – not to the vandals who destroyed it.