HE’S ON THE BRIGHT SIDE
But progress is a tough sell
Steven Pinker is looking forward to coming to his old hometown.
Montreal-born and raised, the Harvard psychologist and linguist has fond memories of growing up in an intellectual Westmount household, drawing childhood inspiration from the Time-Life Science book series, and coming of age at a time of cultural and political ferment.
“There was a real cosmopolitanism to the city,” the 63-yearold recalled on the phone from a book-tour stop in Seattle. “For me it was a combination of the highly literate and intellectual and argumentative Jewish community I grew up in with influences from McGill and from the Canadian, American and Québécois — and via that, European — cultures. I tend to think creativity is fostered by a confluence of many ideas from different sources.”
A dual Canadian and American citizen, Pinker visits Montreal four or five times a year from his Boston home to see family, including psychologist-writer sister Susan Pinker. When here, the Dawson College and McGill alumnus can’t help but note changes to the city he first left in 1976 to pursue graduate studies.
“Of course, now its cachet has risen — with the dysfunction in the United States, the settling down of the (Quebec) political situation, the realization of the cultural, architectural and demographic richness of the city.”
The “argumentative” element of the mix Pinker cites above is likely to come in especially handy as he promotes his new Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress ( Viking, 556 pp, $45), a wide-ranging and exhaustively sourced book that has already been causing some lively disagreement.
We’re speaking two days after the death of Stephen Hawking, one of Pinker’s few peers in the popularizing of serious science. “His sense of adventure and determination were remarkable,” Pinker said of the late physicist. “And yes, with A Brief History of Time he broke open the market (for popular science books).”
Pinker joined his predecessor as a bestseller in 1994 with The Language Instinct. From there he has gradually expanded his remit from pure science to a more social purview, peaking in 2011 with The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, the very subtitle of which caused controversy.
The new book is, in many ways, the natural followup. Pushing back against what he perceives as fearmongering and alarmist rhetoric from both the right and the left, Pinker posits that a better way forward is to take the long view and nurture the precepts first formulated in Europe in the second half of the 18th century — essentially, the four ideas in the title. The pushback this new book has been getting is probably at least partly due to timing: in a moment when Trump and related global recidivisms of authoritarian populism dominate so much of the public discourse, the very idea of progress is a tough sell.
“I conceived the book when Donald Trump was a reality TV star,” Pinker said. “The concept of his being president would have been considered a joke in bad taste. It did require a bit of a rethink when he was elected, in that I underlined my pre-existing assertions that progress is not an inexorable force that carries us ever higher and that if we depart from the principles of the Enlightenment, progress can be threatened. Many aspects of Trump’s program do that, starting with something as important as vaccines, where his position threatens one of the greatest public-health breakthroughs in human history.”
INEQUITIES OF WEALTH
A position in the book causing particular contention is Pinker’s stated belief that inequities of wealth receive disproportionate attention, distracting from recognition of one of humankind’s greatest achievements: the enormous reduction of poverty.
“There are problems associated with inequality, in particular the outsized political influence of the wealthy — the fact that, especially in the United States, politicians can be bought too easily. But I think our assessment of whether we’ve made progress shouldn’t look at inequality itself, but at poverty, where we’ve made great strides. An irony is that it’s often the people on the left and liberal side of the spectrum who are afraid to acknowledge that, because it would seem to undermine efforts toward further anti-poverty programs.”
Activist and fellow Montrealer Naomi Klein is subject to some strong words in Enlightenment Now; among other things, her discounting of a carbon tax as a tool to alleviate the climate crisis is decried.
“I do agree that (climate change) is a fundamental issue, and clearly we must not do business as usual,” said Pinker. “But the answer isn’t to use climate change as an excuse to prosecute the agenda of the far left and to dismantle markets which have brought so much good to the world. The solution isn’t to turn South Korea into North Korea. It’s to use the combination of policy, markets and technology to decarbonize the economy so that we can enjoy the unmistakable gifts of modern democratic societies without harm to the environment.”
A through-line in the book, I suggest, is the lament, mostly unspoken, that pessimism is granted greater gravitas in the public conversation than optimism.
“Indeed. Pessimists sound serious and morally engaged, while optimists can sound frivolous. Morgan Housel, a financial writer, said, ‘Pessimists sound like they’re trying to help you; optimists sound like they’ re trying to sell you something .’ Pessimismcan also be a form of social and intellectual one-upmanship. Because many social critics aren’t actually responsible for getting society to run, disparaging the state of society is simply a way of putting down their rivals. It accounts for the irony that, often, it’s the so-called progressive intellectuals who have the greatest problem with progress.”
A line Pinker walks most delicately and deftly in Enlightenment Now is the one separating optimism — however tempered it might be — and complacency.
“I suppose so,” he said. “We should be aware of all the problems, but also of how they might be mitigated and improved. Ultimately what we really need is neither optimism nor pessimism. What we need is accuracy.”