Notwithstanding some of the accusations made by his detractors, Steven Pinker has never claimed that the progress we have made cannot be unmade, or that there is no need for further progress, or that our solutions to old problems have not brought new problems requiring new solutions. All he has argued is that, by several criteria that any rational person should consider supremely relevant, most of the world's people are far better off than the people of any earlier generation. This is so throughout almost the entire world and is especially true, by orders of magnitude, in the developed nations. Pinker credits the Englightenment values of reason, science, and humanism for that progress, and in a general way I agree with him. As a characterization of the overall Enlightenment it is probably too simple by at least half, but I must note in fairness to him that I didn't get the impression he was trying to say that the Enlightenment was all about and only about reason, science, and humanism. And he certainly intended no suggestion that the Enlightenment thinkers invented any of them. Whenever and wherever in history there have been any serious thinkers, some have advocated the proper exercise of reason, the use of some of the intellectual tools now referred to collectively as the scientific method, and some ethical and epistemological notions we would recognize as humanism. Through most of history and in most places, those thinkers were not numerous enough or influential enough for their ideas to have much effect on the lives of their contemporaries, and so for centuries at a time the rate of progress was either glacial or nonexistent. Then in the 17th century, for reasons still debated, those ideas started catching on in a few of Western Europe's intellectual circles, and progress started happening fast enough for many people to notice that they were seeing it happen. It also seems to have occurred to some in the ruling classes that what was good for people in general was good for them as well.
Of course, not everyone figured this out. The justification of evil requires stupidity, but there has never been a shortage of stupidity, even in the upper classes. An expensive education can mask it, but is never guaranteed to cure it. One of the more popular stupid ideas is that stupid people cannot become rich and powerful. Recent U.S. political history ought to have killed that meme, but one characteristic of stupidity is its immunity to counterexamples.
There now seems to be a consensus that America is in deep trouble. There is less consensus about who is to blame, but the alleged villains are usually said to have one thing in common: They are extremely wealthy, and their agendas are supported by the nation's largest corporations, most or all of which are multinational. Until a few years ago, this accusation was usually made by left-wingers against the right wing. We are now hearing that the political left has sold its own soul to the moneyed classes as well. A political solution will therefore require a popular repudiation of both the liberal and conservative establishment, to be manifest in the empowerment of modern progressivism.
A national government controlled by progressives would undoubtedly result in changes that neither establishment Democrats nor establishment Republicans would like. Whether the American people in general would like them is what the debate is all about. Every faction claims to care, more than anything else, about what is best for "the people." It's what the progressives say, it's what the Democrats say, it's what the Republicans say. It's what you always have to say if you want to win an election. What else is democracy supposed to be about, anyway? And isn't that what the Enlightenment was all about, among other things?
Yes. Among other things. Those other things included reason and science, which almost nobody is advocating with any consistency. Every faction judges the exercise of reason, and especially the results of scientific research, by their consistency with its agenda. Whatever is inconsistent with the agenda, they think, is fallacious reasoning or bad science. One of their key characteristics, though, is their independence from factional viewpoints, which is why we need to revive them if we're going to avoid some kind of catastrophe.
A common account of the Enlightenment has it rejecting the authority of church and crown, as reflected in the saying attributed (erroneously) to Denis Diderot: "Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest." What it rejected was epistemic authority in general, including the authority of popular opinion or of personal conviction. Enlightenment thinking accepts no argument that something must be true because somebody says it, no matter who that somebody is. Thus the motto of the Royal Society, founded in the mid-17th century: Nullius in verba, loosely translated as "Take no one's word for it." There has always been talk of "self-evident truths," which are supposed to be known independently of any authority, but no truth is self-evident just because someone says it is. According to George Will, what the authors of the Declaration of Independence had in mind was "truths that are apparent to a reasonably educated mind unclouded by superstition." That sounds good, but who gets to decide which unevidenced beliefs are superstitions? Plenty of atheists think all religion is so much superstition. I happen to disagree with them. Many believers think God’s existence is a self-evident truth. I happen to disagree with those people, too. To call something a superstition seems almost always to express a certain kind of disapproval toward some class of unevidenced beliefs. And the claim of self-evidence, as far as I can tell, is just a way of begging the question without having to admit it.
And then, what constitutes a reasonable education? There is certainly no consensus answer, which is not to say there is no right answer. We would not be in the current mess if there were a strong correlation between consensus and truth. I’m sure Will has his own answer, and while I don’t know what it is, I suspect it’s close to mine. A reasonably educated person is one who, among other things, is adept at the proper exercise of reason. This requires knowledge in a range of subjects that used to be definitive of a liberal education. This concept of a liberal education arose in late Medieval times, was strengthened during the Enlightenment and seems to have persisted until well into the 20th century. This strengthening was one of the characteristics of the Enlightenment, following from its focus on reason, science, and humanism.
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(This page last updated on September 17, 2020.)