Steven Pinker says intellectuals hate progress.
I don't think he means it literally. Intellectuals will assure anyone listening to them that they would love to see some progress, and Pinker knows that. What sets so many of them off is people thinking there has been any progress. He must know this, or else he is as clueless as those Christian apologists who accuse us atheists of hating God. You can't hate something that you don't think is real.
The intellectuals' pessimism, though, doesn't explain their anger. To understand that, we might find a clue in the religious community, particularly the evangelical community and their Catholic forbears. Their mission in life is to persuade all of us that we have a fatal disease for which they happen to have the cure. The disease is called original sin, and the cure is for us to believe what they tell us about the man known to secular history as Jesus of Nazareth.
The Christian version of original sin is in two parts. One is the literally original sin: Adam's disobedience of a divine command. The other is the consequence of that disobedience on human nature. Because Adam did what he did, all his descendants—including all of us alive today—are incorrigibly sinful. Sin has consequences, and we are powerless to avoid those consequences without divine intervention. When Christians talk about original sin, they are usually referring to the second part.
A key difference between the Christian and secular versions is that Christians deny any possibility of overcoming original sin in this life. We can be freed from it in the next life if we are properly submissive to the church's instructions, but not until then. Secularists make no promises about the next life, but profess to think it possible we can rehabilitate ourselves in this life. As with the Christians, though, rehabilitation is contingent on our acceptance of certain dogmas that the secularists proclaim: If you don't believe, you are condemned.
The Christian worldview is little concerned with progress in this life, because no improvement in humanity's physical condition—less suffering, longer lives, fewer wars, whatever&emdash;has any bearing on our spiritual condition. No matter what we accomplish, we are still sinners and cannot change that fact. Only God can change it, and he will not unless we believe what we are told to believe. Secular intellectuals, though, must concede at least the possibility of progress in this life. It is what they are trying to accomplish. Their problem is their insistence that they are the only ones who can accomplish it, and that the only way they can accomplish it is by persuading the world to believe their dogmas. They must therefore deny that any progress has been or ever could be accomplished by any other means.
We who believe in the Enlightenment agree with them on one small point. The progress we have made and can continue to make does depend on people's accepting certain ideas. Those ideas include the necessity of reason, the epistemological efficacy of science, and the value of humanistic ideals. We differ with our adversaries by maintaining that these are not conclusions to be reached but rather methods for judging whether our conclusions are likely to be true. And, we insist, it is always, in the end, a matter of judgment. We believe some judgments are more defensible than others, and so we are not pure relativists, but we reject any appeal to infallibility, and in particular to infallible authority. We don't think there is anything we should believe just because someone says so, regardless of that someone's moral integrity, intellectual or artistic achievements, victimhood status, political affiliation, or demographic identity.
Sin is a theological concept, and I see no useful analogue in secular philosophy. To deny that we are sinners is not to affirm that we are in any sense perfect. To strive for progress is to strive for improvement, not for perfection. I do not believe human perfection can be usefully defined, for that matter, but we don't need to know what the perfect human society would be like or whether it could even exist. It suffices that we know our present society could be better and that we know some ways to make it better. To that end, we need to realize that it is better than it used to be and to understand how we made it so. But that realization, and that understanding, are inconsistent with many of the dogmas of contemporary orthodoxy. Intellectuals who promote that orthodoxy are thus obliged to hate the notion that any progress has yet happened.
Next: Political compasses
(This page last updated on June 18, 2020.)