This is a summary and critique of a debate hosted by the Institute of Art and Ideas. In the videos linked below, Steven Pinker and John Mearsheimer are debating The Enlightenment and its alternatives. The subtitle is, Which ideals are the best guide to human betterment? In my opinion, this debate is an important addition to questions I have raised about the Enlightenment, and so I’m providing a summary of it here. I apologize for the length, but I think it was necesssary for analysis. My comments are in parentheses, bold type, and italics. Please watch the debate at the IAI website or view it on YouTube in 2 parts. The debate was published December, 2023.
Gresham College Director, Sophie Scott-Brown, was the artist, and she provided the following resolution.
“The Enlightenment advocated reason, science, democracy and universal human rights as a grounding for human morality and social organization. In the quarter millennium since, to what extent have these ideals been realized? Has the Enlightenment in fact been successful in bringing about moral progress, or are there viable alternatives to the Enlightenment vision?”
(Mearsheimer and Pinker address the question of whether society has improved since the Enlightenment. Pinker argues that it has, according to his material criteria. The opposing argument is Mearsheimer’s focus on the effectiveness of Enlightenment values in promoting political and moral progress. He said he chose this focus because Pinker had previously argued in the affirmative on this point.
An additional ‘provocation’ as stated by Sophie Scott-Brown, seems to suggest a slightly different focus. It questions whether the values of universal liberty and justice are harmful or helpful in themselves. I think it can be argued that both Pinker and Mearsheimer would defend universal liberty and justice, but this question was not taken up.)
We associate values such as universal liberty and justice with the Enlightenment. Do they harm or hinder the world or do they help the world?
Sophie Scott-Brown
Steven Pinker’s Constructive Speech for Enlightenment Values
Steven Pinker constructs his affirmative position for Enlightenment ideals by arguing that we should use reason to improve human flourishing. He explains that the fruits of reason can be seen in certain institutions, such as liberal democracy, regulated markets and international institutions. By reason, he means we should use open deliberation, science, and history in the evaluation of ideas.
Pinker’s definition of human flourishing is: access to the things that each of us wants for ourselves, and by extension, can’t deny to others. These include life, health, sustenance, prosperity, freedom, safety, knowledge, leisure, and happiness. But they are not to be confused with the notion that we should venerate great men of the 18th century. It’s the ideas that count. Nor should we venerate the West. According to Pinker, the West has always been ‘ambivalent’ to Enlightenment ideals, and many counter-enlightenment themes have had great influence in the West.
(The caution against venerating the West seems to be a deliberate narrowing of the terms of the debate. For one thing, it heads off any inclination to analyze the real effects of the Enlightenment on the American system, which was directly influenced by it. In addition, the caution against venerating ‘great men of the 18th century’ eliminates the possibility of analyzing the motives and biases of the philosophes, not to mention their historical context. Pinker wants to limit the debate to data points for material progress.)
Has the Enlightenment Worked? The Affirmative Position
For Pinker, material progress is evidence that the Enlightenment has worked. According to the statistics provided in the video, there has been impressive improvement. The following data provide a snapshot of what has happened in the last 250 years as it applies to the various dimensions of human flourishing.
Decrease in Poverty, Famine and War; Increase in Life Expectancy, Literacy and Democracy
- First, Pinker cites a drastic increase for life expectancy and large decreases in child mortality. In addition, extreme poverty has gone from about 90 percent globally to less than 9 percent. Famine, which used to occur regularly, is only known in war zones and some autocracies. There has also been a large increase in the literacy rate and the percentage of the global population receiving a basic education.
- War has decreased since the Enlightenment. Pinker limits this criterion to what he calls ‘great power war’, or war between ‘800-pound gorillas’. His argument is that this type of war was constant several hundred years ago, but it no longer happens since the Korean War.
- Thanks to the Enlightenment there has been an increase in democratic countries. Pinker believes this has led to fewer incidences of ‘judicial torture’, slavery, and homicide. By judicial torture he means crucifixion, breaking on the wheel, and disembowelment. During the Enlightenment period there has been ‘a wave’ of abolishment of this type of judicial torture.
- Finally, Pinker argues that countries with Enlightenment ideals, by which he means liberal democracies, are the healthiest, cleanest, safest, happiest, and the most popular destination of immigrants.
As to the question of alternatives to the Enlightenment Pinker lists religion, romantic nationalism and authoritarianism, zero-sum struggle (in which a country or group tries to end the control of an oppressor), and reactionary ideologies.
John Mearsheimer’s Constructs his Argument Against the Effectiveness of Enlightenment Values in Fostering Political and Moral Progress
Mearsheimer begins by explaining that he is not arguing there has been no progress since 1680. Nor is he denying that the Enlightenment contributed to some of it. His question is whether the Enlightenment has led to moral and political progress. As mentioned above, he bases this focus on the argument made by Steven Pinker in the affirmative. In Mearsheimer’s view, moral and political progress have to do with first principles or the ability to reach consensus on the good life. Has the Enlightenment created a situation where wide scale consensus can be reached on first principles, or the good life? If so, this would be evidence of moral progress. His argument has three parts:
The Probems: Unfettered Reason, Radical Individualism, and Security Competition
- The core argument is based on the question of whether unfettered reason will lead individuals to come to an agreement on first principles or truth. Again, this is in contrast to Steven Pinker, who has argued in his book that it will lead to agreement. On the contrary, Mearsheimer believes agreement can’t be achieved by using unfettered reason. When unfettered reason involves many individuals, there will be significant disagreement, and it can actually lead to homicide. This is due to the fact that people cannot agree on first principles, political goods, or justice. For this reason, politics are important. By contrast, Pinker argues that politics are not important. He believes agreement will come in the end.
- People who focus on the Enlightenment focus on radical individualism. However, Mearsheimer argues that people are social animals first, and they carve out room for their individualism. Because they are social animals, they belong to tribes. Today, we call tribes ‘nations’. Because human beings are tribal, their identity is bound up with the tribe or nation. This affects their interests, ways of looking at the world, views of justice, etc. Since individuals are parts of nations, and nations disagree on first principles, it is harder to reach agreement.
- In international relations, people who focus on the Enlightenment believe, like Kant, that by using reason people can create perpetual peace. However, Mearsheimer doesn’t think Enlightenment ideals lead to consensus, or some sort of truth about political factors. He thinks reason leads to competition. This is a problem because the international system is anarchic. In other words, it has no higher authority. Therefore, each state uses reason to think about how to survive. And survival has to be its principle goal. This means that all states will engage in security competition. So, in an anarchical system you have a situation where reason leads not to peace but competition, and sometimes to deadly conflict.
Theme One: Can We Agree on What Progress Looks Like or will we never be able to agree on first principles?
Sophie Scott-Brown asks Steven Pinker if politics is missing from his account. It seemed rather rosy at first, but maybe some political context is missing. She gives the example of how some countries might seem attractive because they are colonial powers. The countries that are not so attractive are not colonial powers and have been put into very difficult economic situations by successful and quite aggressive states which are now liberal democracies. Is there any scope for agreed frameworks and shared decision making that could lead to the kind of collective progress that Enlightenment seems to feel is necessary?
Steven Pinker’s Response to Sophie Scott-Brown and Rebuttal of John Mearsheimer
Absolutely. It’s called democracy. The Enlightenment thinkers were obsessed with how you can have a political organization that is not vested in an absolute monarch with divinely granted powers. And the ideals of free speech and democracy were absolutely predicated on the fact that people do disagree. There is absolutely no presumption that everyone has the same values and the same beliefs. That’s why you need democracy. Given that people are not going to agree, how are we going to govern ourselves? On the other hand, Pinker thinks it’s important not to exaggerate how much disagreement there is compared to say, 250 or 500 years ago, specifically compared to the wars of religion.
The Declaration of Human Rights
The world’s nations did sign the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. You have many countries signing on to it, sometimes in the breach and sometimes hypocritically. But these ideals command wide assent. Not universal assent. There are still religious fanatics and authoritarian despots. And there are still glory-mad expansionist leaders. The ideals of the Enlightenment are not a guarantee that everyone will come around, but they are arguments about which way we ought to be heading.
(The underlying assumption is that the world should be heading to more liberalism. The alternatives are described as religious fanatics, authoritarians, and glory-mad expansionist leaders–in other words, as inferior.)
Individuals are Free to Belong to a Group, and to Leave the Group
Next, Pinker addresses individualism, another point that Mearsheimer mentioned. Among the individual needs are belonging to a group, belonging to family, having friends, belonging to institutions, belonging to organizations. There’s nothing about recognizing the right of individuals that contradicts the idea the we like to belong to groups, as long as they don’t coerce us or as long as we can leave those groups. And that includes nations.
Not everyone agrees with everyone else in a nation. That’s why we have parties and contested elections and people who come and go and disagree with their leaders, unless they are threatened with jail for doing so. It is exactly a precept of the Enlightenment in its commitment to democracy that people within a nation actually disagree with each other. And the fact that a nation has an ideology doesn’t mean that is it right for every last individual to be forced into conforming to it. We know historically and from current events, people don’t.
(Pinker seems to deny that there is any difference between Mearsheimer’s claim that humans are social animals and his own claim that humans are first and foremost individuals. But this is a fundamental difference between the two participants.)
The Rate of War Has Decreased
On Mearsheimer’s claim that competition for security means that we will perpetually be at war, Pinker argues that if that were true, the rate of war should be at a constant level throughout history. And it’s not. It’s gone way down, especially since the end of the second world war. Competition for security does not mean we will be perpetually at war. The rate of war goes up and down depending on nations’ commitment to Enlightenment ideals, or whether its goal is glory or grandeur or preeminence. Countries who have been at each other’s throats for centuries have decided that it’s better to get along. The nature of the international system does not pin us to a constant level of war in every period in history.
(Pinker says the rate of war has decreased since World War II. But is this due to the Enlightenment? To answer that, we will have to examine the structural changes in governance and finance that took place during and after that war, and as a direct result of that war. His claim is that the rate of war goes up and down depending on nations’ commitment to Enlightenment ideals. He seems to imply that a lack of Enlightenment ideals results in a country having a goal of glory, grandeur, or preeminence. Are wars initiated by countries with those goals? Or are wars initiated against countries with those goals?)
John Mearsheimer’s Rebuttal to Steven Pinker
Mearsheimer says that with a careful reading of Pinker’s book, it is clear that he talks about truth, and about allowing truth to prevail. (Pinker adds that he means approaching truth, that we don’t know what truth is.) But Mearsheimer is interested in how you get moral and political progress if you don’t get truth? For example, in the United States we have the red versus blue divide. How do you make progress in that situation? ‘It just seems to me that progress is bound up with the concept of truth’.
He is also aware that Pinker considers progress to be the coming of liberalism. When he says we’re getting smarter, he means we’re becoming more liberal. Mearsheimer concludes that, for Pinker, the truth is synonymous with becoming liberal.
Mearsheimer is not criticizing liberalism per se, but he says there are a lot of people on the planet who don’t like it. Furthermore, liberal democracies have been decreasing since 2006. He asks whether we really want to identify progress as liberalism, and anyone who opposes it as wrong.
Steven Pinker’s Rebuttal to John Mearsheimer
Pinker argues that he wants to identify progress with human flourishing. He says some values of human flourishing, like freedom, do overlap with liberalism, but he could argue that other values like health, longevity, sustenance, and equality of women (he redefines this as a liberal value in the next sentence), infants not dying, women not dying in childbirth, people not getting stabbed to death in muggings, or getting thrown in jail because they disagree with the king, are universal. Values like equality of women are liberal values, but many of the values listed above are universally agreed upon. There are ‘holdouts’, but there is a significant trend in values such as equality of women.
The Historical Trend is Liberalism
The countries that deny women the vote have been dwindling. According to Pinker, the only one left is the Vatican But the direction is that laws discriminating against women are falling off the books. Also, countries that have laws criminalizing homosexuality are liberalizing that. Overall, he thinks there is a historical trend toward liberal values. And liberal values are the most defensible. Therefore, when people come together, they tend to agree on these values more easily. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is an example.
Liberalism as a Universal Value–as Opposed to the Vatican for Example
However, he argues that if the first universal value is that we accept Jesus Christ as our savior, a lot of people will fall by the wayside. Education and freedom of speech are harder to argue against.
(The mention of ‘holdouts’ is interesting. He specifically mentions the Vatican as a holdout. He points out that a religious belief, like the acceptance of Jesus Christ as our savior, can’t lead to consensus or agreement. He’s probably right, and Mearsheimer doesn’t disagree with him on this. Pinker may be more extreme, because he sees liberalism and Enlightenment as superior to Christianity, and not only as a first principle. In his view, Christianity is destined to diminish over time.)
John Mearsheimer’s Rebuttal
Mearsheimer’s concern about consensus remains, and he wants to go a step further. He says Pinker believes that in the academy there are huge numbers of people who do not agree with his world view. He says these are people who are not using reason for good ends. It’s not only that Pinker thinks a large number of great thinkers, people who enjoy great esteem in the academy, people like Foucault and Nietzsche, are hindering progress or getting in the way. He argues that anybody who believes in these isms, these ideologies, are asking for trouble. So the question is, how can Pinker argue we are moving in a positive direction?
Mearsheimer does not disagree that these ‘great thinkers’ hinder progress. He believes ideologies are a hindrance to progress on the moral and political front. That is the point he’s been trying to make. Given this panoply of forces that are acting in ways that are contrary to Pinker’s preferences, how can he argue that we’re making progress?
Steven Pinker’s Rebuttal
There are a number of pathologies in our institutions. The belief that there is progress is not a belief that everything gets better for everyone all the time. Progress is incremental and has setbacks. It has to, because it’s not a force of the universe.
Mearsheimer is right that there was a perception of progress as some mystical force that carries us ever upward. That’s not what Pinker is advocating. Quite the contrary. Pinker says most of the forces of the universe will try to grind us down, but we fight back with reason, with deliberation, with argument, and there’s no guarantee of success. Sometimes brute force wins. Sometimes people are under a spell of delusions or believe in ideologies. But the standard argument of what we ought to do and the descriptive argument of where we are, are separate. Things can go wrong, and things have gone wrong. On average, we’re better off than 100 or 200 years ago, to say nothing of 2,000 years ago.
(Apparently, progress is not something that can be defined in the moment. You can only see it in retrospect. Until then, we struggle against the forces of the universe. It is only on the basis of observable historical change that Pinker can say the world is better off than 100, 200, or 2,000 years ago. His evidence is in the statistics that measure human flourishing. However, in the present, the ‘normative (or standard) argument’ of what we ought to do is all we can depend on. Fortunately, Pinker believes he knows what we ought to do.
Cross Examination
On cross examination, Sophie Scott-Brown asks John Mearsheimer if maybe it’s not always about getting it right and building up a history of that rightness. Maybe it’s understanding more about how you go about getting it right. She asks John, if that is a convincing argument for him.
John Mearsheimer’s Response to Sophie Scott-Brown
He clarifies his point by saying that deliberation and reason in different individuals leads to different conclusions about political or moral goods. In universities, for example, there are huge numbers of smart people who can’t agree on much of anything.
Steven Pinker’s Rebuttal of John Mearsheimer
Pinker thinks it’s a bit of an exaggeration that they can’t agree on much of anything. [But] there is plenty of disagreement. He says we want to distinguish between the institution of academia and the republic of letters, which includes think tanks, newspapers, bloggers and so on. [But] even within Academia there are not a lot of people who agree with traditional gender roles or think that homosexuality should be criminalized, or that war is heroic and humanity will become decrepit if we ever have peace. Many arguments are obsolete–like the idea that we should have racial segregation, or that we should look to the Bible as a source of history. There is intellectual progress; there are also crazy superstitions and monstrous beliefs.
Cross Examination
John Mearsheimer, are you confident we won’t slip back again or do you see new myths rising to replace the old ones?
Sophie Scott-Brown
John Mearsheimer’s response to Sophie Scott-Brown
It’s not so much myths. Reason can lead individuals to come up with smart views that the world works in one way, and lead other individuals to think it works in other ways. In international relations, the world I operate in, I have a theory of realism. I argue that realism best explains how the world works. Steve is a very smart guy and he has a different view of international politics, a liberal view. That is my basic point. Smart individuals can use their critical faculties to come up with different world views. When you have different views, how do you have progress? The fact that Steve and I have different views of international relations makes me doubt we can have progress in understanding how the world works.
Steven Pinker’s Rebuttal
If we take the history of science as our guide, we find that at any given time there are controversies. But sometimes enough time passes, enough empirical tests are done, and we find out one of them was right and one of them was wrong. Turn back the clock 80 years and scientists were arguing whether inheritance was carried in protein or DNA. The DNA guys won and the protein guys lost. It may be that in the realm of international relations, let’s say we have a competition and we try to make predictions about what will happen in the next year, 5 years or 10 years. Time passes and we may discover that one of us was wrong and one was right. We use the history of science as our guide…
John Mearsheimer’s Rebuttal
When talking in the moral and political realm, and not the medical realm, it is almost impossible to reach consensus on a widespread scale. There’s always going to be disagreement. Mearsheimer says this is his basic point.
Steven Pinker Introduces a Hypothetical Question
How about the desirability of a Marxist-Leninist command control economy and political system? I think reasonable people would say, yeah we tried that experiment and it didn’t work.
John Mearsheimer’s Rebuttal of Pinker’s Premise
I think there’s no question that ideas come and go. I think the example of what’s happened with Marxism is basically correct. It had its heyday and it’s no longer a very influential ideology. But the point is, it’s not the new ideologies that have appeared and the old ideologies that have hung on, and we have fought with each other and had some sort of dialectical process that has led to a consensus. My argument is that you need a consensus to get progress. What we’re talking about, the dependent variable, is moral and political progress. (In other words, you need consensus at the beginning of the process in order to go in the right direction. The alternative is to wait for 50 years or a century to see who was right.)
Theme Two: How Do We Define Individualism, and Has it Made the World a Better Place?
Let’s pick back up with the idea of the individual. John, Steve says the individual is not this isolated entity, they are multi-social beings. They don’t abandon their social belonging, they are members of different social groups. It’s that no one predominates. There are also distinctions within nations. Nations are not unified concepts. What do you think about that?
Sophie Scott-Brown
John Mearsheimer’s Rebuttal
When you think about human nature you have to ask yourself certain questions. Do you think we are first and foremost individuals who form social contracts? This is what liberalism is all about. Or do you think that we are first and foremost social individuals who carve out room for our individualism? Almost all Enlightenment thinkers start with the individual. He thinks this is true of Steven Pinker. For Pinker, the focus is on the individual and it is individual reason that really matters. Mearsheimer’s view is that we are first and foremost social animals. We are born and socialized into social tribes, which we now call nations. He says, ‘for folks like Steve, tribes get in the way of rational thinking…Political tribalism is the most insidious form of irrationality today.’ And political tribalism is equated with the nation.
Mearsheimer Does Not Disagree With Pinker on the Problems of Tribalism and Nationalism
However, it’s important to be clear what their differences actually are. Mearsheimer is not disagreeing with Pinker on this point. He acknowledges there are problems with tribalism. Nationalism, identity with a nation, the fact that we live in a world with nation states, makes it difficult to reach progress. But if you do believe that we are social animals, that causes all sorts of problems for Pinker’s argument.
Steve Pinker’s Rebuttal
One of the challenges of the Enlightenment is, how do you have large-scale groupings without the coercion of forcing people to sacrifice their interests for a majority or even for the most powerful? That’s why we have liberal democracy and freedom of speech. It explains why nations have decreasingly identified themselves with some single religion or ethnic group. They have become defined, retrospectively, through something like a social contract.
The Problem with Defining a Nation in Terms of Race or Religion
It’s not historically true that people sat down together and hatched out the details for a country. But in terms of rationalizing what are the defensible arrangements for a country, Pinker thinks it’s really good that the United States is not a Christian nation. It doesn’t define itself as a white nation, or even an Anglo nation. In addition, the other nations that people want to live in are nations that are multicultural, accept difference, and recognize rights of individuals.
Among the rights of individuals are the right to affiliate voluntarily with groups like religions or clubs or whatever they want. But to have the violence that is carried out by a state identified with a particular ethnic group is a terrible idea. Because you’re never going to have the members of one kindred, of one ethnic group, of one religion sharing a territory. Every territory has people from many backgrounds. It’s a bad idea if the wielder of force serves one blood line. He believes in human nature, but he thinks there are some features of human nature that we ought to develop means to control.
(Pinker’s argument depends on individualism. However, he does not admit that this is a fundamental difference with Mearsheimer’s contention that humans are social animals first. Also, in the United States, the wielder of force often favors one bloodline. Is that the result of liberalism, or is it an example of the West’s ambivalence to Enlightenment liberalism?)
The Problem of Tribalism in the United States
Pinker explains why he thinks tribalism leads to irrationality. He gives the example of a healthcare proposal that was first developed by the Republicans. When the Democrats tried to pass it, the Republican opposed it. That’s irrational. Another example is a math problem. If the answer favors a liberal policy proposal, the liberals will overlook mathematical errors and vice versa. Say you give people a logical deduction from certain premises, and it’s consistent with a leftist agenda. The leftists will think it’s highly proper and the right will reject it. Tribalism is an incoherent system for a modern nation state because nation states are heterogenous.
(It seems Pinker has made Mearsheimer’s point. Reason does not lead to consensus. This is important because Pinker previously defended political parties as a liberal remedy for the inability to come to consensus.)
John Mearsheimer’s Rebuttal
Mearsheimer says he is happy he lives in a country that is not a Christian country, or of one ethnicity. But there are a lot of his fellow Americans who disagree with him. And if you go outside the boundaries of the United States there are lots of countries who don’t want a multiethnic state. He says this is what underpins his argument that we have not made a lot of progress over time.
Steven Pinker’s Rebuttal
Pinker says part of the argument he is making is normative. It is true that there are a lot of societies that try to limit the population to one race or ethnicity. Many argue that is not viable, that they will be torn by strife. These societies will have significant minorities, and it’s bad to suppress them, ignore them or deny them rights. That’s the standard argument. And then there’s the argument of those who ask, are we winning? It’s not true that we have convinced the entire world.
Then there’s the separate question of what has been the trend? Do you have more societies that recognize minority rights? That give the franchise to minorities? Or do you have more societies that criminalize a religion? It’s not unanimous. It hasn’t swept all over the globe. But that has been the trend. He cites his book Better Angels. The empirical study of how many people are convinced that this is how a society ought to be run is different than how ought a society to be run.
Cross Examination
Can we talk about liberalism as the system that’s best at handling the differences we are talking about? And actually that’s why it’s so successful? John?
Sophie Scott-Brown
John Mearsheimer’s Affirmative Speech for Liberalism
I agree one hundred percent. Liberalism is predicated on the assumption that individuals can’t agree about first principles. They cannot agree on questions about the good life. And sometimes those disagreements are so intense that people kill each other. So, liberalism deals with that fundamental set of problems by creating civil society, and by giving people room to live life the way they see fit.
Liberalism also privileges individual rights. It says we each have the right to live the way we see fit. Furthermore, liberalism preaches tolerance because, again, individuals can’t agree on first principles. And finally, liberalism enables the creation of a state to make sure no single person is in a position to kill another person. That’s what liberalism is all about. It’s all about dealing with the fact that there is no consensus on political and moral questions of the first order.
So is progress, Steve, just acknowledging that no consensus is possible and we just have to learn to live and manage these differences as best we can? Is that actually an alternative account of progress?
Sophie Scott-Brown
(John Mearsheimer interjects that that is not Steve’s definition of progress.)
Steven Pinker’s Rebuttal
It’s a component, but it’s not the definition of progress. Pinker would define progress as improvements in human flourishing. But yes, the fact of disagreement stemming from the fact that humans are different individually and culturally, and have to come to some working agreement despite that disagreement. But it’s an exaggeration to say we can’t agree on first principles.
The fact is that despite disagreement, some factual opinions are better than others, we don’t know them a priori because the truth has not been given to us by some deity. Instead, we’ve got to blunder along and discover what the truth is. Likewise, we’ve got to experiment and blunder to find the best arrangements for living together. Some of them work better than others in terms of the criteria of enhancing human flourishing.
Pinker’s Redefinition of First Principles
If you look at the UN’s sustainable development goals, every country agreed on which way the world ought to go. Poverty should be reduced, safety should be increased, access to clean water should be increased, etc. There’s an awful lot of agreement. And then we can reframe other arguments in terms of what will get us to the state that many of us can agree on? Again not everyone will agree.
There’s some people who have messianic visions that the world is not going to be a great place until everyone obey’s all of God’s commandments. And if kids die it doesn’t matter. But to the extent that people do agree that kids dying is bad, that changes the argument from disagreements over first principles to disagreements over means to the end.
(Pinker can’t explain why people with different visions still exist, so he discounts them as irrational. In his view, the focus on the importance of keeping kids alive is a remedy for human disagreement because it is something most people can agree on. This agreement then changes the focus of the argument from first principles to means-to-an-end.)
John Mearsheimer’s Refutation
I just don’t think, Steve, there’s any disagreement on issues of safety, health and sustenance. That’s not the issue. We’re talking about moral and political principles here. We’re talking about first principles, what comprises the good life. That’s where the real disagreements are.
Steven Pinker’s Response
He asks if fewer children dying isn’t a moral principle? (This is somewhat dishonest. As I understand him, child and infant mortality was part of his measure of human flourishing, which is part of the means-to-an-end argument rather than a first principles argument.)
John Mearsheimer’s Rebuttal
That is so obvious it’s not interesting. You didn’t need the Enlightenment for that. From time immemorial people have understood that children dying is a bad thing and we should try to keep them alive as long as possible.
Steven Pinker’s Rebuttal
But Pinker says those are first principles everyone agrees on. He then counters that the end of slavery, human sacrifice and genocide are also moral. Likewise, agricultural improvements are a better a way to avert famine than prayer. Agricultural improvements were a moral development in his view.
Finally, he argues that the idea of universal human flourishing is not so obvious. If you go back to ancient codes the idea that every last homo sapien ought to flourish isn’t there. This supports his contention that the concern for human flourishing is due to the Enlightenment.
(I think we need statistics on Pinker’s claim–the belief that every last homo sapien ought to flourish, didn’t exist in ancient codes. As for the morality of agricultural improvements instead of prayer, the ancients knew about crop rotation.)
Theme Three: Are there any really viable alternatives or are we stuck trying to make Enlightenment values work?
John Mearsheimer’s Points of Agreement with Pinker: The First Enlightenment Principle is Unfettered Reason
The first Enlightenment value is unfettered reason. Reason is put up on a pedestal, however, this is another premise Mearsheimer agrees with. And he assumes all three of the participants, as academics, would agree with it too. He argues that the dispute has to do with what unfettered reason leads to in moral and political questions.
The Second Enlightenment Principle is Individualism
The second principle value of the Enlightenment is the focus on the individual. Nor is Mearsheimer against individualism. For academics, individualism really matters. But his basic point is we are all social animals and we have to carve out space for our individuality.
Where we live makes a difference in how we see the world and that makes it more difficult to reach a consensus or truth on social and political values. Therefore, Mearsheimer has a mixed mind about individualism. He does like individualism, but also believes we are social animals first. With regard to international relations. He reiterates that we live in a fundamentally competitive world. States compete with each other often in nasty ways and this has not changed since the beginning of time. And this is not going to change in the future. We haven’t made any progress there.
Steven Pinker’s Rebuttal: What are the Alternatives to Enlightenment Principles?
Well, the more you try to formulate alternatives to Enlightenment ideals, the better they look. Because what are the alternatives? If you decide to argue against reason, why should we take that seriously? Either it’s reasonable, in which case you signed on to it, or it’s not reasonable, in which case there’s no reason to go along with it.
If you’re against individualism, are you okay with your parents arranging a marriage for you? Are you okay with your parents forcing you to go to church every Sunday? Are you okay being forced to do anything? For the coherence of the group, not expressing your opinion is the rule, because that would introduce dissent, and that would be uncomfortable.
It’s very hard to argue for an alternative for individualism as long as it includes people’s preference to belong to social collectives. Again Pinker would distinguish the normative position of what ought we to persuade others or to argue for from the triumphalist argument that we’ve won and everyone agrees with us. Everyone doesn’t agree with us. We might think they ought to, but he wouldn’t want the dictatorial force to make them agree. Those are two separate arguments. But he thinks the trend has been in the direction of consensus. He would argue that Enlightenment ideals are what we ought to strive for and that that’s the direction we are moving.
John Mearsheimer’s Rebuttal
Mearsheimer thinks there is a large element of triumphalism in Pinker’s book. He said it made him think of ‘Frank’ Fukuyama’s article, The End of History, which was published in 1989. ‘Frank’s’ argument is that we’re making progress. We defeated fascism in the first half of the twentieth century, and Communism in the second half. The future is liberalism. We will have more and more democracy over time. And once you have more democracy, you won’t have fundamental disagreement over political and moral issues. Therefore, since most of the countries of the world will be democracies, there won’t be much political disagreement out there.
‘Frank’s’ argument at the end of his article was that the biggest problem we will face is boredom because there will be no more politics and no more fights. Mearsheimer’s argument is that because of the limits of unfettered reason, what you get are really big fights where people are willing to kill each other. And that’s what makes politics a contact sport. Once politics, which is a contact sport, is at play, you’re not going to make a lot of progress. In fact, you’re going to need a state to keep everybody under control.
Steven Pinker’s Rebuttal
Pinker argues that the end of history was deliberately ambiguous in the two ways he has mentioned in this debate. You could read it either as a goal that political systems are aiming at or ought to aim at, or you could read it as the factual claim that we’ve got there. He says that he read Fukuyama as arguing more for the former than the later. Fukuyama’s book was written before the end of the Cold War and at that time, he was right. Liberal democracies were steadily growing. In the last ten years, there has been a recession of democracy, but Pinker predicts democracy will increase in the future.
