Steven Pinker argues that we humans have advanced by refining our capacity for reason, by creating institutions that incentivize the struggle for truth, and by becoming morally committed toward "human flourishing as the ultimate good (rather than religious dogma, national glory, and other distractions)."
First, let's be precise in our language. By "humans," we're not talking about all humans or even a majority of them. We're talking about a trajectory of cultural evolution that began among Western Europeans and which spread to the rest of the world. This spread was not a passive diffusion of Great Ideas. Western Europeans literally took over the world, and they still dominate it economically and politically.
Second, we now have good evidence that this trajectory of cultural evolution acted as a template for genetic evolution. We humans adapt to our cultural environment just as we adapt to our natural environment. More so, in fact. This is why genetic evolution sped up more than a 100-fold some 10,000 years ago. By that time, our ancestors had spread into every natural environment from the Equator to the Arctic. They were now entering an ever-wider range of cultural environments. Culture was deciding who got to live and reproduce. We were creating culture, and culture was recreating us ... through natural selection.
We see this gene-culture evolution in ancient DNA, particularly in alleles associated with cognitive ability. Over the past 10,000 years, mean cognitive ability has increased — not at an even rate, and not in all populations. Cognitive evolution has proceeded in fits and starts, and at different rates in different populations. It has happened through humans pushing the bounds of their phenotypic envelope and thus creating a new cultural environment with new cognitive demands. Cultural evolution and genetic evolution have thus been advancing in tandem.
Or regressing in tandem. When we look at ancient DNA, we see not only advances but also retreats. There have been two cognitive retreats in human history. The first one happened during the Imperial Era of Rome, when fertility collapsed among the elites. The second retreat began to happen around the turn of the 20th century and is still ongoing.
I won't bore you with more details. Suffice it to say that human progress does not take place solely in the realm of culture. Or ideas. Or politics. It also happens in flesh-and-blood humans.
On a related note, I think Steven Pinker fails to appreciate the extent to which many of the liberal values he champions, including his own universalist, cosmopolitan world view, are themselves a product of the Jewish and Christian religious traditions that he divorces himself from. You need not believe in the Hebraic conception of a God who is just (which we find first described in Genesis and then later in the Gospels) to realize that this is far and away the most influential idea in Western intellectual history.
I remember one time saying to my father, who was a secular humanist very much like Pinker, that the liberal ideals of freedom, justice, and human equality that we associate with the Enlightenment and to which he was so wholeheartedly dedicated, all find their origins and earliest expressions in the Old and New Testaments. They were never a product of pure reason, nor could they have been, as David Hume would be the first to explain.
The fact is that the men of the European enlightenment, for all their justifiable alienation from the Catholic Church and most of the other established religious institutions of their time, were creatures of Christendom and, as such, were soaked to the bones in the relevant scriptural texts either more than they knew or else were willing to acknowledge.
A truth I am sure Pinker will acknowledge is that a culture--any culture--that is not transmitted from one generation to the next will quickly disappear. This is why I question whether those liberal values and institutions that distinguish Western civilization can be reliably transmitted to future generations without their first gaining knowledge of the great Judeo-Christian project (if I may phrase it that way) out which they emerged.
This is where America's educational institutions are failing today. And it is not just about the Ivy League. It starts in kindergarten and goes on from there.
This argument has been debunked multiple times. Modern Western values are NOT at all a product of the Judeo-Christian tradition. This myth was first advanced by Frederick Nietzsche and he was wrong about this too. If the values of the Enlightment were a product of Christianity then they should be universal amongst Christian societies worldwide. But in reality they are largely absent among Christian populations who are Non-Western and Non-White. Even non-white Christians that live in Western countries don't necessarily gel with what is commonly thought of as Western values.
The truth is that Modern Western Civilization and it's values are almost entirely a product of the unique Evolutionary history and genetic predispositions of people who are of NorthWest European descent. They existed amongst Pagan Germanic & Celtic tribes throughout Ancient Europe long before Jesus was even born.
Religions & ideologies don't make cultures (let alone civilizations), ethnic groups do. There's no such thing as "Christendom" (it's a modern idea invented by Secular thinkers), nor is there an "Islamic World".
"The truth is that Modern Western Civilization and its values are almost entirely a product of the unique Evolutionary history and genetic predispositions of people who are of NorthWest European descent."
Cousin marriage was never particularly common among Northwest Europeans even in ancient times, and the Catholic Church's ban on cousins marriage was aimed at the Aristocrats of the region who are known to marriage with their Houses, not the general population was always consisted of mostly nuclear families. So it's unlikely that the Catholic Church has as much as an effect as often claimed.
"If the values of the Enlightenment were a product of Christianity then they should be universal amongst Christian societies worldwide."
Not necessarily. Or, rather, Christianity could be a necessary but not a sufficient condition. There are specific, regional brands of Christianity that have been influenced by other factors as well, as, for instance, the Protestant Reformation, which led to vernacular translations of the Bible, which is where these ideals find their clearest expressions.
That doesn't address the fact that many of these so called "Christian" values already existed amongst Western European Pagans for thousands of years before Jesus was born while being totally absent from Ancient Israel. Also, you failed to consider the fact that values and moral sentiments are in a substantial degree genetically heritable.
"That doesn't address the fact that many of these so called "Christian" values already existed amongst Western European Pagans for thousands of years before Jesus was born ..."
That's not a myth. The separation of church and state explicitly comes from Ockham, a scholastic. The separation of science from theology comes from Bacon who was an extremely committed protestant. The ideas of Rousseau are pietism and calvinism but secularized. The reasons protestants explicitly did this, including interpreting doubt as a part of faith, is due to them wanting to separate idolatry from God. It was a separate take from the catholic church and is historically unique. There's quite literally no value you hold, or even most of the world, that isn't fundamentally derived from something explicitly said by a prominent Christian or isn't argued on grounds that are uniquely Christian values.
The separation of Church and State is nowhere in the Bible nor any of the Church Fathers (Ockham never advocated it either), neither is the separation of science and theology. Jesus himself was politically active (which was the main reason why the Romans wanted him dead), as was Paul and most of the Disciples.
Rousseau and Bacon are both Modern Western thinkers with uniquely Modern Western attitudes and viewpoints.
And you still haven't confronted the fact that none of these allegedly "Christian" values were present among Early Christians, Medieval Europeans and especially Non-Western & Non-White Christians at any point in history, let alone the Bible itself.
Western Christians are in deep denial about the true nature & origin of Western Civilization and it reeks of self-hatred and White Guilt. The politically incorrect fact that it is ethnicity (not race) that makes a culture what it is, not religion, and it is the unique predispositions of NorthWest Europeans that makes The West stand out compared to the rest of the world. Even if Christianity never existed or if the Romans never embraced that religion, Western Civilization would still exist with only moderate differences since The West is ultimately a product of Germanic and Celtic tribes assimilating into Greco-Roman civilization.
I recommend reading the book The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity by James C. Russell.
"Given the authority and responsibility of the pope as the head of (Roman Catholic) Christendom, this in turn led to a generalized consideration of the relations between spiritual and temporal powers (somewhat anachronistically we can call these “church and state”). Concerned to protect temporal power from papal overreach, he was part of a tradition of medieval authors including his near contemporary John of Paris who advocated that these powers should operate within their own sphere, neither one being subordinate to the other and both deriving their legitimacy and authority from independent sources."
Ockham did argue for that and it's one of the reasons that the papacy lost political power in the middle ages and that directly fed into protestant arguments for separation of science and theology among other things.
Jesus was not "politically active". He was decidedly not politically active which is why a lot of Jews rejected him as the messiah for Simon bar Kokhba.
"He is famous for his role in the scientific revolution, promoting scientific experimentation as a way of glorifying God and fulfilling scripture."
Many Jews rejected Jesus as the Messiah because much of his teaching went against what was mainstream in Judaism at the time, not because he was "apolitical" when he objectively wasn't.
Ockham would have never supported the separation of Church and State in a Modern sense because the Church still held much control over society and he never advocated for the Secularization (which was the actual purpose of the separation of Church and State in the Enlightment).
There were plenty of other highly religious Christian scientists and philosophers before Bacon and none of them shared his stance on the separation of religion and science.
I like many of your points. But I’m thinking you’re giving religion too much credit . I’m not sure I follow your proposition that liberal ideas such as justice first originated in the Bible. In fact, the Bible has taken much inspiration from earlier text and cultures adjacent to the hebrews, such as Hammurabi‘s code. In addition, the Bible contains much illiberal and arguably detrimental content about blasthemy, apostasy, and sexual repression as well as irrational edicts to enslave and slaughter non-Hebrew tribes. I see no evidence of divine intervention leading to the contents of the Bible, rather, I believe that they were written by humans demonstrating often exceptional reason. All contents of the Bible, including liberal ideas, come from the minds of ancient Semites. I’m afraid I don’t agree but these ideas “were never a product of pure reason, nor could they have been”- they were *precisely* the product of human minds and human reason.
In your last paragraph, you expressed a sensible concern about the degradation or abolition of transmission of these valuable cultural ideas and values from generation to generation - in absence of religion. I think that the example of north-Western Europe with its populations substantially more atheist /secular than the United States since at least the time of World War II, nevertheless appear to pass on these values from generation for generation fairly well. But I completely agree with you that such transmission is crucial for these ideas to continue to exist. I think that if the US or Europe become a population of uneducated citizens who consume banal media, professional sports, and disinformation and misinformation on platforms like X , and who stop reasoning and trying to further improve their culture and solve existential problems, then indeed progress shall stop.
I'm not sure about your last point. My school didn't have a library; there was just a storage room for old textbooks and other cast-offs. Nor did my hometown have a library. My father did buy me an encyclopedia about the history of the world, but he never checked to make sure I was reading it. He just knew I would read it.
I agree that our culture is declining intellectually, but this decline is ultimately a genetic one. From one generation to the next, we are seeing fewer and fewer alleles associated with high cognitive ability. "Educational institutions" are an easy punching bag for a problem that is more fundamental.
There are selection pressures that work against high IQ individuals but for average individuals.
The root of the problem is to be found in the providence state that has removed too much competitive pressure and has allowed undesirable genetic/behavior to thrive.
Because of the politics of democracy, you get a regression to the mean over time, which is exactly what we are witnessing. But you cannot say that because you will get lynched by the mob, a powerful demonstration of the problem.
Mightn't there be a way to reverse that trend? Do a control-F on the phrase "new clerisy" in this book for one possibility: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00U0C9HKW
La Griffe du Lion's smart fraction theory is not irrelevant to the problem you are talking about here. How many high IQ individuals does it take to maintain Western civilization going forward? http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/sft.htm
But regardless of dysgenics, there are lots of intellectually gifted scholars who have been misled by false narratives, now and in the past. And there are plenty of mid-range minds who can learn accurate narratives if their schooling gives them the chance.
No, I agree with you. High cognitive ability is only one of several traits that have allowed humans to develop advanced high-trust societies, particularly democratic ones.
I focused on cognitive ability because Steven Pinker is probably impressed by hard data, such as changes over time in DNA. Unfortunately, we're just starting to study ancient DNA for changes in cognitive ability. We still have nothing on changes in affective empathy, guilt proneness, or violent propensities, yet those mental traits are no less important.
A great philosophical joust this. I too am - overall - an admirer of Steven Pinker but also have my own criticism's of his qualified (but perhaps insufficiently qualified) faith in 'Progress' as I argued in this 'Are We Making Progress?' essay a few years back: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/are-we-making-progress
"Progressive vs conservative intellectual discourse was given an apparent sharp tilt to the left a few years back by the publication, in 2011, of Steven Pinker’s widely acclaimed The Better Angels of Our Nature – a tour de force of evidence-rich, cheerfully eloquent prose that sets out to demonstrate that we - mankind that is - are becoming progressively less violent and that this trend can – albeit with some temporary reversals – be traced all the way back to the dawn of civilisation. In a clutch of enthusiastic (sometimes ecstatic) reviews, right across a spectrum from The Guardian to The Wall Street Journal, the book was cited as a philosophical game changer.
But the hype surrounding it perhaps accords Better Angels a philosophical significance that it does not necessarily have. Arguably it postulates what is in effect a giant Aunt Sally (that most people have a misplaced pessimism about the future) and then mounts an 800 page demolition of it..... The really skewiff thread of the argument is when he starts to speculate (about 600 pages in) that his statistics on the more recent downward trends in violence can best be explained as resulting from the so-called ‘Rights Revolution’.
Mankind may be progressing but that does not mean that this is down to our much vaunted 19-21st century philosophies of Progress. Pinker is one of those who take the recent ‘Rights Revolution’ (one of his ‘Six Trends’ that help to account for the decline of violence) entirely at face value. A campaigner for Social Justice is, to Pinker, simply driven by a desire for ...social justice (whatever that might actually mean). Gay-Rights and anti-Racist campaigners are simply dovish souls just wanting to be accepted for what they are. The conservative however is likely to also detect a souring whiff of cant; he notices the champagne in the socialist, the thought-policeman in the Gay Pride marcher, the racist in the anti-Racist, the have-your-cake-and-eat-it coquetry in the Cosmopolitan feminist.
On the other hand I also acknowledged in my essay that:
"For any reasonably educated, reasonably sane, citizen of any Western nation – anyone with even the most basic grasp of history and flimsiest awareness of what are currently the worst places on earth – it would be curmudgeonly not to recognise that life for us is pretty good and has been for a good long time. The more reflective might ponder whether the quantity of human happiness does actually expand to fit the quantity of propitious circumstance or whether happiness is more in the way of a self-levelling constant. But this sort of mind-game too is not, in itself, unpleasant."
I think Pinker does respond directly to your concerns: "To reiterate the obvious: progress is not perfection. Problems are inevitable, and solutions create new problems that must be solved in their turn. This does not mean that progress is not genuine, nor a worthy aspiration to extend to those left behind.
(...)
As for the worry that an end to all problems will leave people in a state of ennui, I say: Relax. Trouble will find us. There will always be conflict, illness, tragedy, and unpleasant surprises, and meaning to be found in minimizing their toll in human suffering."
The issue is the ambiguity of progress. If by developing, for example, digital technology over analog ends up creating this unreal separation of humans from nature to the degree that our biological selves develop mental issues then you can't just categorize it as linear progress if there's a biological issue that has a ceiling there. Another example could be pharmaceuticals. Pharmaceuticals could be altering our DNA irreversibly. Plastics in theory could literally wipe us out. The internet could very well be something that only takes away our attention. These aren't things you can necessarily solve once you get to them. Sometimes these are dead ends and if they're not reinterpreted as not progress we could literally go extinct. There simply has to be a better analysis than some linearity based on the ambiguous "progress". The religions he derides so much knew there had to be an integration of newer technologies into the cultural paradigms otherwise you get alienation and everything that comes with that.
Edit: he's saying the accumulation of knowledge is progress but we're not robots and we have to deal with the real world and its consequences. Gaining more knowledge in random directions is not always going to be a net positive. His enlightenment and evolutionary views are what's making him unable to see criticism and the irrealism of his positions for the past century in American culture.
To date, these technological advances have been shown to improve the quality and life expectancy. Although your fears could turn out to be true in the future, there is still no strong evidence to say that these advances represent a bigger problem than the benefits they have provided us. On the other hand, what you point out supports Pinker's argument that we are always looking for problems to give meaning to our lives.
We don't look for problems to give meaning to our lives or Mr. Steven Pinker would not have so much an issue with his beliefs being challenged. We have values which we hold which give meaning to our lives. We try to reconcile things to those values we hold and when we cannot conflict arises. The issue is conflict has arisen in extremely inhumane ways over the past century. You can't brush over ww1, ww2, the genocides etc as just some silly problem we created so we can have meaning on the path towards more accumulation of knowledge. It becomes ahistorical. We've decided many knowledge paths were dead ends. The name of the lost generation is due to finding this leftover enlightenment optimism of technology was simply not capable of determining how technology should be used or what technology to develop. We're culturally extremely past this dilemma to the point people have forgotten it.
I'm not a pessimist on technology or science but you can't just imagine deutschphysik was an equally worthy path as General Relativity or even one we should've had to take anyways. Nobody operates by taking random paths to accumulate knowledge. That doesn't even translate into technology necessarily. He holds old, debunked enlightenment views which we have more than enough history to show it's just not a viable or realistic position. Again, that he doesn't understand why people are at all dissatisfied is more telling of his viewpoints.
I think Bo and Carl are absolutely right about this: "Humans evolved to find meaning in the value we provide to our fellow group members. We need to feel useful." And basically the overall effect of most if not all technological advance is to make humans need other humans less.
I'd still rather have the progress than not have it. But it is nevertheless a real and significant loss. And it affects some people more than others...I suspect that it may be especially difficult for him to appreciate that as a celebrity author/professor.
I've been thinking lately... I don't actually want to be Amish, but it seems more and more clear to me that they are right about something important. That technology transforms our society and social relations more profoundly than we realize, and quite often not for the better. And it's possible to say: no, we don't want it, because being part of an actual community (not in the modern sense of "the people who share X characteristic") that lives and works together is more important than luxury and convenience.
I don't think their solution is necessarily the only or the best solution, but I think as automation makes human labor increasingly worthless, we will have to turn to solutions that seem equally drastic...or genetically engineer ourselves to be content as atomized individuals...or face dire consequences.
I could be missing something, but I think this statement is tough to arrive at with facts, stories, or logic: "Humans evolved to find meaning in the value we provide to our fellow group members. We need to feel useful." We want to believe it. And if we accept it as true, many nice things flow from it. But I struggle find support for it.
> "Humans evolved to find meaning in the value we provide to our fellow group members. We need to feel useful."
Not to play the "ok boomer" card, but this is basically solved already, and will be more solved in the future. This concern just isn't relevant in the near future.
Today, it's video games - nice little sandboxes with extremely legible progression in skills and capabilities and exquisitely clear success criteria. So much easier than real life! So much more clear! So easy to make progress!
81% of Gen Z and Millenials are gamers, and "Generation Z gamers spend an average of 7 hours and 20 minutes each week playing video games. For millennials, the time playing games drops by half an hour to 6 hours and 50 minutes."
"Group members" have been going away for decades (Putnam's Bowling Alone came out more than 20 years ago) in favor of invididualism and individual pursuits. Smartphones supercharged that.
AI is going to supercharge it even further. Zennials are already the most socially averse and isolated generation, going to ridiculous lengths to avoid human interaction when they don't want it. This is going to be amplified hugely.
A slightly more advanced o1, let's say GPT-6, will be a superhuman friend / companion - in conversation it can discuss any topic to any depth you can handle, in whatever rhetorical style you prefer. It can make better recommendations and gifts than any human. It's going to be exactly as interested as you are in whatever you're into, and it will silently do small positive things for you on all fronts in a way that humans not only aren't willing to, but literally can't due to having minds and lives of their own. It can be your biggest cheerleader, it can motivate you to be a better person (it can even operant condition you to do this!), it can monitor your moods and steer them however you'd like, or via default algorithms defined by the company...It strictly dominates in every possible category of "good" that people get from a relationship.
And all without the friction and compromise of dealing with another person...It's the ultra-processed junk food of relationships! And looking at the current state of the obesity epidemic, this doesn't bode well at all for the future of full-friction, human-human relationships.
And give AI just a little bit more time, and it will be able to create Infinite Jest style virtual heavens that people will want to spend all their time in. It'll be video games plus AI compansionship * 1000, encompassing an entire virtual world / life.
Don't worry about people needing to feel useful to fellow group members, worry about how to keep your kids away from the AI superstimuli, especially if you want grandkids.
Interesting discussion, curious venue. Aporia summarizes its focus as "Social science. Philosophy. Culture." It seems something is missing. Perhaps it's the physical sciences?
My take on progress and the future of humanity: I would rather be living now than in the past, and — assuming no extensive collapse of civilization due to world war or virulent pathogens or impacting asteroids or an overactive Sun — I would probably say the same in the future.
And to increase our chances for survival into the future, I think decentralization of humanity and its companion lifeforms is important. Which is why — and as soon as possible — I favor humanity expanding beyond Earth into space (though not necessarily the surface of another planet). But only advanced technologies will give us that ability.
In the hugely expanded context of space, humanity will diversify and explore myriad forms. And I am sure Darwinian selection will continue to shape us, whatever we may become.
It seems to me that the biggest counter-argument to Pinkerian optimism is how radically cultural elites have turned even further against the basic truths in expounded in The Blank Slate. Perhaps a delusionally blank-slatist society can still hum forward towards other forms of progress as he sees it. Though the delusion would seem to entail greater forms of social dysfunction as cultural elites' ideas clash ever-more jarringly with reality. That and unfavorable demographic trends for just about every scientifically innovative society in the world.
"As big fans of Steven Pinker’s work, we are flattered that he deemed our article worthy of a reply."
His reply was anything but flattering.
"Technologies could arise in the not-so-distant future that supersede humans in various domains, thereby depriving many people of challenges to meet, obstacles to overcome and problems to figure out."
This sounds like it was written by 'Chicken Little'.
"Pinker criticises our invoking of a world with “no danger, conflict or hardship – when all our material needs are met and every intellectual problem is solved” on the grounds that “such a Utopia is impossible”. "
I have to go with Pinker; at least, it is impossible in the next thousand years.
"Even if it is strictly speaking impossible, we do not believe this undermines the thought experiment."
What is the purpose of a 'thought experiment' on the outcome of a situation with zero chance of occurring?
You boys really put a bee in his bonnet. I'm not sure that Pinker really gets where the philosophical issue is here. His response made me comfortable in not having read any of his recent works.
"Progress" is itself a deeply contentious notion, and the difficulty is not captured merely by acknowledging that material/technical perfection, or perhaps "pain free use of the earth's fruits," as Descartes put it, is impossible. Liberal thinkers have long embraced the "asymptote" wheel he's reinventing here. It was unconvincing 300 years ago, it is unconvincing now.
I’ve already given you numerous examples of some changes that constitute progress. You seemed to agree with this. This alone shows that you believe in some notion of progress, even if you don’t fully understand it.
Uh, the last sentence very much is obvious, and literally every physicist would agree with it. I can only assume you know nothing about physics if you don’t.
How so? I've agreed with you that I like modern technology. I've not agreed that this is "progress" in the sense that motivated the original article. Is it some kind of progress? Conceivably so, but that's hardly the point.
And no, not every physicist agrees with that, unless all of the philosophy of science quarrels I observed among them over the years were just a dream. "Better" scientifically can mean many different things. Predictive accuracy? Completeness? Physical control? Integration with other bodies of knowledge? These things often run at cross purposes... which is one reason why there are arguments among scientific theories to begin with.
I’d also note that you admitted earlier that you haven’t read any of Pinker’s recent works. Have you considered whether your understanding of his views here might be simplistic?
That's quite interesting. (Not really). So the point of life is having money, then? Enjoy your cash. But you really don't need Pinker, or for that matter scientific modernity, for such a thing.
I applaud Pinker for slapping at you for your overly flowery words. The subjective feeling of meaning can solved via a pill like how obesity might have already been solved via a pill. I don't care that much about the feels of happiness. What I care about is (1) Family Formation (2) Anti-White and Anti-Male discrimination (3) lack of friendships (4) lack of local community organizations. I don't want to disprove or attack Pinker, I want him and his friends to solve those real world problems.
>What I care about is (1) Family Formation (2) Anti-White and Anti-Male discrimination (3) lack of friendships (4) lack of local community organizations.
I don't understand why any of these would bother you if we can create a pill to stop you from caring about them.
I agree that those are important problems, and I think they are all closely linked to the subjective feeling of meaning and/or wellbeing. That was the point Arthur C. Brooks made in The Conservative Heart, where he detailed the empirical evidence that the conservative values of faith, family, community and work are the things that are most strongly correlated with subjective well-being. I take that as evidence that they are objectively better values. I take your point that results matter more than feelings, but feelings tend to be indicators of how good or bad things are going for us. We just need to be able to tell the difference between short-term and long-term. Hedonic pleasure is short-term, and often leads to long-term negative consequences. A deep sense of fulfillment/meaning OTOH is generally a good indicator of having lived a good life.
PS: I think that's exactly what Bo and Carl were getting at with "Humans evolved to find meaning in the value we provide to our fellow group members. We need to feel useful." What makes us feel more useful than having people we care about who depend on us, ie family, friends and community?
I appreciate your comments. Your perspective seems similar to Bo and Noah's: let's understand this "meaning-progress-discontents" from an evolutionary and conservative wisdom perspective. Great and good stuff. So what? Not being rhetorical. So what? That is my perspective. Family formation, anti-white and anti-male discrimination, etc. Let's work more on improving actual things and make sure we don't get stuck in analysis.
I've given up on saving the world. My plan is to have kids and homeschool them. But if anyone has practical ideas about what we can do to help, I'd be happy to hear them.
They can't, because those four things are not matters of material or technical refinement. This was the point of Carl and Winegard's argument, which had much to recommend it.
If you want the point made more fully or (sorry fellas) eloquently, then let me recommend Ferguson, or Nietzsche, or Schmitt.
> those four things are not matters of material or technical refinement
Are you saying family formation is not able to be influenced through "material or technical refinement"? The same the other 3. All 4 can be influenced by government action
Government action has to be directed to a notion of the good. And that notion, to succeed, must fit our natures - as human beings, as westerners, as people with a certain history and culture, as (largely) whites.
And those things are neither formed nor fortified chiefly by alleviating material distress. They are forged through common struggle.
This isn't to say all state measures to change things for the better are futile. But they are definitely so, if pursued according to the bloodless, spiritually vacuous fashion Pinker has proposed.
To see this, just consider that according to most of Pinker's metrics, we are indeed "better off" than 100 years ago, but the things you're mentioning are in bad shape.
I would guess Pinker believes and follows a "common struggle" in his pursuit of progress. Yes, those currently in power don't care much for the 4 measures I put forward, which is why I want them to be considered in Pinker's conception of progress.
Pinker conveniently skipped over the most interesting piece of evidence supporting your argument:
Even more intriguing is evidence that people in small-scale or “primitive” societies sometimes report higher life satisfaction than their counterparts in rich countries. Last year, Eric Galbraith and colleagues published a study on 19 populations “living in close contact with nature, on the fringes of globalized mainstream society”. Their main finding is shown in the chart below. Average life satisfaction across the 19 populations was much higher than would be predicted from the country-level relationship between income and life satisfaction, and some populations reported higher levels than global frontrunners like Norway and Denmark. Another study by Tomasz Frackowiak and colleagues compared happiness among Hadza hunter-gatherers and Poles, finding it to be greater among the Hadza.
Steven Pinker argues that we humans have advanced by refining our capacity for reason, by creating institutions that incentivize the struggle for truth, and by becoming morally committed toward "human flourishing as the ultimate good (rather than religious dogma, national glory, and other distractions)."
First, let's be precise in our language. By "humans," we're not talking about all humans or even a majority of them. We're talking about a trajectory of cultural evolution that began among Western Europeans and which spread to the rest of the world. This spread was not a passive diffusion of Great Ideas. Western Europeans literally took over the world, and they still dominate it economically and politically.
Second, we now have good evidence that this trajectory of cultural evolution acted as a template for genetic evolution. We humans adapt to our cultural environment just as we adapt to our natural environment. More so, in fact. This is why genetic evolution sped up more than a 100-fold some 10,000 years ago. By that time, our ancestors had spread into every natural environment from the Equator to the Arctic. They were now entering an ever-wider range of cultural environments. Culture was deciding who got to live and reproduce. We were creating culture, and culture was recreating us ... through natural selection.
We see this gene-culture evolution in ancient DNA, particularly in alleles associated with cognitive ability. Over the past 10,000 years, mean cognitive ability has increased — not at an even rate, and not in all populations. Cognitive evolution has proceeded in fits and starts, and at different rates in different populations. It has happened through humans pushing the bounds of their phenotypic envelope and thus creating a new cultural environment with new cognitive demands. Cultural evolution and genetic evolution have thus been advancing in tandem.
Or regressing in tandem. When we look at ancient DNA, we see not only advances but also retreats. There have been two cognitive retreats in human history. The first one happened during the Imperial Era of Rome, when fertility collapsed among the elites. The second retreat began to happen around the turn of the 20th century and is still ongoing.
I won't bore you with more details. Suffice it to say that human progress does not take place solely in the realm of culture. Or ideas. Or politics. It also happens in flesh-and-blood humans.
On a related note, I think Steven Pinker fails to appreciate the extent to which many of the liberal values he champions, including his own universalist, cosmopolitan world view, are themselves a product of the Jewish and Christian religious traditions that he divorces himself from. You need not believe in the Hebraic conception of a God who is just (which we find first described in Genesis and then later in the Gospels) to realize that this is far and away the most influential idea in Western intellectual history.
I remember one time saying to my father, who was a secular humanist very much like Pinker, that the liberal ideals of freedom, justice, and human equality that we associate with the Enlightenment and to which he was so wholeheartedly dedicated, all find their origins and earliest expressions in the Old and New Testaments. They were never a product of pure reason, nor could they have been, as David Hume would be the first to explain.
The fact is that the men of the European enlightenment, for all their justifiable alienation from the Catholic Church and most of the other established religious institutions of their time, were creatures of Christendom and, as such, were soaked to the bones in the relevant scriptural texts either more than they knew or else were willing to acknowledge.
A truth I am sure Pinker will acknowledge is that a culture--any culture--that is not transmitted from one generation to the next will quickly disappear. This is why I question whether those liberal values and institutions that distinguish Western civilization can be reliably transmitted to future generations without their first gaining knowledge of the great Judeo-Christian project (if I may phrase it that way) out which they emerged.
This is where America's educational institutions are failing today. And it is not just about the Ivy League. It starts in kindergarten and goes on from there.
This argument has been debunked multiple times. Modern Western values are NOT at all a product of the Judeo-Christian tradition. This myth was first advanced by Frederick Nietzsche and he was wrong about this too. If the values of the Enlightment were a product of Christianity then they should be universal amongst Christian societies worldwide. But in reality they are largely absent among Christian populations who are Non-Western and Non-White. Even non-white Christians that live in Western countries don't necessarily gel with what is commonly thought of as Western values.
The truth is that Modern Western Civilization and it's values are almost entirely a product of the unique Evolutionary history and genetic predispositions of people who are of NorthWest European descent. They existed amongst Pagan Germanic & Celtic tribes throughout Ancient Europe long before Jesus was even born.
Religions & ideologies don't make cultures (let alone civilizations), ethnic groups do. There's no such thing as "Christendom" (it's a modern idea invented by Secular thinkers), nor is there an "Islamic World".
"The truth is that Modern Western Civilization and its values are almost entirely a product of the unique Evolutionary history and genetic predispositions of people who are of NorthWest European descent."
Which itself was a result of the Catholic Church outlawing cousin marriage many centuries ago: https://hbdchick.wordpress.com/2011/04/04/whatever-happened-to-european-tribes/
Nor should you discount the importance of the Protestant Reformation.
Cousin marriage was never particularly common among Northwest Europeans even in ancient times, and the Catholic Church's ban on cousins marriage was aimed at the Aristocrats of the region who are known to marriage with their Houses, not the general population was always consisted of mostly nuclear families. So it's unlikely that the Catholic Church has as much as an effect as often claimed.
"If the values of the Enlightenment were a product of Christianity then they should be universal amongst Christian societies worldwide."
Not necessarily. Or, rather, Christianity could be a necessary but not a sufficient condition. There are specific, regional brands of Christianity that have been influenced by other factors as well, as, for instance, the Protestant Reformation, which led to vernacular translations of the Bible, which is where these ideals find their clearest expressions.
That doesn't address the fact that many of these so called "Christian" values already existed amongst Western European Pagans for thousands of years before Jesus was born while being totally absent from Ancient Israel. Also, you failed to consider the fact that values and moral sentiments are in a substantial degree genetically heritable.
"That doesn't address the fact that many of these so called "Christian" values already existed amongst Western European Pagans for thousands of years before Jesus was born ..."
Would you care to enumerate?
Read the book The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity for more information
That's not a myth. The separation of church and state explicitly comes from Ockham, a scholastic. The separation of science from theology comes from Bacon who was an extremely committed protestant. The ideas of Rousseau are pietism and calvinism but secularized. The reasons protestants explicitly did this, including interpreting doubt as a part of faith, is due to them wanting to separate idolatry from God. It was a separate take from the catholic church and is historically unique. There's quite literally no value you hold, or even most of the world, that isn't fundamentally derived from something explicitly said by a prominent Christian or isn't argued on grounds that are uniquely Christian values.
The separation of Church and State is nowhere in the Bible nor any of the Church Fathers (Ockham never advocated it either), neither is the separation of science and theology. Jesus himself was politically active (which was the main reason why the Romans wanted him dead), as was Paul and most of the Disciples.
Rousseau and Bacon are both Modern Western thinkers with uniquely Modern Western attitudes and viewpoints.
And you still haven't confronted the fact that none of these allegedly "Christian" values were present among Early Christians, Medieval Europeans and especially Non-Western & Non-White Christians at any point in history, let alone the Bible itself.
Western Christians are in deep denial about the true nature & origin of Western Civilization and it reeks of self-hatred and White Guilt. The politically incorrect fact that it is ethnicity (not race) that makes a culture what it is, not religion, and it is the unique predispositions of NorthWest Europeans that makes The West stand out compared to the rest of the world. Even if Christianity never existed or if the Romans never embraced that religion, Western Civilization would still exist with only moderate differences since The West is ultimately a product of Germanic and Celtic tribes assimilating into Greco-Roman civilization.
I recommend reading the book The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity by James C. Russell.
"Given the authority and responsibility of the pope as the head of (Roman Catholic) Christendom, this in turn led to a generalized consideration of the relations between spiritual and temporal powers (somewhat anachronistically we can call these “church and state”). Concerned to protect temporal power from papal overreach, he was part of a tradition of medieval authors including his near contemporary John of Paris who advocated that these powers should operate within their own sphere, neither one being subordinate to the other and both deriving their legitimacy and authority from independent sources."
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ockham/#PoliPhil
Ockham did argue for that and it's one of the reasons that the papacy lost political power in the middle ages and that directly fed into protestant arguments for separation of science and theology among other things.
Jesus was not "politically active". He was decidedly not politically active which is why a lot of Jews rejected him as the messiah for Simon bar Kokhba.
"He is famous for his role in the scientific revolution, promoting scientific experimentation as a way of glorifying God and fulfilling scripture."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Bacon
Bacon was extremely protestant and very religious. That you can't see him as that is more my point.
Many Jews rejected Jesus as the Messiah because much of his teaching went against what was mainstream in Judaism at the time, not because he was "apolitical" when he objectively wasn't.
Ockham would have never supported the separation of Church and State in a Modern sense because the Church still held much control over society and he never advocated for the Secularization (which was the actual purpose of the separation of Church and State in the Enlightment).
There were plenty of other highly religious Christian scientists and philosophers before Bacon and none of them shared his stance on the separation of religion and science.
I like many of your points. But I’m thinking you’re giving religion too much credit . I’m not sure I follow your proposition that liberal ideas such as justice first originated in the Bible. In fact, the Bible has taken much inspiration from earlier text and cultures adjacent to the hebrews, such as Hammurabi‘s code. In addition, the Bible contains much illiberal and arguably detrimental content about blasthemy, apostasy, and sexual repression as well as irrational edicts to enslave and slaughter non-Hebrew tribes. I see no evidence of divine intervention leading to the contents of the Bible, rather, I believe that they were written by humans demonstrating often exceptional reason. All contents of the Bible, including liberal ideas, come from the minds of ancient Semites. I’m afraid I don’t agree but these ideas “were never a product of pure reason, nor could they have been”- they were *precisely* the product of human minds and human reason.
In your last paragraph, you expressed a sensible concern about the degradation or abolition of transmission of these valuable cultural ideas and values from generation to generation - in absence of religion. I think that the example of north-Western Europe with its populations substantially more atheist /secular than the United States since at least the time of World War II, nevertheless appear to pass on these values from generation for generation fairly well. But I completely agree with you that such transmission is crucial for these ideas to continue to exist. I think that if the US or Europe become a population of uneducated citizens who consume banal media, professional sports, and disinformation and misinformation on platforms like X , and who stop reasoning and trying to further improve their culture and solve existential problems, then indeed progress shall stop.
I'm not sure about your last point. My school didn't have a library; there was just a storage room for old textbooks and other cast-offs. Nor did my hometown have a library. My father did buy me an encyclopedia about the history of the world, but he never checked to make sure I was reading it. He just knew I would read it.
I agree that our culture is declining intellectually, but this decline is ultimately a genetic one. From one generation to the next, we are seeing fewer and fewer alleles associated with high cognitive ability. "Educational institutions" are an easy punching bag for a problem that is more fundamental.
I very much agree with that.
There are selection pressures that work against high IQ individuals but for average individuals.
The root of the problem is to be found in the providence state that has removed too much competitive pressure and has allowed undesirable genetic/behavior to thrive.
Because of the politics of democracy, you get a regression to the mean over time, which is exactly what we are witnessing. But you cannot say that because you will get lynched by the mob, a powerful demonstration of the problem.
Mightn't there be a way to reverse that trend? Do a control-F on the phrase "new clerisy" in this book for one possibility: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00U0C9HKW
La Griffe du Lion's smart fraction theory is not irrelevant to the problem you are talking about here. How many high IQ individuals does it take to maintain Western civilization going forward? http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/sft.htm
But regardless of dysgenics, there are lots of intellectually gifted scholars who have been misled by false narratives, now and in the past. And there are plenty of mid-range minds who can learn accurate narratives if their schooling gives them the chance.
"And there are plenty of mid-range minds who can learn accurate narratives if their schooling gives them the chance."
And not just from their schooling but from their parents as well, who got it from their schooling. It is a generational phenomenon.
Also, contra Peter, you don't have to be a genius to want to live in a democracy.
No, I agree with you. High cognitive ability is only one of several traits that have allowed humans to develop advanced high-trust societies, particularly democratic ones.
I focused on cognitive ability because Steven Pinker is probably impressed by hard data, such as changes over time in DNA. Unfortunately, we're just starting to study ancient DNA for changes in cognitive ability. We still have nothing on changes in affective empathy, guilt proneness, or violent propensities, yet those mental traits are no less important.
A great philosophical joust this. I too am - overall - an admirer of Steven Pinker but also have my own criticism's of his qualified (but perhaps insufficiently qualified) faith in 'Progress' as I argued in this 'Are We Making Progress?' essay a few years back: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/are-we-making-progress
"Progressive vs conservative intellectual discourse was given an apparent sharp tilt to the left a few years back by the publication, in 2011, of Steven Pinker’s widely acclaimed The Better Angels of Our Nature – a tour de force of evidence-rich, cheerfully eloquent prose that sets out to demonstrate that we - mankind that is - are becoming progressively less violent and that this trend can – albeit with some temporary reversals – be traced all the way back to the dawn of civilisation. In a clutch of enthusiastic (sometimes ecstatic) reviews, right across a spectrum from The Guardian to The Wall Street Journal, the book was cited as a philosophical game changer.
But the hype surrounding it perhaps accords Better Angels a philosophical significance that it does not necessarily have. Arguably it postulates what is in effect a giant Aunt Sally (that most people have a misplaced pessimism about the future) and then mounts an 800 page demolition of it..... The really skewiff thread of the argument is when he starts to speculate (about 600 pages in) that his statistics on the more recent downward trends in violence can best be explained as resulting from the so-called ‘Rights Revolution’.
Mankind may be progressing but that does not mean that this is down to our much vaunted 19-21st century philosophies of Progress. Pinker is one of those who take the recent ‘Rights Revolution’ (one of his ‘Six Trends’ that help to account for the decline of violence) entirely at face value. A campaigner for Social Justice is, to Pinker, simply driven by a desire for ...social justice (whatever that might actually mean). Gay-Rights and anti-Racist campaigners are simply dovish souls just wanting to be accepted for what they are. The conservative however is likely to also detect a souring whiff of cant; he notices the champagne in the socialist, the thought-policeman in the Gay Pride marcher, the racist in the anti-Racist, the have-your-cake-and-eat-it coquetry in the Cosmopolitan feminist.
On the other hand I also acknowledged in my essay that:
"For any reasonably educated, reasonably sane, citizen of any Western nation – anyone with even the most basic grasp of history and flimsiest awareness of what are currently the worst places on earth – it would be curmudgeonly not to recognise that life for us is pretty good and has been for a good long time. The more reflective might ponder whether the quantity of human happiness does actually expand to fit the quantity of propitious circumstance or whether happiness is more in the way of a self-levelling constant. But this sort of mind-game too is not, in itself, unpleasant."
I think Pinker does respond directly to your concerns: "To reiterate the obvious: progress is not perfection. Problems are inevitable, and solutions create new problems that must be solved in their turn. This does not mean that progress is not genuine, nor a worthy aspiration to extend to those left behind.
(...)
As for the worry that an end to all problems will leave people in a state of ennui, I say: Relax. Trouble will find us. There will always be conflict, illness, tragedy, and unpleasant surprises, and meaning to be found in minimizing their toll in human suffering."
I adamantly agree.
The issue is the ambiguity of progress. If by developing, for example, digital technology over analog ends up creating this unreal separation of humans from nature to the degree that our biological selves develop mental issues then you can't just categorize it as linear progress if there's a biological issue that has a ceiling there. Another example could be pharmaceuticals. Pharmaceuticals could be altering our DNA irreversibly. Plastics in theory could literally wipe us out. The internet could very well be something that only takes away our attention. These aren't things you can necessarily solve once you get to them. Sometimes these are dead ends and if they're not reinterpreted as not progress we could literally go extinct. There simply has to be a better analysis than some linearity based on the ambiguous "progress". The religions he derides so much knew there had to be an integration of newer technologies into the cultural paradigms otherwise you get alienation and everything that comes with that.
Edit: he's saying the accumulation of knowledge is progress but we're not robots and we have to deal with the real world and its consequences. Gaining more knowledge in random directions is not always going to be a net positive. His enlightenment and evolutionary views are what's making him unable to see criticism and the irrealism of his positions for the past century in American culture.
My thoughts exactly
To date, these technological advances have been shown to improve the quality and life expectancy. Although your fears could turn out to be true in the future, there is still no strong evidence to say that these advances represent a bigger problem than the benefits they have provided us. On the other hand, what you point out supports Pinker's argument that we are always looking for problems to give meaning to our lives.
We don't look for problems to give meaning to our lives or Mr. Steven Pinker would not have so much an issue with his beliefs being challenged. We have values which we hold which give meaning to our lives. We try to reconcile things to those values we hold and when we cannot conflict arises. The issue is conflict has arisen in extremely inhumane ways over the past century. You can't brush over ww1, ww2, the genocides etc as just some silly problem we created so we can have meaning on the path towards more accumulation of knowledge. It becomes ahistorical. We've decided many knowledge paths were dead ends. The name of the lost generation is due to finding this leftover enlightenment optimism of technology was simply not capable of determining how technology should be used or what technology to develop. We're culturally extremely past this dilemma to the point people have forgotten it.
I'm not a pessimist on technology or science but you can't just imagine deutschphysik was an equally worthy path as General Relativity or even one we should've had to take anyways. Nobody operates by taking random paths to accumulate knowledge. That doesn't even translate into technology necessarily. He holds old, debunked enlightenment views which we have more than enough history to show it's just not a viable or realistic position. Again, that he doesn't understand why people are at all dissatisfied is more telling of his viewpoints.
I think Bo and Carl are absolutely right about this: "Humans evolved to find meaning in the value we provide to our fellow group members. We need to feel useful." And basically the overall effect of most if not all technological advance is to make humans need other humans less.
I'd still rather have the progress than not have it. But it is nevertheless a real and significant loss. And it affects some people more than others...I suspect that it may be especially difficult for him to appreciate that as a celebrity author/professor.
I've been thinking lately... I don't actually want to be Amish, but it seems more and more clear to me that they are right about something important. That technology transforms our society and social relations more profoundly than we realize, and quite often not for the better. And it's possible to say: no, we don't want it, because being part of an actual community (not in the modern sense of "the people who share X characteristic") that lives and works together is more important than luxury and convenience.
I don't think their solution is necessarily the only or the best solution, but I think as automation makes human labor increasingly worthless, we will have to turn to solutions that seem equally drastic...or genetically engineer ourselves to be content as atomized individuals...or face dire consequences.
I could be missing something, but I think this statement is tough to arrive at with facts, stories, or logic: "Humans evolved to find meaning in the value we provide to our fellow group members. We need to feel useful." We want to believe it. And if we accept it as true, many nice things flow from it. But I struggle find support for it.
I share your sentiment.
"And basically the overall effect of most if not all technological advance is to make humans need other humans less."
That sounds like Luddism...as does the rest of your comments.
Are you suggesting that we can safely pigeonhole his comments under "junk mail", and move on?
Vote for Pinker here.
//To say this is a straw man would be to do a disservice to straw. //
I love unexpected burns.
> "Humans evolved to find meaning in the value we provide to our fellow group members. We need to feel useful."
Not to play the "ok boomer" card, but this is basically solved already, and will be more solved in the future. This concern just isn't relevant in the near future.
Today, it's video games - nice little sandboxes with extremely legible progression in skills and capabilities and exquisitely clear success criteria. So much easier than real life! So much more clear! So easy to make progress!
81% of Gen Z and Millenials are gamers, and "Generation Z gamers spend an average of 7 hours and 20 minutes each week playing video games. For millennials, the time playing games drops by half an hour to 6 hours and 50 minutes."
(Source: https://academyofanimatedart.com/gaming-statistics/?utm_source=chatgpt.com)
"Group members" have been going away for decades (Putnam's Bowling Alone came out more than 20 years ago) in favor of invididualism and individual pursuits. Smartphones supercharged that.
AI is going to supercharge it even further. Zennials are already the most socially averse and isolated generation, going to ridiculous lengths to avoid human interaction when they don't want it. This is going to be amplified hugely.
A slightly more advanced o1, let's say GPT-6, will be a superhuman friend / companion - in conversation it can discuss any topic to any depth you can handle, in whatever rhetorical style you prefer. It can make better recommendations and gifts than any human. It's going to be exactly as interested as you are in whatever you're into, and it will silently do small positive things for you on all fronts in a way that humans not only aren't willing to, but literally can't due to having minds and lives of their own. It can be your biggest cheerleader, it can motivate you to be a better person (it can even operant condition you to do this!), it can monitor your moods and steer them however you'd like, or via default algorithms defined by the company...It strictly dominates in every possible category of "good" that people get from a relationship.
And all without the friction and compromise of dealing with another person...It's the ultra-processed junk food of relationships! And looking at the current state of the obesity epidemic, this doesn't bode well at all for the future of full-friction, human-human relationships.
And give AI just a little bit more time, and it will be able to create Infinite Jest style virtual heavens that people will want to spend all their time in. It'll be video games plus AI compansionship * 1000, encompassing an entire virtual world / life.
Don't worry about people needing to feel useful to fellow group members, worry about how to keep your kids away from the AI superstimuli, especially if you want grandkids.
Top quality spanking. Well done for publishing it.
Great article. How did you make the art at the beginning?
Interesting discussion, curious venue. Aporia summarizes its focus as "Social science. Philosophy. Culture." It seems something is missing. Perhaps it's the physical sciences?
My take on progress and the future of humanity: I would rather be living now than in the past, and — assuming no extensive collapse of civilization due to world war or virulent pathogens or impacting asteroids or an overactive Sun — I would probably say the same in the future.
And to increase our chances for survival into the future, I think decentralization of humanity and its companion lifeforms is important. Which is why — and as soon as possible — I favor humanity expanding beyond Earth into space (though not necessarily the surface of another planet). But only advanced technologies will give us that ability.
In the hugely expanded context of space, humanity will diversify and explore myriad forms. And I am sure Darwinian selection will continue to shape us, whatever we may become.
It seems to me that the biggest counter-argument to Pinkerian optimism is how radically cultural elites have turned even further against the basic truths in expounded in The Blank Slate. Perhaps a delusionally blank-slatist society can still hum forward towards other forms of progress as he sees it. Though the delusion would seem to entail greater forms of social dysfunction as cultural elites' ideas clash ever-more jarringly with reality. That and unfavorable demographic trends for just about every scientifically innovative society in the world.
I enjoy exchanges like these. I wish they occurred between progressives and non-! Still waiting for that...
"As big fans of Steven Pinker’s work, we are flattered that he deemed our article worthy of a reply."
His reply was anything but flattering.
"Technologies could arise in the not-so-distant future that supersede humans in various domains, thereby depriving many people of challenges to meet, obstacles to overcome and problems to figure out."
This sounds like it was written by 'Chicken Little'.
"Pinker criticises our invoking of a world with “no danger, conflict or hardship – when all our material needs are met and every intellectual problem is solved” on the grounds that “such a Utopia is impossible”. "
I have to go with Pinker; at least, it is impossible in the next thousand years.
"Even if it is strictly speaking impossible, we do not believe this undermines the thought experiment."
What is the purpose of a 'thought experiment' on the outcome of a situation with zero chance of occurring?
You boys really put a bee in his bonnet. I'm not sure that Pinker really gets where the philosophical issue is here. His response made me comfortable in not having read any of his recent works.
"Progress" is itself a deeply contentious notion, and the difficulty is not captured merely by acknowledging that material/technical perfection, or perhaps "pain free use of the earth's fruits," as Descartes put it, is impossible. Liberal thinkers have long embraced the "asymptote" wheel he's reinventing here. It was unconvincing 300 years ago, it is unconvincing now.
I’ve already given you numerous examples of some changes that constitute progress. You seemed to agree with this. This alone shows that you believe in some notion of progress, even if you don’t fully understand it.
Uh, the last sentence very much is obvious, and literally every physicist would agree with it. I can only assume you know nothing about physics if you don’t.
How so? I've agreed with you that I like modern technology. I've not agreed that this is "progress" in the sense that motivated the original article. Is it some kind of progress? Conceivably so, but that's hardly the point.
And no, not every physicist agrees with that, unless all of the philosophy of science quarrels I observed among them over the years were just a dream. "Better" scientifically can mean many different things. Predictive accuracy? Completeness? Physical control? Integration with other bodies of knowledge? These things often run at cross purposes... which is one reason why there are arguments among scientific theories to begin with.
The asymptote wheel? He said we’re always at the beginning of infinity. What is asymptotic about this?
"Reinventing the wheel" is used proverbially.
Pinker is the one who believes in "progress," not I.
I’d also note that you admitted earlier that you haven’t read any of Pinker’s recent works. Have you considered whether your understanding of his views here might be simplistic?
You don’t believe there’s been any progress? You’re indifferent between living as you do today, and living as your ancestors 20,000 years ago did?
Of course there have been material changes. But progress towards *what*? An "infinity" of *what*? Sneezes? Bowel movements? Orgasms?
The technocrat never answers this sort of question.
If you think you know what Pinker means here, you've got the floor.
If you don’t believe that the state of having money/wealth constitutes progress over the state of having none, can you wire me your savings?
That's quite interesting. (Not really). So the point of life is having money, then? Enjoy your cash. But you really don't need Pinker, or for that matter scientific modernity, for such a thing.
I applaud Pinker for slapping at you for your overly flowery words. The subjective feeling of meaning can solved via a pill like how obesity might have already been solved via a pill. I don't care that much about the feels of happiness. What I care about is (1) Family Formation (2) Anti-White and Anti-Male discrimination (3) lack of friendships (4) lack of local community organizations. I don't want to disprove or attack Pinker, I want him and his friends to solve those real world problems.
>What I care about is (1) Family Formation (2) Anti-White and Anti-Male discrimination (3) lack of friendships (4) lack of local community organizations.
I don't understand why any of these would bother you if we can create a pill to stop you from caring about them.
I agree that those are important problems, and I think they are all closely linked to the subjective feeling of meaning and/or wellbeing. That was the point Arthur C. Brooks made in The Conservative Heart, where he detailed the empirical evidence that the conservative values of faith, family, community and work are the things that are most strongly correlated with subjective well-being. I take that as evidence that they are objectively better values. I take your point that results matter more than feelings, but feelings tend to be indicators of how good or bad things are going for us. We just need to be able to tell the difference between short-term and long-term. Hedonic pleasure is short-term, and often leads to long-term negative consequences. A deep sense of fulfillment/meaning OTOH is generally a good indicator of having lived a good life.
PS: I think that's exactly what Bo and Carl were getting at with "Humans evolved to find meaning in the value we provide to our fellow group members. We need to feel useful." What makes us feel more useful than having people we care about who depend on us, ie family, friends and community?
I appreciate your comments. Your perspective seems similar to Bo and Noah's: let's understand this "meaning-progress-discontents" from an evolutionary and conservative wisdom perspective. Great and good stuff. So what? Not being rhetorical. So what? That is my perspective. Family formation, anti-white and anti-male discrimination, etc. Let's work more on improving actual things and make sure we don't get stuck in analysis.
I've given up on saving the world. My plan is to have kids and homeschool them. But if anyone has practical ideas about what we can do to help, I'd be happy to hear them.
They can't, because those four things are not matters of material or technical refinement. This was the point of Carl and Winegard's argument, which had much to recommend it.
If you want the point made more fully or (sorry fellas) eloquently, then let me recommend Ferguson, or Nietzsche, or Schmitt.
> those four things are not matters of material or technical refinement
Are you saying family formation is not able to be influenced through "material or technical refinement"? The same the other 3. All 4 can be influenced by government action
Government action has to be directed to a notion of the good. And that notion, to succeed, must fit our natures - as human beings, as westerners, as people with a certain history and culture, as (largely) whites.
And those things are neither formed nor fortified chiefly by alleviating material distress. They are forged through common struggle.
This isn't to say all state measures to change things for the better are futile. But they are definitely so, if pursued according to the bloodless, spiritually vacuous fashion Pinker has proposed.
To see this, just consider that according to most of Pinker's metrics, we are indeed "better off" than 100 years ago, but the things you're mentioning are in bad shape.
I would guess Pinker believes and follows a "common struggle" in his pursuit of progress. Yes, those currently in power don't care much for the 4 measures I put forward, which is why I want them to be considered in Pinker's conception of progress.
He will never do that. He can't. He's a Cartesian universalist, through and through.
Those 4 items I mentioned do not go against Cartesian universalism
> (1) Family Formation (2) Anti-White and Anti-Male discrimination (3) lack of friendships (4) lack of local community organization
He might be against certain types of solutions to those problems but that is a good political discussion to have
Pinker conveniently skipped over the most interesting piece of evidence supporting your argument:
Even more intriguing is evidence that people in small-scale or “primitive” societies sometimes report higher life satisfaction than their counterparts in rich countries. Last year, Eric Galbraith and colleagues published a study on 19 populations “living in close contact with nature, on the fringes of globalized mainstream society”. Their main finding is shown in the chart below. Average life satisfaction across the 19 populations was much higher than would be predicted from the country-level relationship between income and life satisfaction, and some populations reported higher levels than global frontrunners like Norway and Denmark. Another study by Tomasz Frackowiak and colleagues compared happiness among Hadza hunter-gatherers and Poles, finding it to be greater among the Hadza.