by Ben Shapiro
So man’s capacity disappeared. Man’s purpose seemed to disappear as well. If human beings could change nothing, being non-free actors, and if David Hume’s distinction between what is and what ought to be remained valid—if you couldn’t learn what was moral from nature itself—then human beings were left with nothing but hedonism. They were creatures of pleasures and pain, animals rooted in biology, responding to stimuli.
THE NEO-ENLIGHTENMENT
But many of the same scientists who promoted the mechanistic, materialist vision of human beings and the universe were unwilling—thankfully—to leave human beings utterly adrift. Instead, many of them clawed their way back to the roots of the Enlightenment. Just as Enlightenment thinkers had relied on the power of reason, they relied on the power of science. Supposedly, the human mind could once again reign supreme, after analyzing the world around it. This search would provide human beings with meaning: by investigating the nature of the universe, we would finally understand its unity. Wilson himself declares that his goal is to resume the Enlightenment quest: “when built from reality and reason alone, cleansed of superstition, all of knowledge might come together to form what in 1620 Francis Bacon, greatest of the Enlightenment’s forerunners, termed the ‘empire of man.’”15
Of course, as we have seen, the Enlightenment’s reliance on reason unmoored from revelation—the assumption by its greatest thinkers that human beings could in fact derive ought from is and then impose the ought—led from the bloody streets of French Revolutionary Paris to the thumping jackboots of Hitler. Wilson’s optimism would have sounded far better in 1789 than it does in 2018.
Nonetheless, neo-Enlightenment thinkers continue to trumpet a new purpose for mankind, discernible through science. As Wilson wrote:
Preferring a search for objective reality over revelation is another way of satisfying religious hunger. . . . It aims to save the spirit, not by surrender but by liberation of the human mind. Its central tenet, as Einstein knew, is the unification of knowledge. When we have unified enough certain knowledge, we will understand who we are and why we are here.16
Wilson rejects Aquinas and Kant; he rejects any attempt to create purpose or meaning on the back of transcendent and eternal values. Those values, he recognizes, depend largely on the notion of free will that modern science has apparently rejected.
Instead, Wilson proposes a new sort of faith: faith in science.
Now, we could easily ask at this point whether faith in science was not the faith that brought us eugenics and central planning. But Wilson has something else in mind: not the scientific manipulation of human beings, but the gradual emergence of workable values in tune with the nature that defines us all. Wilson believes that ethics are an outgrowth of evolution itself, in combination with environment; culture is an effect, not a cause. Wilson explains the way things are.
Wilson argues that the empiricist spots the value of an ethical system in its success: “ethics is conduct favored consistently enough throughout a society to be expressed as a code of principles.” The rightness of an ethical system can be explained by its prevalence.
But what about the fact that awful ethical systems have dominated throughout human history? What about the fact that billions live under tyranny, or that the religious bigotry that alienated Wilson from the church originally now thrives across the globe? What about the fact that instead of the world gradually surrendering to the beauties of transnational liberalism, as Francis Fukuyama suggested it would, clashes of civilization have broken out anew, in accordance with the theories of Samuel Huntington? What about the fact that certain constants that Wilson full-throatedly rejects have marked human experience and human morality—including the commonality of religious practice, and its use as a basis for moral systems?
This is where Wilson makes his leap of faith: “The empiricist argument holds that if we explore the biological roots of moral behavior, and explain their material origins and biases, we should be able to fashion a wise and enduring ethical consensus.”
Now, though, Wilson is using tools that are no longer at his disposal. Who decides what that “wise and enduring” consensus looks like? The vox populi—which worldview is “more widely perceived to be correct.” This is fully relativistic—popularity cannot substitute for any reliable moral compass. And so Wilson slides back into Hegel: that which is right is imminent, or will change to become more right. Wilson obliterates David Hume’s argument that we cannot learn what we ought to do from what is in nature—because there is no ought. There is only what is. And that can always change. According to Wilson, the evolution of human morality is not about human beings working to better the world, but about human beings acting as agents of information integration, who spit out updated morals on a regular basis. Morality becomes an “ensemble of many algorithms, whose interlocking activities guide the mind across a landscape of nuanced moods and choices.”17
This obviously leaves some serious questions unanswered. First, how ought we to live? There is no ought—there is only how we do live. But that gives us no purpose after all. Human beings were not fashioned to find meaning in being. Wilson offers us no help there. Second, Wilson uses an awful lot of active verbs to describe the quest for meaning—“We are about to abandon natural selection, the process that created us, in order to direct our own evolution by volitional selection,” he writes in The Meaning of Human Existence.18 But “we” are a bundle of neurons; “direct” is an active verb when we, in truth, have no active role in defining what we do next. Can there truly be meaning when we cannot determine what we do next—if we are biological stones thrown through space, destined to land at a predetermined place and time?
In the end, Wilson retreats into the existentialism of Sartre, though he lacks Sartre’s stirring faith in man’s will: “We are, it seems, completely alone. And that in my opinion is a very good thing. It means we are completely free. . . . Laid before us are new options scarcely dreamed of in earlier ages.” But this is untrue by Wilson’s own lights. All of “our options” have been foreclosed by Wilson’s scientism—they are not “ours,” since we are just animals living without the freedom to have our own options, and they are not “options,” since nature commands, it does not request. Those “options” are nature’s path, laid before us, which we will unerringly trod, regardless of whether we believe we want to do so or not. When Wilson states, “We have enough intelligence, goodwill, generosity, and enterprise to turn Earth into a paradise both for ourselves and for the biosphere that gave us birth,” he offers us no plausible reason what paradise constitutes, how we can actively pursue that paradise, or why we should do so, given that our lives matter approximately as much as the lives of the ants he originally studied. When Wilson states, “We need to understand ourselves in both evolutionary and psychological terms in order to plan a more rational, catastrophe-proof future,” he strays from his own naturalistic, deterministic genealogy of morals, and begins preaching something close to the transcendental values he supposedly deplores.19
Other thinkers seem to embrace transcendent Enlightenment values more clearly—and antiscientifically. If the new science had foreclosed the possibility of free choice and will, advocates of scientism were willing to overlook that rather inconvenient fact. If the new science had called into question the possibility of universal human truths, advocates of scientism were willing to overlook that, too. Instead, these neo-Enlightenment thinkers returned to the premises of the Enlightenment in the name of science: the same Enlightenment that had brought about scientific progress, they argued, had ushered in an age of universal morality as well.
Take, for example, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker. Pinker’s book Enlightenment Now is a powerful ode to Enlightenment values. Where Wilson discards Kant as antiscientific, Pinker embraces Kant’s call to “understand.” He also endorses in glowing terms the power of reason: “The Enlightenment principle that we can apply reason and sympathy to enhance human flourishing may seem obvious, trite, old-fashio
ned. . . . I have come to realize that it is not.”20 And Pinker is obviously correct in celebrating in voluminous fashion the outgrowth of human reason—the material gains that are its products.
But Pinker does cheat just a bit. Most obviously, he seems to endorse versions of will and truth that science can’t justify; these versions spring from a Judeo-Christian tradition he rejects. He simultaneously embraces Enlightenment ideas that have Judeo-Christian roots, and chops off those roots. Pinker treats the Enlightenment as a significant break from the thought that preceded it. That’s not true, as we’ve seen. He also engages in the No True Scotsman fallacy—he labels Enlightenment thinkers like Rousseau, Herder, Schelling, and others members of a “counter-Enlightenment,” ignoring their commonalities with fellow Enlightenment thinkers and casting them off into the outer darkness. In a four-hundred-page book about the Enlightenment, he never mentions the French Revolution—which, as we have seen, worshipped the Cult of Reason. Pinker wants to pluck the fruit of the Enlightenment without stepping in the manure. But the manure was heavily linked to precisely the worship of God-free reason that Pinker embraces. As Yoram Hazony observes, “In short, the principle advances that today’s Enlightenment enthusiasts want to claim were ‘set in motion’ much earlier. And it isn’t at all clear how helpful the Enlightenment was once it arrived.”21
More important, however, Pinker never explains why reason ought to triumph; he assumes as self-evident the idea that material gain is the highest priority. He writes that human progress “requires only the convictions that life is better than death, health is better than sickness, abundance is better than want, freedom is better than coercion, happiness is better than suffering, and knowledge is better than superstition and ignorance.” This is circular reasoning: if you assume that Pinker is right, it turns out that Pinker is right. But he isn’t right, at least not for most human beings. It all depends on the meaning of happiness, which Pinker contrasts with suffering—as though all happiness can be got from a 98.6 degree temperature, a hearty meal, and a steady supply of sex. But that’s not what happiness actually constitutes. Human beings keep showing that they need something more—man cannot live by quality of life indicators alone. Material human progress in the absence of spiritual fulfillment isn’t enough. People need meaning.
And so Pinker seems to miss the central question of his own book. He acknowledges that the “appeal of regressive ideas is perennial,” but can’t seem to figure out why. If we are all material beings merely looking for material well-being, we should embrace the Enlightenment merely for its utilitarian purposes—but we don’t because we aren’t. He opens his book by retelling the story of a student who asked him precisely that question: “Why should I live?” According to Pinker, his answer went something like this:
As a sentient being, you have the potential to flourish. You can refine your faculty of reason itself by learning and debating. You can seek explanations of the natural world through science, and insight into the human condition through the arts and humanities. You can make the most of your capacity for pleasure and satisfaction, which allowed your ancestors to thrive and thereby allowed you to exist. You can appreciate the beauty and richness of the natural and cultural world. As the heir to billions of years of life perpetuating itself, you can perpetuate life in return. . . . And because reason tells you that none of this is particular to you, you have the responsibility to provide to others what you expect for yourself.22
This isn’t much of an answer. It offers a smorgasbord of choices and then suggests that the smorgasbord itself provides meaning. But that wasn’t the question. The question was why to choose from the smorgasbord in the first place. Pinker has no answer to that question, because it requires a reliance on universal truths outside the realm of human reason. And his halfhearted attempt to build a morality on the supposed ethic of Kantian mutuality falls apart quickly. His statement that reason tells you all other human beings are human, and therefore you have a responsibility to treat them as you would treat yourself is effectively a religious appeal, not a reasoned argument. Why not simply take what you want? Why not declare your tribe or class superior? Why not reason that your genetic offspring can only survive if you gain an advantage over others, in accordance with the survival of the fittest?
Before we laugh off such suggestions, review again the history of the twentieth century.
Pinker isn’t alone in his quest to revitalize the ideas of the Enlightenment. And some of his colleagues look for moral truths in the dictates of reason as well. Michael Shermer, a historian of science and editor of Skeptic magazine, argues that there are real moral values “out there to be discovered . . . in human social nature.” He considers himself a moral realist. How can we find those values? Shermer says they are inherent in the exercise of reason. So, he states, we don’t need God to tell us that the Holocaust was wrong—it simply was. Why? Because his morality places at its center the “survival and flourishing of sentient beings. We all want to survive and flourish. It’s in our nature. It’s what evolution designed us to desire.”23 Sam Harris, too, takes this view—he says that the primary value that makes life worth living and gives us meaning is “the well-being of conscious creatures.”24 Like Hobbes, who saw the key to human systems in our desire to seek pleasure and avoid pain, moral systems can be built on the basis of a utilitarian calculation about human survival and flourishing.
But again, we all define human flourishing differently. Harris acknowledges the inherent vagary in the term: “the concept of well-being is like the concept of physical health: it resists precise definition, and yet it is indispensable.” But Harris assures us that “there is every reason to think that this question has a finite range of answers . . . the moral landscape—will increasingly be illuminated by science.” But has it been? As Harris acknowledges, “Most of what constitutes human well-being at this moment escapes any narrow Darwinian calculus.”25
Here is the truth: most of what constitutes human well-being at any moment will escape narrow Darwinian calculus, because most human beings are not driven simply by the dictates of procreation and survival and pain avoidance.
And focusing on the need for survival doesn’t beget a workable morality, either. Take, for example, a simple thought experiment: You are the leader of a nation. That nation is more technologically advanced and more intellectually and culturally adaptive than its neighbors. Your nation is relatively small, and there are populations that live in your nation that consume disproportionate resources and refuse to integrate into your superior culture. You are surrounded by more populous and more barbarous nations. Thus, you have two options. First, you can wait for the inevitable demographic swamping of your nation—which, in the long run, will result in the collapse of humanity’s survival, since your neighbors are less adaptable. Second, you can attack your neighbors, and take whatever measures are necessary in order to assure the long-term survival of your nation.
That was Hitler’s case for the Holocaust, after all.
When the highest moral cause is material success, it looks a lot like having no morals at all.
IS THE NEO-ENLIGHTENMENT SUSTAINABLE?
The neo-Enlightenment view is that Enlightenment ideals would have come from anyone using reason, and just happened to spring up in a particular place and time. How strange, then, that Pinker and Shermer and Harris and I agree on nearly all the same values—values that arose in the Judeo-Christian West alone, that spread from there outward, and that relied on the words of revelation and the application of Greek teleology.
It isn’t strange, of course. We all grew up in a West formulated on the basis of thousands of years of history. History isn’t merely happenstance; movements don’t merely wink into existence. To explain our current notions of individual rights, we must look to foundational ideas.
The neo-Enlightenment attempts to disown Judeo-Christian values and Greek teleology rest in historical ignorance. Neo-Enlightenment advocates tend to attribute every ill of the past
several centuries to religious superstition and ancient mumbo-jumbo, failing to acknowledge that the values they hold dear rest on ancient foundations.
Neo-Enlightenment philosophers like to connect religion with slavery, overlooking that the abolitionist movement in the West was almost entirely led by religious Christians—and ignoring that the global movement against slavery was led by the West (slavery was only legally abolished in China in 1909, and slavery was only legally ended in Saudi Arabia in 1962). Even Enlightenment philosophers who opposed slavery did so because they were steeped in a Judeo-Christian tradition stemming from the basic notion of imago dei and natural rights. The French philosopher Diderot, a declared atheist, wrote this regarding slavery in his Encyclopédie: “This purchase of Negroes to reduce them into slavery is a negotiation that violates all religion, morals, natural law, and human rights.”26 This wasn’t a scientific perspective. It was a moral one, steeped in an abolitionist ideal born centuries beforehand in Catholic Europe.
How about universal suffrage? Again, it wasn’t science that supported that notion—it was a belief in the individual, born of the Judeo-Christian tradition and Greek reason. Yes, Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote The Woman’s Bible to challenge precisely the sexism she saw in the Bible—but in doing so, she cut herself off from influence with the suffrage movement, which reached success by leaving her behind and appealing to the better angels of the Christian nature (Frances Willard’s Woman’s Christian Temperance Union was far more instrumental in achieving the women’s vote than Stanton). And naturally, even Stanton was groomed in a Christian society and inculcated Christian values.