Enlightenment Now

by Steven Pinker

  The physical requirements that allow rational agents to exist in the material world are not abstract design specifications; they are implemented in the brain as wants, needs, emotions, pains, and pleasures. On average, and in the kind of environment in which our species was shaped, pleasurable experiences allowed our ancestors to survive and have viable children, and painful ones led to a dead end. That means that food, comfort, curiosity, beauty, stimulation, love, sex, and camaraderie are not shallow indulgences or hedonistic distractions. They are links in the causal chain that allowed minds to come into being. Unlike ascetic and puritanical regimes, humanistic ethics does not second-guess the intrinsic worth of people seeking comfort, pleasure, and fulfillment—if people didn’t seek them, there would be no people. At the same time, evolution guarantees that these desires will work at cross-purposes with each other and with those of other people.9 Much of what we call wisdom consists in balancing the conflicting desires within ourselves, and much of what we call morality and politics consists in balancing the conflicting desires among people.

  As I mentioned in chapter 2 (following an observation by John Tooby), the Law of Entropy sentences us to another permanent threat. Many things must all go right for a body (and thus a mind) to function, but it takes just one thing going wrong for it to shut down permanently—a leak of blood, a constriction of air, a disabling of its microscopic clockwork. An act of aggression by one agent can end the existence of another. We are all catastrophically vulnerable to violence—but at the same time we can enjoy a fantastic benefit if we agree to refrain from violence. The Pacifist’s Dilemma—how social agents can forgo the temptation to exploit each other in exchange for the security of not being exploited—hangs over humanity like the Sword of Damocles, making peace and security a permanent quest for humanistic ethics.10 The historical decline of violence shows that it is a solvable problem.

  The vulnerability of any embodied agent to violence explains why the callous, egoistic, megalomaniacal sociopath cannot remain disengaged from the arena of moral discourse (and its demand for impartiality and nonviolence) forever. If he refuses to play the game of morality, then in the eyes of everyone else he has become a mindless menace, like a germ, a wildfire, or a rampaging wolverine—something to be neutralized by brute force, no questions asked. (As Hobbes put it, “No covenants with beasts.”) Now, as long as he thinks he is eternally invulnerable, he might take that chance, but the Law of Entropy rules that out. He may tyrannize everyone for a while, but eventually the massed strength of his targets could prevail. The impossibility of eternal invulnerability creates an incentive even for callous sociopaths to re-enter the roundtable of morality. As the psychologist Peter DeScioli points out, when you face an adversary alone, your best weapon may be an ax, but when you face an adversary in front of a throng of bystanders, your best weapon may be an argument.11 And he who engages in argument may be defeated by a better one. Ultimately the moral universe includes everyone who can think.

  Evolution helps explain another foundation of secular morality: our capacity for sympathy (or, as the Enlightenment writers variously referred to it, benevolence, pity, imagination, or commiseration). Even if a rational agent deduces that it’s in everyone’s long-term interests to be moral, it’s hard to imagine him sticking his neck out to make a sacrifice for another’s benefit unless something gives him a nudge. The nudge needn’t come from an angel on one shoulder; evolutionary psychology explains how it comes from the emotions that make us social animals.12 Sympathy among kin emerges from the overlap in genetic makeup that interconnects us in the great web of life. Sympathy among everyone else emerges from the impartiality of nature: each of us may find ourselves in straits where a small mercy from another grants a big boost in our own welfare, so we’re better off if we bestow good turns on one another (with no one taking but never giving) than if it’s every person for himself or herself. Evolution thus selects for the moral sentiments: sympathy, trust, gratitude, guilt, shame, forgiveness, and righteous anger. With sympathy installed in our psychological makeup, it can be expanded by reason and experience to encompass all sentient beings.13

  * * *

  A different philosophical objection to humanism is that it’s “just utilitarianism”—that a morality based on maximizing human flourishing is the same as a morality that seeks the greatest happiness for the greatest number.14 (Philosophers often refer to happiness as “utility.”) Anyone who has taken Introduction to Moral Philosophy can rattle off the problems.15 Should we indulge a Utility Monster who gets more pleasure out of eating people than his victims get out of living? Should we euthanize a few draftees and harvest their organs to save the lives of many more? If townspeople enraged by an unsolved murder threaten a deadly riot, should the sheriff assuage them by framing the town drunk and stringing him up? If a drug could put us into a permanent slumber with sweet dreams, should we take it? Should we set up a chain of warehouses that inexpensively support billions of happy rabbits? These thought experiments make the case for a deontological ethics, composed of rights, duties, and principles that deem certain acts moral or immoral by their very nature. In some versions of deontological morality, the principles come from God.

  Humanism indeed has a utilitarian flavor, or at least a consequentialist one, in which acts and policies are morally evaluated by their consequences. The consequences needn’t be restricted to happiness in the narrow sense of having a smile on one’s face, but can embrace a broader sense of flourishing, which includes childrearing, self-expression, education, rich experience, and the creation of works of lasting value (chapter 18). The consequentialist flavor of humanism is actually a point in its favor, for several reasons.

  First, any Moral Philosophy student who stayed awake through week 2 of the syllabus can also rattle off the problems with deontological ethics. If lying is intrinsically wrong, must we answer truthfully when the Gestapo demand to know the whereabouts of Anne Frank? Is masturbation immoral (as the prototypical deontologist, Kant, argued), because one is using oneself as a means to satisfy an animal impulse, and people must always be treated as ends, never as means? If a terrorist has hidden a ticking nuclear bomb that would annihilate millions, is it immoral to waterboard him into revealing its location? And given the absence of a thundering voice from the heavens, who gets to pull principles out of the air and pronounce that certain acts are inherently immoral even if they hurt no one? At various times moralists have used deontological thinking to insist that vaccination, anesthesia, blood transfusions, life insurance, interracial marriage, and homosexuality were wrong by their very nature.

  Many moral philosophers believe that the dichotomy from the Intro course is drawn too sharply.16 Deontological principles are often a good way to bring the greatest happiness to the greatest number. Since no mortal can calculate every consequence of his actions into the indefinite future, and since people can always spin-doctor their selfish acts as benefiting others, one of the best ways to promote overall happiness is to draw bright lines that no one may cross. We don’t let governments deceive or murder their citizens, because real politicians, unlike the infallible and benevolent demigods in the thought experiments, could wield that power capriciously or tyrannically. That is one of many reasons why a government that could frame innocent people for capital crimes or euthanize them for their organs would not produce the greatest happiness for the greatest number. Or take the principle of equal treatment. Are laws that discriminate against women and minorities unfair by their very nature, or are they deplorable because the victims of discrimination suffer harm? We may not have to answer the question. Conversely, any deontological principle whose consequences are harmful, such as the Sanctity of Life-Sustaining Blood (which rules out transfusions), can be tossed out the window. Human rights promote human flourishing. That’s why, in practice, humanism and human rights go hand in hand.

  The other reason that humanism needn’t be embarrassed by its overlap with utilitarianism is that thi
s approach to ethics has an impressive track record of improving human welfare. The classical utilitarians—Cesare Beccaria, Jeremy Bentham, and John Stuart Mill—laid out arguments against slavery, sadistic punishment, cruelty to animals, the criminalization of homosexuality, and the subordination of women which carried the day.17 Even abstract rights like freedom of speech and religion were largely defended in terms of benefits and harms, as when Thomas Jefferson wrote, “The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”18 Universal education, workers’ rights, and environmental protection also were advanced on utilitarian grounds. And, at least so far, Utility Monsters and rabbit gratification factories have not turned out to be a problem.

  There is a good reason why utilitarian arguments have so often succeeded: everyone can appreciate them. Principles like “No harm, no foul,” “If no one is hurt it can’t be wrong,” “What consenting adults do in private is no one else’s concern,” and “If I should take a notion / To jump into the ocean / Ain’t nobody’s business if I do” may not be profound or exceptionless, but once they are stated, people can readily understand them, and anyone who wants to oppose them has a heavy burden of proof. It’s not that utilitarianism is intuitive. Classical liberalism came late in human history, and traditional cultures believe that what consenting adults do in private is very much their concern.19 The philosopher and cognitive neuroscientist Joshua Greene has argued that many deontological convictions are rooted in primitive intuitions of tribalism, purity, revulsion, and social norms, whereas utilitarian conclusions emerge from rational cogitation.20 (He has even shown that the two kinds of moral thinking engage emotional and rational systems of the brain, respectively.) Greene also argues that when people from diverse cultural backgrounds have to agree upon a moral code, they tend to go utilitarian. That explains why certain reform movements, such as legal equality for women and gay marriage, overturned centuries of precedent astonishingly quickly (chapter 15): with nothing but custom and intuition behind it, the status quo crumbled in the face of utilitarian arguments.

  Even when humanistic movements fortify their goals with the language of rights, the philosophical system justifying those rights must be “thin.”21 A viable moral philosophy for a cosmopolitan world cannot be constructed from layers of intricate argumentation or rest on deep metaphysical or religious convictions. It must draw on simple, transparent principles that everyone can understand and agree upon. The ideal of human flourishing—that it’s good for people to lead long, healthy, happy, rich, and stimulating lives—is just such a principle, since it is based on nothing more (and nothing less) than our common humanity.

  History confirms that when diverse cultures have to find common ground, they converge toward humanism. The separation of church and state in the American Constitution arose not just from the philosophy of the Enlightenment but from practical necessity. The economist Samuel Hammond has noted that eight of the thirteen British colonies had official churches, which intruded into the public sphere by paying ministers’ salaries, enforcing strict religious observance, and persecuting members of other denominations. The only way to unite the colonies under a single constitution was to guarantee religious expression and practice as a natural right.22

  A century and a half later, a community of nations still smoldering from a world war had to lay down a set of principles to unite them in cooperation. It’s unlikely that they would have agreed upon “We accept Jesus Christ as our savior” or “America is a shining city upon a hill.” In 1947 the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) asked several dozen of the world’s intellectuals (including Jacques Maritain, Mohandas Gandhi, Aldous Huxley, Harold Laski, Quincy Wright, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, together with eminent Confucian and Muslim scholars) which rights should be included in the UN’s universal declaration. The lists were surprisingly similar. In his introduction to their deliverable, Maritain recounted:

  At one of the meetings of a Unesco National Commission where Human Rights were being discussed, someone expressed astonishment that certain champions of violently opposed ideologies had agreed on a list of those rights. “Yes,” they said, “we agree about the rights but on condition that no one asks us why.”23

  The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a humanist manifesto with thirty articles, was drafted in less than two years, thanks to the determination of Eleanor Roosevelt, chair of the drafting committee, to avoid getting mired in ideology and move the project along.24 (When John Humphrey, author of the first draft, was asked on what principles the Declaration was based, he tactfully replied, “No philosophy whatsoever.”)25 In December 1948 it was passed without opposition by the UN General Assembly. Contrary to accusations that human rights are a parochial Western creed, the Declaration was supported by India, China, Thailand, Burma, Ethiopia, and seven Muslim countries, while Roosevelt had to twist the arms of American and British officials to get them behind it: the United States was worried about its Negroes, the United Kingdom about its colonies. The Soviet bloc, Saudi Arabia, and South Africa abstained.26

  The Declaration has been translated into five hundred languages, and has influenced most of the national constitutions that were drafted in the following decades, together with many international laws, treaties, and organizations. At seventy years old, it has aged well.

  * * *

  Though humanism is the moral code that people will converge upon when they are rational, culturally diverse, and need to get along, it is by no means a vapid or saccharine lowest common denominator. The idea that morality consists in the maximization of human flourishing clashes with two perennially seductive alternatives. The first is theistic morality: the idea that morality consists in obeying the dictates of a deity, which are enforced by supernatural reward and punishment in this world or in an afterlife. The second is romantic heroism: the idea that morality consists in the purity, authenticity, and greatness of an individual or a nation. Though romantic heroism was first articulated in the 19th century, it may be found in a family of newly influential movements, including authoritarian populism, neo-fascism, neo-reaction, and the alt-right.

  Many intellectuals who don’t sign on to these alternatives to humanism nonetheless believe they capture a vital truth about our psychology: that people have a need for theistic, spiritual, heroic, or tribal beliefs. Humanism may not be wrong, they say, but it goes against human nature. No society based on humanistic principles can long endure, let alone a global order based on them.

  It’s a short step from the psychological claim to a historical one: that the inevitable collapse has begun, and we are watching the liberal, cosmopolitan, Enlightenment, humanistic worldview unravel before our eyes. “Liberalism Is Dead,” announced the New York Times columnist Roger Cohen in 2016. “The liberal democratic experiment—with its Enlightenment-derived belief in the capacity of individuals possessed of certain inalienable rights to shape their destinies in liberty through the exercise of their will—is but a brief interlude.”27 In “The Enlightenment Had a Good Run,” the Boston Globe editorialist Stephen Kinzer agreed:

  The cosmopolitanism that is central to Enlightenment ideals has produced results that disturb people in many societies. This leads them back toward the ruling system that primates instinctively prefer: A strong chief protects the tribe, and in return tribe members do the chief’s bidding. . . . Reason offers little basis for morality, rejects spiritual power, and negates the importance of emotion, art and creativity. When reason is cold and inhumane, it can cut people off from deeply imbedded structures that give meaning to life.28

  Other pundits have added that it’s no wonder so many young people are drawn to ISIS: they are turning away from an “arid secularism,” and seek “radical and religious correctives to a flattened view of human life.”29

  So sh
ould I have called this book Enlightenment While It Lasts? Don’t be silly! In part II, I documented the reality of progress; in this part, I have focused on the ideas that drive it and why I expect them to endure. Having rebutted the cases against reason and science in the preceding two chapters, I’ll now take on the case against humanism. I’ll examine these arguments not just to show that the moral, psychological, and historical arguments against humanism are wrong. The best way to understand an idea is to see what it is not, so putting the alternatives to humanism under the microscope can remind us what is at stake in advancing the ideals of the Enlightenment. First we’ll look at the religious case against humanism, then at the romantic-heroic-tribal-authoritarian complex.

  * * *

  Can we really have good without God? Has the godless universe advanced by humanistic scientists been undermined by the findings of science itself? And is there an innate adaptation to the divine presence—a God gene in our DNA, a God module in the brain—which ensures that theistic religion will always push back against secular humanism?

  Let’s start with theistic morality. It’s true that many religious codes enjoin people from murdering, assaulting, robbing, or betraying one another. But of course so do codes of secular morality, and for an obvious reason: these are rules that all rational, self-interested, and gregarious agents would want their compatriots to agree upon. Not surprisingly, they are codified in the laws of every state, and indeed seem to be present in every human society.30

  What does an appeal to a supernatural lawgiver add to a humanistic commitment to make people better off? The most obvious add-on is supernatural enforcement: the belief that if one commits a sin, one will be smitten by God, damned to hell, or inscribed on the wrong page of the Book of Life. It’s a tempting add-on because secular law enforcement cannot possibly detect and punish every infraction, and everyone has a motive to convince everyone else that they cannot get away with murder.31 As with Santa Claus, he sees you when you’re sleeping, he knows when you’re awake, he knows if you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness’ sake.