Enlightenment Now

by Steven Pinker

  But this condescension is belied by the history of Islam and by nascent movements within it. Classical Arabic civilization, as I mentioned, was a hothouse of science and secular philosophy.103 Amartya Sen has documented how the 16th-century Mughal emperor Akbar I implemented a multiconfessional, liberal social order (including atheists and agnostics) in Muslim-ruled India at a time when the Inquisition was raging in Europe and Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake for heresy.104 Today the forces of modernity are working in many parts of the Islamic world. Tunisia, Bangladesh, Malaysia, and Indonesia have made long strides toward liberal democracy (chapter 14). In many Islamic countries, attitudes toward women and minorities are improving (chapter 15)—slowly, but more detectably among women, the young, and the educated.105 The emancipative forces that liberalized the West, such as connectivity, education, mobility, and women’s advancement, are not bypassing the Islamic world, and the moving sidewalk of generational replacement can outpace the walkers shambling along it.106

  Also, ideas matter. A cadre of Muslim intellectuals, writers, and activists has been pressing the case for a humanistic revolution for Islam. Among them are Souad Adnane (co-founder of the Arab Center for Scientific Research and Humane Studies in Morocco); Mustafa Akyol (author of Islam Without Extremes); Faisal Saeed Al-Mutar (founder of the Global Secular Humanist Movement); Sarah Haider (co-founder of Ex-Muslims of North America); Shadi Hamid (author of Islamic Exceptionalism); Pervez Hoodbhoy (author of Islam and Science: Religious Orthodoxy and the Battle for Rationality); Leyla Hussein (founder of Daughters of Eve, which opposes female genital mutilation); Gululai Ismail (founder of Aware Girls in Pakistan); Shiraz Maher (author of Salafi-Jihadism, quoted in the introduction to part 1); Omar Mahmood (an American editorialist); Irshad Manji (author of The Trouble with Islam); Maryam Namazie (spokesperson for One Law for All); Amir Ahmad Nasr (author of My Isl@m); Taslima Nasrin (author of My Girlhood); Maajid Nawaz (coauthor, with Sam Harris, of Islam and the Future of Tolerance); Asra Nomani (author of Standing Alone in Mecca); Raheel Raza (author of Their Jihad, Not My Jihad); Ali Rizvi (author of The Atheist Muslim); Wafa Sultan (author of A God Who Hates); Muhammad Syed (president of Ex-Muslims of North America); and most famously, Salman Rushdie, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Malala Yousafzai.

  Obviously a new Islamic Enlightenment will have to be spearheaded by Muslims, but non-Muslims have a role to play. The global network of intellectual influence is seamless, and given the prestige and power of the West (even among those who resent it), Western ideas and values can trickle, flow, and cascade outward in surprising ways. (Osama bin Laden, for example, owned a book by Noam Chomsky.)107 The history of moral progress, recounted in books such as The Honor Code by the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, suggests that moral clarity in one culture about a regressive practice by another does not always provoke resentful backlash but can shame the laggards into overdue reform. (Past examples include slavery, dueling, foot-binding, and racial segregation; future ones targeting the United States may include capital punishment and mass incarceration.)108 An intellectual culture that steadfastly defended Enlightenment values and that did not indulge religion when it clashed with humanistic values could serve as a beacon for students, intellectuals, and open-minded people in the rest of the world.

  * * *

  After laying out the logic of humanism, I noted that it stood in stark contrast to two other systems of belief. We have just looked at theistic morality. Let me turn to the second enemy of humanism, the ideology behind resurgent authoritarianism, nationalism, populism, reactionary thinking, even fascism. As with theistic morality, the ideology claims intellectual merit, affinity with human nature, and historical inevitability. All three claims, we shall see, are mistaken. Let’s begin with some intellectual history.

  If one wanted to single out a thinker who represented the opposite of humanism (indeed, of pretty much every argument in this book), one couldn’t do better than the German philologist Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900).109 Earlier in the chapter I fretted about how humanistic morality could deal with a callous, egoistic, megalomaniacal sociopath. Nietzsche argued that it’s good to be a callous, egoistic, megalomaniacal sociopath. Not good for everyone, of course, but that doesn’t matter: the lives of the mass of humanity (the “botched and the bungled,” the “chattering dwarves,” the “flea-beetles”) count for nothing. What is worthy in life is for a superman (Übermensch, literally “overman”) to transcend good and evil, exert a will to power, and achieve heroic glory. Only through such heroism can the potential of the species be realized and humankind lifted to a higher plane of being. The feats of greatness may not consist, though, in curing disease, feeding the hungry, or bringing about peace, but rather in artistic masterworks and martial conquest. Western civilization has gone steadily downhill since the heyday of Homeric Greeks, Aryan warriors, helmeted Vikings, and other manly men. It has been especially corrupted by the “slave morality” of Christianity, the worship of reason by the Enlightenment, and the liberal movements of the 19th century that sought social reform and shared prosperity. Such effete sentimentality led only to decadence and degeneration. Those who have seen the truth should “philosophize with a hammer” and give modern civilization the final shove that would bring on the redemptive cataclysm from which a new order would rise. Lest you think I am setting up a straw Übermensch, here are some quotations:

  I abhor the man’s vulgarity when he says “What is right for one man is right for another”; “Do not to others that which you would not that they should do unto you.”. . . . The hypothesis here is ignoble to the last degree: it is taken for granted that there is some sort of equivalence in value between my actions and thine.

  I do not point to the evil and pain of existence with the finger of reproach, but rather entertain the hope that life may one day become more evil and more full of suffering than it has ever been.

  Man shall be trained for war and woman for the recreation of the warrior. All else is folly. . . . Thou goest to woman? Do not forget thy whip.

  A declaration of war on the masses by higher men is needed. . . . A doctrine is needed powerful enough to work as a breeding agent: strengthening the strong, paralyzing and destructive for the world-weary. The annihilation of the humbug called “morality.” . . . The annihilation of the decaying races. . . . Dominion over the earth as a means of producing a higher type.

  That higher Party of Life which would take the greatest of all tasks into its hands, the higher breeding of humanity, including the merciless extermination of everything degenerate and parasitical, would make possible again that excess of life on earth from which the Dionysian state will grow again.110

  These genocidal ravings may sound like they come from a transgressive adolescent who has been listening to too much death metal, or a broad parody of a James Bond villain like Dr. Evil in Austin Powers. In fact Nietzsche is among the most influential thinkers of the 20th century, continuing into the 21st.

  Most obviously, Nietzsche helped inspire the romantic militarism that led to the First World War and the fascism that led to the Second. Though Nietzsche himself was neither a German nationalist nor an anti-Semite, it’s no coincidence that these quotations leap off the page as quintessential Nazism: Nietzsche posthumously became the Nazis’ court philosopher. (In his first year as chancellor, Hitler made a pilgrimage to the Nietzsche Archive, presided over by Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, the philosopher’s sister and literary executor, who tirelessly encouraged the connection.) The link to Italian Fascism is even more direct: Benito Mussolini wrote in 1921 that “the moment relativism linked up with Nietzsche, and with his Will to Power, was when Italian Fascism became, as it still is, the most magnificent creation of an individual and a national Will to Power.”111 The links to Bolshevism and Stalinism—from the Superman to the New Soviet Man—are less well known but amply documented by the historian Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal.112 The connections between Nietzsche’s ideas and the megadeath m
ovements of the 20th century are obvious enough: a glorification of violence and power, an eagerness to raze the institutions of liberal democracy, a contempt for most of humanity, and a stone-hearted indifference to human life.

  You’d think this sea of blood would be enough to discredit Nietzsche’s ideas among intellectuals and artists. But he is, incredibly, widely admired. “Nietzsche is pietzsche,” says a popular campus graffito and T-shirt. It’s not because the man’s doctrines are particularly cogent. As Bertrand Russell pointed out in A History of Western Philosophy, they “might be stated more simply and honestly in the one sentence: ‘I wish I had lived in the Athens of Pericles or the Florence of the Medici.’” The ideas fail the first test of moral coherence, namely generalizability beyond the person offering them. If I could go back in time, I might confront him as follows: “I am a superman: hard, cold, terrible, without feelings and without conscience. As you recommend, I will achieve heroic glory by exterminating some chattering dwarves. Starting with you, Shorty. And I might do a few things to that Nazi sister of yours, too. Unless, that is, you can think of a reason why I should not.”

  So if Nietzsche’s ideas are repellent and incoherent, why do they have so many fans? Perhaps it is not surprising that an ethic in which the artist (together with the warrior) is uniquely worthy of living should appeal to so many artists. A sample: W. H. Auden, Albert Camus, André Gide, D. H. Lawrence, Jack London, Thomas Mann, Yukio Mishima, Eugene O’Neill, William Butler Yeats, Wyndham Lewis, and (with reservations) George Bernard Shaw, author of Man and Superman. (P. G. Wodehouse, in contrast, has Jeeves, a Spinoza fan, say to Bertie Wooster, “You would not enjoy Nietzsche, sir. He is fundamentally unsound.”) Nietzschean values also appeal to many Second Culture literary intellectuals (recall Leavis sneering at Snow’s concern with global poverty and disease because “great literature” is “what men live by”) and to social critics who like to snigger at the “booboisie” (as H. L. Mencken, “the American Nietzsche,” called the common folk). Though she later tried to conceal it, Ayn Rand’s celebration of selfishness, her deification of the heroic capitalist, and her disdain for the general welfare had Nietzsche written all over them.113

  As Mussolini made clear, Nietzsche was an inspiration to relativists everywhere. Disdaining the commitment to truth-seeking among scientists and Enlightenment thinkers, Nietzsche asserted that “there are no facts, only interpretations,” and that “truth is a kind of error without which a certain species of life could not live.”114 (Of course, this left him unable to explain why we should believe that those statements are true.) For that and other reasons, he was a key influence on Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault, and a godfather to all the intellectual movements of the 20th century that were hostile to science and objectivity, including Existentialism, Critical Theory, Poststructuralism, Deconstructionism, and Postmodernism.

  Nietzsche, to give him credit, was a lively stylist, and one might excuse the fandom of artists and intellectuals if it consisted of an appreciation of his literary panache and an ironic reading of his portrayal of a mindset that they themselves rejected. Unfortunately, the mindset has sat all too well with all too many of them. A surprising number of 20th-century intellectuals and artists have gushed over totalitarian dictators, a syndrome that the intellectual historian Mark Lilla calls tyrannophilia.115 Some tyrannophiles were Marxists, working on the time-honored principle “He may be an SOB, but he’s our SOB.” But many were Nietzschean. The most notorious were Martin Heidegger and the legal philosopher Carl Schmitt, who were gung-ho Nazis and Hitler acolytes. Indeed, no autocrat of the 20th century lacked champions among the clerisy, including Mussolini (Ezra Pound, Shaw, Yeats, Lewis), Lenin (Shaw, H. G. Wells), Stalin (Shaw, Sartre, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, Brecht, W. E. B. Du Bois, Pablo Picasso, Lillian Hellman), Mao (Sartre, Foucault, Du Bois, Louis Althusser, Steven Rose, Richard Lewontin), the Ayatollah Khomeini (Foucault), and Castro (Sartre, Graham Greene, Günter Grass, Norman Mailer, Harold Pinter, and, as we saw in chapter 21, Susan Sontag). At various times Western intellectuals have also sung the praises of Ho Chi Minh, Muammar Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, Kim Il-sung, Pol Pot, Julius Nyerere, Omar Torrijos, Slobodan Milošević, and Hugo Chávez.

  Why should intellectuals and artists, of all people, kiss up to murderous dictators? One might think that intellectuals would be the first to deconstruct the pretexts of power, and artists to expand the scope of human compassion. (Thankfully, many have done just that.) One explanation, offered by the economist Thomas Sowell and the sociologist Paul Hollander, is professional narcissism. Intellectuals and artists may feel unappreciated in liberal democracies, which allow their citizens to tend to their own needs in markets and civic organizations. Dictators implement theories from the top down, assigning a role to intellectuals that they feel is commensurate with their worth. But tyrannophilia is also fed by a Nietzschean disdain for the common man, who annoyingly prefers schlock to fine art and culture, and by an admiration of the superman who transcends the messy compromises of democracy and heroically implements a vision of the good society.

  * * *

  Though Nietzsche’s romantic heroism glorifies the singular Übermensch rather than any collectivity, it’s a short step to interpret his “single stronger species of man” as a tribe, race, or nation. With this substitution, Nietzschean ideas were taken up by Nazism, fascism, and other forms of Romantic nationalism, and they star in a political drama that continues to the present day.

  I used to think that Trumpism was pure id, an upwelling of tribalism and authoritarianism from the dark recesses of the psyche. But madmen in authority distill their frenzy from academic scribblers of a few years back, and the phrase “intellectual roots of Trumpism” is not oxymoronic. Trump was endorsed in the 2016 election by 136 “Scholars and Writers for America” in a manifesto called “Statement of Unity.”116 Some are connected to the Claremont Institute, a think tank that has been called “the academic home of Trumpism.”117 And Trump has been closely advised by two men, Stephen Bannon and Michael Anton, who are reputed to be widely read and who consider themselves serious intellectuals. Anyone who wants to go beyond personality in understanding authoritarian populism must appreciate the two ideologies behind them, both of them militantly opposed to Enlightenment humanism and each influenced, in different ways, by Nietzsche. One is fascist, the other reactionary—not in the common left-wing sense of “anyone who is more conservative than me,” but in their original, technical senses.118

  Fascism, from the Italian word for “group” or “bundle,” grew out of the Romantic notion that the individual is a myth and that people are inextricable from their culture, bloodline, and homeland.119 The early fascist intellectuals, including Julius Evola (1898–1974) and Charles Maurras (1868–1952), have been rediscovered by neo-Nazi parties in Europe and by Bannon and the alt-right movement in the United States, all of whom acknowledge the influence of Nietzsche.120 Today’s Fascism Lite, which shades into authoritarian populism and Romantic nationalism, is sometimes justified by a crude version of evolutionary psychology in which the unit of selection is the group, evolution is driven by the survival of the fittest group in competition with other groups, and humans have been selected to sacrifice their interests for the supremacy of their group. (This contrasts with mainstream evolutionary psychology, in which the unit of selection is the gene.)121 It follows that no one can be a cosmopolitan, a citizen of the world: to be human is to be a part of a nation. A multicultural, multiethnic society can never work, because its people will feel rootless and alienated and its culture will be flattened to the lowest common denominator. For a nation to subordinate its interests to international agreements is to forfeit its birthright to greatness and become a chump in the global competition of all against all. And since a nation is an organic whole, its greatness can be embodied in the greatness of its leader, who voices the soul of the people directly, unencumbered by the millstone of an administra
tive state.

  The reactionary ideology is theoconservatism.122 Belying the flippant label (coined by the apostate Damon Linker as a play on “neoconservatism”), the first theocons were 1960s radicals who redirected their revolutionary fervor from the hard left to the hard right. They advocate nothing less than a rethinking of the Enlightenment roots of the American political order. The recognition of a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and the mandate of government to secure these rights, are, they believe, too tepid for a morally viable society. That impoverished vision has only led to anomie, hedonism, and rampant immorality, including illegitimacy, pornography, failing schools, welfare dependency, and abortion. Society should aim higher than this stunted individualism, and promote conformity to more rigorous moral standards from an authority larger than ourselves. The obvious source of these standards is traditional Christianity.

  Theocons hold that the erosion of the church’s authority during the Enlightenment left Western civilization without a solid moral foundation, and a further undermining during the 1960s left it teetering on the brink. Any day during the Bill Clinton administration it would plunge into the abyss; no, make that the Obama administration; no, but for sure it would happen during a Hillary Clinton administration. (Hence Anton’s hysterical essay “The Flight 93 Election,” mentioned in chapter 20, which compared the country to the airliner hijacked on 9/11 and called on voters to “charge the cockpit or you die!”).123 Whatever discomfort the theocons may have felt from the vulgarity and antidemocratic antics of their 2016 standard-bearer was outweighed by the hope that he alone could impose the radical changes that America needed to stave off catastrophe.

  Lilla points out an irony in theoconservativism. While it has been inflamed by radical Islamism (which the theocons think will soon start World War III), the movements are similar in their reactionary mindset, with its horror of modernity and progress.124 Both believe that at some time in the past there was a happy, well-ordered state where a virtuous people knew their place. Then alien secular forces subverted this harmony and brought on decadence and degeneration. Only a heroic vanguard with memories of the old ways can restore the society to its golden age.