The Patterning Instinct - BR: A new history of cultural big ideas looks to the East for solace | New Scientist

A new history of cultural big ideas looks to the East for solace | New Scientist


REVIEW

24 May 2017
A new history of cultural big ideas looks to the East for solace

To create a less divisive world, Jeremy Lent's The Patterning Instinct wants to get rid of the Western split between animalistic urges and rational control

The revolution starts here: a Confucian temple in Shanghai

Olivier Aubert/Picturetank

By Pat Kane

AS THE daily turbulence of politics, economics, environmental change and religion rages around us, there is an understandable marketplace for books that look at the bigger picture. Jeremy Lent’s The Patterning Instinct does just that, joining the dots between points in history and culture, identifying echoes and consiliences across the natural and social sciences.


This is more than a scholastic exercise. Our planetary predicament demands the broadest and deepest perspectives, not just to enable masterful armchair contemplation, but also to guide our actions in the middle of what would otherwise be an enervating horror show.

The cover of Lent’s intellectual epic shows a line drawing of networks, the dots ostentatiously joined. No doubt this expresses the author’s fundamentalism, derived from his scientific and religious readings, about the power of connectedness.

But on the way to a somewhat familiar end point, Lent provides a useful and massively referenced road map of the most enduring structures of meaning in human history.

Humanity’s first world-encompassing idea, says Lent, was the hunter-gatherer belief that “everything is connected”. There followed an agricultural era during which humanity lived under the “hierarchy of the gods”. 

He then charts what he calls “the divergence”. Lent’s shorthand for this pattern is “split cosmos, split human”: the assumption that our physical reality, personal or objective, can be controlled by transcendent powers. Whether we call those powers “divine” or “rational” is, to Lent, neither here nor there. The two developed in lockstep: you couldn’t have conceived one without the other.

Articulated first by the philosophers of Ancient Greece, this “Western pattern” of meaning gathered force under the rise of Christianity and the innovations of the Enlightenment and continues to hold sway under today’s scientific industrialism.

“This idea could produce a split humanity, one species enhanced and exploring, the other barely surviving”

Lent traces his splitting thesis all the way to the thrumming fortresses of Silicon Valley. Here, Plato’s fantasy – a rational soul subjecting the animalistic body to its will – is not just a moral compass, it’s become techno-scientific mission.

Are you extending our cognitive abilities by creating devices that mimic and mesh with our thinking? Are you influencing people’s emotions through mood-altering drugs? Are you engineering our bodies to the optimum with gene editing? Then you are in the grip of an ancient idea: that pure rationality stands sovereign over the biological world.

This idea has the potential, already half-realised, Lent says, to produce a split humanity, “one species, genetically and technologically enhanced, exploring entirely new ways of being human; the other species, genetically akin to us, barely surviving within its collapsed infrastructure.”

Similar to Yuval Noah Harari’s recent, and equally expansive, Homo Deus, Lent’s book seeks some perspective on our modern juggernaut of radical innovation and global polarisation. To do so, it reaches towards Asian wisdom traditions – an “Eastern pattern” that Lent calls “the harmonic web of life”.

But while Harari’s no-self Buddhism comes close to exulting in the way humankind will be overtaken by intelligent algorithms, Lent finds a place for connecting, meaning-seeking humans in this complex future.

To carve out this space for ourselves, Lent says we must recast the deep metaphors structuring our attitudes to nature and other humans.

Neo-Confucianism is the candidate that Lent favours to lead this metaphorical revolution. Its core concept is an understanding of the universe as the interrelation of qi (spoken as “chi”) and li. Qi is the raw material of the universe – but liis “the ever-moving, ever-present set of patterns that flow through everything in nature and in all our perceptions of the world, including our consciousness”.

Like his mentor Fritjof Capra, who provides an introduction for the book, Lent seeks corroboration for this spiritual insight in what were once called the “new”, non-deterministic sciences – the study of complex adaptive systems in physics and biology, which find curious analogues in certain branches of mathematics.

Lent shows how the tenets of Neo-Confucian thought are homologous with maths, neuroscience and climatology, particularly when those disciplines identify “a complex of dynamical systems that remain valid across the entire natural world, from systems as vast as global climate to as small as a living cell”.

Like Capra, Lent wants to fuse spiritual tradition and the “new” sciences in service of a less rapacious and divisive world. If we could grasp what Lent calls elsewhere “liology”, we would attribute our ultimate sources of value not to “a transcendent realm”, or to our “moral rationality”, but to “humanity’s intrinsic connection with the natural world”.

There’s an obvious, real-world refutation available, of course. It’s not hard to find a regime that loudly deploys Confucian values in a modern setting. But does China, which recorded its highest ever figures for coal-fired electricity this April, provide the best exemplar? Lent himself delicately “refrains from making direct inferences regarding modern China” in his study of Neo-Confucianism. He should entertain a little more hope. Although China is producing more energy from coal in absolute terms, the percentage of total energy provided by coal is dropping.

Since 2007, Beijing elites have been hyping East Asia as a land mass uniquely placed to bring about an “ecological civilisation”, underpinned by the Confucian belief in harmony with nature. Meanwhile the administrations of US president Donald Trump and UK prime minister Theresa May have each rubbished climate change action and research. They have handed China a golden opportunity: to make good on its soft-power rhetoric and create a sustainable model that, sooner or later, the rest of the world will have to emulate.

Lent uses what he calls “cognitive history” and “archaeology of the mind” to show how such massive shifts in underlying world view can happen, and they involve an evolutionary account of the brain. Again like Harari, Lent dates the advent of our capacity for advanced cognition to a point about 70,000 years ago, when our prefrontal cortex began to expand.

Lent describes the “executive function” of the prefrontal cortex well. “It mediates our ability to plan, conceptualise, symbolise, make rules, and impose meaning on things. It controls our physiological drives and turns our basic feelings into complex emotions. It enables us to be aware of ourselves and others as separate beings, and to turn the past and the future into one narrative.” This is the locus of the “patterning instinct”.

In many of the neurology-informed history epics, authors are often studiedly neutral about the raw mental ability of humans to forge new paradigms. Few of them dare to connect our cognitive flexibility to any necessary idea of progress, or human flourishing. This is perhaps understandable given what’s involved is often a survey of historical carnage. Lent himself is unsparing in his descriptions of the cruelty and brutality meted out by righteous monotheists and dualists, their meaning-patterns justifying colonialism and empire.

“Cultures shape values, and those values shape history. Our values will shape our future”

Given all this, you have to admire the way Lent sticks his neck out on behalf of Neo-Confucianism. He goes so far as to propose that its concept of “heart-mind”, which seeks to integrate emotion and reason, is analogous to the prefrontal cortex when it functions at its best. And he has a point, citing research that shows that a healthy prefrontal cortex is not about “repressing or overriding emotional states”, but about “integrating them into appropriate decisions and actions… our cognition takes place not in the brain but in the felt sensation of the entire body.”

The Patterning Instinct, oblivious to the science-deniers currently occupying high executive office, ends with a statement of simple confidence: “Cultures shape values, and those values shape history. By the same token, our values will shape our future.” One way to equip yourself for this heroic task will be to read this enormous, learned, yet garrulous and helpful book.


The Patterning Instinct: A cultural history of humanity’s search for meaning

Jeremy Lent

Prometheus Books

Steven Pinker You can deny environmental calamity

Opinion 

Steven Pinker

You can deny environmental calamity – until you check the facts

George Monbiot

Rosy worldviews that rely on avoiding inconvenient truths should always set alarm bells ringing

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Wed 7 Mar 2018 18.00 AEDTLast modified on Thu 8 Mar 2018 02.49 AEDT

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 ‘Steven Pinker suggests that countries become cleaner as they get richer. But when you look at the whole picture, the opposite is true.’ Smoke stacks in Page, Arizona. Photograph: Alamy

One of the curiosities of our age is the way in which celebrity culture comes to dominate every aspect of public life. Even the review pages of the newspapers sometimes look like a highfalutin version of gossip magazines. Were we to judge them by the maxim “Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people”, they would not emerge well. Biography dominates. Ideas often seem to come last. Brilliant writers such as Sylvia Plath are better known for their lives than their work. Turning her into the Princess Diana of literature does neither her nor her readers any favours.

Steven Pinker: ‘The way to deal with pollution is not to rail against consumption’

 

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Even when ideas are given prominence, they no longer have standing in their own right. Their salience depends on their authorship. Take, for example, the psychology professor Steven Pinker, who attracts breathless adulation.

I am broadly sympathetic to his worldview. I agree with him that scientific knowledge is a moral imperative, and that we must use it to enhance human welfare. Like him, I’m enthusiastic about technologies that horrify other people, such as fourth-generation nuclear reactors and artificial meat. So I began reading his new book, Enlightenment Now, with excitement.

I expected something bracing, original, well sourced and well reasoned. Instead, in the area I know best – environmental issues – the alarm began to sound for me when he characterised “the mainstream environmental movement” as “laced with misanthropy, including an indifference to starvation, an indulgence in ghoulish fantasies of a depopulated planet, and Nazi-like comparisons of human beings to vermin, pathogens and cancer”.

Yes, I have come across such views, but they are few and far between. When they are expressed on social media, they are rapidly slapped down by other environmentalists. They are about as far from the environmental mainstream as they are from the humanitarian mainstream.

But this is just the beginning of the problem. Rather than using primary sources, Pinker draws on anecdote, cherry-picking and discredited talking points developed by anti-environmental thinktanks. Take, for example, Pinker’s claims about the landmark Limits to Growth report, published in 1972. It’s a favourite target of those who seek to dismiss environmental problems. He suggests it projected that aluminium, copper, chromium, gold, nickel, tin, tungsten and zinc would be exhausted by 1992. It is hard to see how anyone who had read the report could form this impression. The figures it uses for illustrative purposes have been transformed by some critics into projections.

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 ‘Pinker also claims that “we may have reached … Peak Car” – yet global car sales rose 11% between 2014 and 2017.’ Photograph: Tim Graham/Getty Images

Its actual prediction is that “the great majority of the currently important non-renewable resources will be extremely costly 100 years from now”. It would be perfectly reasonable to take issue with this claim. It is not reasonable to recycle, then attack, a widely circulated myth about the report. That’s called the straw man fallacy. It is contrary to the principles of reason that Pinker claims to champion.

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Citing the famous ecologist Stuart Pimm, Pinker maintains that “the overall rate of extinctions has been reduced by 75%”. But Pimm has said no such thing. I checked with him. Pinker had latched on to a seven-word quote in the New Yorker, invested it with spurious precision, and misunderstood it as referring to all species rather than only birds. Pimm’s work has upgraded the overall extinction rate to 1,000 times the natural background rates, while “future rates are likely to be 10,000 times higher”.Like the straw man fallacy, cherrypicking offends the principles of reason.

He also claims that “we may have reached … Peak Car” (yet global car sales rose 11% between 2014 and 2017), and that as countries become richer “their thoughts turn to the environment”. In reality, the 2014 Greendex survey of 14 nations shows environmental concern has consistently been highest in India and China, and lowest in Britain, France, Japan, Canada and the US.

Pinker suggests that the environmental impact of nations follows the same trajectory, claiming that the “environmental Kuznets Curve” shows they become cleaner as they get richer. To support this point, he compares Nordic countries with Afghanistan and Bangladesh. It is true that they do better on indicators such as air and water quality, as long as you disregard their impacts overseas. But when you look at the whole picture, including carbon emissions, you discover the opposite. The ecological footprints of Afghanistan and Bangladesh (namely the area required to provide the resources they use) are, respectively, 0.9 and 0.7 hectares per person. Norway’s is 5.8, Sweden’s is 6.5 and Finland, that paragon of environmental virtue, comes in at 6.7.

'Plastic, plastic, plastic': British diver films sea of rubbish off Bali

 

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Pinker seems unaware of the controversies surrounding the Kuznets Curve, and the large body of data that appears to undermine it. The same applies to the other grand claims with which he sweeps through this subject. He relies on highly tendentious interlocutors to interpret this alien field for him. If you are going to use people like US ecomodernist Stewart Brand and the former head of Northern Rock Matt Ridley as your sources, you need to doublecheck their assertions.Pinker insults the Enlightenment principles he claims to defend.

Could he have succumbed to the motivated reasoning these principles are supposed to suppress? If the environmental crisis cannot be so easily dismissed, it threatens his argument that life is steadily improving. What looks like a relentless enhancement in human welfare could emerge instead as an interlude between one form of deprivation and the next.

I doubt such poor scholarship will dim the adulation with which his claims are received. While Pinker is lauded, far more interesting and original books, such as Jeremy Lent’s The Patterning Instinct and Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics, are scarcely reviewed. If there is one aspect of modernity that owes nothing to the Enlightenment, it is surely the worship of celebrities.

• George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist

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Steven Pinker: ‘The way to deal with pollution is not to rail against consumption’ | Science | The Guardian

Steven Pinker: ‘The way to deal with pollution is not to rail against consumption’ | Science | The Guardian



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Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker: ‘The way to deal with pollution is not to rail against consumption’


The feather-ruffling Harvard psychologist’s new book, a defence of Enlightenment values, may be his most controversial yet

• Read an extract from Enlightenment Now here



Andrew Anthony

Sun 11 Feb 2018 19.00 AEDTLast modified on Thu 22 Mar 2018 10.48 AEDT





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Comments819 Steven Pinker: ‘If scientific beliefs are just mythology, how come we can get to the moon?’ Photograph: Scott Nobles


Say the word “enlightenment” and it tends to conjure images of a certain kind of new-age spiritual “self-improvement”: meditation, candles, chakra lines. Add the definite article and a capital letter and the Enlightenment becomes something quite different: dead white men in wigs.

For many people, particularly in the west, reaching a state of mindful nirvana probably seems more relevant to their wellbeing than the writings of, say, Immanuel Kant and Adam Smith. But according to Enlightenment Now, a new book by the celebrated Harvard cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, this is precisely where we’re getting our priorities wrong.

For Pinker, the Enlightenment is not some distant era, of interest only to historians and philosophers, but instead the foundation for all the many benefits and advantages to which we scarcely give a second’s thought in the 21st century.
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He lists some of the advancements made by modern societies: “Newborns who will live more than eight decades, markets overflowing with food, clean water that appears with a flick of a finger and waste that disappears with another, pills that erase a painful infection, sons who are not sent off to war, daughters who can walk the streets in safety, critics of the powerful who are not jailed or shot, the world’s knowledge and culture available in a shirt pocket.”

These were not inevitable developments, Pinker wants us to know, but the fruits of the methods and values that were first popularised in the 18th century.


It’s safe to say that few of us stop and marvel at the extraordinary progress that humankind has made in the past couple of hundred years – a mere blink of the eye in evolutionary terms. Instead we’re more likely to lament the state of the world, deplore the ravenous nature of humanity, rage at the political and financial elites and despair at the empty materialism of consumer society.


What we do to combat poverty: that’s far more important than reducing inequality

But for Pinker, that’s an indulgence we can no longer afford. His book is a sustained, data-packed argument in favour of the principles promoted by the Enlightenment, “The Case,” as its subtitle puts it, “for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.”

By virtue of science, I’m able to see and speak to Pinker via Skype, from my office in north London, while he is in his office in Boston. He explores the issue of inequality in some depth in the book, so it’s not an entirely trivial observation to note that his office looks to be about eight times larger than mine. But more on the distribution of wealth later.
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Pinker’s trademark mop of silver curls, more like that of an ageing hard rock guitarist than an Ivy League academic, a pair of twinkling blue eyes and a ready expression of amusement beam out from my screen.

So, I ask, why do the values of the Enlightenment require such staunch and detailed defence (the book is more than 550 pages long, filled with graphs, footnotes and an exhaustive wealth of references) at this particular juncture in time?

“Among other things,” he replies, “they are under threat from authoritarian populism, religious fundamentalism and radicalism of the left and right. The great successes the world has enjoyed over the past decades and centuries are taken for granted, because many of the ideas responsible for them have become part of the establishment and no one is willing to defend them. So anything that is going right is not associated with any movement, any values, and that has left a vacuum that forces of extremism have rushed into.”


On my radar: Steven Pinker’s cultural highlights

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Pinker, however, is willing to defend these established, even establishment, ideas. He is, rather bravely, prepared to be the bearer of good news. I say bravely because it’s not a popular stance. Announce that the world has gone badly wrong, that there are too many people, the Earth has been despoiled, we’ve never been in greater danger of death and destruction, or more adrift in the spiritual void of materialism and you’ll have the nodding attention of the news media and the intellectual classes.

But painstakingly show that, actually, things are on the whole quite a bit better than they have ever been and you’ll meet a torrent of bafflement and denial. Pinker knows this because he’s already been through the process with his previous book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, which persuasively argued – again with graphs and a mountain of research – that humankind was becoming progressively less violent.

It was a message that seemed to run counter to everything we thought we knew or had been told. How, after two world wars, the advent of the nuclear bomb, the proliferation of the arms industry and the brutality and murder we saw on television each night, could we seriously entertain the notion that we are becoming less violent?

But we are, and Pinker showed it with such an abundance of apparently irrefutable data that his detractors were left scrambling to redefine the meaning of violence.

“One of the surprises in presenting data on violence,” he says, “was the lengths to which people would go to deny it. When I presented graphs showing that rates of homicide had fallen by a factor of 50, that rates of death in war had fallen by a factor of more than 20, and rape and domestic violence and child abuse had all fallen, rather than rejoice, many audiences seemed to get increasingly upset. They racked their brains for ways in which things could not possibly be as good as the data suggested, including the entire category of questions that I regularly get: Isn’t X a form of violence? Isn’t advertising a form of violence? Isn’t plastic surgery a form of violence? Isn’t obesity a form of violence?”

Graphic evidence: Steven Pinker's optimism on trial


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This time round, Pinker appears to have written with his doubting audience more firmly in mind. It’s as if he’s thought up every counter-argument before it can be made, and met each one with statistical refutations. It makes for a chewy but, well, enlightening read.

The idea for the book came out of a debate that Pinker had with the cultural critic Leon Wieseltier in the pages of the New Republic back in 2013. Wieseltier accused Pinker of invading the humanities with “scientism” – belief in the all-conquering value of science. Pinker replied that there was a false distinction between the humanities and science, that both were once the domain of educated thinkers, and that they were complementary in reaching a better understanding of the world and our place in it.

The debate, as they say, went viral, and Pinker was soon signing a book contract.

“But,” says Pinker, “ I quickly realised that a spat between a couple of magazine intellectuals was not worthy of a book-length treatment. So I submerged that particular debate in a larger defence of Enlightenment values, of which science is a part.”

The Enlightenment is a period placed by historians largely in the 18th century, and it remains a subject of much scholarly dispute about what it constituted and who were members of it. Even at the time, its adherents wrestled with definitions. In his 1784 essay An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?, Kant said that it amounted to “humankind’s emergence from its self-incurred immaturity”. He exhorted his readers to “dare to understand”.


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In Pinker’s conception, although the Enlightenment featured many different creeds, there was a unifying rejection of the constraints of religious faith and tribal loyalties, and in their place a belief in human universalism, the power of reason and the progressive role of science. For him it’s no coincidence that slavery and cruel punishments (such as being hanged, drawn and quartered) were outlawed in the wake of the Enlightenment. Nor that health, wealth and life expectancy began to rapidly improve.

Right from its inception, the Enlightenment had to do battle with the counter-Enlightenment – formed from the massed ranks of traditionalists, the religiously orthodox, and Romantics who recoiled from the unblinking gaze with which the Enlightenment thinkers felt emboldened to observe the world.

The struggle has continued ever since, with the Enlightenment being blamed for racism, imperialism and Nazi eugenics by critics from the left, and by the right for the moral void of atheism and materialism that found its murderous apogee in the Soviet Union and communist China. More recently, postmodernists have looked upon the Enlightenment as yet another false grand narrative, in which humanism, science and reason are just more belief systems, no more nor less valid than any others.
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Pinker rejects all three positions. Far from sanctioning racism or nazism, he says, the Enlightenment laid the philosophical groundwork for universalism, the belief in equal rights for all, which ultimately triumphed over fascism and imperialism. Pinker argues that the inspiration for Nazi ideology should be more appropriately traced to Friedrich Nietzsche, who attacked the Enlightenment’s dependence on reason and argued for a “will to power” and the idea of “übermensch”, or superman. Nietzsche’s supporters won’t take that lying down.

And Marxism, he maintains, was not a legacy of the Enlightenment, but instead a pseudoscience that has more to do with German Romanticism. We can also expect Marxists to revolt.

As for postmodernism, Pinker is scathing.
FacebookTwitterPinterest Steven Pinker in 1994, the year he published The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language. Photograph: Boston Globe/Getty Images

“If scientific beliefs are just a particular culture’s mythology, how come we can cure smallpox and get to the moon, and traditional cultures can’t? And if truth is just socially constructed, would you say that climate change is a myth? It’s the same with moral values. If moral values are nothing but cultural customs, would you agree that our disapproval of slavery or racial discrimination or the oppression of women is just a western fancy?”
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No doubt Pinker will be admonished for mischaracterising the views of his opponents. But while there are certainly some polemical flourishes, Enlightenment Now is a careful and deeply researched piece of work. That is more than can be said of the accusations directed at him by some of his critics. A few weeks ago the biologist and blogger PZ Myers launched an attack on Pinker by putting out an edited clip of the Harvard professor in a public debate. The edited version seemed to suggest Pinker’s approval of supporters of the “alt-right”.

In fact, as the New York Times was quick to note, the unedited video showed Pinker was denouncing far-right ideas, and arguing that the left needs to make better arguments against them. It was a vivid example of how easy it can be, in the age of fake news and social media, to tarnish reputations with doctored evidence.

There have been several examples in recent years in which careers, including those of academics, have been brought to an ignominious end after social media campaigns based on disputed testimonies. Does this overheated climate of denunciation make Pinker more inhibited with his opinions?

“In my case, no,” he says. “But I think in the broader community that is a real danger. I think I have the reputation and the social capital to withstand distortions like that, but for younger and less established people, they might think twice about saying something that could be taken out of context, doctored, and go viral. So I do think it has a pernicious effect on the quality of intellectual discourse.”

Canadian-born, Pinker has done the faculty rounds of MIT, Stanford and Harvard, where he has built a formidable reputation as a multidisciplined thinker. But it is his books that have elevated him to the coveted position of public intellectual.

He wrote a series of well-received books about linguistics and psychology before publishing The Blank Slate in 2002, which argued that human behaviour was not simply or even largely a matter of environmental influence but instead shaped mostly by evolutionary adaptations. The book had its critics, but it became a bestseller. Ever since, Pinker’s audience has only grown in number – as have his critics.

It’s likely that Enlightenment Now will prove his most controversial book to date. His targets are many and he pulls few punches. For example, he takes the green movement to task for a “misanthropic environmentalism” that views modern humans as “vile despoilers of a pristine planet”.

Underpinning the belief that humans are destroying the Earth is the assumption that progress is not sustainable. Pinker disagrees, or at least argues that such doomsday conclusions have a long and fallible history. A fundamental tenet of the Enlightenment was that all problems, if studied long and hard enough, could be understood, and therefore at some point solved. And environmental problems, writes Pinker, are no exception.
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He argues that progress is not only sustainable, but essential for attaining the knowledge that will enable us to find the cleanest and most efficient use of energy. In other words, scientific progress is what will make economic progress work. The book is a kind of rallying call to replace moral posturing with clear-eyed realism. Pinker’s message is that if we are not going to return to hunter-gathering – and we’re not – we had better face up to the task at hand.

That probably means using more nuclear reactors in the immediate future, something that, as with GM crops and shale gas, the green movement has responded to with apocalyptic protestations. And we may also have to acknowledge that to cut down on carbon emissions, the developing world first needs to attain a level of material wealth, by burning more energy, at which point it can turn its attention to the environment.

But perhaps he will be most in need of a tin hat for his unapologetic dismissal of the kind of anti-capitalists who see globalism as an international conspiracy bent on impoverishing the world for the enrichment of a tiny elite. A rave review by Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who called Enlightenment Now “My new favourite book of all time” (his previous favourite was The Better Angels of Our Nature), is unlikely to improve Pinker’s credentials in radical circles. Although he emphasises the need for strict regulation of capitalism, Pinker points to the data that shows that history has never seen such a massive movement out of poverty as that witnessed by the late 20th-century capitalist revolutions in China and India. It’s for this reason that he believes the dangers of inequality have been overstated.


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FacebookTwitterPinterest Violence in retreat: Steven Pinker reveals the better angels of our nature.

“If wealth consisted of a finite pot that was divided in a zero-sum fashion,” he says, “then maybe poverty and inequality would be the same issue. But we know that isn’t true, that prosperity has increased maybe a hundred-fold since the Industrial Revolution. A second point that gets omitted from discussions on inequality: although it’s true that inequality within many rich western countries, especially the Anglosphere, UK, US and Canada, has grown, globally, inequality has fallen because the poor are getting richer faster than the rich are getting richer. China and India and Africa and Latin America are getting richer and that has reduced the global indices of poverty.”
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Pinker accepts that, to a degree, the decreased inequality between the developing world and the west has come at the expense of increased inequality within the west, as manufacturing jobs that once benefited the lower middle class in America and Europe now benefit the lower middle class in China and India.

“If we were to step back and look at the progress of the world’s poor, we’d have to say this is a marvellous development. If you’re a British or American politician, of course it’s much harder to make that argument. More generally, the political issue that should engage us is how well off the people at the bottom of the ladder are. What we do to combat poverty: that’s far more important than reducing inequality.”

But what of the argument that this ever-expanding cycle of production and commercialisation is turning us into mindless consumers, who can only see value in disposable commodities?

Pinker laughs. “The intellectual and cultural critics who make that argument never seem to include trips to the continent or fine food and wine as a sign of soulless materialistic consumption. It’s always consumption by the other guy that they think of as morally compromising. There’s an issue with the effects on the environment: it really is not good to pollute the environment, particularly when it comes to carbon emissions, but the way to deal with that is not to rail against consumption. There are a lot of aspects of consumption, like being able to travel, see the world, be warm in the winter, cool in the summer, that are human goods. The challenge is: how do we get the most human benefit with the least environmental damage?”

Even Pinker’s fiercest enemies would acknowledge that, however it may have been distributed, there has been scientific and material progress since the advent of the Enlightenment. But many, perhaps most notably the philosopher John Gray, argue that it has not been – and cannot be – accompanied by moral progress.

Pinker disagrees. He thinks that the Enlightenment has been misunderstood as a doomed project aimed at perfecting humanity by repressing emotion. But that was never the intention, says Pinker, because humans are inescapably emotional beings, made from what Kant famously called the “crooked timber of humanity”.

Those unpredictable impulses that lead to strife, violence and war will always be with us. What’s at issue is how we govern those impulses – through religious dogma, tribal lore and superstition, or by reason, debate, the rule of law? Pinker suggests that latter approach has delivered undeniable moral advancement.

“Slavery used to be practised by every single civilisation,” he says. “Now it is illegal everywhere on Earth. The concept of equal rights for women wasn’t a concept until a couple of hundred years ago. Now it is part of the explicit belief of all world bodies and most countries. The rights of children not to be exploited for their labour, racial equality, religious tolerance, freedom of speech… it’s very difficult to find clear statements of these values before the Enlightenment. There were some statements in ancient Greece, but they certainly didn’t carry the day then. In almost everything that you could take as an index of moral progress, the data show that we have been making it.”

It’s just the kind of speech that will be pilloried as “Panglossian”, after Voltaire’s relentlessly optimistic Professor Pangloss in Candide. But as Pinker correctly notes, Pangloss was a satire on theodicy, the belief that God had created the best of all possible worlds. Professor Pinker, by contrast, believes the world is inherently unstable and nothing is guaranteed. His concern is to make things better. And you can only do that if you first acknowledge the improvements that have been made. Enlightenment Now has made it extremely difficult to ignore them, even if you’d much prefer a spot of crystal healing and a Deepak Chopra tape. Namaste.

• Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker is published by Allen Lane (£13.99). To order a copy for £11.89 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99


Since you’re here …

… we have a small favour to ask. More people are reading the Guardian’s independent, investigative journalism than ever but advertising revenues across the media are falling fast. And unlike many news organisations, we haven’t put up a paywall – we want to keep our journalism as open as we can. So you can see why we need to ask for your help.

The Guardian is editorially independent, meaning we set our own agenda. Our journalism is free from commercial bias and not influenced by billionaire owners, politicians or shareholders. No one edits our Editor. No one steers our opinion. This is important because it enables us to give a voice to the voiceless, challenge the powerful and hold them to account. The Guardian’s editorial independence makes it stand out in a shrinking media landscape, at a time when factual and honest reporting is more critical than ever. The Guardian offers a plurality of voices when the majority of Australian media give voice to the powerful few.