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One of the great things about being on sabbatical is that you actually get a little time to hide away and do something that professors generally have very little opportunity to do \u2013 read books. As a result, I have spent the last couple of months gorging myself on the scholarly fruits that have been piling up on my desk for some time. What fun it is to soak yourself in the literature! To swim from genre to genre, from topic to topic with a little more freedom to explore beyond your micro-specialism than is ever usually possible and, through this, to garner new insights.<\/p>\n
That is until an argument and insight makes you stop and tread water; to question your intellectual tribe and its contribution to society; that leaves you with a sense that a gentle swim has ended and that you may now be \u201cnot waving but drowning\u201d.<\/p>\n
To some extent, Steven Pinker\u2019s Enlightenment Now <\/i>(2018) is the literary equivalent of being hit over the head while open water swimming by the chap in the guide boat who was supposed to be looking after you.<\/p>\n
For someone who had just taken so much from Pankaj Mishra\u2019s wonderful book The Age of Anger <\/i>(2018), Pinker\u2019s position is \u2013 simply put \u2013 that \u201cthose angry people don\u2019t know how lucky they are\u201d.<\/p>\n
His argument is as simple as it is bold: overall, the world is not declining into chaos and disaster but \u201cpeople are getting healthier, richer, safer, and freer, they are also becoming more literate, knowledgeable, and smarter\u2026People are putting their longer, healthier, safer, freer, richer and wiser lives to good use\u201d.<\/p>\n
There is no \u201chellish dystopia\u201d but a world defined by progress based upon the insights of science and the Enlightenment. Pinker offers a powerful polemic that is almost bursting with apparently unquenchable optimism. From sustenance to health, from peace to equal rights to quality of life and the environment, the world has never been a better place to live in.<\/p>\n
Did you know that that Americans today are 37 times less likely to be killed by lightning than in 1900, thanks to a combination of better meteorological forecasting, electrical engineering and safety awareness? Pinker writes that his favourite sentence in the whole English language comes from Wikipedia, \u201cSmallpox was an infectious disease caused by two virus variants, Variola major and Variola minor\u201d. The word \u201cwas\u201d is what he likes.<\/p>\n
In a somewhat odd turn of argument, Pinker focuses upon Friedrich Nietzsche as the root of all Counter-Enlightenment evil. And yet when reading Enlightenment Now,\u00a0<\/i>Nietzsche\u2019s phrase \u201cphilosophizing with a hammer\u201d sprang to mind\u00a0because of Pinker\u2019s emphasis on the world as understood (and only understood) through data-driven graphs. Variations of\u00a0these graphs appear over and over in his book, each one measuring an apparently indisputable measure of human progress but hitting you over the head with the dull data thud of progress until you surrender to the inevitability of progress past, progress present and progress future.<\/p>\n
The problem is, however, reconciling this vast body of data on global human progress with the rise of populism, which is in itself arguably reflective of a large amount of frustration and anger among\u00a0huge sections of the public who don\u2019t \u201cfeel good\u201d but feel \u201cleft behind\u201d (Wuthnow, 2018), \u201cstrangers in their own land\u201d (Hochschild, 2016 \u2013 by far the best book I have read for years) or part of the forgotten \u201cp\u00e9riph\u00e9rique\u201d (Guilluy, 2015).<\/p>\n
And yet if life is actually improving in relative terms for most people, why have so many people been seduced by populist temptations? Who or what is to blame?<\/p>\n
\u201cI believe that the media and intelligentsia were,\u201d Pinker writes, \u201ccomplicit in populists\u2019 depiction of modern Western nations as so unjust and dysfunctional that nothing short of a radical lurch could improve them.\u201d<\/p>\n
This intelligentsia includes the social and political sciences and, although he notes that \u201cit may sound quixotic to offer a defence of the Enlightenment against professors\u201d, he proceeds to rally against the \u201cdystopian rhetoric\u201d of academe, the cultural pessimism of professors and even accuses them of poisoning voters against democracy. Academics are, apparently, \u201cprogressophobes\u201d who chip away at the public\u2019s confidence in conventional politics and, through this, may have unwittingly created a vacuum that populism has filled.<\/p>\n
I am not really that interested in Pinker\u2019s book. It is flawed from too many angles. Moreover, the academics and cultural pessimists that he blames are generally sociologists and critical theorists such as my old friend Zygmunt Bauman and the terror of modernity himself, Slavoj \u017di\u017eek.<\/p>\n
And yet I could not escape a vague sense of uneasiness; a feeling that in some oblique and indirect way there might be a link between the critique of the \u201cnew optimists\u201d and the psychoanalytic temperament of political science. Not only has the discipline\u2019s long-standing focus upon \u201cendism\u201d, crises and failure been well documented, even its more quantitative approaches tend to be laden with fairly pessimistic assumptions about human nature.<\/p>\n
John Kenneth Galbraith once advised that if you ever want a lucrative book contract, just propose to write The Crisis of American Democracy \u2013\u00a0<\/i>and it appears that there may have been some truth in this advice (at least in the minds of publishers thinking about potential sales). This is true to the extent that even when the arguments that reside within the pages of books such as Democratic Deficits<\/i>(Norris, 2011) Democracy Disrupted (<\/i>Krastev, 2014) and How Democracy End<\/i>s (Runciman, 2018) are as balanced and measured as they are coherent and constructive they are published under a title that resonates with \u201cendism\u201d.<\/p>\n
Therefore, if democracy is not in terminal decline, the general message emanating from political science seems to be that it is in pretty bad shape. Put slightly differently and with Pinker\u2019s critique in mind, it is hard to find a positive vision within the discipline that sees the world\u2019s problems against a backdrop of progress. That may well be all and good; I\u2019m certainly no apologist for capitalism, but it did at least make me stop and think about the existence of academic orthodoxies and default assumptions and what Elinor Ostrom once called \u201cthe danger of self-evident truths\u201d.<\/p>\n
That democracy is \u2018in trouble\u2019 certainly appears to be something of a \u201cself-evident truth\u201d within political science and Pinker certainly seems to think such beliefs are \u201cdangerous\u201d, but can academics really be blamed for the rise populism? I\u2019m not convinced.<\/p>\n
To make such a claim seems to overestimate the public influence of academe while also underestimating the amount of international data on the rise of \u201cdisaffected democrats\u201d. This seems to leave Pinker facing a \u201cblame boomerang\u201d that stems from his urge to shoot the messenger, in this case the critical professor, rather than looking beyond and beneath the populist signal in terms of its underlying emotional currents. Progress may well have occurred but (ironically) it is also the nature of that progress <\/i>with its increasingly unequal and precarious dynamic that is really to blame. But, then again, maybe I\u2019m just one of those progressophobes.<\/p>\n