I am not qualified to comment on Pinker’s statistical methods, and will leave that to others. But data are always susceptible to framing and interpretation, and thus the book’s first and last parts surround this exposition with a polemical framework that tries to give an account of the ways in which the earlier book failed to convince some readers. One of these factors is a set of cognitive biases common to all of us that makes us more receptive to negative accounts of our present situation and pessimistic predictions about the future. But, concludes Pinker, there must be more to it than that, and so he turns his attention to a hazily defined counter-Enlightenment, whose allegedly obtuse and misanthropic ravings find their strongest constituency in the modern humanities. Pinker reprises C.S. Snow’s famous division of the intellectual landscape into ‘two cultures’ characterised by mutual suspicion and hostility, while adding a peculiar twist: he refers throughout to the literary side of Snow’s dichotomy as the ‘Second Culture’, and the scientific side as the first. Pinker acknowledges in a footnote that ‘Snow never assigned an order to his Two Cultures, but subsequent usage has numbered them in that way’, citing as evidence a volume from called The New Humanists: Science at the edge (2003). Has it? Nothing in my reading suggests that subsequent usage has done any such thing, even in the book Pinker cites, and least of all in Stefan Collini’s comprehensive account of the debate. This sleight of hand and slight against the humanities gives us a sense of Pinker’s basic project: the Enlightenment doesn’t just need defending in the public sphere, but from from its traditional disciplinary custodians as well. Cognitive science to the rescue.

But Pinker’s salvific mission quickly runs into difficulty. His definition of ‘Enlightenment’ tries to encompass both the event in European thought of the late eighteenth century (historically contingent and culturally specific) and the values of ‘reason, science, and humanism’ that it articulated (putatively transhistorical and universal). Pinker is certainly aware that to assert the universal validity of a Western set of values is to invite condemnation, so he hedges: Enlightenment ideals ‘are rooted in reason and human nature, so any reasoning human can engage with them. That’s why Enlightenment ideals have been articulated in non-Western civilizations at many times in history.’ Pinker has been careful here to inoculate himself against the charge of Eurocentrism, but one may therefore be moved to wonder why none of these putative non-Western Enlightenments has had a significant effect on human well-being (the late eighteenth century remains the baseline for Pinker’s argument), or indeed why the Western Enlightenment should appear to be the lasting one.

One reason for the latter must be the era of European imperialism with which the Enlightenment coincides: European powers, already benefiting from material conditions propitious to exploration and conquest, and shortly to be bolstered by industrial production, spread their dominion over nearly the whole planet. Pinker takes up imperialism and its legacy in the contemporary world not once. Raising the historical correlation of Enlightenment philosophy and European imperialism is not in itself to show that the Enlightenment should be ‘blamed’ for European conquest. But Enlightenment thought played handmaiden to that destructive project all the same. David Hume, one of Pinker’s Enlightenment heroes, once averred that he was ‘apt to suspect the negroes to be naturally inferior to the whites. There scarcely ever was a civilized nation of that complexion, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation.’ One could adduce similar statements from Kant. (If it seems unfair to impute racism to Hume on the grounds of these brief remarks alone, I would observe that it only takes five sentences from Nietzsche for Pinker to diagnose him as a genocidal maniac.) Thus attributing to themselves racial and civilisational supremacy, Europeans flattered themselves as the natural custodians of the rest of mankind while ruthlessly expropriating their resources, destroying their institutions, and denigrating their cultures.

Steven PinkerThat the modern humanities have devoted much time and effort to documenting and trying to understand these historical travesties is a point not lost on Pinker, but where a moral concern with the crimes of the past shades over into mere political correctness for him is never clear. At one point, Pinker cites ‘context, nuance, historical depth’ as the ‘qualities we prize in humanities scholars’. I heartily agree, but when humanities scholars have brought those values to bear on the Enlightenment itself, Pinker tends to become enraged by the result. But where the Enlightenment and science have been complicit with oppression and violence, it behoves us to pay attention and to learn something about their limits. Values can be articulated and defended in the abstract, but we must also give an account of their shortcomings in the moment of their historical articulation.

Consequent to his refusal to brook any criticism of the Enlightenment beyond the milquetoast piety that its adherents were ‘men of their time’, Pinker regards the humanities as hopelessly in hock to historical declinism and cultural pessimism. The Western tradition’s ‘prophets of doom’ are also the ‘all-stars of the liberal arts curriculum’, and Pinker lists Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Heidegger, Adorno, Benjamin, Foucault, and many others. It is a peculiar list, cutting across centuries, nations, disciplines, and politics; if one had read these figures deeply, would one feel as if they could be so blithely lumped together? The answer is no, but Pinker hasn’t read them deeply: his chief informant on the present state of the humanities is a little-known scholar called Arthur Herman whose The Idea of Decline in Western History is an artefact of the 1990s conservative campaign against postmodernism (and also cited in the introduction to The New Humanists: this connection gives some indication of the thinness of Pinker’s engagement with recent humanities scholarship). Were he to have looked, he might have encountered, for instance, Jürgen Habermas’s mighty effort to vindicate Enlightenment reason through a deep engagement with its critics (whom Pinker feels entitled to wave away with a flick of his rhetorical wrist), or perhaps Foucault’s moving call in his late essay ‘What Is Enlightenment?’ (reprising Kant) for the Enlightenment project of critique to continue, not only as a body of doctrines but as a way of life. To demand that Enlightenment values be subject to their own standard of critical interrogation is not to descend into a morass of relativism and self-contradiction; it is rather to inhabit Enlightenment as an ethos. If the breach between the two cultures is to be repaired, and there is evidence that Pinker earnestly wishes for it to be, it will have to start from a position of interdisciplinary respect markedly absent here.