Is Steven Pinker Wrong About Violence Declining?

“In many parts of the world, the anarchy came, and those like Pinker who insist otherwise should reflect on whether their claims really reflect reality, or whether they are simply bromides used by those thought-leaders who see the horror and turn away, looking to statistics as consolation against the tragedy.”

Steven Pinker’s books are read by some of the world’s most important political and cultural thought leaders. His work on the heritability of human nature laid out in The Blank Slate is a masterful rebuttal to those who think people can be molded every which way from birth, putty in some social planner’s hands. Pinker, however, becomes less convincing when he starts talking about war and violence. His latest book, Enlightenment Now, is a case in point.

What the Enlightenment actually is isn’t really explained beyond an inaccurate potted history that serves his narrative of inexorable human progress based on humanistic reason and growing tolerance winning over the dark forces of tradition, religion and superstition. Everything good we have today came from the Enlightenment, and everything bad came from reactionaries who refused to see the light. Never mind that as John Gray notes, many Enlightenment thinkers were decidedly illiberal in their thought, and that some of the most illiberal episodes of the 20th century were directly descended from Enlightenment ideas. This selective reading of the Enlightenment is rammed down the reader’s ungrateful throat with a deluge of graphs to shame him or her into accepting his message: things have never been better, things are getting better all the time, and any objections are just counter-Enlightenment fabrications that lead to incipient fascism, so get over yourselves.

Basically, Enlightenment = liberal = good, anything not Enlightenment = illiberal = bad. This simplification of the Enlightenment’s history and meaning is easily countered: the splitting of the Enlightenment into British, American and French strands by Gertrude Himmelfarb is useful for considering the differences in the evolving thought traditions. Pinker ignores this, so his definition of the Enlightenment basically comes down to “everything I like is liberal and therefore comes from the Enlightenment.” The aggregate data used presents a reassuring picture of a world improving in every way, reassuring to those in power on both sides of the political aisle that they can just maintain the status quo and ignore anyone who says otherwise. As Pinker says, “Everything is amazing.” Except it isn’t, and it doesn’t do anyone any good to pretend otherwise.