Today in the American Spectator there's a piece by Christopher deGroot critiquing Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. The problem with chaps like Pinker is his naive faith in reason as the basis of society.
Now I happen to be in the middle of reading a couple of books on all this: Jordan B. Peterson's Maps of Meaning and Rodney Stark's Why God? They both emphasize the primary importance of "affect" in understanding humans. The point is that, while reason and science are super-duper, they only provide answers for what is already known.
Peterson goes on at great length to unearth the world that "primitive man" experienced and relates that world to religion and myth.
His basic notion is that man in life is suspended between the known and the unknown. Imagine a man walking in the lands close by his encampment, knowing and understanding all the plants and animals and humans around him. Suddenly he spies an animal he has never seen before. Now he is in the realm of the unknown, and the immediate feeling is Fear, and everything has changed. Now this man must stop everything, figure out what this strange animal is all about and also protect himself in case the animal is dangerous. In other words, the normal even life of the known is suspended by a period of exploration to bring the unknown animal into the realm of the known. The point Peterson makes is that emotion, feeling, or affect is a signal for us to stop everything and pay attention to an irruption of the unknown, the unexpected, into the known world.
But the rational world view leaves this out, on the assumption that we already know everything we need to know and therefore can proceed and live as though life was completely known and mapped out. No it ain't.
And Steven Pinker should know better. What, after all, is the reality of the Left, but that the world is in a complete mess, because injustice, and we must do something right now to bring it back to peace and justice. The left is insisting of the primacy of affect, the intolerable experience of misery of poverty, injustice, oppression. Here is Jordan B. Peterson arguing with a lefty that insists that kids should go straight out and solve all the world's problems with activism.
I am also reading Rodney Stark, about why people believe in gods, and why the rise of monotheism. The reason, as I understand it, is that people need to believe in the promise that good will win out in the end, and they will participate in the triumph of good. But why monotheism?
Two things, according to Stark. First of all, in the Axial Age, starting about 600 BC, humans started to live in larger communities, and the old informal social control methods of the village started to break down, requiring the substitution of expensive force to keep the malefactors under control. But gods could also help by dealing with the malefactors themselves, and, according to Stark, the more powerful the god, the more effective the god. Thus, he says, where gods get involved in good and evil there tends to be a move to monotheism.
According to Peterson, then, the basic trajectory of human life is that it is inevitably punctured by unforeseen events that require a non-rational response. And according to Stark, people are programmed to want a world in which good is rewarded and evil is punished.
You can see that the best-of-all-possible-world of Pinker does not compute with this approach to the human condition.
And indeed, if we just look around we see that everyone is all worked up about good and evil all the time, no matter that we have just raised per capita income by 30 times in 200 years. The left is concerned about the horrors all around us, from the under-representation of women in tech to the over-disciplining of minority youth in schools to the gun-violence problem to immigration and Muslims, oh and The Planet! Conservatives are worried about the evils of abortion, the decline of marriage, and the Muslim threat.
Hey, everything may be copacetic, as per Steven Pinker, but nobody seems to be listening.
And anyway, as deGroot writes, "civilizations are organic, rising and falling in endless cycles of progression and regression." So what do we do about that, Professor Pinker?
The answer is, of course, that each civilization is based upon some grand assumptions about how the world works, and, what with stupidity and corruption, the day comes when the civilization is suddenly confronted, like the primitive man above, with something completely unknown for which the current knowledge base does not have an answer. Typically, the civilization fails to adjust to the new reality, and so gets flushed down the toilet, maybe because it was ruled by a bunch of Steven Pinkers that know that they already had all the answers.
Actually, The Climate is the best illustration of all this. All of a sudden, various people in the Pinker educated elite have decided, on the basis of limited data (and data is always limited), that we are in the dangerous unknown, that the planet is heating up uncontrollably, and Something Must Be Done before The Climate eats us all for breakfast. The reality is that there really isn't much science and reason out there, just a few theories, a few climate computer models, and a lot of Fear and Emotion. The Pinkers say we should pay them a lot of money to study the problem and pay for their expensive answers requiring more center-left government. Other people say that there is nothing to fear but fear itself.
What's a mother to do?
If your car breaks down, there’s a mechanic who can fix it, and so too, if only men and women would follow the way of reason and our Enlightenment heritage, we could count on amelioration like death and taxes.The missing link is that reason and science and not enough, and that humans, and I suspect all living things, are creatures of affect. We are what we feel.
For we are essentially passionate animals. The loss of a loved one, like the prospect of our own demise, would not matter to us if life did not already have an inherently affective value, which we feel long before we can have any idea of death.And if reason and science were all there were, why haven't we solved all the world's problems by now? And why, after the triumph of Enlightenment reason, did the 20th century feature so many death cults, from Leninism and Hitlerism to Maoism? No, deGroot will not admit Pinker's line that Nietzsche was to blame for the "romantic militarism" of World War I. (Of course another lefty I have read, Michael Mann, blames World War I on the militarism of the old regimes, the pre-Enlightenment feudal regimes, of Russia, Germany, and Austria).
Now I happen to be in the middle of reading a couple of books on all this: Jordan B. Peterson's Maps of Meaning and Rodney Stark's Why God? They both emphasize the primary importance of "affect" in understanding humans. The point is that, while reason and science are super-duper, they only provide answers for what is already known.
Peterson goes on at great length to unearth the world that "primitive man" experienced and relates that world to religion and myth.
His basic notion is that man in life is suspended between the known and the unknown. Imagine a man walking in the lands close by his encampment, knowing and understanding all the plants and animals and humans around him. Suddenly he spies an animal he has never seen before. Now he is in the realm of the unknown, and the immediate feeling is Fear, and everything has changed. Now this man must stop everything, figure out what this strange animal is all about and also protect himself in case the animal is dangerous. In other words, the normal even life of the known is suspended by a period of exploration to bring the unknown animal into the realm of the known. The point Peterson makes is that emotion, feeling, or affect is a signal for us to stop everything and pay attention to an irruption of the unknown, the unexpected, into the known world.
But the rational world view leaves this out, on the assumption that we already know everything we need to know and therefore can proceed and live as though life was completely known and mapped out. No it ain't.
And Steven Pinker should know better. What, after all, is the reality of the Left, but that the world is in a complete mess, because injustice, and we must do something right now to bring it back to peace and justice. The left is insisting of the primacy of affect, the intolerable experience of misery of poverty, injustice, oppression. Here is Jordan B. Peterson arguing with a lefty that insists that kids should go straight out and solve all the world's problems with activism.
I am also reading Rodney Stark, about why people believe in gods, and why the rise of monotheism. The reason, as I understand it, is that people need to believe in the promise that good will win out in the end, and they will participate in the triumph of good. But why monotheism?
Two things, according to Stark. First of all, in the Axial Age, starting about 600 BC, humans started to live in larger communities, and the old informal social control methods of the village started to break down, requiring the substitution of expensive force to keep the malefactors under control. But gods could also help by dealing with the malefactors themselves, and, according to Stark, the more powerful the god, the more effective the god. Thus, he says, where gods get involved in good and evil there tends to be a move to monotheism.
According to Peterson, then, the basic trajectory of human life is that it is inevitably punctured by unforeseen events that require a non-rational response. And according to Stark, people are programmed to want a world in which good is rewarded and evil is punished.
You can see that the best-of-all-possible-world of Pinker does not compute with this approach to the human condition.
And indeed, if we just look around we see that everyone is all worked up about good and evil all the time, no matter that we have just raised per capita income by 30 times in 200 years. The left is concerned about the horrors all around us, from the under-representation of women in tech to the over-disciplining of minority youth in schools to the gun-violence problem to immigration and Muslims, oh and The Planet! Conservatives are worried about the evils of abortion, the decline of marriage, and the Muslim threat.
Hey, everything may be copacetic, as per Steven Pinker, but nobody seems to be listening.
And anyway, as deGroot writes, "civilizations are organic, rising and falling in endless cycles of progression and regression." So what do we do about that, Professor Pinker?
The answer is, of course, that each civilization is based upon some grand assumptions about how the world works, and, what with stupidity and corruption, the day comes when the civilization is suddenly confronted, like the primitive man above, with something completely unknown for which the current knowledge base does not have an answer. Typically, the civilization fails to adjust to the new reality, and so gets flushed down the toilet, maybe because it was ruled by a bunch of Steven Pinkers that know that they already had all the answers.
Actually, The Climate is the best illustration of all this. All of a sudden, various people in the Pinker educated elite have decided, on the basis of limited data (and data is always limited), that we are in the dangerous unknown, that the planet is heating up uncontrollably, and Something Must Be Done before The Climate eats us all for breakfast. The reality is that there really isn't much science and reason out there, just a few theories, a few climate computer models, and a lot of Fear and Emotion. The Pinkers say we should pay them a lot of money to study the problem and pay for their expensive answers requiring more center-left government. Other people say that there is nothing to fear but fear itself.
What's a mother to do?
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