Thread by @JeffreyASachs

Yet another review tearing apart Pinker's "Enlightenment Now". Since I kicked that particular beehive myself a week or two ago, and was subsequently challenged by @clairlemon et. al. to put up or shut up, I'll take this opportunity to do the former.

lareviewofbooks.org/article/pinker…

@clairlemon Essentially, the book has three major flaws: historical, causal, and descriptive.

Historical: Pinker criminally misdescribes the Enlightenment, flattening it in the course of two short chapters into something unrecognizable.

@clairlemon What is Pinker's Enlightenment? It is the triumph of reason and democracy over superstition and aristocracy. His heroes are Smith, Locke, Diderot, and above all, Kant. Whether he knows it or not, Pinker owes a deep debt to Peter Gay, Cassirer, and Habermas.

And that's a problem.

@clairlemon Because as Jonathan Israel has painstakingly shown, "The Enlightenment" contained a powerfully moderate-to-conservative strain as well, one present (if not dominant) in the thought of each of Pinker's heroes above.

h-net.org/reviews/showre…

@clairlemon And by "moderate-to-conservative", I mean that they were in some sense actively anti-democratic, anti-secularism, anti-egalitarianism, or anti-reason. One need to fully buy into Israel's schema to see this reality.

@clairlemon Pinker may be aware of Israel (he cites him passingly in the footnotes) but he certainly doesn't play out the implications. Which is odd, because Israel's radical Enlightenment furnishes Pinker with precisely the revolutionary story he needs. Swap out Kant for Spinoza, and voilà!

@clairlemon So why doesn't he seize it? Because doing so would require adopting a much more radical political stance than Pinker is prepared to take. But don't take my word for it. Consider that in a 576-page book called Enlightenment Now, not ONCE do the words "French Revolution" appear.

@clairlemon Hold on, have to do a real-world thing.

@clairlemon OK, back.

All this is no accident. It's a direct consequence of Pinker's refusal to grapple with the Enlightenment as it actually was. He flattens the Enlightenment, presenting even its most conservative voices as if they were political and epistemological radicals...

@clairlemon ...but then refuses to even name-drop the greatest actual, existing episode of Enlightenment radicalism put to work. Which, in case it's not obvious, radiates disaster triumphant.

@clairlemon This is a pattern with Pinker. Presented by @jbouie with a damning indictment of the Enlightenment's relationship with race and colonialism...

slate.com/news-and-polit…

@clairlemon @jbouie ...he replies by saying, in essence, "So what?" Pinker doesn't take intellectual history seriously (he chose the Enlightenment because it was a catchy hook!), so why, he asks, should we?

quillette.com/2019/01/14/enl…

@clairlemon @jbouie These are not the words of someone who has a different interpretation of history. They are the words of someone who does not respect history. Someone who sees it as a marketing device, a catchphrase. Certainly not something you can learn from.

@clairlemon @jbouie At this point, it feels almost unnecessary to mention the second flaw: causality. As @pseudoerasmus pointed out some time back, it's not that Pinker fails to prove that the Enlightenment caused human progress. It's that he literally doesn't even try.

@clairlemon @jbouie @pseudoerasmus Take democracy. There are many explanations for its rise, from institutional arrangements (Douglass) to economic conditions (Acemoglu and Robinson) to ideas and cultural values (McCloskey, Mokyr). Pinker is clearly working in this last vein, but does none of the hard work needed.

@clairlemon @jbouie @pseudoerasmus There is no reason - zero - to simply assume that just because a bunch of French aristocrats and English lawyers talked a lot about political rights, this had anything to do with the historical emergence of democracy. You can't just assert a connection. You need to prove it.

@clairlemon @jbouie @pseudoerasmus This has already gone on longer than the book is worth, but I'm almost done. Last flaw: descriptive. While the Enlightenment may be the "catch", most of the book is just a parade of graphs purporting to show the March of Human Progress (courtesy of Max Roser).

@clairlemon @jbouie @pseudoerasmus So how about those graphs? Many of them are perfectly fine, but a lot of them (and I mean a LOT) function essentially as factoids: itty bits of information with none of the context or background necessary to evaluate their significance. Here's a typical example.

@clairlemon @jbouie @pseudoerasmus Pinker uses this graph to show that the world's forests are actually healthy, part of his larger campaign against environmental pessimism. But note that he gives us no reason, in either the figure or text, to believe that forest cover is an appropriate measure of forest health.

@clairlemon @jbouie @pseudoerasmus Curious! So I did precisely what you're supposed to do. I checked Pinker's source, the UNFAO's 2012 biennial State of the World's Forest report. This in turn cites the UNFAO's 2010 report, along with some historical data.

fao.org/3/i1757e/i1757…

@clairlemon @jbouie @pseudoerasmus First of all, the report specifically warns against what Pinker is doing. Forest cover tells us very little about forest health, it says, since there's a big difference between an intact, indigenous forest and an area that is reforested. And reforested with what? It matters!

@clairlemon @jbouie @pseudoerasmus And how about those estimates on deforestation? Would it shock you to learn that they are highly controversial, poorly measured, and have been contradicted by satellite imaging?

weforum.org/agenda/2015/03…

science.sciencemag.org/content/361/64…

e360.yale.edu/features/confl…

@clairlemon @jbouie @pseudoerasmus Pinker mentions none of this, which is precisely what makes it a factoid and not a fact. How many more of his 70+ graphs are like this? How many fall apart under even the slightest, inexpert scrutiny? Or was I just lucky enough to stumble across the only problematic one?

@clairlemon @jbouie @pseudoerasmus I could go on, but what's the point? Most Pinkerstans will never be convinced. Even if they'll admit these flaws, they'll wave it all away as immaterial to his basic point: things are getting better and Classical Liberals are the cause. Nothing I say will persuade them otherwise.

@clairlemon @jbouie @pseudoerasmus Which should tell you something! This book is a work of ideology, not history or political science or economics. It's a Just-So story. A polemic, as told by a soft-spoken Harvard professor. It isn't designed to explain the world. It's meant to make you feel good about it.

@clairlemon @jbouie @pseudoerasmus People have an emotional attachment to it, not an intellectual one. Which, in a way, I can at least respect. Because to have an intellectual attachment to a work this bad would be deeply, deeply depressing.

@clairlemon *need NOT fully buy*

@clairlemon @jbouie @pseudoerasmus Just to really drive the point home, a small addenda.

https://twitter.com/JeffreyASachs/status/1207001894645829633

@clairlemon @jbouie @pseudoerasmus This review is just brutal.

networks.h-net.org/node/28443/dis…

@clairlemon @jbouie @pseudoerasmus And another.

abc.net.au/religion/the-e…