I don’t know exactly what @Antony Nickles meant, but I can see a sense in which he’s right. Kant erased real human individuals from the picture in favour of an abstraction, the transcendental subject:

Kant is concerned with demonstrating the general conditions of cognition. He does this in part by drawing attention to the distinction between finite human being and the abstract subject reduced to what is sometimes called an epistemic placeholder. Kant’s theory depends on a non- or even anti-anthropological conception of the subject variously described as the transcendental unity of apperception, the original synthetic unity of apperception, and so on. — Tom Rockmore, Fichte, Kant and the Copernican Turn

What you cynically call magic and assumption is simply a belief in charts that plot points and show progress. — Judaka

I can see why you are calling it cynical—it looks like I’ve tried to sneak it through—but I think it’s a bit more substantial than that. In describing the view as “that there is an overarching general progress in history, like a magical power standing over society,” without acknowledging that we could accept an overarching general progress which is not a magical power standing over society, I mean that as things play out in discourse, the former effectively implies the latter. That is, there is no view of history as Progress that is not imposing a myth.

You will say that Pinker’s evidence shows this to be false, but I’m not going to address the evidence here, at least not yet. I may say more in the near or middle future.

I agree in real life, but the reason for discussing the 'ideal' atheist here was to highlight to process difference. Essentially, one cannot check on any way the qualification of the authority in a religious approach, it's about trust and faith. No one asks for Moses's qualification, no-one checks his methodology statement. He is accepted by faith to have heard the will of God. I might trust a scientist to tell me how things are, say with physics, of which I know virtually nothing, but It's not faith. I check their qualifications. I go through a different (not better or worse, but different) mental process to arrive at my decision to believe them. — Isaac

Point taken, and I agree.

What are you trying to correct in this view? Progress isn't inevitable for you, but is it probable? Perhaps highly probable but you want to mention that perhaps something might go wrong and we should worry about the possibility? Or is your goal self-flagellation as the latter half of your OP seems to imply? Does Pinker's self-congratulatory book annoy you because you feel humans are beyond redemption? Do you just feel uncomfortable with a focus on what's going well, and you'd prefer to focus on the areas in which we're failing? What's your angle here? — Judaka

I want to correct the view that there is an overarching general progress in history, like a magical power standing over society that we can either abide by, as Pinker wants us to do, or stupidly ignore, as we do when we do war and genocide. I think there are progresses here and there, and they don't always go together. So if we say that progress is probable, I think we're already assuming an all-encompassing trend that I am sceptical about.

And yes, the self-satisfied purveyors of Progress annoy me, because self-congratulation is not in the spirit of the Enlightenment as I see it. It is not self-critical enough. And this is a problem for me particularly because it serves to justify and glorify the system that has raised our productive potential so radically over the past few hundred years. Although the Enlightenment was importantly entwined with capitalism, the internal contradictions in that process bring their own problems, and they are what interest me, as they interested Marx (who did not lament the replacement of the old society with an industrial one).

I don't think the latter part of the OP is self-flagellation. It's more a reaction to this self-satisfied glorification of general progress, which amounts to a brushing off of moral outrages. I've experienced this on the forum. Criticism of the violent transition from peasantry to proletariat will be met with knee-jerk reactions like "do you really want to return to back-breaking labour in muddy fields," etc. That is, it is taken as a claim that the past was better, and I think this is very revealing. And it is common enough for me to fairly identify it as a significantly prevalent way of thinking. A better attitude would be to embrace the critique of progress as myth, with a view to advancing particular progresses.

Progress as a general tendency is an abstraction, and all abstractions cloud our perception of real things. That's my angle, vague as it might be.

Often, the worst way to become prisoner of a system is to have a dream that things may turn better, there is always the possibility of change. Because it is precisely this secret dream that keeps you enslaved to the system.

Could Enlightenment be that dream? — Tom Storm

Typical Zizek. Looking at the context though, what I think he means is that if the better world is a dream rather than a realistic aim that is conscious of the difficulty of getting there, it functions as pacification.

Maybe that's a good example, I'm not sure. I'd rather give as examples extreme nationalism, fascism, Stalinism, etc.

In the OP? I don’t see the claim. — praxis

I've just realized that I misinterpreted this. I thought you meant my claim that "I'm revealing how a particular myth is reproduced in discourse, merely using one short passage from a famous author to do it."

When I said "Obviously," I meant that it was obvious that Pinker warns us...

about anti-enlightenment (I think that’s the term he uses) movements — praxis

To deal with this misunderstanding once and for all, my point is not that Pinker outright claims inevitable betterment over time, but rather that his thinking, and the idea of progress that underlies it and is common in our culture, tends towards that or depends on it unknowingly.

I don't know what your ultimate authority is. My guess is if you feel that you don't have one, you're just not aware of what it is. — Noble Dust

I think it's Pinker :wink:

It seems to me that atheists submit to authority in their thinking as much as religious people. The ideal atheist, maybe not so much, but then the ideal atheist is just a form of the ideal of the independently rational person, contrasted not with religious people as such but with the blind following of authority of any kind.

This isn’t claiming “inevitable betterment over time”. — praxis

I have not made that claim.

It's not that complicated or subtle, and if you really want to get clear on what I'm saying, I don't think it's too difficult. Just read what I've written with an open mind, applying the principle of charity, and resist the temptation to be pedantic or to leap to the defence of a thinker you admire, just because I appear to be attacking him.

First paragraph.

I've also emphasized it and expanded on it in later posts.

Obviously. I've said repeatedly that I'm revealing how a particular myth is reproduced in discourse, merely using one short passage from a famous author to do it.

It's partly because increased means changes the calculus to tip the balance towards the moral choice. Such as how the abolishment of slavery in the West coincided with the industrialisation of the West. It's easier to say "let's not have slaves because slavery is wrong" when you've got machines to do the back-breaking labour you wanted to force onto someone else — Judaka

There are many counterexamples. Together they show that mastery of the conditions of life and moral improvement do not, as you claimed, “almost always” coincide. Take slavery. Far from depending for its existence always on a lower stage of technical development, it was in fact enabled by mastery. It was the complex settled agriculturally-based society that led to class domination, exploitation, imperialism, and slavery. That's very general, but I don't think I need to go into details, because it's common knowledge.

It’s just a movie, and it’s been criticized as being historically innacurate, but what I think is so powerful about Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto is its critique of modernity, especially because it achieves this without casting the Europeans in the role of the modernizers. It shows how civilization, with its achievements in knowledge, art and architecture (those wonderful pyramids) was built on oppression. We shouldn’t glorify the hunters and gatherers, but there is a truth conveyed by this stark contrast (one which is backed up by our study of history and prehistory) even if in the film it’s a simplistic caricature.

I think I'll leave it at that, rather than make a long list. I could do that, but again, it's common knowledge. If the list was chronological, near the end would be the Holocaust and Hiroshima. They depended on technical mastery, and they are still within living memory.

The gist here is that things are more complex. History is not just onwards and upwards, and moral improvement is not technologically or economically determined in any simple way.

However...

The promise of being able to do better is given to us by technological and economic improvement. The solutions we rely on today didn't exist before, and the problems we'll solve in the future will be solved with technology that doesn't exist today. — Judaka

I broadly agree with this. I do believe, for example, that our technical mastery potentially allows us to ensure that everyone has food, shelter, and basic healthcare. It's tempting for me to think in crude terms like this: first, we had egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies, then we had agriculture and industry that made life worse for many people for a while, but now we have the means to achieve a new egalitarianism again, but this time with lots of cool stuff: art, science, knowledge, washing machines, space exploration, long healthy lives, and freedom from the tyranny of nature. That's pretty much the old-fashioned socialist or Marxist view, and probably the regular Liberal view as well, and it's always been where my sympathies lay. But to me it's no longer adequate, either descriptively or morally. This doesn't mean it's entirely wrong, only that it should be critiqued to build a better picture of reality, to show the gap between progress and Progress (between real advances and the myth of inevitable betterment over time).

The other half is that outcomes are not just the result of our will to be good. We might look at the state of policing and law and condemn our societies as unjust. But perhaps these are just the limitations of our organisational infrastructure, our laws, and our technology, we're just bad at these things. — Judaka

Yes, I don't think I see any objection to this either.

Why make such a point? Is Pinker guilty of reducing human suffering to mere rings in a ladder? — Judaka

Sometimes yes, and that's my point. But it's not really about Pinker.

Considering that poverty, conflict, disease and so on all predate not only civilisation itself, but human existence. I don't think it's that unreasonable to call those conditions primitive. Why are you sure the implication is that any unhappy condition is primitive? — Judaka

Not sure I understand this. Pinker does explicitly describe some present-day conditions as primitive. I think it's unreasonable because those conditions might not be mere relics. They might be built in to the way our societies are organized.

That makes two of us, comrades in ignorance.

I’ve been wondering…

Do you think it’s common for serious thinkers to misinterpret Marx as advocating the rejection of philosophy—as if he’s saying “those guys just sat around thinking and now we have to do something”—instead of seeing that he’s trying to redirect philosophy itself, or do you think that’s just a popular, unphilosophical reading?

Enlightenment cannot stop questioning the way things are, or it’s not Enlightenment any more — Jamal

Can this process eventually transcend Enlightenment? Is post-modern thinking an inevitable outcome of such an Enlightenment process? Isn't the eventual trajectory of questioning and more questioning anti-foundationalism? — Tom Storm

Philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, lives on because the moment to realize it was missed. The summary judgment that it had merely interpreted the world, that resignation in the face of reality had crippled it in itself, becomes a defeatism of reason after the attempt to change the world miscarried…philosophy is obliged ruthlessly to criticize itself…The introverted thought architect dwells behind the moon that is taken over by extroverted technicians. — Adorno, Negative Dialectics

Right now I can’t escape from this viewpoint, even though it has a lot of the Progress narrative about it that I’ve been criticizing. Adorno is saying that because the Enlightenment did not lead to humanity’s emancipation as Marx and the Marxists assumed it would—they really were surprised and stunned that instead of multiple social revolutions to put societies on the course to peace and freedom, we got world wars and unprecedented barbarism—philosophy has to struggle on somehow and face up to its failure. Adorno’s reference of course is to Marx’s famous eleventh thesis on Feuerbach:

The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.

By which Marx meant that the point of philosophy is to change the world.

It didn’t happen and then we got postmodernism. To repurpose a Frank Zappa quote: Philosophy is not dead, it just smells funny.

Postmodernism wasn’t inevitable tout court, but in retrospect, given the actual historical circumstances, it doesn’t seem surprising that philosophy went that way: the failure of socialist movements and the horrors of war twisted things up, and they’re still twisted. Marxism was the last grand narrative/metanarrative (except for those that justified existing conditions), and it fell to pieces. Maybe it’s natural that thinkers began to question the very idea of grand narratives.

Now it feels like postmodernism, with its scepticism towards both Enlightenment universalism and the individual subject of experience, is precisely the kind of philosophy that suits modern society, with its fragmented public sphere and atomized populace. That is, it doesn’t seem like much of a challenge to the status quo, not significantly critical at all, despite sometimes seeming to be.

But I’m being too general and impressionistic, and I don’t know the answers to your questions. I haven’t read much of what is called postmodernism aside from Foucault (whose philosophy I like quite a lot), and I know I’m seeing things too much through a historical and political lens, rather than a strictly philosophical one, but that’s the way my mind goes.

It occurs to me to re-read Foucault’s What is Enlightenment? to see what he says about the whole thing, and maybe get a clearer picture.

EDIT: I just realized: in fact, self-critical Enlightenment has not only led to postmodernist anti-humanism and anti-universalism; it has also led to philosophers like Zizek, who (I think) has made it his mission to rehabilitate both universalism and the subject. So all is not lost!

You gotta roll with it, like I'm doing. :grin:

A Muslim has faith in their religious authorities — praxis

This is probably kind of close to blasphemy from a Muslim point of view. Which authorities? Some Muslims might follow religious leaders, but for the vast majority I think Islam is a way of life that doesn’t recognize hierarchy—famously, there is no institutional hierarchy in Islam. Respecting and listening to the Imam is not faith, but just an everyday deference to, ideally, expertise, knowledge, wisdom, etc.

But ND can take up the challenge from here.

moral improvement almost always coincides with increased mastery over the conditions of life — Judaka

I don’t want to argue now against increased mastery, but can you explain why you think it coincides with moral improvement?

Why does humanity need redemption? Humanity is just better at killing and dominating than other animals. Life is about killing and domination, competition and conflict, eating and being eaten, and suffering and causing suffering. Shouldn't humans be praised for trying to rise above that, and having any kind of success? — Judaka

Sure, I think of humans like that sometimes. I was really just referring to the suffering of human beings, usually caused by other human beings. War, oppression, and poverty, that kind of thing. That last paragraph in the OP was a rather grand and emotive way of making the point that we shouldn’t reduce those past evils (not that they are consigned to the past) to steps on a ladder to present or future happiness.

It seems OP is just a question about what measuring stick we should use... And you've decided it should be extraordinarily high. Isn't that the source of your relative pessimism? — Judaka

I don’t think that’s what I’m doing. It’s more an examination of ideology, of the myth of inevitable betterment, which I think is implied in the unthinking description of unhappy conditions as primitive.

I'll just add that I was motivated by the both of you to re-read the Yeats poem, and the hair stood up on my neck. Hasn't happened in awhile. — Noble Dust

Same here, even though I’d read it before.

But then, Pinker isn't really representing all the Enlightenment values he claims as his own - only the aspects of it that are adopted by MBA courses and hawkish economic rationalists — Wayfarer

Yes, that’s exactly the problem I have with him. His Enlightenment doesn’t have much of the spirit of the Enlightenment.

Edit: or maybe it’s better to say he’s missing some crucial aspects of it.

I enjoyed reading your overview of the status and history of progress, not least the way it ends triumphantly with some powerful poetry.

I disagree. I don't accept the binary of religious belief and secular belief; they're different flavors of the same thing, and again, what they do is give the lives of believers a sense of purpose, meaning and value. If this sounds corny, just reflect and examine your own life, beliefs, and what you value. Even a nihilist or rigorous individualist does not function outside of this reality. Religion is, in a sense, simply an organized narrative around which groups of people orient their lives, beliefs and values. You are no different than a muslim in this way. That's why I think the concept of "usefulness" in regards to "religion" (you're actually using it in regards to a set of beliefs) is misleading. Religion is not the opiate of the masses; rather, belief is what keeps people going, religious or secular — Noble Dust

Nicely put, and I agree.

I just want to add for anyone who doesn’t know that in the sentence before “opium of the people,” Marx says that religion is the “heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.”

"Scarcity" seems the fundamental driver of dominance hierarchies and imperialism that no amount of "progress" has put an end to or significantly diminished, so the title of Pinker's book doesn't recommend itself to me — 180 Proof

Absolutely.

That said, Jamal, why do you think I should read it? — 180 Proof

I don’t. This discussion is not about the book.

Can this process eventually transcend Enlightenment? Is post-modern thinking an inevitable outcome of such an Enlightenment process? Isn't the eventual trajectory of questioning and more questioning anti-foundationalism? — Tom Storm

Great questions that I hope to respond to tomorrow :smile:

I can't help but feel Pinker is an old fashioned figure, the kind of public educator with faith in progress I grew up with. My question for you is could his position be enhanced by more rigorous philosophical knowledge? Is he essentially just another nostalgic modernist liberal? — Tom Storm

When I was growing up I was a big fan of Jacob Bronowski, scientist, TV science communicator and documentary maker. He was very much on the side of Enlightenment, but I feel he was more sensitive and humane than people like Pinker. I still retain a belief in Enlightenment partly thanks to him.

Could Pinker’s position be enhanced philosophically? Maybe, although he’d probably end up with a rather different argument and thesis.

And yes, he probably is another nostalgic liberal modernist, but he’s not just that.

I was struck by this — Tom Storm

The passage is polemical, so it’s unfair to analyze it philosophically. But I’ll do it anyway.

Don't confuse pessimism with profundity: problems are inevitable, but problems are solvable, and diagnosing every setback as a symptom of a sick society is a cheap grab for gravitas — Tom Storm

Here, a problem is just a setback. This goes back to the OP, the claim that in this idea of progress, everything is a problem because it is at a primitive stage of development. Are there not problems that might make us pessimistic which are not setbacks on a road to happiness and prosperity for all, but are rather a result of how we are travelling down that road, and even where the road is leading? Isn’t that a legitimate question, and possibly a profound one? Can nobody point out that society is sick? Granted that diagnosing every problem as a symptom of a sick society is probably wrong, so what if we just diagnose some of them as such? At what point am I making a cheap grab for gravitas?

As it happens, that last paragraph of mine is a cheap jab, because as I say, the passage is polemic. As far as it can be taken seriously, it’s as an expression of the ideas that are at work in our culture.

Finally, drop the Nietzsche. His ideas may seem edgy, authentic, baad, while humanism seems sappy, unhip, uncool But what's so funny about peace, love, and understanding? — Tom Storm

Enlightenment must critique itself, and few did it better than Nietzsche. Enlightenment cannot stop questioning the way things are, or it’s not Enlightenment any more. Enlightenment is not just science, but reason too, and reason isn’t worthy of the name when it’s no longer critical but only instrumental (this is straight from Adorno & Horkheimer of course, and I’m trying on their critique for size).

Anyway, his targets in that passage are pessimists and anti-humanists. I think I’m neither, but I can still be critical. We can find Nietzsche exciting and incisive without embracing all of his thought. Dropping him is a bad idea.

To where and to what we are progressing is never mentioned. — NOS4A2

To the advanced conditions prevalent at Harvard?

Good point.

So isn’t that the past itself is bad, but that conditions were worse than now. If his conditions were to reverse he would have to say the past is worse according to his own measure. — NOS4A2

You've got to the heart of my post, which I appreciate. But I disagree. It isn't that conditions were worse, otherwise he wouldn’t have described present conditions as primitive. He would have described them as bad, unacceptable, or atrocious.

Now, of course I am not saying that he consciously believes that it's the past that's bad rather than the conditions themselves. I am saying that he, and we, slip into this way of thinking and reproduce it, imposing it on history as an abstraction and a myth, obscuring the fine details, dismissing the troublesome realities.

And of course I am not saying that he doesn't describe those conditions as bad elsewhere in the book. Focusing on one short passage, I'm examining how a mythic narrative seeps into our discourse, the result of which is to put the cart before the horse and explain away present evils as belonging essentially to the past.

I also realize that in the book he attempts to show that conditions were generally worse in the past, that general progress by means of Enlightenment is real. And if this is true, then you might say that he is justified in describing them as primitive even when we see them today, because, so the story goes, they characterize the past more than the present. But, even aside from how controversial his evidence is (which someone else might address), this is precisely the blindness of the narrative of Progress. Those conditions are not characteristic only of primitive or scientifically unenlightened societies.

But his use of “primitive” to describe those conditions is the clue to where he’s coming from. Of course he is acknowledging that those conditions exist in the present, but for him they are first and foremost relics, rather than the result of modern problems.

I very much agree. Maybe I’ll say something intelligent about it tomorrow.

That’s a fascinating angle. I can certainly see how the settler colonialism in Africa and India, with its “civilizing” mission, was part of the Progress narrative, but with the Middle East, I’m not so sure. I mean, you’re right, but there was a lot going on. For example, Ataturk, Saddam Hussein and other Ba'athists, the Shah of Iran, Nasser, and Gaddafi led modernization efforts, in many cases against the West. But I do agree that part of the original impetus for this was the encounter with the foreign imperial powers.

Yes, the “othering” that @unenlightened mentioned is directed towards whoever is not in the West and not in the present.

It can be seen as progressive in the sense that as civilization developed at some point (I think China was first) power was given based on merit rather than kinship, which may have resulted power exercised more competently. — praxis

Yes, I was saying pretty much the same thing last week:

Before capitalism, social relations were based on traditions and obligations that had nothing to do with money, and the people at the top had other things to think about, like winning wars, getting in to heaven, or producing an heir (and if they did make money, they didn't actually make it but just took it). A clan chief was obliged to protect his clan members and they owed him loyalty and service; a vassal was obliged to fight for his king to justify holding on to his fief, and also to protect his peasants, who in turn owed him part of their produce; and so on across many variations and times up to the modern period. Capitalism swept most of this away. The result in connection to merit was, ideally, that at last people could be rewarded for their effort and ability, not for their existing attachments of family, class, guild, religion, tradition, obligation, and so on. — Jamal

Otherwise, I do agree that the pervasive sense that everything is getting worse obscures some real progress.

But you’re still a moralist, not yet beyond good and evil — Joshs

And thus, in a sense, beyond Nietzsche.

But a nice point.

Me too. I was watching the Munk debates on both capitalism and populism and the same theme struck me, that the motivating ideology of any movement is not the same as the product. There's a disconnect created by the fact that ideologies gather popular support and as such become tools in themselves which can be wielded in the service of other, completely different ideologies.

I think enlightenment, progressiveness, whatever you call it, is like that. The notion of trusting in science, the rule of law, reason etc is one thing. The purposes that such a trust is put to is another. — Isaac

This fits with what I was saying recently about meritocracy. Whatever its… merits (and I question those), the idea functions as ideology to obscure existing inequality or even to justify it by implying you got to the top on merit, and I’m still poor because I’m lazy and talentless (though the latter is less often stated openly).

I think beyond Nietzsche by bypassing him.

That book looks interesting. Still haven’t got around to Graeber.

Some films I’ve enjoyed a lot in more recent years:

Under the Skin
The Green Knight
The Killing of a Sacred Deer
The Cabin in the Woods
Midsommar
Us, Get Out (haven’t seen Nope yet)
Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood
Triangle of Sadness
Nightcrawler
Birdman
Edge of Tomorrow

There are many I haven’t seen, especially foreign language films. I don’t watch a lot of anything these days.

Hey GMBA, good to see you ag—wait a minute, what’s this?

Isn't there a forum, on some other website, where the buzz of intellectual gnats do not drown out the thought of man? — god must be atheist

I’m offended!

Incidentally, I got the phrase "insufferable enthusiasm" from Nietzsche, writing about progress. Elsewhere he wrote this:

Progress. — Let us not be deceived! Time marches forward; we'd like to believe that everything that is in it also marches forward— that the development is one that moves forward. The most level-headed are led astray by this illusion. But the nineteenth century does not represent progress over the sixteenth; and the German spirit of 1888 represents a regress from the German spirit of 1788. "Mankind" does not advance, it does not even exist. The overall aspect is that of a tremendous experimental laboratory in which a few successes are scored, scattered throughout all ages, while there are untold failures, and all order, logic, union, and obligingness are lacking. How can we fail to recognize that the ascent of Christianity is a movement of decadence? -That the German Reformation is a recrudescence of Christian barbarism? -That the Revolution destroyed the instinct for a grand organization of society? Man represents no progress over the animal: the civilized tenderfoot is an abortion compared to the Arab and Corsican; the Chinese is a more successful type, namely more durable, than the European. — Nietzsche, Will to Power

I quite like the idea of humanity or history as a "tremendous experimental laboratory in which a few successes are scored, scattered throughout all ages, while there are untold failures."

My temptation is to think beyond Nietzsche and say: one day we'll get it right. This would not be to endorse Progress, only to admit that we can find better ways of living.

1. Nowhere is it established how we (enlightened countries) justify such a discreet separation from those benighted countries of war, famine and pestilence. It's as if Pinker treats borders as having some deep cultural/psychological fence around them such that cultures within can be judged in isolation. — Isaac

Wouldn't he just say that in actuality, the Enlightenment was only realized in nation-states, and especially in the US, where he and his friends stand at the pinnacle of history?

2. The assumption that recorded history is equal to 'the past' which, of course it isn't. What goes into the records is a selected subset of everything that actually happened. One of the main critiques I've read of Pinker here is that he takes a single, fairly famously biased, source for his data on Hunter-Gatherer tribes, for example. We shouldn't confuse the academic canon with the lived experiences of the people there. — Isaac

Yes, those are the critiques that I've seen too.

I like (though hadn't thought of it before) your noting that 'the past' is simply assumed to be source of these evils rather than actual material conditions (which, obviously could re-materialise). I agree it dangerously implies we need do nothing, that just passively 'allowing' progress will result in the benefits assigned to it. It has a disturbing paternalistic feel that I don't think is accidental. Pinker's target, after all, is not the forces which keep these benighted countries down. His audience is Western. His target is that particular branch of progressivism which sees technological and capitalist growth as a concern. His message is "stand aside". — Isaac

Exactly. At the same time, I share Pinker's animus towards some of that progressivism. It's complicated.