How should Professors react to this clear and present danger? Two Professors at Harvard show the way forward. On the basis of their debate, given below, we learn that what Professors should do is pretend there was something called 'the Enlightenment' and that telling stupid lies about this imaginary event can help suppress the cannibalistic instincts of young people on College Campuses.
Consider the following dialogue between Steve Pinker & Homo Bhabha. Steve is White, Bhabha is Brownish. My remarks are in bleck.
Steven Pinker: ''The Enlightenment principle that we can apply reason and sympathy to enhance human flourishing may seem obvious, trite, old-fashioned.They may seem trite? They are fucking trite! There has never been any Religious or Cultural Paideia which has not celebrated reason and sympathy and which has not developed systems of logic and deontics to promote their application.
This is true even of 'transgressive' epistemic systems.
Voodoo and Wicca practitioners drone on about the importance of abiding by their absurd rules and being mindful and empathic and so forth.
Nobody ever says we must apply stupidity and callousness to enhance human flourishing. Yet, as a rule, stupidity is all that is on offer. People who make a living talking about human flourishing have to very quickly develop a level of callousness equal to a sociopath to keep going through the motions of appearing to be on the side of the angels and to be purveying urgent truths.
I wrote this book because I have come to realise that it is not.A very convenient realisation. But it is unnecessary. Anyone who has written a worthless book has an incentive to merely pretend to believe that saying something which is obvious and trite and old-fashioned is actually vitally necessary now, more than ever.
More than ever, the ideals of reason, science, humanism, and progress need a wholehearted defense.A defense against whom? Boko Haram? That's the only group which is against books and knowledge and science and so forth.
We take its gifts for granted: newborns who will live more than eight decades, markets overflowing with food, clean water that appears at the flick of a finger and waste that disappears with another, pills that erase a painful infection, sons who are not sent off to war, daughters who can walk the streets in safety, critics of the powerful who are not jailed or shot, the world’s knowledge and culture available in a shirt pocket.Who, in America, takes for granted stuff they have to pay for? Maybe, kids who are still on their parent's health insurance. But, they soon have to fend for themselves and discover that health care is very very expensive. The same is true for 'clean water'- for which they have to pay the water company- and electricity and gadgets and so forth.
Americans who live in bad neighborhoods know very well that if they criticize powerful gang members they will get shot. They may also get jailed, if they can't afford a high price attorney, for a minor infraction because of a nexus between for-profit prisons and the judicial system.
Both sons and daughters may, for purely economic reasons, find themselves forced to sign up for never ending foreign wars where daughters are more likely to be raped by their own colleagues and sons to be disabled for life, rather than killed outright as happened in the old days.
But these are human accomplishments, not cosmic birthrights./No kidding! Has Pinker ever met an undergrad who said 'God created my apple phone' ?
In the memories of many readers of this book—and in the experience of those in less fortunate parts of the world—war, scarcity, disease, ignorance, and lethal menace are a natural part of existence. We know that countries can slide back into these primitive conditions, and so we ignore the achievements of the Enlightenment at our peril. […]The Englightenment did not invent Electricity or even understand the germ theory of disease. It was ignorant. An Enlightenment paideia could and did flourish under primitive conditions for the vast majority.
The ideals of the Enlightenment are products of human reason, but they always struggle with other strands of human nature: loyalty to tribe, deference to authority, magical thinking, the blaming of misfortune on evildoers. […]It is sheer magical thinking to associate economic and technological changes with what a bunch of dead pedants wrote in books nobody, outside wholly worthless University Departments, bothers to read.
Ideals don't struggle with 'other strands of human nature'. Why? They are too plastic. The quickly morph into 'loyalty to the tribe'- because the tribe can be represented as embodying the ideal- and 'deference to authority'- because the Great Leader can be represented as the greatest Scientist ever- and as for 'the blaming of misfortune on evildoers', that is what Pinker is himself doing. He pretends that people who don't endorse his silly thesis are bad guys who imperil human progress.
If you are still unsure whether the ideals of the Enlightenment humanism need a vigorous defense, consider the diagnosis of Shiraz Maher, an analyst of radical Islamist movements. “The West is shy of its values – it doesn’t speak up for classical liberalism,” he says. “We are unsure of them. They make us feel uneasy.” Contrast that with the Islamic State, which “knows exactly what it stands for,” a certainty that is “incredibly seductive” – and he should know, having once been a regional director of the jihadist group Hizb ut-Tahrir.”'Shiraz Maher left Hizb ut Tahrir after the London bombings- in other words, the moment he himself could have been Gunatanomoed. The British Government had put some money on the table for ex-Islamists and Maher jumped at the opportunity. But, Maher is old news. Why not quote Katie Hopkins instead?
This is the wrong question. If someone says 'x requires defence', the right question to ask is 'what is the opportunity cost to benefit ratio of providing that defence?' One way of defending oneself against ISIS terrorists is to chant Buddhist mantras. But, the opportunity cost of doing so is not spending money on drone striking the fuck out of those murderous bastards. Writing yet another worthless book about the Enlightenment is even less effective than chanting Buddhist mantras because the sight of Buddhists being decapitated may get the Chinese and Japanese and Thais and so forth into the fight. However, Pinker writing tosh will have no positive effect whatsoever.
Homi Bhabha: “Every serious writer should be taken at his word, and I want to start with the pith of Steven Pinker’s argument: “More than ever, the ideals of reason, science, humanism, and progress need a wholehearted defense”. A worthy cause that prompts the question: Who has put the Enlightenment in the dock? And who should be called to the witness box?
Steven’s wholehearted defense valiantly rounds up the usual suspects —fundamentalism, obscurantism, prejudice, irrationality—but the historical amalgam of Enlightenment ideas, ideals and values doesn’t set his prose racing. He hits his stride when he puts his finger on the pulse of the present—enlightenment, now!Nonsense! Zen Buddhists say 'satori now'. Pinker does not. Instead, because he has a worthless book to sell, right now, he says there's something special about how things are now which makes it urgent that people spend money buying his stupid shite.
“Now” is more than a time signature that gives Steven’s title a sense of urgency; it is an important measure of our progress. Too often, those who take the long view, what historians call the longue durée, blow away the repetitive and rebarbative perils that have shadowed the modern age—slavery, imperialism, world wars, genocide, the holocaust, tyranny, inequality, poverty—which appear as mere glitches in the ascending graph of modern civility: aberrations in the forward march of enlightenment progress.Really? Who are these people 'taking the long view'? Name and shame the bastids, Bhabha. Ring them up in the middle of the night and shout at them- 'Why are you blowing away the repetititive and rebarbative perils that have shadowed the modern age, you fucking cunt! Don't you know this is very naughty of you? Kindly stop it or I'll report you to the Principal.'.
Back in India, when Bhabha was growing up, there was a set essay for the Eighth standard Hindi exam- 'Vigyan- Vardan ya Abhishap?' 'Science- boon or curse?' The correct answer was 'Science is good if it is used for good things. It is a curse if it is used to do very naughty and wicked things'.
The same could be said about Religion or Cheese fondling or anything else under the Sun.
Steven robustly defends the record of social and political progress that he sees as the evidence of ‘enlightenment now. It is here that we diverge. Steven believes that we take the enlightenment’s gifts for granted; I believe that in embracing these gifts, we must look the gift-horse in the mouth. We must calculate the cost at which they come—a price paid largely by those who do not belong to “our crowd”.Sheer nonsense. If we do Science and improve our Technology, we pay a price- Science and Technology are costly to do. It is not the case that we benefit while poor people somewhere else pay the price. It is a different matter that we could use a Technological edge to rob or otherwise fuck over poor people who couldn't invest in Science the way we could. However, in order to prevent being fucked over, we would have to invest in Science anyway. How we use it is up to us.
One of the great gifts of enlightenment thinking is intellectual self-critique and ethical self-questioning.Intellectual self-critique was a feature of ancient Greek and Jewish and Indian and Chinese thought. So was ethical self--questioning. Enlightenment thinking was somewhat below, not above, the average in this regard because it was associated with despotic monarchs or entrenched oligarchies.
Enlightenment progress must also have its day in the witness box. Now. 1. Newborns may become octogenerians one day, but now: “U.S. infant mortality rates (deaths under one year of age per 1,000 live births) are about 71 percent higher than the comparable country average”.[Bradley Sawyer and Selena Gonzales, How does Infant Mortality in the U.S. Compare to other Countries? Kaiser Family Foundation, July 7, 2017]This has nothing to do with 'Enlightenment progress'. It is purely economic. That is why there is variance between comparable advanced countries.
According to a June 2018 report from the Economic Policy Institute, the black child poverty rate as of 2016 was 30.8%, as compared to 10.8% of whites and 26.6% of Hispanics. The overall rate (for all groups) was 18%. The comparison year the Economic Policy Institute gives is 1976, when it was at 40.6%.What does this prove? Nothing save that only Economics matters. Enlightenment can go hang.
2. Somewhere over the rainbow markets may well be overflowing with food, but now in the U.S. (to say nothing of Syria, Iraq, Libya, Venezuela, India, Uganda, Puerto Rico, Cuba, etc.): “In 2016, an estimated 1 in 8 Americans were food insecure, equating to 42 million Americans including 13 million children. [Alisha Coleman-Jensen, Matthew P. Rabbitt, Christian A. Gregory, and Anita Singh, Household Food Security in the United States in 2016, ERR-237, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service, 2017]Markets are currently overflowing with food largely because of Scientific progress. Distribution is a different matter. Its pathologies can only be studied under the rubric of mechanism design- about which the Enlightenment philosophers had nothing to say because they lacked the mathematical and statistical nous.
3. Clean water at the flick of a switch, sanitation at the pull of a flush, but now:“Globally, 663 million people live without easy access to clean water and 2.4 billion people lack access to improved sanitation facilities.” [UNICEF]What is Bhabha saying? That Enlightenment is a magic that meanly discriminates against poor brown people? We should scold Enlightenment and threaten to tell its Mommy that it isn't playing nice. Then, Enlightenment will be sent to bed without any supper and will weep bitter tears of remorse.
4. The world’s knowledge is in your palm, and the globe may be in your shirt-pocket, but now: “There is a clear and highly uneven geography of information in Wikipedia. Europe and North America are home to 84% of all articles… There are remarkably more articles (7,800) written about Antarctica than any country in Africa or South America.” [Geographies of the World’s Knowledge, Convoco Foundation and Oxford’s Internet Institute, 2011]Chee! Chee! Enlightenment baba you are doing dirty on Africa and South America! Why you are so obsessed with Antarctica? Due to why such naughtiness? Should be ashamed of yourself, isn't it?
5. After the diasporas and statelessness of World War II, we said never again, but now: “If the world’s forcibly displaced [65 million] were a country, it would be the 21st largest in the world—about the size of the United Kingdom.” [Save the Children]Who the fuck said 'never again'? Stalin? Mao? Anyone who mattered?
My purpose is not to play the “numbers game”. I am well aware that we owe to Enlightenment reason our sense of a historical archive through which we measure our progress and support our claims with facts and figures.Sheer nonsense! We owe a 'historical archive' featuring 'facts and figures' to accountants employed by Imperial or National bureaucracies who tracked 'progress' for purely fiscal reasons. If these bureaucracies did not already exist, Enlightenment philosophy had no power to magic them into existence or change how they operated.
In pointing out these ongoing failures or deficits of enlightenment now, I believe that humanist reason and liberal progress have always been contradictory and conflicted processes of advancement. And this is not only because they have been waylaid by “other” ideologies of “loyalty to tribe, deference to authority, magical thinking”, or have somehow passed their sell-by date. Enlightenment reason works with the necessary paradoxes of progress, and thinks through the conundrums of reason. Humanist progress is fraught with the inequities of power and privilege; it is, at times, forgetful of justice and mercy while piously uttering never again. Kant’s foundational essay What is Enlightenment? suggests that “public reason” can only free us from the “immaturity” of dogmatism and prescriptivism because enlightenment “reveals to us a strange and unexpected pattern in human affairs (such as we shall always find if we consider them in the widest sense, in which nearly everything is paradoxical)”. Paradox, in the Kantian sense, is not merely an inevitable fact of life; it is a carefully constructed principle of ethical judgment and political decision-making.Kant's essay founded nothing. The American Revolution had already occurred. The Separation of Church and State was an accomplished fact for Harvard's students of the period. Kant, who came from a backward country, was still wittering on about Princes- like Fredrick the Great or Catherine the equally Great. He thought it a paradox that only a very powerful despot with lots of troops and secret policemen and the ability to chop anyone's head off could allow free thought of a type which challenged the Church and traditional hierarchies and 'embedded' forms of behaviour. That's why the English speaking people ignored the silly pedant. They knew, from their lived experience, that a 'limited monarchy' or Republic under the Rule of Law could function as well, or better, than any autocratic Empire. History confirmed this view again and again. Only a professional idiot- i.e. a Professor of Eng Lit- could think Kant wasn't a fool who was widely ignored for that very reason.
This is what Kant actually wrote-
Only worthless shite can be founded on paradoxes. There is no 'inevitable fact of life' which features any paradox. That's why Medicine is a scientific discipline, as is Physics and Chemistry and so forth. Carefully constructed principles avoid any paradox or aporia. Carelessly constructed principles don't. That's why, even if a Chief Justice is an idiot, her law clerks are the smartest of the young graduates from the top Law Schools.
John Stuart Mill was well aware of the moral paradoxes of progress and classical liberalism’s complicity with imperialism when he profoundly questioned his own identity as a democrat in his country and a despot in someone else’s.Right! Once he got his pension from John Company he started questioning stuff. So what? The guy wrote books. People who write books have to pretend to care deeply about some shite or the other so as to get other people to buy their shite.
“Global doubt” on the part of the empowered in the North and the South, Amartya Sen suggests, is the only way to ensure that equity and justice prevail in making any claim to global progress.Really? That's the only way? Howsabout actually doing something useful instead of talking Sen-tentious shite? I may doubt that Gravity exists and encourage you to doubt its existence as well. The fact of the matter is that Gravity is highly inequitable and unjust which is why my ball sac now hangs down to my knees and my man boobs, too, droop pendulously. Still even if everyone on the Planet indulged in 'Global doubt' regarding Gravity, the thing would not disappear.
Confronting liberalism’s confidence with its complicities, putting the enlightenment’s “gifts” in the witness box, as I have done above—these principles of critical self-questioning and the paradoxes of progress are the enduring values and political virtues of Enlightenment thought from its very earliest contested and cosmopolitan origins. (Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment, 2001; Enlightenment Contested, 2008).Really? That's what will get Trump out of the Oval office? How fucking stupid and utterly delusional are these Harvard Professors?
What Shiraz Maher sadly fails to understand is that the best of the legacy of enlightenment liberalism now is that it does not belong to the “West”; it belongs as much to the non-violent independence movement in India as it does to the Civil Rights movement in the U.S.; as much to the pioneers of Islamic internationalism as to the liberation theologists of Latin America; as much to the feminist and LGBTI movements the world over as to climate change activists across the globe.India's independence movement- as Bhahba should know- owes nothing at all to 'Enlightenment liberalism'. On the contrary, the Indian comprador class adopted its terminology to resist full Independence on the basis of universal suffrage. Only after Congress adopted a wholly vernacular message and method of mobilisation did it gain salience as an opponent rather than collaborator of the Raj.
Islamic internationalism is based on the affirmation of Divine Revelation. It has nothing to do with enlightenment liberalism for the excellent reason that there are plenty of Quranic verses and hadith and hermeneutic principles which can justify any rational measure that improves welfare.
The liberation theologian of Latin America draw upon Marx as well as Catholic 'Corporatist' ideas. They have nothing to do with Enlightenment liberalism or neo-liberalism.
Feminists and LGTB activists are fully aware that Enlightenment Liberalism accorded women and gay people a lower- 'heteronomous'- status.
You cannot bomb out of existence the most transformative aspects of democratic humanism because of their dissemination across the world; nor should you ever condemn a great tradition of moral life and civic community --- Islamic or otherwise --- on the evidence of its sectarian movements or its dangerous demagogues.This is a bad lesson. Building worthless arguments is a waste of resources.
Now is the time to build arguments; not necessarily to win them. That is the humane lesson we learn from the world’s diverse and plural enlightenments.”
Steven Pinker: ''I share Homi Bhabha’s concern that the world has too much preventable suffering. But in enumerating examples as the “costs at which [the gifts of Enlightenment] have come,” he has, I believe gotten the history and causality backwards.There is no history or causality here. Nor were there any 'gifts of the Enlightenment' as opposed to returns on resources invested sensibly.
The suggestion that today’s ills are “perils that shadowed the modern age” assumes that before the modern age, people enjoyed abundant and evenly distributed longevity, food, sanitation, peace, and knowledge. Then the Enlightenment happened, and rational liberal humanists plundered the toilets, Wikipedia articles, and other resources from “those who do not belong to ‘our crowd.’”FALSE! I personally witnessed Milton Friedman stealing toilets in New Delhi a few years before I was born.
This is not how history unfolded. The natural state of humanity, at least since the dawn of civilisation, is poverty, disease, ignorance, exploitation, and violence (including slavery and imperial conquest). It is knowledge, mobilised to improve human welfare, that allows anyone to rise above this state.Knowledge mobilised to improve human welfare is the subject of Mechanism Design. It is something Pinker knows nothing about.
As I show in Enlightenment Now (and its prequel, The Better Angels of Our Nature), this progression is not just a theoretical expectation from the laws of thermodynamics and evolutionary biology.WTF? The 'theoretical expectation' from the laws of thermodynamics has to do with entropy. Enlightenment is not a 'Maxwell's demon', but good Mechanism Design can be.
Evolutionary biology has no teleological laws. Pinker know that well enough. Why is he pretending otherwise? The answer is that he has been selling silly books based on crap Statistical methodology.
It’s visible in scores of graphs that plot global well-being over time.A situation where there are 'scores of graphs' is one where whatever it is they are tracking has been rising. When the bad times come, the graphs disappear.
Nor can cats. Why does nobody mention the cats? A book tilted 'Cute Cats Now!' would probably outsell one titled 'Enlightenment Now!' and have equal epistemic value.
The Great Escape (as Angus Deaton calls it) is necessarily uneven, with some regions and cultures benefiting before others catch up. That is not a “paradox of progress” but an absence of miracles. Good ideas and their fruits cannot blanket the planet instantaneously.
Thus Homi’s ahistorical list of contemporary inequities means the opposite of what he implies. In every case, the numbers were far worse in the past, and are continuing to improve, often vertiginously.But not because of 'Enlightenment liberalism'. Rather, it is highly authoritarian regimes, drawing upon indigenous political traditions, which have brought about 'vertiginous' improvements in life-chances over the last four decades.
Poverty can't reproduce itself if it isn't allowed to. Even ignorance requires resources to continue to propagate itself.
Two hundred and fifty years ago, no one had access to improved sanitation. In 1990, 2.8 billion did; today, the number is 5 billion and growing.Since 'improved sanitation' means 'improved since 1770, Pinker's statement is tautological. Adequate sanitation is what matters. It is likely that improvements in Medicine meant that population growth could occur even as sanitation worsened for billions of people who would not otherwise have existed or reproduced.
Getting the history and causality right matters, both morally and practically. Homi’s commentary falls into a way of thinking in which the ultimate moral good is sameness, rather than well-being, and in which progress is propelled by political struggle, rather than the expansion of reason and sympathy. My view is different. Morally speaking, a world in which 33% of the children die in all countries is inferior to a world in which 0.3% of children die in more fortunate countries and 7% die in less fortunate ones (particularly when even that percentage is falling). And identifying the forces that raised human welfare in the past shows us the ways in which we can reduce suffering and danger in the present. These include advances in know-how such as carbon-free energy and waterless toilets, and reassertion of the ideal of universal human rights over the pre-eminence of a nation, faith, tribe, or class. I suspect that “liberation theology” will play little role.So 'know-how' matters. But 'Enlightenment' isn't know-how. It is pi-jaw.
I agree with Homi that it’s a mistake to equate Enlightenment ideals with The West (and to be fair to Shiraz Maher, who knows a thing or two about non-Western, non-Enlightenment ideals, it’s clear in context that he was not doing this). Not only have ideals such as science, secularism, and tolerance periodically emerged in non-Western civilisations, but the West itself never went all in for Enlightenment humanism and has always indulged counter-Enlightenment movements such as romanticism, nationalism, Fascism, religious fundamentalism, and reactionary ideology. If these sound familiar, it reminds us why we ignore the achievements of the Enlightenment at our peril.''WTF? Nationalism led to Nation States investing in Science and Technology in a competitive manner. This is what killed off the Liberal Arts and the pretence that it could counsel the 'Philosopher Prince' or enable the elite to propagate a 'Noble Lie'.
Homi Bhabha: "I was hoping for a productive conversation with Steven Pinker --- after all we both adhere to the values of enlightenment --- but he is intent, for reasons that elude me, on polarising the exchange.
People who adhere to the values of enlightenment can only have productive conversations if they discuss alethic matters. But this also true of those with obscurantist values or indeed any or no values at all.
If the subject of discussion is meaningless, egregiously false, or wholly nonsensical, any discussion is bound to end either in unseemly sexual acts or else a 'polarisation' of a silly type.
To do so, he has to accuse me of “assumptions” that simply do not exist in my argument. To attribute to me (or anyone else) the ignorant, ahistorical view “that before the modern age, people enjoyed abundant and evenly distributed longevity, food, sanitation, peace, and knowledge” is preposterous; to assert, as Steven frequently does, that “The natural state of humanity, at least since the dawn of civilization, is poverty, disease, ignorance, exploitation, and violence” is equally reductive and historically naïve.Oh dear. A higher infant mortality rate correlates with higher life expectancy for a given cohort of children because less viable infants die at birth or soon after. Pinker's claim is reasonable. Bhabha's objection is ignorant.
I assumed nothing at all about the pre-modern past, either gory or glorious, because I was addressing Steven’s vaunted global claims for enlightenment now: for instance, his prediction that children have a life expectancy of eighty when, in America alone, infant mortality rates are now 71% higher than all comparable countries in the West. Etc. Etc.
What on earth is “ahistorical” (Steven’s accusation) about my engaging with the here and now in America, certainly one of the world’s relatively enlightened places? Unlike Steven’s implacable polarisations, I believe that any mature argument has to deal with praise and blame.Childish arguments deal with praise and blame. Mature arguments don't save in a juristic, protocol bound, context.
As I said, I take my stand with Kant’s view in What is Enlightenment that any purposeful exploration of progress must import paradoxes and contradiction into the act of judgment and self-reflection. Otherwise all you do is to take potshots at straw men and women.Kant wasn't an idiot. He didn't say 'import paradoxes into the act of judgement'. On the contrary, he developed a theory of categories so as to get around antinomies which would otherwise vitiate discourse. Russel's theory of types, or category theory, or Voevodsky's 'univalent foundations' all do the same thing. That's why their type of maths is useful for actual physics, not surrealist pataphysics.
Bhabha is a moron. All Kant said was that it was paradoxical, in the Eastern Europe of the late Eighteenth Century that Enlightened Despots can do more to roll back the power of the Church and the Country Squires than 'Civil Society'. Obviously, Americans of the period knew Kant was wrong. A Republic under the Rule o Law could do even better. There was no paradox at all- just the ignorance of a backwoods pedant.
My desire for a measure of equality, fairness, and justice in assessing how enlightened we are now is again misinterpreted by Steven as claiming that the “ultimate moral good is sameness.”Bhabha says he wants a metric of Enlightenment which incorporates a 'equality/fairness' yardstick. Why does he not produce one? Is it because he is too stupid or too lazy or that this desire of his can be gratified by a wholly mental masturbation?
If Bhabha refuses to specify the metric he uses, he can't refute Steven's interpretation of it. Why should we take his word that Steven misinterpreted him? Suppose I say 'the abc conjecture has been proved' and you reply 'you are assuming that Mochizuki's refutation of Scholze's objection passes muster'. I then say 'you are deliberately misinterpreting me. The abc conjecture is that the next letter is d, not e as all you fucking Fascists ignorantly believe.' Have I vindicated myself? Nope. I've just shown I'm a moron.
This is what Bhabha is doing. He doesn't understand Kant. He doesn't understand Statistics. What does he understand? Let us see-
Of course, Steven, progress is uneven, which is why paradoxes and historical ironies must be carefully considered and which is why Amartya Sen argues that without norms of equity, opportunity, and choice it is difficult for people to develop their diverse and different capabilities.WTF? Erosion is a natural phenomenon. It is uneven for purely material reasons. This does not give rise to any paradoxes or historical ironies. If we hire a guy to halt erosion, he does not have to give any careful consideration to paradoxes or ironies or what some stupid philosopher said hundreds of years ago.
The dissemination of a new technology is uneven for purely material reasons. It can be sped up by smart decisions or slowed down by stupid ones.
Animals can develop diverse and different capabilites and do so in the same way that our species does. Sen may think otherwise but he hasn't helped anyone- least of all the students of that Nalanda University of which he was Chancellor. The poor things couldn't even get yoghurt!
But to suggest as a principle of progress, as Steven does, that “some regions and cultures benefit before others catch up” doesn’t at all explain why some regions, cultures and communities never seem to catch up fast enough.Actually, there is a simple explanation for this. The retarded section of that population expands faster than the advanced section. This can be easily modelled mathematically.
Go play catch-up with black children in the US whose poverty rate has improved by 10 percentage points in 42 years, as my colleague Henry Louis Gates pointed out to me.African American Economists- some of the smartest people in the profession- know very well what needs to be done and what forces prevent it being done. Worthless Sen-tentious shite or Kantian shite or Po-Co stupidity is part of the problem, as Thomas Sowell showed, not part of the solution.
Go play catch-up with Indian Untouchables (Dalits) whose economic and political fate is largely untouched by India’s progress 70 years after Independence.Again, Dalit intellectuals have approached this problem in a scientific manner. Dr. Ambedkar had two PhDs in Econ, one from Columbia, the other from the LSE. He was a also a barrister and great constitutional lawyer. Bhaba-blather and Sen-tentious shite is what Dalit intellectuals have had to battle.
This is not to attack enlightenment, as Steven would insist; it is only to usefully and properly trouble our collective conscience and consciousness.This is the crux of the problem. If worthless shitheads like Bhabha and Sen and so forth get to pretend they care about Dalits then, because they are Professors at Colleges which have great STEM subject Departments, they can fuck things up for very poor people. But only if we let them. That is why we must, in foro conscientiae, confront their hypocritical stupidity as and when it appears and refute their shitty little arguments while telling them, in no uncertain terms, to go fuck themselves.
Most art historians admire the great architectural and aesthetic progress displayed in the Taj Mahal while deploring, at the same time,the barbarisms inflicted on the workers who constructed the building.What fucking barbarism is this cunt talking about? Is he really so stupid as to believe the old story about the workers having their hands chopped off or eyes put out so they could never again make anything as beautiful? The truth, as everybody knows, is that billions of Hindu slaves were forced to masturbate and then simultaneously ejaculate so as to dye the Taj to its present colour.
Most historians I know admire the remarkable modern system of railways that the British bequeathed to India while, at the same time, deploring the barbarisms of Empire as a modern form of expropriation and oppression that, in many instances, violated the freedom and dignity of the Indian people.Most historians, we all know, are shite. So what? Who cares what they deplore or admire? What matters is that trillions of Hindus are still being forced to jerk off and splooge over the Taj Mahal so that it can look pretty and white for when some fucking foreign dignitary turns up to get photographed in front of it.
This plurality of perspectives, in argument and evaluation, eludes Steven’s frame of mind.That's a good thing. A frame of mind shouldn't have plural perspectives any more than a window frame should. If a mind does so, it is schizophrenic. If a windowpane does so, it isn't attached to a wall but just spinning around anyhow.
Progress isn’t necessarily linear, nor is it inevitably evolutionary.If Progress can be measured, it must be linear in at least one dimension. If it involves beings who arose by natural selection it must be evolutionary.
Human agency, scientific rationality, and historical contingency chart the course of progress,To chart a course means to plan a path. Only 'human agency' can do so- unless Bhabha believes in his ancestral angels. What is the point of writing sentences like this? The thing is Victorian bombast. It is Babu English. Some mofussil bureaucrat writing a speech for a Junior Minister can indulge in such bromides. But Bhabha has been at Harvard for more than a decade.
which is why the only way to properly appreciate the great contributions of enlightenments across the world now is to set up mirrors that reflect their achievements and failings.Oho! Baba wanting to set up mirrors is it? How sweet! He wants to see his own ass-hole and watch as it goes toot-toot.
Enlightenment thinking is, quite properly, a work in progress. The best way to defend the Enlightenment is to stop being reductionist about it."Very true! If only Einstein hadn't been so fucking reductionist in defending Enlightenment, Hitler would never have come to power.
Steven Pinker: "I am accustomed to seeing the epithet reductionist used to dismiss any attempt to bring clarity and evidence to bear on 'paradoxes', 'ironies', and 'contradictions'. It was just such an attempt at theoretical clarification (and not the setting up of a straw man) that led me to place Homi’s list of contemporary problems in the context of two hypothetical (and deliberately extreme) histories.This is Pinker's mistake. There is no such thing as good social science. There is good Maths and good Stats and both can be used to efficiently represent a Social Decision space or fitness landscape. But both are highly idiographic- indeed, must be so- and thus yield no nomothetic 'laws' of the Nineteenth Century sort.
Enlightenment Now makes the case for reason, science, and humanism against alternatives from left-wing, right-wing, and religious ideologies. Much of the defense consists of documenting the underappreciated progress the world has made since the Enlightenment. In what way is Homi’s list of current ills relevant to this argument? Much depends on the historical trajectory: whether Enlightenment ideas and institutions have, overall, made people better or worse off compared to what prevailed before. As soon as you acknowledge the facts of progress (with a statistical appreciation of shades of gray), it’s no 'paradox' or 'contradiction' that these advances did not penetrate 100% of the human population instantaneously, or that poverty and oppression continue to exist. Only if these maladies had been caused or worsened by Enlightenment ideas, introducing suffering that never existed before, would they be relevant to the case at hand.
Statistical thinking also resolves pseudo-paradoxes such as that “children have a life expectancy of eighty when, in America alone, infant mortality rates are now 71% higher than all comparable countries in the West.” An expectancy is an average, and yes, some countries fall below the average.It’s true that acknowledging the variation among cultures does not, by itself, explain why some don’t catch up as quickly as others. But neither does “troubling our collective conscience and consciousness.” Only good social science can do that, and Enlightenment Now reviews some of the major findings.
The case of the United States is instructive. America’s underperformance can be attributed in part to its resistance to Enlightenment humanism and its secular institutions.Nonsense. This is a story about bad mechanism design and rent seeking and McKelvey chaos and so forth.
The US is the most religious of Western democracies, and across countries and states, religious belief is inversely correlated with measures of health and well-being.Rubbish. Religious belief can't be measured. Some proxies for it may correlate with anything you like. The thing itself can't.
Speaking of straw men, it’s ironic that Homi thinks I need to be told that “progress isn’t necessarily linear, nor is it inevitably evolutionary,” or that “human agency, scientific rationality, and historical contingency chart the course of progress.” Enlightenment Now documents exactly those ideas in unprecedented depth."
Which is why it is shite.
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