Enlightenment Now

LISTEN. We're off to see my surgeons and physical therapists shortly, two weeks after dual surgery. I'm eager for their confirmation that my convalescence has been swift and that at least the more oppressive restrictions on my activity can now be loosened. 

The great advances of medical science in our time is one of Steven Pinker's large themes, as tonight we open his Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress -- the book that inspired our course. A hundred or so scientists are responsible for saving more than five billion lives! - so far. Pinker's right to indict the pervasive ingratitude/ignorance of too many of us about that. "[T]he neglect of the discoveries that transformed life for the better is an indictment of our appreciation of the modern human condition."

I think he's right, too, to say that we can measure and thus mark our progress with respect to countless indices. "...life is better than death. Health is better than sickness. Sustenance is better than hunger. Abundance is better than poverty. Peace is better than war. Safety is better than danger. Freedom is better than tyranny. Equal rights are better than bigotry and discrimination. Literacy is better than illiteracy. Knowledge is better than ignorance. Intelligence is better than dull-wittedness. Happiness is better than misery..." 

These are humanistic values, and coupled with a firm commitment to applied learning they have transformed our world for the better. I wouldn't have opted for the surgeries I'm rebounding from, already so much better than before, in the pre-anaesthetic age that ended just the day before yesterday. And aren't we all lucky not to have been swept up in pandemic a century ago? Can you imagine the toll COVID would have taken in 1918?

Another of Pinker's large themes is entropy. Yes, in a closed system energy runs down inexorably. Dissolution is the ultimate fate of the universe as we understand it. But we don't live our human lives on a cosmological scale, we are tasked always to carve out the meanings and purposes of our lives in a suitably local context."Energy channeled by knowledge is the elixir with which we stave off entropy, and advances in energy capture are advances in human destiny." So Pinker lines up with William James, as against the dark entropy-driven depressive ruminations of Henry Adams.

The "second law" is wholly irrelevant to "history"—save that it sets a terminus—for history is the course of things before that terminus, and all that the second law says is that, whatever the history, it must invest itself between that initial maximum and that terminal minimum of difference in energy-level. As the great irrigation-reservoir empties itself, the whole question for us is that of the distribution of its effects, of which rills to guide it into; and the size of the rills has nothing to do with their significance. Human cerebration is the most important rill we know of, and both the "capacity" and the "intensity" factor thereof may be treated as infinitesimal. Yet the filling of such rills would be cheaply bought by the waste of whole sums spent in getting a little of the down-flowing torrent to enter them. Just so of human institutions—their value has in strict theory nothing whatever to do with their energy-budget—being wholly a question of the form the energy flows through. Though the ultimate state of the universe may be its vital and psychical extinction, there is nothing in physics to interfere with the hypothesis that the penultimate state might be the millennium—in other words a state in which a minimum of difference of energy-level might have its exchanges so skillfully canalisés that a maximum of happy and virtuous consciousness would be the only result. In short, the last expiring pulsation of the universe's life might be, "I am so happy and perfect that I can stand it no longer." You don't believe this and I don't say I do. But I can find nothing in "Energetik" to conflict with its possibility. You seem to me not to discriminate, but to treat quantity and distribution of energy as if they formed one question... Letters of Wm James, June 17, 1910

 

 

I took some time yesterday to enjoy Pinker's conversation with Stephen Fry. 

It's a delight. And I think Steve #1 is right to call out the late Stephen Jay Gould for not getting the whole Enlightenment idea. NOMA, Gould's "non-overlapping magisteria" proposal, goes badly off the rails when it denies the relevance of empirically-gathered knowledge in informing not only our knowledge but our values. That's odd, given his statement that what we've learned of evolution  is constitutive of the meaning of our lives insofar as science can speak to that. And with the advent of ubiquitous social media, we're further off the rails. It's making us dumber.

"The Enlightenment principle that we can apply reason and sympathy to enhance human flourishing" is not only not trite or old-fashioned, it has not even yet really been tried or even noticed by a teeming sea of so-called modern men and women. We desperately need to try it. Now.