https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=eqgfgBH0ICw
Hello everybody. I am currently speaking at an Orthodox Christian Fellowship meeting for their leadership. I have a bit of spare time and I have been reading Stephen Pinker’s book, Enlightenment Now. I also heard him speak on Jordan Peterson’s podcast recently. I thought it would be a good opportunity to talk a little bit about his ideas, about his book, Enlightenment Now, and some of the problems that come up in the manner in which he frames his narrative, let’s call it. This is Jonathan Peugeot. Welcome to the symbolic world. Most of you who are watching this will know who Stephen Pinker is. He is a psychologist at Harvard University, social psychologist, and he does studies on thinking, on society. He’s recently been known for pushing the notion of enlightenment and how the values of the enlightenment and the think of the enlightenment are the key to the problems that we’re facing and are the reason for all the positive things in our world today. His book, Enlightenment Now, which is I think his most recent book, deals with the questions of how the world is getting better, the questions of the reason why they seem to be doing better because of enlightenment principles, what he calls enlightenment principles, and also the threat of this based on what he calls counter-enlightenment principles and also a regressive attitude going back to religion and going back to all those things. Stephen Pinker, he’s quite anti-religious. He really is a kind of atheist materialist in the Sam Harris version of it. It’s very fascinating to read his book and to try to analyze the way that he frames reality. Understanding the way he does that will also help us see the inevitability of some of the patterns that I’ve been telling you guys about and some of the manners in which we frame the world in order to present a coherent story. Stephen Pinker says that his whole way of thinking, his whole manner of presenting the world is based on reason and that if only human beings would center their activity, center their intentions on reason, then a lot of the problems that are around us would go away. This is what he calls enlightenment thinking. What you realize as you’re reading his book is that what he’s also presenting, kind of underneath his call to reason, is a narrative. He is giving us the usual progressive narrative. When we analyze the progressive narrative, we can get some understanding about some of the problems that happen when he frames his way of presenting the world as being obvious and inevitable. One of the first interesting things he does is that he gives us these enlightenment principles. Reason, democracy, science. Then he tells us about the counter-enlightenment principles. Then he mentions totalitarianism. He also mentions romanticism, this kind of focus on will and emotion and all of that. That stuff is bad. We need to get rid of that stuff and we need to focus on the enlightenment principles, which are democracy, reason, and science. What’s fascinating is the manner in which he frames that. The counter-enlightenment, what he calls the counter-enlightenment and the enlightenment, are two faces of the same thing. For example, in his book, he quotes Hobbes quite a bit. He quotes Hobbes as an example of an enlightenment thinker. Well, Hobbes was a totalitarian thinker. He believed in absolutism and absolute monarchy. Absolute monarchy, the French monarchies, the English monarchies, Louis XIV, Charles I, those types of monarchs that tried to be absolute, those were enlightenment thinkers. They were done in an enlightenment manner. If you asked Napoleon what he was doing, he would have told you, I am furthering the enlightenment. Already you see a problem in the manner in which he is presenting reality. What he is able to do, and it’s quite tricky, is he is able to look at the modern world and to everything that he likes about the modern world, he is able to say enlightenment. Everything he dislikes about the modern world, he is able to say counter-enlightenment. By saying counter-enlightenment, he is able to suggest that somehow this counter-enlightenment is going back to the past, going back to the horrible things of the past, which are akin to religion and all that superstitious stuff. It’s very fascinating because the totalitarian spirit is a modern… I mean obviously there are traces of all these things in the past, but the focus on this kind of totalitarian idea is something which happened at the same time as the other enlightenment ideas that were coming back in the 17th century and the 18th century. It is extremely… there’s something a little bit dishonest about simply choosing the things you like about the modern world and putting them on your side and taking all the things you don’t like about the modern world and putting them in… being akin to all those horrible dark medieval things that you want to get rid of. Now we see the same thing in the book Explaining Postmodernism by Stephen Hicks, where he puts postmodernism all the way back into the early modern era and all the philosophers that he doesn’t like in the early modern era, he puts them… he traces a line where he says that all these thinkers are the ones that led to postmodernism. And he even mentions Kant, he mentions Hegel, and it’s crazy because I mean the idea that Kant is not an enlightenment thinker is absolutely insane. It’s not insane, but there’s something extremely dishonest about simply splicing the world like that, putting the good guys on one side, the bad guys on the other, and then telling your story that way. But it’s a story, you know, the way that Stephen Pinker tells the story is no better or no worse than any superhero story where there’s a clear bad guy, a clear good guy, we’re on the good side, and we’re going to defeat the bad guys. And it’s fascinating because he obviously, he presents his whole thinking as moving away from that type of approach. He presents his whole thinking as moving away from this identitarianism that he sees as evil, to this conviction that he sees as evil, but at the same time he presents a very clear narrative. We have the good guys who want these things, the bad guys who want these things, they’re totally separate, you know, and we need to vanquish those bad guys. But like I said, a lot of the ideas that he opposes originate in the same thinkers that he also supports. You know, Voltaire, when he went to England, he was amazed by the strength of the royalty and how royalty was there to impose enlightenment principles on the world. A lot of the colonial efforts of the early modern era were done in a desire to bring enlightenment to the world and to shine the light of reason and of science and all of that on all these other cultures. And so these are the things that Steven Pinker puts to the side. He either ignores them or he doesn’t connect the dots together in order to show how all of this is related together. So one of the problems of the way that Steven Pinker is presenting reality and presenting his narrative is the problem that Jordan Peterson has been trying to express in different ways, which is the idea that true religious narrative tries to encompass all of human reality within the story. And so it tends to to focus or to bring into the scope of the story the light and the dark sides and the left and the right hand, you could say all of that tends to be part of these stories. Now, one of the things that that Steven Pinker does is by the way that he’s able to frame, he’s able to ignore certain aspect or or or marginalized certain aspects of reality and pretend that if we just don’t focus on them, if we just focus on on reason and science and humanism, then we’ll all be fine. But there’s a problem with that. There’s a problem. The problem is that human beings are not only reasonable. There are other aspects of the human person which exist and you and you can’t just ignore them. You can’t just ignore them because they’re always there and they will always manifest themselves. So you have to take them into account. I can explain it this way. If you say something like reason, only reason, focus on reason, focus on reason, then what you can do is then when something unreasonable presents itself, when something unreasonable within yourself or within the world starts to manifest, you can say, there, there, I’m telling I told you, you need to focus on reason because look at the unreasonable thing and look at how it’s manifesting itself. Focus on the reason, focus on reason. But the problem is that that thing, that unreasonable thing, it’s there. You have to deal with it. You can’t just say, no, no, no. You know, it’s like, I just want you to focus on reason. So if there’s something unreasonable that happens, it means that that’s not what I told you to focus on. But the problem is that the side effects of what you want aren’t necessarily what you control. You can’t just say, a good example is like you can’t just say, I want society to be based on reason and I want society to be based on democracy. And then you think anything that isn’t based on reason and on democracy, if it doesn’t happen that way, then it’s not what I want. It’s not what I told you to do. But the problem is that reason and democracy don’t necessarily totally jive together because the, the, the, the, and in the book, it’s fascinating because in the book, Steven Pinker is constantly complaining about how people are not capable of being reasonable, how the majority of people are incapable of focusing on reason. But then he says, we need to be reasonable and we need democracy. So how can you have those two things together? You can understand why people like Hobbes who said we need to be reasonable rather pointed to a kind of absolutism, which is to have someone with absolute power that could impose reason on the world because people left to their own mechanisms don’t tend to choose reason. How many people do you know who actually vote for someone based on reason? I’m pretty sure that Justin Trudeau was elected because he has a pretty face rather than people being reasonable and thinking reasonably about the problems in the world. And it’s fascinating to watch in the book how I would say like almost half the book is Steven Pinker complaining about how people aren’t capable of being reasonable and at the same time saying that’s what we need and we also need democracy. So it’s like you can’t just say this is what the world should be like and whatever side effect comes about that you can just ignore it and pretend like, well, that’s not what I said. I didn’t. You know, I said it’s like if I told you, you need to be nice and you need to be really nice to people and you need to never hurt anybody and you need to do only good things. Do only good things. And then when somebody does bad things, it’s like, well, no, I didn’t. I told you do good things. Do only good things. If you do only good things, then there’ll be no problem in the world. I mean, can you argue with that? Can you argue with the fact that if you only do if I tell you to just do good things and then there’ll be no problems in the world? So if there are bad things happening in the world, that’s not what I said. I said do good things. And that’s what that’s the way that Steven Pinker approaches reality. The side effects of his thinking. There’s a very powerful image that was an engraving by Goya. Most of you probably will have seen it. It’s called The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters. And I’m sure Steven Pinker, if he saw it, he would consider it part of the the counter enlightenment. But there’s a very wise, very wise thought in that engraving. It’s that you cannot be only reasonable as a person, just like you cannot just stay awake. It’s like if I told you, you know, you can accomplish, you can, you can work 24 hours a day. You can accomplish so much. All you need to do is work 24 hours a day and then you’ll accomplish all of this. And then if you fall asleep, I’m like, no, no, no, I told you. Don’t fall asleep. I told you, stay awake. If you stay awake, then you’ll be fine. But the problem is that the human being has cycles. We have cycles of awake and sleep, just like we have cycle of reason and unreason or reason and emotion or we need reason. And we also have other aspects, which is our desire to belong or desire for identity. And what Steven Pinker does is he shows us all the negative aspects of belonging and as if we don’t need that, but we need that. And there are negative aspects to belonging, but we have to deal with them instead of just put them aside and say, no, no, no, no, no, just focus on reason. Be reasonable and everything will be OK. And so what it does is it’s ignoring of one of the of some of the major aspects of how humanity works, which is these cycles. We have human attention is is not constant. Human attention falls from attention to distraction or you could call it from focus to opening up to question all of these these pattern of focus and opening or the pattern of attention and distraction. The pattern of being awake and being asleep. That’s just how we exist as human beings. And you have to take that into account. You can’t just ignore it and tell and tell people that I told you to stay awake. I told you to be reasonable. And if you’re not reasonable, then you’re just not doing what I said. And so if you only did what I said, then everything would be fine. And so there is an ignoring of how the human person works and some of the inevitable elements of human of the human person. And so and so one of the things that Steven Pinker does is that because he doesn’t see these cycles, he doesn’t see them. So so he he sees this. He talks about this progress. And then he sees I mean, obviously, he sees the totalitarian moments in the 20th century. And he says, oh, no, but that was the counter enlightenment. That was that all of this progress. That’s the enlightenment. But anything that led to the totalitarian spirit, that’s the counter enlightenment. And so now in the World War Two, there was this blip. We fell into the counter enlightenment thinking. But now we’re back on track and we’re just going to keep going up and up and up and up. And if we make the effort, if we just make the effort, we’ll keep going up. You know, if we we stay focused on reason and focus on that. But that’s just not how reality works. That’s not how human beings work. And the World War Two was only, you know, it was was barely a generation ago. And and you think that that was just a blip. And now we’re just it’s just going to be constant sailing from there. No, they have we have cycles. You pull the blanket on one side, it’s going to snap on the other. If you if you say just just just just reason, then chaos is waiting in the wings to come back and devour the this over emphasis on reason. You cannot have just one. It is not possible to have just one. It is it is ignoring the human person, ignoring an important aspect of what it means to be human. And so what the end and one of the problems is that one excess leads necessarily into the other. And so, for example, what’s fascinating in his analysis is that he talks about how democracy is in danger. You know how we’re seeing is is democracy just going democracy is in danger now. We can see it in the United States. We can see it in Europe. We can see it all of this. And he’s bemoaning the fact that democracy is in danger. But he doesn’t understand that the very mechanisms of democracy lead to its own its own problematic reality and that the mechanisms of democracy can lead to a breakdown of cohesion, a breakdown of understanding and in capacity to to agree on things and that that stalemate will will will create the desire for for a totalitarian regime. And it’s not this is I mean, Plato saw this in the Republic. Plato described the mechanisms of democracy as leading to tyranny. And Steven Pinker has a wild statement in his book where he says that democracy has never led to totalitarian regime, but rather that it’s thugs who took over, took over governments. And it wasn’t, you know, the democratic process. But it’s like that’s sorry. That’s not what happened in Germany. The Nazis were elected. People desired Hitler. You know, you can say what you want. People desired the Germans desired Hitler. Just like just like people in some people in Europe now are voting for harder right governments that could even be even worse. People could vote for even the harder even harder totalitarian governments. You know, the the idea that the idea that communism wasn’t desired by the people that that the people didn’t that there wasn’t a mass of people that participated in the revolution is absurd. You know, the Plato talks about how the excess of liberty leads to the excess of tyranny. Those two things are related. You know, a traditional understanding of the world, a traditional vision of the world understands this pattern and wants to create a smooth sailing in the pattern. That’s what the you know, that’s what things like the liturgical year is for. That’s what the manner in which you know, I’ve talked about the structure of the church as from the center leading towards buffer buffer areas, places where chaos is allowed in a little bit like the carnival or little moments in a year where we let in some of the unreason in order to evacuate it. You could say so that we can restart the cycle and move to something unreasonable. But if you pretend like those things don’t exist or that we can just we can just focus on one and not at some point get the other. You misunderstand what a human with what human consciousness how it works. Human consciousness functions through this wave, this wave and you what you want is you don’t want it to go into extremes. You want it to remain, you know, small ways of attention and and dispersion you could call it in the traditional mystical practice of the Orthodox Church. For example, we have a the Jesus prayer where one is an invocation. You know, you you invoke the divine name, say Lord Jesus Christ, the son of God. And then you say, have mercy on me a sinner. And so you have this attention and then you have this dispersion and it has to do with breathing. You breathe in and you breathe out. You focus, you concentrate and then you disperse. And that’s the pattern of everything. You cannot have only inhalation. You cannot have only awake and you cannot have only reason to think so is to delude oneself. So I hope that this was helpful. You can check out the talk that Steven Picker, you can find him online if you don’t know much about him. And I wouldn’t suggest to read his book. I mean, you can read his book. But if you understand this, if you understand what I’m trying to explain, the reading of the book will be very frustrating to you. But there’s a lot of data in there that could be interesting. You know, we can’t deny that that that science has brought a lot of material good to the world and and that our societies are peaceful at the moment. You know, this means it’s going to be like that forever. But but yeah, so I hope you enjoyed this discussion on Steven Picker’s book. And all right, guys, I will see you soon.