Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

For all the prescience of the founders, framers, and philosophes, this is not a book of Enlightenolatry. The Enlightenment thinkers were men and women of their age, the 18th century. Some were racists, sexists, anti-Semites, slaveholders, or duelists. Some of the questions they worried about are almost incomprehensible to us, and they came up with plenty of daffy ideas together with the brilliant ones. More to the point, they were born too soon to appreciate some of the keystones of our modern understanding of reality.
They of all people would have been the first concede this. If you extol reason, then what matters is the integrity of the thoughts, not the personalities of the thinkers. And if you're committed to progress, you can't very well claim to have it all figured out. It takes nothing away form the Enlightenment thinkers to identify some critical ideas about the human condition and the nature of the progress that we know and they didn't.

The idea of a universal human nature brings us to a third theme, humanism. The thinkers of the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment saw an urgent need for a secular foundation for morality, because they were haunted by a historical memory of centuries of religious carnage: the Crusades, the Inquisition, witch hunts, the European wars of religion. They laid that foundation in what we now call humanism, which privileges the well-being of individual men, women, and children over the glory of the tribe, race, nation, or religion.

Evolution left us with another burden: our cognitive, emotional, and moral faculties are adapted to individual survival and reproduction in an archaic environment, not to universal thriving in a modern one. To appreciate this burden, one doesn’t have to believe that we are cavemen out of time, only that evolution, with its speed limit measured in generations, could not possibly have adapted our brains to modern technology and institutions.

So for all the flaws in human nature, it contains the seeds of its own improvement, as long as it comes up with norms and institutions that channel parochial interests into universal benefits. Among those norms are free speech, nonviolence, cooperation, cosmopolitanism, human rights, and an acknowledgment of human fallibility, and among the institutions are science, education, media, democratic government, international organizations, and markets. Not coincidentally, these were the major brainchildren of the Enlightenment

But not so long ago the left was sympathetic to nationalism when it was fused with Marxist liberation movements. And many on the left encourage identity politicians and social justice warriors who downplay individual rights in favor of equalizing the standing of races, classes, and genders, which they see as being pitted in zero-sum competition.

Many intellectuals and critics express a disdain for science as anything but a fix for mundane problems. They write as if the consumption of elite art is the ultimate moral good. Their methodology for seeking the truth consists not in framing hypotheses and citing evidence but in issuing pronouncements that draw on their breadth of erudition and lifetime habits of reading. Intellectual magazines regularly denounce “scientism,” the intrusion of science into the territory of the humanities such as politics and the arts. In many colleges and universities, science is presented not as the pursuit of true explanations but as just another narrative or myth.

A dirty secret of the conservation movement is that wilderness preserves are set up only after indigenous peoples have been decimated or forcibly removed from them, including the national parks in the United States and the Serengeti in East Africa. As the environmental historian William Cronon writes, “wilderness” is not a pristine sanctuary; it is itself a product of civilization.

The fact that many measures of environmental quality are improving does not mean that everything is OK, that he environment got better by itself, or that we can just sit back and relax. For the cleaner environment we enjoy today we must thank the arguments, activism, legislation, regulations, treaties, and technological ingenuity of the people who sought to improve it in the past. We’ll need more of each to sustain the progress we’ve made, prevent reversals (particularly under the Trump presidency), and extend it to the wicked problems that still face us, such as the health of the oceans and, as we shall see, atmospheric greenhouse gases.

In writing the chapters on progress, I resisted pressure from readers of earlier drafts to end each one by warning, “But all this progress is threatened if Donald Trump gets his way.” Threatened it certainly is. Whether or not 2017 really represents a turning point in history , it’s worth reviewing the threats, if only to understand the nature of the progress they threaten.
- Life and Health have been expanded in large part by vaccination and other well-vetted interventions, and among the conspiracy theories that Trump has endorsed is the long-debunked claim that preservatives in vaccines cause autism. The gains have also been secured by broad access to medical care, and he has pushed for legislation that would withdraw health insurance from tens of millions of Americans, a reversal of the trend toward beneficial social spending.
- Worldwide improvements in Wealth have come from a globalized economy, powered in large part by international trade. Trump is a protectionist who sees international trade as a zero-sum contest between countries, and is committed to tearing up international trade agreements.
- Growth in Wealth will also be driven by technological innovation, education, infrastructure, an increase in the spending power of the lower and middle classes, constraints on cronyism and plutocracy that distort market competition, and regulations on finance that reduce the likelihood of bubbles and crashes. In addition to being hostile to trade, Trump is indifferent to technology and education and an advocate of regressive tax cuts on the wealthy, while appointing corporate and financial tycoons to his cabinet who are indiscriminately hostile to regulation.
- In capitalizing on concerns about Inequality, Trump has demonized immigrants and trade partners while ignoring the major disrupter of lower-middle-class jobs, technological change. He has also opposed the measures that most successfully mitigate its harms, namely progressive taxation and social spending. - The Environment has benefited from regulations on air and water pollution that have coexisted with growth in population, GDP, and travel. Trump believes that environmental regulation is economically destructive; worst of all, he has called climate change a hoax and announced a withdrawal from the historic Paris agreement.
- Safety, too, has been dramatically improved by federal regulations, toward which Trump and his allies are contemptuous. While Trump has cultivated a reputation for law and order, he is viscerally uninterested in evidence-based policy that would distinguish effective crime-prevention measures from useless tough talk.
- The postwar Peace has been cemented by trade, Democracy, international agreements and organizations, and norms against conquest. Trump has vilified international trade and has threatened to defy international agreements and weaken international organizations. Trump is an admirer of Vladimir Putin, who reversed the democratization of Russia, tried to undermine democracy in the United States and Europe with cyberattacks, helped prosecute the most destructive war of the 21st century in Syria, fomented smaller wars in Ukraine and Georgia, and defied the postwar taboo against conquest in his annexation of Crimea. Several members of Trump’s administration secretly colluded with Russia in an effort to lift sanctions against it, undermining a major enforcement mechanism in the outlawry of war.
- Democracy depends both on explicit constitutional protections, such as freedom of the press, and on shared norms, in particular that political leadership is determined by the rule of law and nonviolent political competition rather than a charismatic leader’s will to power. Trump proposed to relax libel laws against journalists, encouraged violence against his critics at his rallies, would not commit to respecting the outcome of the 2016 election if it went against him, tried to discredit the popular vote count that did go against him, threatened to imprison his opponent in the election, and attacked the legitimacy of the judicial system when it challenged his decisions—all hallmarks of a dictator. Globally, the resilience of democracy depends in part on its prestige in the community of nations, and Trump has praised autocrats in Russia, Turkey, the Philippines, Thailand, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt while denigrating democratic allies such as Germany.
- The ideals of tolerance, equality, and Equal Rights took big symbolic hits during his campaign and early administration. Trump demonized Hispanic immigrants, proposed banning Muslim immigration altogether (and tried to impose a partial ban once he was elected), repeatedly demeaned women, tolerated vulgar expressions of racism and sexism at his rallies, accepted support from white supremacist groups and equated them with their opponents, and appointed a strategist and an attorney general who are hostile to the civil rights movement.
- The ideal of Knowledge—that one’s opinions should be based on justified true beliefs—has been mocked by Trump’s repetition of ludicrous conspiracy theories: that Obama was born in Kenya, Senator Ted Cruz’s father was involved in John F. Kennedy’s assassination, thousands of New Jersey Muslims celebrated 9/ 11, Justice Antonin Scalia was murdered, Obama had his phones tapped, millions of illegal voters cost him the popular vote, and literally dozens of others. The fact-checking site PolitiFact judged that an astonishing 69 percent of the public statements by Trump they checked were “Mostly False,”“False,”or “Pants on Fire”(their term for outrageous lies, from the children’s taunt “Liar, liar, pants on fire”). 27 All politicians bend the truth, and all sometimes lie (since all human beings bend the truth and sometimes lie), but Trump’s barefaced assertion of canards that can instantly be debunked (such as that he won the election in a landslide) shows that he sees public discourse not as a means of finding common ground based on objective reality but as a weapon with which to project dominance and humiliate rivals.
- Most frighteningly, Trump has pushed back against the norms that have protected the world against the possible Existential Threat of nuclear war. He questioned the taboo on using nuclear weapons, tweeted about resuming a nuclear arms race, mused about encouraging the proliferation of weapons to additional countries, sought to overturn the agreement that prevents Iran from developing nuclear weapons, and taunted Kim Jong-un about a possible nuclear exchange with North Korea. Worst of all, the chain of command gives an American president enormous discretion over the use of nuclear weapons in a crisis, on the tacit assumption that no president would act rashly on such a grave matter. Yet Trump has a temperament that is notoriously impulsive and vindictive.