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Of course he didn't say that literally every Enlightenment thinker shared the exact set of values. Neither I nor Gray are claiming that. But his argument, as I

Of course he didn't say that literally every Enlightenment thinker shared the exact set of values. Neither I nor Gray are claiming that. But his argument, as I understand it, is that there are a certain determinate set of "Enlightenment values" that these thinkers mostly shared, that Pinker himself shares, and that society as a whole needs to share in order to make progress, stay civilized, etc. Gray's point is that no such set of values exists, that Enlightenment thinkers were always in contradiction with each other, and that people who claim to hew to "Enlightenment values" today are likely to be in fundamental disagreement with each other.

csallen 9y ago
The way I read it, Pinker wasn't adamant about these values being determinate and shared. Quite the opposite, he was aware that there was disagreement and that things were messy. From the first chapter of the book: > What is the Enlightenment? There is no official answer, because the era named by Kant’s essay was never demarcated by opening and closing ceremonies like the Olympics, nor are its tenets stipulated in an oath or creed… The era was a cornucopia of ideas, some of them contradictory, but four themes tie them together: reason, science, humanism and progress. In other words, the themes are of Pinker's own determining, with the benefit of hindsight. More importantly, this is not a book about the history of the Enlightenment. Out of the many thousands of paragraphs in this book, Pinker only devotes a small handful to discussing the source of the values/themes he defends. I don't think it's accurate to refer to their origin as the argument Pinker makes in the book. It would be more accurate to say that this is merely one supplemental point he makes in the book, and that it's largely irrelevant to his central thesis.
- zasz 9y ago
  The thing is, how can you trust Pinker's interpretation of the Enlightenment? Pinker thinks the Enlightenment was an important engine of 'progress,' but John Locke was a tremendously influential Enlightenment thinker who argued in defense of slavery, who owned shares in a slave-trading company. (http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0090591713485446?journalCode=ptxa http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0090591713485446...) Locke was also responsible for many of the ideas surrounding natural rights that are now enshrined in the American Constitution, but from the perspective of an African slave, Locke was not progressive. Thomas Hobbes was even more illiberal than Locke. He didn't even believe in natural rights at all, and he would have hated democracy. Pinker's getting a lot wrong that he can't cover for just by making a token nod to the vagueness of exactly when the Enlightenment started. His poor understanding of what the Enlightenment was, who was in it, and what they actually believed means that whatever story he tells of human progress is going to be fundamentally flawed.
  - deleted 9y ago
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  - csallen 9y ago
    Again, the point of the book is not to cover the history of the Enlightenment, to praise or judge the Enlightenment thinkers themselves, or to defend some "correct" interpretation or definition of what the Enlightenment entailed. You're arguing against a strawman. The point of the book is that reason, science, and humanism are valuable ideas that have helped us progress as a species since the Enlightenment, and that they continue to drive progress today.
    - FranzFerdiNaN 9y ago
      If he simply ignores everything he doesn't like about the thinkers he writes about, his book is useless. His earlier book, Better Angels Of Our Nature, was also terribly wrong in presenting the hunter-gatherer state of humans as being much more violent than archeologists and anthropologists think, just to present his case that civilization is a good thing. So I don't have much faith in this book, as he clearly starts with a certain idea (civilization is needed because the human being is inherently violent) and looks for arguments to support it instead of the other way around. He should probably stick to his own field of psychology.
      - csallen 9y ago
        > If he simply ignores everything he doesn't like about the thinkers he writes about, his book is useless. This makes zero sense. If I write a guide about how to use red paint to create beautiful paintings, is my guide useless if it fails to acknowledge the atrocities that may or may not have been committed by the inventor of red paint? Of course not. > Better Angels Of Our Nature, was also terribly wrong in presenting the hunter-gatherer state of humans as being much more violent than archeologists and anthropologists think He supported his position with loads of strong evidence. Your counterargument, however, presents no evidence.
psyc 9y ago
As long as critics keep making these arguments, they'll never even reach the beginning of a meaningful argument. It's like when someone tries to have a thread about, say, consciousness, and 90% of commenters want to argue about the definition of the word, again.
- maldusiecle 9y ago
  Given how hard it is to pin down the nature of consciousness, I can't imagine it would be productive to discuss consciousness without explicitly considering its definition. If you want to defend a position, you have to make clear what that position is. If you're writing about the Enlightenment, of course you have to know what it was.
  - psyc 9y ago
    My point is more that there will always be people who insist that a definition isn't clear or doesn't have a basic consensus. I think they're usually wrong in the very assertion. In any case it is negative-productive to discuss definitions if you never stop discussing them and move on to the real content.
    - AnimalMuppet 9y ago
      I think that the opposite is true, at least much of the time. I think that many arguments are because the two sides have different definitions of a word, and neither side states the definition. This leads to arguments that are a complete waste of time.
      - glenstein 9y ago
        I'm with psyc on this one. We study a lot of things, like consciousness, or intelligence, or life, because we don't have a convenient definition of them, because we want to know what they are. Instead we set up broad conceptual parameters that capture the right kinds of problems, the kind that, when solved, would bridge us from our current state of knowledge to a definition. That's the real work, and some people who have this real work in mind pursue the problem in an open-ended way, that's the right shape of open-ended to fit the type of problem being considered. And then they get scolded for not having started with a definition.
smallnamespace 9y ago
> Gray's point is that no such set of values exists, that Enlightenment thinkers were always in contradiction with each other, That's simply untrue on the face of it. Even if every Enlightenment thinker disagrees with other Enlightenment thinkers on the majority of issues, you can take an average over their positions and see that as a group, their average position and the range of positions they take on a variety of issues is markedly different from pre-Enlightenment thinkers. You can do clustering. Whether Pinker has convincingly shown that, I'm not sure, but you are setting the bar unreasonably high. It would be like saying like there's no such thing as an overall 'hacker ethos' that differs from the general population's, just because we have disagreements on HN, or that there's no coherency to Christianity, because there are many denominations that disagree on theological and doctrinal questions. It's both possible and common for there wide diversity within an overall unity.
- maldusiecle 9y ago
  You can do clustering, but it might not be useful. Read Gray's article. If you take the "average position," you're likely to get to positions that Pinker and so on wouldn't find acceptable. My point isn't that there's no possible way to define "Enlightenment values." Quite the opposite. There are many ways to define those values, and if you choose one you must 1) justify that choice, and 2) be aware that you've made a choice, rather than passing your idiosyncratic definition as the only possible definition.
  - taeric 9y ago
    Pinker's argument is compatible with the average being a position that is not acceptable. The assertion is that the average is progressing in what we view as progress to more acceptable positions. Pretty sure he even has quite a few sections discussing exactly this. I confess this is mainly compatible with my world view, so I am likely giving it more leeway than I realize. I fully expect that 200 years from now, someone will easily be able to discern ridiculously backwards views that I maintain with a clear mind today. I don't think you'll have to wait that long, honestly. My children will be far more progressive than I am. That is progress.
  - 9y ago

csallen 9y ago

The way I read it, Pinker wasn't adamant about these values being determinate and shared. Quite the opposite, he was aware that there was disagreement and that things were messy. From the first chapter of the book: > What is the Enlightenment? There is no official answer, because the era named by Kant’s essay was never demarcated by opening and closing ceremonies like the Olympics, nor are its tenets stipulated in an oath or creed… The era was a cornucopia of ideas, some of them contradictory, but four themes tie them together: reason, science, humanism and progress. In other words, the themes are of Pinker's own determining, with the benefit of hindsight. More importantly, this is not a book about the history of the Enlightenment. Out of the many thousands of paragraphs in this book, Pinker only devotes a small handful to discussing the source of the values/themes he defends. I don't think it's accurate to refer to their origin as the argument Pinker makes in the book. It would be more accurate to say that this is merely one supplemental point he makes in the book, and that it's largely irrelevant to his central thesis.

zasz 9y ago
The thing is, how can you trust Pinker's interpretation of the Enlightenment? Pinker thinks the Enlightenment was an important engine of 'progress,' but John Locke was a tremendously influential Enlightenment thinker who argued in defense of slavery, who owned shares in a slave-trading company. (http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0090591713485446?journalCode=ptxa http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0090591713485446...) Locke was also responsible for many of the ideas surrounding natural rights that are now enshrined in the American Constitution, but from the perspective of an African slave, Locke was not progressive. Thomas Hobbes was even more illiberal than Locke. He didn't even believe in natural rights at all, and he would have hated democracy. Pinker's getting a lot wrong that he can't cover for just by making a token nod to the vagueness of exactly when the Enlightenment started. His poor understanding of what the Enlightenment was, who was in it, and what they actually believed means that whatever story he tells of human progress is going to be fundamentally flawed.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- csallen 9y ago
  Again, the point of the book is not to cover the history of the Enlightenment, to praise or judge the Enlightenment thinkers themselves, or to defend some "correct" interpretation or definition of what the Enlightenment entailed. You're arguing against a strawman. The point of the book is that reason, science, and humanism are valuable ideas that have helped us progress as a species since the Enlightenment, and that they continue to drive progress today.
  - FranzFerdiNaN 9y ago
    If he simply ignores everything he doesn't like about the thinkers he writes about, his book is useless. His earlier book, Better Angels Of Our Nature, was also terribly wrong in presenting the hunter-gatherer state of humans as being much more violent than archeologists and anthropologists think, just to present his case that civilization is a good thing. So I don't have much faith in this book, as he clearly starts with a certain idea (civilization is needed because the human being is inherently violent) and looks for arguments to support it instead of the other way around. He should probably stick to his own field of psychology.
    - csallen 9y ago
      > If he simply ignores everything he doesn't like about the thinkers he writes about, his book is useless. This makes zero sense. If I write a guide about how to use red paint to create beautiful paintings, is my guide useless if it fails to acknowledge the atrocities that may or may not have been committed by the inventor of red paint? Of course not. > Better Angels Of Our Nature, was also terribly wrong in presenting the hunter-gatherer state of humans as being much more violent than archeologists and anthropologists think He supported his position with loads of strong evidence. Your counterargument, however, presents no evidence.

psyc 9y ago

As long as critics keep making these arguments, they'll never even reach the beginning of a meaningful argument. It's like when someone tries to have a thread about, say, consciousness, and 90% of commenters want to argue about the definition of the word, again.

maldusiecle 9y ago
Given how hard it is to pin down the nature of consciousness, I can't imagine it would be productive to discuss consciousness without explicitly considering its definition. If you want to defend a position, you have to make clear what that position is. If you're writing about the Enlightenment, of course you have to know what it was.
- psyc 9y ago
  My point is more that there will always be people who insist that a definition isn't clear or doesn't have a basic consensus. I think they're usually wrong in the very assertion. In any case it is negative-productive to discuss definitions if you never stop discussing them and move on to the real content.
  - AnimalMuppet 9y ago
    I think that the opposite is true, at least much of the time. I think that many arguments are because the two sides have different definitions of a word, and neither side states the definition. This leads to arguments that are a complete waste of time.
    - glenstein 9y ago
      I'm with psyc on this one. We study a lot of things, like consciousness, or intelligence, or life, because we don't have a convenient definition of them, because we want to know what they are. Instead we set up broad conceptual parameters that capture the right kinds of problems, the kind that, when solved, would bridge us from our current state of knowledge to a definition. That's the real work, and some people who have this real work in mind pursue the problem in an open-ended way, that's the right shape of open-ended to fit the type of problem being considered. And then they get scolded for not having started with a definition.

smallnamespace 9y ago

> Gray's point is that no such set of values exists, that Enlightenment thinkers were always in contradiction with each other, That's simply untrue on the face of it. Even if every Enlightenment thinker disagrees with other Enlightenment thinkers on the majority of issues, you can take an average over their positions and see that as a group, their average position and the range of positions they take on a variety of issues is markedly different from pre-Enlightenment thinkers. You can do clustering. Whether Pinker has convincingly shown that, I'm not sure, but you are setting the bar unreasonably high. It would be like saying like there's no such thing as an overall 'hacker ethos' that differs from the general population's, just because we have disagreements on HN, or that there's no coherency to Christianity, because there are many denominations that disagree on theological and doctrinal questions. It's both possible and common for there wide diversity within an overall unity.

maldusiecle 9y ago
You can do clustering, but it might not be useful. Read Gray's article. If you take the "average position," you're likely to get to positions that Pinker and so on wouldn't find acceptable. My point isn't that there's no possible way to define "Enlightenment values." Quite the opposite. There are many ways to define those values, and if you choose one you must 1) justify that choice, and 2) be aware that you've made a choice, rather than passing your idiosyncratic definition as the only possible definition.
- taeric 9y ago
  Pinker's argument is compatible with the average being a position that is not acceptable. The assertion is that the average is progressing in what we view as progress to more acceptable positions. Pretty sure he even has quite a few sections discussing exactly this. I confess this is mainly compatible with my world view, so I am likely giving it more leeway than I realize. I fully expect that 200 years from now, someone will easily be able to discern ridiculously backwards views that I maintain with a clear mind today. I don't think you'll have to wait that long, honestly. My children will be far more progressive than I am. That is progress.
- 9y ago