"The Dawn of Everything" and the Demarcation between Science and Propaganda

The Dawn of Everything and the Demarcation between Science and Propaganda

[A sleeker and much shorter version of this article was published in Quillette under the title “The Dawn of Everything” and the Politics of Human Prehistory. This version retains some of my wordier stylistic flourishes, more of my personal take, and longer discussions about Heard’s thesis and the connection between societal scale and political concentration.]

In 1885, Thomas Henry Huxley delivered a speech in which he famously declared that science “commits suicide the moment it adopts a creed.” The occasion was the completion of a statue of Charles Darwin for the British Museum, yet the man known as “Darwin’s Bulldog” felt obliged to emphasize that the monument should in no way be taken as an official sanction of Darwin’s ideas, because “science does not recognize such sanctions.” In science, the status of any idea is contingent upon the strength of the evidence supporting it and must therefore be treated as provisional as data accumulates and our understanding deepens. Huxley intended his aphorism as a reminder that no belief, whether personal, political, religious, or even scientific, should be immune to questioning and revision.

            While many scientists continue to uphold the strict separation between scientific research and political advocacy, a growing number now argue that the convention of barring creeds from science is quaint—even reactionary. This trend is especially pronounced in the social sciences. As Allison Mickel and Kyle Olson write in a 2021 op-ed for Sapiens titled “Archaeologists Should Be Activists Too,” 

There are still some who argue that scientists maintain their authority only when they remain objective, separate from current political concerns. Many academics have decried this view for decades, demonstrating that fully objective science has always been more of a myth than a reality. Science has always been shaped by the contemporary concerns of the time and place in which research occurs.

The suggestion here is that since researchers can never thoroughly eliminate politics from their work, they may as well ensure they are incorporating the correct politics into their foundational assumptions. We might call this the argument from inevitability. The “correct” politics are taken by most activists to consist of whatever is most beneficial to marginalized peoples—which usually means uncritically accepting their own views or, if those views are inaccessible, choosing whatever narrative paints them in the most favorable light. Let’s call this the default to the presumed victim’s truth.

            While this reasoning strikes many as both convincing and morally commendable, its flaws are easy to detect. For instance, the inevitability of political concerns coloring our research offers no justification for abandoning efforts at reducing their impact. Pathogenic microbes will inevitably survive any effort at sanitizing an operating theater. That hardly means surgeons should perform procedures in gas station bathrooms. Those whose goal is to arrive at the clearest and most comprehensive understanding of reality must strive to minimize the influence of prejudices arising from nonscientific beliefs and agendas as much as humanly possible—even if eradicating them completely is beyond anyone’s capability. And, while it may seem admirable, even heroic, to err on the side of protecting those who may not be able to protect themselves, defaulting to the presumed victim’s truth comes with two obvious drawbacks. First, over time the defaulters’ credibility will suffer, as they have clearly chosen a side. And second, the presumed victim’s truth may simply not be true at all, or it may overshadow elements of the truth that could lead to a deeper, more thorough understanding. (A third and less obvious drawback is that privileging the victim’s perspective has the side-effect of pitting groups with competing claims of victimhood against each other for the status of truer, or bigger, victim.)

            The late anthropologist and anarchist David Graeber presents a case study in what happens when you allow creeds and political interests to creep into your attempts at reasoning scientifically. For decades, Graeber participated in leftist and radical movements, and he was one of the original planners—an “anti-leader”—for the Occupy Wall Street protest. In January of 2017, he tweeted a question: “does anyone know any handy rebuttals to the neoliberal/conservative numbers on social progress over the last 30 years?” In the thread that followed, Graeber elaborated:

again & again i see these guys trundling out #s that absolute poverty, illiteracy, child malnutrition, child labor, have sharply declined...that life expectancy & education levels have gone way up, worldwide, thus showing the age of structural adjustment etc was a good thing. It strikes me as highly unlikely these numbers are right … It’s clear this is all put together by right-wing think tanks. Yet where’s the other sides numbers? I’ve found no clear rebuttals.

Graeber responded to charges of motivated reasoning in the comments by insisting he was merely demonstrating a scientist’s proper skepticism by looking for counterevidence. What he failed to understand was that it wasn’t the question itself that revealed his bias. It was that he characterized the data he was inquiring into as “neoliberal/conservative,” assuming without evidence they were “put together by right-wing think tanks.” Rather than treating the data as a possible window onto the nature of our civilization, he saw the numbers as points on a scoreboard for the opposing team, which he assumed could only have been counted because of partisan refereeing.

            Graeber died in 2020, but he continues his challenge to the narrative of social progress in his posthumously published book, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, which he cowrote with the archeologist David Wengrow. Their main thesis is that it is long past time to scrap the traditional story of how human societies evolve from egalitarian bands of hunter-gatherers to larger, more sedentary tribes to more hierarchical chiefdoms to highly stratified states governed by authoritarian rulers. This narrative, they argue, can be traced back to either Jean-Jacques Rousseau (if you believe that hunter-gatherers were peaceful and freedom-loving) or to Thomas Hobbes (if you believe they were miserable and warlike).

“Our objections can be classified into three broad categories,” they write in the first chapter, but only one of these objections is scientific: “these two alternatives,” the authors claim, “simply aren’t true.” The next two bullets complain that the conventional stories “have dire political implications,” and “make the past needlessly dull” (3). Graeber and Wengrow are troubled that ascendent social evolutionary theories treat hunter-gatherers as either savages or “innocent children of nature” (441), instead of crediting them with formulating lofty ideas about freedom and recognizing their ability to experiment with various social arrangements.

Unfortunately, the supposedly conventional thinking Graeber and Wengrow outline at the beginning of each of their book’s sections usually comes with few if any citations, and when they do reference their colleagues’ work, they frequently misrepresent it. Over time, as they glibly generalize about the state of scholarship in their fields, only to turn around and poke holes in their semi-fictional accounts, you start to feel like you’ve been buttonholed by an old man at a bar as he tells a series of tendentious stories about how he bested impossibly dense adversaries in battles of wit. Indeed, the overarching problem with The Dawn of Everything is that it consists primarily of a long rant against the straw man of lockstep societal progression through rigid stages—even though it becomes clear Graeber and Wengrow’s true beef is with scholars who argue that large societies require some form of government domination, an issue suspiciously close to the heart of any good anarchist.

Graeber and Wengrow paint a picture of the study of human prehistory as dominated by researchers who take it as a matter of faith that societies everywhere will inevitably progress through identical stages, driven by the same key technological developments, to arrive at one form or another of a modern state, which is characterized by heavy-handed, top-down control of the masses by the wealthy and powerful few. Late in the book, they admit that “almost nobody today subscribes to this framework in its entirety,” and go on to suggest the real problem is that

if our fields have moved on, they have done so, it seems, without putting an alternative vision in place, the result being that almost anyone who is not an archaeologist or anthropologist tends to fall back on the older scheme when they set out to think or write about world history on a large canvas. (447)

But to create the illusion that they are taking on the prevailing view, which they insist is disproportionately influenced by non-specialists, Graeber and Wengrow are forced to conflate modern scholarship with ideas from the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. This is because modern scholars—both in and out of the field of anthropology—know better than to posit hard-and-fast rules about human behavior and society. Instead, they look for trends and correlations, as in the observation that hunter-gatherers tend to live in small-scale societies that tend to be egalitarian.

Anthropologist Christopher Boehm, for instance, has penned some of the most widely cited books on hunter-gatherer egalitarianism. In the introduction to his book Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior, he writes, “I make the major assumption that humans were egalitarian for thousands of generations before hierarchical societies began to appear.” Graeber and Wengrow fault him for claiming “we were strictly ‘egalitarian for thousands of generations’,” though Boehm never used the word “strictly,” and it becomes clear his theory allows for exceptions. Graeber and Wengrow go on, “So, according to Boehm, for about 200,000 years political animals all chose to live the same way.” They complain of his, “odd insistence that for many tens of thousands of years, nothing happened” (87). But Boehm insists on nothing of the sort. He writes,

When upstarts try to make inroads against an egalitarian social order, they will be quickly recognized and, in many cases, quickly curbed on a preemptive basis. One reason for this sensitivity is that the oral tradition of a band (which included knowledge from adjacent bands) will preserve stories about serious domination episodes. (87)

If there were “domination episodes,” then something happened. If that isn’t clear enough, Boehm later writes that “a hunting and gathering way of life in itself does not guarantee a decisively egalitarian political orientation” (89).

Does Boehm really claim humans in the Pleistocene all lived the same way? In fact, he explicitly argues the opposite: “We must keep in mind that in Paleolithic times the planet’s best environments were available to foragers whose social and adaptive patterns varied across a very wide spectrum” (211). Graeber and Wengrow’s misrepresentation is especially frustrating because the implications of recent discoveries of hunter-gatherer earthworks and monumental building for theories like Boehm’s are important, but the authors apparently can’t help flattening his ideas and robbing them of nuance. Their goal appears to be nothing other than to bolster the impression that anyone whose perspective diverges from theirs must suffer from a stunted imagination. “Blinded by the ‘just so’ story of how human societies evolved,” they write of their colleagues, “they can’t even see half of what’s now before their eyes” (442).

The two scholars whose work—and reputations—suffer the most scathing attacks in The Dawn of Everything, Jared Diamond and Steven Pinker, also rely on the traditional sequence of cultural evolutionism in their works, but they both use Elman Service’s terms “band,” “tribe,” “chiefdom,” and “state” as descriptive categories, not as an explanatory theory of clockwork progression. Graeber and Wengrow nonetheless claim Diamond’s theory is that what spelled doom for hunter-gatherer egalitarianism was farming. “For Diamond,” they write,

as for Rousseau some centuries earlier, what put an end to that equality—everywhere and forever—was the invention of agriculture, and the higher population levels it sustained. Agriculture brought about a transition from “bands” to “tribes.” Accumulation of food surplus fed population growth, leading some “tribes” to develop into ranked societies known as “chiefdoms.” (10)

Did Diamond really argue that agriculture causes a series of transitions to more complex societies “everywhere and forever”? In the section of his book The World until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? Graeber and Wengrow cite, Diamond writes,

The higher populations of tribes than of bands require more food to support more people in a small area, and so tribes usually are farmers or herders or both, but a few are hunter-gatherers living in especially productive environments (such as Japan’s Ainu people and North America’s Pacific Northwest Indians). (15)

So, rather than asserting that agriculture sets off an inevitable march toward despotism, Diamond writes of trends and correlations, leaving unanswered the question of which direction the causal arrow points. He makes this focus on trends explicit very near some of the text that Graeber and Wengrow quote.

            While every human society is unique, there are also cross-cultural patterns that permit some generalizations. In particular, there are correlated trends in at least four aspects of societies: population size, subsistence, political centralization, and social stratification. (12-3)

Diamond’s emphasis on correlations, and on the importance of keeping exceptions in mind, is part of a page-and-a-half discussion of the advantages and drawbacks of using the traditional classification scheme.

Of course, disproving a categorical statement is far easier than refuting an argument about relative frequencies, so it’s easy to understand the temptation. All Graeber and Wengrow need to torch their straw man version of Diamond’s ideas is to provide a counterexample or two, and that is precisely what they attempt to do in the following chapters. To get the real story of what factors contribute to the increasing scale and complexity of a society, you would need to go beyond searching for examples or counterexamples for a given narrative. You would have to do some math and statistics. (It so happens researchers have conducted just this type of statistical analysis into the factors driving increasing scale and complexity, though the findings were published after The Dawn of Everything. The results show that agriculture is indeed one of the two most important factors—the other being warfare.)

            The “dire political implications” of believing agriculture leads to complexity and domination have a clear impact on the conclusions reached by Graeber and Wengrow, and the line separating their science from their politics only gets blurrier from here. Summarizing their case that the old evolutionary theories “simply aren’t true,” they write,

To give just a sense of how different the emerging picture is: it is clear now that human societies before the advent of farming were not confined to small, egalitarian bands. On the contrary, the world of hunter-gatherers as it existed before the coming of agriculture was one of bold social experiments, resembling a carnival parade of political forms, far more than it does the drab abstractions of evolutionary theory. Agriculture, in turn, did not mean the inception of private property, nor did it mark an irreversible step towards inequality. In fact, many of the first farming communities were relatively free of ranks and hierarchies. And far from setting class differences in stone, a surprising number of the world’s earliest cities were organized on robustly egalitarian lines, with no need for authoritarian rulers, ambitious warrior-politicians, or even bossy administrators. (4)

Before looking into the political motivations behind these assertions, we should first ask if anyone actually takes the position that agriculture and private property mark “an irreversible step toward inequality.” Diamond certainly doesn’t: “Remember again: the developments from bands to states were neither ubiquitous, nor irreversible, nor linear,” he writes early in The World until Yesterday (18). Diamond even uses some of the same language as Graeber and Wengrow, writing, “Traditional societies in effect represent thousands of natural experiments in how to construct a human society” (9). But what is it about the transition from egalitarian bands to larger ranked societies that Graeber and Wengrow find so objectionable? After all, the first complex societies must have emerged from simpler ones, however wide the range of local factors may have been.

            The story of agriculture leading to beliefs about private property leading to inequality harks back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, to whom the notion of the virtuous “noble savage” is popularly attributed (though this is an oversimplification of his views). The narrative that is routinely pitted against Rousseau’s is commonly attributed to Thomas Hobbes, who characterized life in a state of nature as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” As poor of a fit as he turns out to be upon close inspection, Diamond serves as a latter-day mouthpiece for Rousseau throughout The Dawn of Everything. Meanwhile, “We can take Pinker as our quintessential modern Hobbesian,” Graeber and Wengrow write (13). For them, though, the two sides of the debate about primordial societies are far less different than most scholars assume. Whether it is the advent of agriculture knocking over the first domino that ultimately ensures domination of the many by the few, or the surly temperament and straitened circumstances of the average hunter-gatherer necessitating the intervention of a government Leviathan to prevent melees, the outcome is the same. Hierarchy is rendered both necessary and inevitable. And that, it turns out, is the worst of the “dire political implications” of the traditional evolutionary sequence.

            For Graeber and Wengrow, accepting the traditional formulation that larger scale tends to coincide with more concentrated power means “the best we can hope for is to adjust the size of the boot that will forever be stomping on our faces” (8). This profound antipathy toward inequality and concentrated political power gels nicely with the strong anti-Western bias prevalent across academia, which is especially pronounced in the humanities and the social sciences. Steven Pinker fell afoul of this bias in 2011when he published The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, which presents copious evidence suggesting that we Westerners are living in an era of unprecedented peace. Following the trendline back into prehistory, Pinker reports startling findings about how common it was to die a violent death, not just before the Enlightenment, but even more so before the rise of the state.

Graeber and Wengrow begin their criticism by pointing out that Pinker overlays his theories about declining violence on the outdated understanding of societal evolution they are working to supplant. Then they get personal:

Since, like Hobbes, Pinker is concerned with the origins of the state, his key point of transition is not the rise of farming but the emergence of cities. “Archeologists,” he writes, “tell us that humans lived in a state of anarchy until the emergence of civilization some five thousand years ago, when sedentary farmers first coalesced into cities and states and developed the first governments.” What follows is, to put it bluntly, a modern psychologist making it up as he goes along. You might hope that a passionate advocate of science would approach the topic scientifically, through a broad appraisal of the evidence—but this is precisely the approach to human prehistory that Pinker seems to find uninteresting. Instead he relies on anecdotes, images and individual sensational discoveries, like the headline-making find, in 1991, of “Ötzi the Tyrolean Iceman.” (13-4)

Turn to the referenced pages in Better Angels, though, and you see it is Graeber and Wengrow who are making things up. The book is chock-full of statistics from scientific sources. Facing one of the two pages that mention Ötzi, which you can find by simply following the index, is a bar graph based on multiple scientific references comparing estimated rates of violence across different types of society. Reading the text, you discover Pinker is not “concerned with the origins of the state” at all; he is interested in those differing rates of violent death between states and other forms of society.

            Tellingly, Graeber and Wengrow give the clearest expression of their contempt for Pinker in an endnote to a line criticizing his endorsement of Hobbes’ theories about the causes of violence. Is Pinker’s verdict on Hobbes’ ideas true? “As we’ll see,” Graeber and Wengrow write, “it’s not even close” (13). Here, they direct us to the following note:

If a trace of impatience can be detected in our presentation, the reason is this: so many contemporary authors seem to enjoy imagining themselves as modern-day counterparts to the great social philosophers of the Enlightenment, men like Hobbes and Rousseau, playing out the same grand dialogue but with a more accurate cast of characters. That dialogue in turn is drawn from the empirical findings of social scientists, including archaeologists and anthropologists like ourselves. Yet in fact the quality of their empirical generalizations is hardly better; in some ways it’s probably worse. At some point, you have to take the toys back from the children. (529)

In other words, they are outraged Pinker, a psychologist specializing in language and cognition, had the audacity to even discuss prehistoric societies and their implications for the modern world. But, though they promise a decisive debunking to come—“As we’ll see”—what follows has little if any bearing on Pinker’s thesis.

Now, it is not for me to speculate on the psychological profile of scholars who come down this hard on a colleague when the most effective criticisms they can marshal occupy the hinterlands of legitimate scholarship, somewhere amid the realms of sloppiness, unscrupulousness, and simple dishonesty. But it is noteworthy that Better Angels (odd title for a Hobbesian book) is not even about societal evolution per se, but, as the subtitle relays, the decline in violence over the course of human history. Likewise, Diamond’s The World until Yesterday, again as the subtitle implies, is about what we can learn from traditional societies, not about how such societies scale up. Meanwhile, it is Graeber and Wengrow who are writing a grand revisionist narrative of human prehistory, one called The Dawn of Everything no less.

            Before considering which of Hobbes’ ideas Pinker called down the thunder by endorsing, we should note that it is not Pinker who attempts to don Hobbes’ mantle. It is Graeber and Wengrow who try to smother him with it, just as they do Diamond by lumping him together with Rousseau. They insist that if we did a reappraisal of Pinker’s argument, minus the cherry-picking, “we would have to reach the exact opposite conclusion to Hobbes (and Pinker),” by which they mean, “our species is a nurturing and care-giving species, and there was simply no need for life to be nasty, brutish or short” (14). While it is true Pinker credits Hobbes’ insights about the causes of violence, he also goes on to write,

But from his armchair in 17th-century England, Hobbes could not help but get a lot of it wrong. People in nonstate societies cooperate extensively with their kin and allies, so life for them is far from “solitary,” and only intermittently is it nasty and brutish. Even if they are drawn into raids and battles every few years, that leaves a lot of time for foraging, feasting, singing, storytelling, childrearing, tending to the sick, and other necessities and pleasures of life. (56)

Oddly, Graeber and Wengrow cite evidence of early peoples caring for the sick and injured as a counter to Pinker’s findings about prehistoric violence. In other words, they aggressively prosecute Pinker for crimes anyone with ten minutes and access to the source material can see he never committed.

            Things only get worse when Graeber and Wengrow discuss Pinker’s use of the Yąnomamö of southern Venezuela and northern Brazil to illustrate a scenario called the “Hobbesian trap,” or more technically as the “security dilemma.” Imagine a homeowner with a gun encountering a burglar in his house who is also visibly packing. Even though the homeowner may not want to kill anyone over what may be an act of desperation, there is no guarantee the burglar won’t shoot first. Likewise, the burglar may not be apt to kill people who are simply defending their homes, but there is no guarantee the homeowner won’t shoot first. Shooting first becomes the most rational option for both. As Pinker explains,

People in nonstate societies also invade for safety. The security dilemma or Hobbesian trap is very much on their minds, and they may form an alliance with nearby villages if they fear they are too small, or launch a preemptive strike if they fear an enemy alliance is getting too big. One Yąnomamö man in Amazonia told an anthropologist, “We are tired of fighting. We don’t want to kill anymore. But the others are treacherous and cannot be trusted.” (46)

It should be noted here that this is the only mention of the Hobbesian trap in relation to the Yąnomamö in the whole of Better Angels; Graeber and Wengrow, however, insist Pinker cherry-picks this society to support his wider application of a Hobbesian framework.

            Graeber and Wengrow go on to botch both their definition of the security dilemma and the explanations of Yąnomamö violence offered by Pinker and Napoleon Chagnon, the anthropologist whose writings inform his theory. Graeber and Wengrow write that

the Yanomami are supposed to exemplify what Pinker calls the “Hobbesian trap,” whereby individuals in tribal societies find themselves caught in repetitive cycles of raiding and warfare, living fraught and precarious lives, always just a few steps away from violent death on the tip of a sharp weapon or at the end of a vengeful club. (16)

Pinker in fact treats revenge as a separate cause of violence, though he does describe cycles of raids and counterraids as the common outcome. Graeber and Wengrow apply the term Hobbesian trap as a catch-all description of a violent society to reinforce their characterization of Pinker as a carrier of Hobbes’ torch. Though, as we’ve already seen, Pinker specifically writes that nonstate peoples were not always “a few steps away from a violent death.”

            The closest Graeber and Wengrow get to addressing the statistics underlying Pinker’s argument is to point out that “compared to other Amerindian groups, Yanomami homicide rates turn out average-to-low” (15). This is an odd point, since Graeber and Wengrow earlier in the section claim Pinker cherry-picked the Yąnomamö because they are particularly violent. And both Pinker and Chagnon themselves point to the relatively higher rates of violence among other groups to counter such charges of cherry-picking and exaggeration from other critics. Graeber and Wengrow go on to claim that

Chagnon’s central argument was that adult Yanomami men achieve both cultural and reproductive advantages by killing other adult men, and that this feedback between violence and biological fitness—if generally representative of the early human condition—may have had evolutionary consequences for our species as a whole. (16)

This is in fact what Chagnon’s critics view as the main takeaway of his work. What he was really contending in the article Graeber and Wengrow cite was not that the Yąnomamö show us how humans may have evolved to be violent, but that Yąnomamö violence was motivated by individual and family interests—what biologists call “inclusive fitness”—and not by a desire for some other village’s valuable resources. In other words, ironically, Chagnon was challenging some of the same notions about the role of farming and private property that Graeber and Wengrow take Diamond and Pinker to task for accepting, even though those two really don’t endorse these notions either.

            The publication of Better Angels made Pinker persona non grata among many social scientists and leftist commentators because it reintroduces the idea of progress in Western history. Specifically, Pinker attributes the most dramatic dips in the trendlines representing violence to some of the ideas and values that came to prominence during the Enlightenment. Unfazed by the backlash to Better Angels, Pinker doubled down in 2018 by publishing Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, which shows numerous other trendlines all suggestive of people living longer, safer, healthier, even happier lives than their ancestors—all contrary to the dismal view of life in modern states put forth by Graeber and Wengrow.

Pinker ascribes these improvements to the implementation of ideas that took hold and blossomed in 17th and 18thcentury Europe. Graeber and Wengrow respond by pointing to Pinker’s presumed politics (because, remember, their impact on his reasoning is inevitable), asking, if Pinker wants to portray himself as a rational centrist,

why then insist that all significant forms of human progress before the twentieth century can be attributed only to that one group of humans who used to refer to themselves as “the white race” (and now, generally, call themselves by its more accepted synonym, “Western Civilization”)? (17)

The shift from Pinker’s real argument to Graeber and Wengrow’s straw man entails turning the focus from the ideas of the Enlightenment to the race of the people who first embraced them as a larger cultural package. But Pinker does not attribute the progress he reports to Western civilization as a whole—which would make no sense given its long history—but to a single current that began to run through it at a certain point in that history. 

Graeber and Wengrow’s not-so-subtle accusation of racism is a predictable instantiation of the activists’ imperative to default to the presumed victims’ perspective—which likely also motivated them to make the case that the Enlightenment was largely indigenous peoples’ idea. It is this same imperative which infuses with venom the taboo against suggesting that anything coming from the West might somehow be better than what is on offer in non-Western societies or that anything coming from non-Western societies might somehow be worse. Graeber and Wengrow explain the problem thus:

Insisting, to the contrary, that all good things come only from Europe ensures one’s work can be read as a retroactive apology for genocide, since (apparently, for Pinker) the enslavement, rape, mass murder and destruction of whole civilizations—visited on the rest of the world by the European powers—is just another example of humans comporting themselves as they always have; it was in no sense unusual. What was really significant, so this argument goes, is that it made possible the dissemination of what he takes to be “purely” European notions of freedom, equality before the law, and human rights to the survivors. (17-8)

Not only is Pinker a racist by their lights; he is also an apologist for genocide, slavery, rape, and mass slaughter. This would be outrageous if true, but as we’ll see, it’s not even close.

            The sleight of hand here is again to conflate Pinker’s celebration of the specific Enlightenment values he lists in his subtitle with the whole of Western civilization. It would be difficult for anyone embracing the ideals of reason, science, and humanism to justify something so abhorrent as the transatlantic slave trade—which is not to say no one ever tried. To say that some people, who happened to live in Europe, took up a certain set of ideas, which would eventually lead to improved lives for those carrying on their tradition, does nothing to excuse the atrocities committed by other people, who also happened to be living in Europe at the time. “For one thing,” Pinker writes in Enlightenment Now,

all ideas have to come from somewhere, and their birthplace has no bearing on their merit. Though many Enlightenment ideas were articulated in their clearest and most influential form in 18th-century Europe and America, they are rooted in reason and human nature, so any reasoning human can engage with them. That’s why Enlightenment ideals have been articulated in non-Western civilizations at many times in history. (29)

Recall Graeber and Wengrow claim Pinker’s argument is that “‘purely’ European notions” are responsible for making the world a better place, when in fact Pinker explicitly argues the opposite. (Are those supposed to be scare quotes surrounding the word “purely”?) And Pinker is under no illusion that every European embraced the Enlightenment with equal fervor. He writes,

But my main reaction to the claim that the Enlightenment is the guiding ideal of the West is: If only! The Enlightenment was swiftly followed by a counter-Enlightenment, and the West has been divided ever since. (29)

In Better Angels, Pinker does consider the possibility that recent biological evolution played a role in declining violence among Europeans, but he dismisses the theory as both implausible and unnecessary. No matter, Graeber and Wengrow need to make the issue about race so they can comfortably dismiss Pinker as a racist, so that’s what they claim—the actual substance of Pinker’s arguments be damned.

Graeber and Wengrow continue their criticism of Pinker’s thesis by asserting that the only way to compare two societies is to give people a chance to experience both and then let them choose which one they would prefer to live in. They go on to assure readers that “empirical data is available here, and it suggests something is very wrong with Pinker’s conclusions.” Here’s what they mean:

The colonial history of North and South America is full of accounts of settlers, captured or adopted by indigenous societies, being given the choice of where they wished to stay and almost invariably choosing to stay with the latter. This even applied to children. Confronted again with their biological parents, most would run back to their adoptive kin for protection. By contrast, Amerindians incorporated into European society by adoption or marriage, including those who… enjoyed considerable wealth and schooling, almost invariably did just the opposite: either escaping at the earliest opportunity or—having tried their best to adjust, and ultimately failed—returning to indigenous society to live out their last days. (19)

Empirical evidence that European settlers and indigenous people alike “almost invariably” prefer to live in indigenous societies—that would be some data set. Of course, people may choose to live in a society with a shorter life-expectancy and other drawbacks for a host of reasons that bear little relation to the general quality of life. For instance, they may have fallen in love. Or they may be wanted for a crime back home. Still, the finding would be suggestive. We have to wonder who collected and analyzed the original sources and what criteria they used to score the cases. How did they ensure the sample was representative of the total population of captives and former captives? How large is this sample? And by “almost invariably,” do they mean north of 90%, or some even higher percentage?

            To get just a portion of the statistics on pre-state violence Graeber and Wengrow pretend he never bothered to investigate, Pinker relied on a paper published in the journal Science. That means it was rigorously peer-reviewed, its methods scrutinized, its math checked and doublechecked. What prestigious journal was Graeber and Wengrow’s source published in? It turns out the source they cite was never published in a journal at all; it was rather a doctoral thesis submitted in 1977 by a PhD candidate named Joseph Norman Heard—which isn’t to disparage it. The thesis, titled “The Assimilation of Captives on the American Frontier in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” makes for fascinating reading. The first thing you notice is that it is a qualitative, not quantitative analysis, which already casts doubt on Graeber and Wengrow’s account. The second thing you notice is that, at least in the abstract, Heard reports nothing like what Graeber and Wengrow claim. Heard summarizes a section examining the factors that go into determining whether a captive became assimilated thus,

It was concluded that the original cultural milieu of the captive was of no importance as a determinant. Persons of all races and cultural backgrounds reacted to captivity in much the same way. The cultural characteristics of the captors, also, had little influence on assimilation. (vi)

We are still in the introductory material for the paper, and already we see the author’s own conclusion is that whatever is going on in these cases, it is not what Graeber and Wengrow suggest. Assimilation is not about people sampling two cultures and voting with their feet. So what was going on? According to Heard, “It was concluded that the most important factor in determining assimilation was age at the time of captivity.” Heard reports that children captured before puberty almost always became assimilated—recall Graeber and Wengrow’s line, “This even applies to children”—while those captured after puberty usually wanted to return to their society of origin. This was the case for settler and indigenous children alike.

            In other words, Graeber and Wengrow’s approach to refuting Pinker’s case for progress is first to severely distort his actual position to support their charge of racism, and second to grossly misrepresent a doctoral thesis from over forty years ago so that it appears to undermine a claim of general superiority Pinker never made. Time to take the toys back from the children indeed. The one part of Heard’s paper that cites actual numbers reports that of one sample of 750 captured settlers, 92 were killed, and 60 became completely assimilated. Taking 658 as the number who had the opportunity to choose, we’re left with a mere 9% who remained with their captors. For Graeber and Wengrow, nine out of a hundred equates to “almost invariably.” Even if you add every last one of the 1500 missing captives in the report with no further record to the list of the assimilated—a move there is no justification for—you are still left with 28% who were not fully assimilated.

When historian Daniel Immerwahr pointed out in a review for The Nation that the characterization of Heard’s findings in The Dawn of Everything is “ballistically false,” Wengrow took to twitter to try to salvage the point by highlighting individual lines and suggesting that Heard considered too small of sample—apparently forgetting this was the source he and his coauthor chose to cite. For good measure, he intimates that Immerwahr got tripped up because he only read the abstract. Nowhere in the thread, however, aside from a block quote from Benjamin Franklin, does he point to any part of Heard’s paper that could in any way be construed as justification for his and Graeber’s claim that captives “almost invariably” became completely assimilated. Wengrow concludes his thread by reminding his followers what’s at stake: “for context, our point here was to refute Pinker’s suggestion that any sensible person would prefer Western civ to life in (what he calls) ‘tribal’ societies.” No citation is provided to point readers to where Pinker makes this suggestion.

            The expression straw man refers to the underhanded rhetorical tactic of challenging an argument the person being challenged never made. One of the most common examples involves treating claims about statistical trends as if they were about ironclad laws. To strawman Diamond and Boehm’s point that mobile hunters and gathers tend to be egalitarian, Graeber and Wengrow insist their position is that all hunters and gathers must be egalitarian. Then they point to exceptions and pretend they have refuted the point. Usually, straw men bear at least some resemblance to the actual argument—enough to create an illusion of fairness and accuracy. So, does the term still apply when one scholar claims another argues a point diametrically opposed to the point that was actually made? Or do we need a stronger term? What do we call it when scholars creatively misinterpret a source so it appears to undermine another scholar’s thesis when in fact it does no such thing? Archeologist Michael E. Smith calls Graeber and Wengrow out for their use of “empty citations,” an expression for when “works are cited merely to lend an aura of support for an argument, when in fact they contain no empirical support.” Historian David Bell meanwhile worries that their discussion of the indigenous influence on Enlightenment thinking “comes perilously close to scholarly malpractice.” When scientists fabricate results from their experiments, we call it fraud. Is that too harsh a verdict in this case?

            In light of Graeber and Wengrow’s stated political concerns, I think the best term for what they’ve done with The Dawn of Everything is propaganda. While it is true that every scholar who writes a book has political concerns—including Diamond and Pinker—the important question is whether those concerns take precedence over truth-seeking. If your priority is finding and sharing the truth, then you will report evidence that runs counter to your preferred political narrative honestly and accurately. If pushing that narrative is your priority, on the other hand, then you will be apt to neglect or distort any source that challenges it. When the goal is to influence people to adopt moral or political positions, what does it matter if your case is based on straw men or ad hominem attacks? Thus, it is not that Graeber and Wengrow come out and state that at least one of their issues is political that calls for applying the label—though that is a red flag. It is rather the conjunction of the stated political concern with the execrable, single-note scholarship on display throughout The Dawn of Everything that earns it the descriptor.

            What were Graeber and Wengrow hoping to achieve with their propaganda? First, having observed that works like The World until Yesterday and Enlightenment Now have captured the public imagination like few books on such weighty topics ever do, they wanted to recapture the audience for those books for assimilation into their own society of archeologists and anthropologists—the ones with the correct politics and priorities. They open their book with a quote from Carl Jung about living in the right time for a “metamorphosis of the gods.” The study of human prehistory is indeed going through some upheaval in response to many of the dramatic discoveries Graeber and Wengrow describe in The Dawn of Everything, and it seems they saw this as an opportunity to firmly establish their own paradigm before the rival one takes hold anew.

To understand why they might have been motived to do this, suffice to say the fields of anthropology and archeology are divided into rival camps, one that prioritizes science and truth-seeking in the tradition of Thomas Huxley, and another that prioritizes political reform—or at least carries on assured that truth-seeking is always perfectly compatible with a reform agenda. Scholars in this latter camp tend to believe the status quo in the West is as oppressive and unjust today as at any point in its history, and far more so than most other societies around the world. Graeber and Wengrow write,

If something did go terribly wrong in human history—and given the current state of the world, it’s hard to deny something did—then perhaps it began to go wrong precisely when people started losing that freedom to imagine and enact other forms of social existence. (502)

That is why they bristle at Pinker’s observations about progress, and why they treat field workers like Chagnon who report on indigenous violence as suspect. That is why Graeber was so incredulous of those “neoliberal/conservative” numbers he tweeted about. What this means is that Graeber and Wengrow are effectively sending the message: Don’t listen to these guys who stole our toys, listen to us, or at least listen to people who think like us, the ones who know the West is evil and our only hope lies in dismantling its institutions.

Second, as they clearly state, Graeber and Wengrow want to persuade readers that concentrated political power is neither necessary nor inevitable for modern states—a lesson we would naturally learn from indigenous peoples of the past if we could only stop viewing them as “cardboard stereotypes” (21) in the tradition of Rousseau and Hobbes. “What is the purpose of all this new knowledge,” they ask in the conclusion, “if not to reshape our conceptions of who we are and what we might yet become?” (525). Political reform is so important to them that they list “the freedom to shift back and forth between social structures” (133) or “the freedom to create or transform social relationships” as one of three “primordial freedoms” (426). The crux of their argument for the possibility of a less politically unequal large-scale society is that such societies existed in prehistory, or at least it looks like they may have. If the people living in these societies could manage it, maybe, why can’t we?

The main unexamined assumption at the heart of The Dawn of Everything is that hierarchy and concentrated political power can only ever exist to the detriment of the people. Pinker, for instance, advocates pacificism and liberal democracy, not heavy-handed authoritarian rule. But that’s not radical enough for Graeber and Wengrow. Insofar as Western history moves in a particular direction, they can see no alternative to it being from freedom to domination, which is ironic considering their complaints about the traditions of Rousseau and Hobbes. In addition to the freedom to experiment with social arrangements, they list the freedom to move to another location and the freedom to disobey orders among the primordial liberties we in the West have lost. By the freedom to relocate, they mean that indigenous peoples could count on a friendly welcome when they arrived at a new place, though the only evidence for this is artifacts in one place originating in another and the existence of the same clan names across wide swaths of the continents. Graeber and Wengrow spend little time weighing the possibility that some travelers met with different fates than others, and they make no effort to quantify how many people exercised this freedom in prehistory versus in today’s modern societies. As for the third freedom, while they suggest we in the West have been trained in obedience, even in modern Western societies, you find a great deal of ambivalence toward authority figures, for reasons Boehm eloquently explains. Witness our fraught relationship with police.

Maybe the difference Graeber and Wengrow mean to highlight is that modern Westerners must obey certain authority figures in certain contexts, whereas in prehistory people were free to disobey anyone at any time. But was that really ever the case? Conspicuously absent from their list of primordial freedoms are the freedom to choose an occupation and the freedom to choose a spouse. And never mind the opportunities that would simply never be on offer, like choosing a major at a university or choosing to go on sabbatical to write a doorstop lamenting lost freedoms. Diamond and Pinker write in terms of tradeoffs when moving from one type of society to another. “Traditional societies may not only suggest to us some better living practices,” Diamond writes in The World until Yesterday, “but may also help us appreciate some advantages of our own society that we take for granted” (9). But for Graeber and Wengrow, the modern West is bad because of domination and oppression, while the world beyond its influence—which is mostly in prehistory—may have some unsavory elements, but as a whole was just better. If you have any doubts, they might direct you to Heard’s 1977 thesis, though they wouldn’t want you to read it too closely.

A lot of us share Graeber and Wengrow’s desire for a more widely and diversely distributed governing apparatus, but merely describing the ability to create an entirely new social arrangement as a freedom presents us with a problem: who exactly enjoys this freedom? And who grants it to them? The simplest example they give of creating a social arrangement is the promise, and indeed any individual can make a commitment to another individual. But what about the other person in this arrangement? Is this person not free to discount the promise? If the promise entails some sort of reciprocal gesture or behavior, no one is free to make the other person play along. Additionally, what form does the promise take? Do you invoke a deity? A monarch? These are all matters determined by the cultural context, and no lone individual is free to change the culture on his or her own.

Graeber and Wengrow repeatedly insist scale has no necessary implications for decision-making structures, but is it not logically the case that the larger the society the less influence any individual can have, because that individual would have to persuade however many more people to adopt any new convention? The authors are clearly irritated by Diamond’s argument that increasing scale must be correlated with concentrated decision-making, and by Pinker’s suggestion that disinterested third-party institutions are necessary to curb cycles of violence, but they never effectively engage with the basic logic. Instead, they again and again point to this or that archeological site, insisting the absence of palaces and the similarity of the dwellings means people there were equal and had no kingly rulers. Or they point to this or that indigenous American confederacy we only know about through patchy records or folk histories. (As an interesting counterexample to Graeber and Wengrow’s complaints about Westerners not being able to imagine indigenous peoples coming up with any good ideas for social arrangements, the Iroquois “Great League of Peace” is generally acknowledged as an inspiration for the US Constitution.) But, while for them the most important fact is that these more enlightened governing institutions existed, for the rest of us the big question is how exactly they functioned. How are we to follow their examples, after all, if we have no idea how they solved problems of communication and coordination? What happened when a significant bloc of people opposed an otherwise collective decision? How did they address factionalism and polarization? (You get the sense from reading The Dawn of Everything that the authors have never in their lives had a conversation with a MAGA republican—or for that matter a conservative of any stripe.)

Graeber and Wengrow take a step toward acknowledging these difficulties in their discussion of traditional Basque settlements, which are some of the few egalitarian communities in the modern world. Houses in these settlements are arranged in circular patterns, and each household has a set of obligations to the houses on both sides, with the effect that “no one is first, and no one is last” (295). But, as Graeber and Wengrow point out,

such “simple” economies are rarely all that simple. They often involve logistical challenges of striking complexity, resolved on a basis of intricate systems of mutual aid, all without any need of centralized control or administration. (297)

In the next paragraph, though, they write, “There is no reason to assume that such a system would only work on a small scale.” Of course, such a system could possibly work on a larger scale—say with tens of thousands of households—but, despite their proclamation to the contrary, there is good reason to believe such a complex system would be unlikely to arise and persist. It’s the same reason complex lifeforms are unlikely to burst into existence in the absence of slightly simpler precedents. Anyway, is a complex set of obligations to surrounding neighbors any less of a curb to freedom than a set of laws devised by a bureaucratic government?

            The archeologist Michael E. Smith, whose work on Teotihuacan Graeber and Wengrow cite in their book, characterizes their arguments about scale and urban institutions as “a serious example of ignoring prior relevant research.” Again and again throughout The Dawn of Everything, the authors attempt to dismiss theories about increasing stratification and concentrated power by tracing them back to outdated—often colonialist—theories from bygone eras. But as Smith explains,

Graeber and Wengrow want to establish that the decentralized decision-making and social freedoms common in small groups and small-scale societies can also work at an urban scale…The idea that population size and density have strong effects on urban society and organization is not just an assumption or ideological belief, as Graeber and Wengrow suggest. It is, rather, one of the most strongly supported empirical findings of urban research. (4)

Smith cites sources from a range of fields to support this assertion, but his most compelling example comes from an annual event that the organizers originally planned based on anarchistic principles.

Aerial view of Burning Man Festival

The Burning Man Festival began as 35 people on a beach in California in 1986. By 2019, attendance had grown to 80,000. Sometime in the late 90s, the organizers started to see problems arising. As festival planner Rod Garrett explains,

We got to a point where I saw people becoming irrationally angry with each other and with the city. It occurred to me that this might be an effect of overpopulation, and that we’d hit some tipping point where people were no longer comfortable.

This is a gathering of people as likeminded, at least with regard to their aversion to arbitrary constraints on their radical self-expression, as you’re likely to encounter in such large numbers. And even among this group of avowed idealists, a threshold of population density was eventually reached that necessitated the imposition of rules and greater efforts at organization. Could these new rules have been arrived at collectively? Not without first coming up with a way to gather 80,000 opinions and a method for transforming them into actionable plans. What the organizers did instead was to create the rules themselves—the few dictating to the masses.

            Intriguingly, Graeber himself seems to have experienced the difficulties on the other side of this dynamic firsthand. We have already seen how difficult it can be to maintain harmonious societies at largescale, but the other challenge for egalitarian decision-making is that you have to find a way to prevent ambitious individuals from accumulating power. In a footnote to a discussion of their three proposed forms of power—control of violence, control of information, and personal charisma—the authors reveal that at least one of them (probably Graeber) has witnessed groups struggling to keep their members from acquiring one or another of them. They write, 

This again is easy to observe in activist groups, or any group self-consciously trying to maintain equality between members. In the absence of formal powers, informal cliques that gain disproportionate power almost invariably do so through privileged access to one or another form of information. If self-conscious efforts are made to pre-empt this, and make sure everyone has equal access to important information, then all that’s left is individual charisma. (587)

This footnote comes dangerously close to an admission of how difficult egalitarianism is to establish and preserve—“almost invariably”—since putting checks on individual authority in one form leaves open opportunities of gaining other forms of influence.

            As replete as The Dawn of Everything is with ax-grinding and unscholarly shenanigans, as out of date as the supposedly conventional thinking it seeks to topple turns out to be, and as quixotic as the reform agenda the authors hope to galvanize probably is, we must still ask if there might be a scientific baby at risk of being thrown out with the propagandistic bathwater. Unsurprisingly, the parts of the book I personally enjoyed most tended to be the least polemical. I found the discussion of “culture areas” and “schismogenesis”—whereby one society consciously defines itself and its values in opposition to another neighboring society—both riveting and largely plausible. “One problem with evolutionism,” Graeber and Wengrow write, “is that it takes ways of life that developed in symbiotic relation with each other and reorganizes them into separate stages of human history” (446). That is a remarkable—and potentially fruitful—insight. And it is true that, while scholars like Boehm leave more room for exceptions to the egalitarian model of nomadic hunter-gatherers than Graeber and Wengrow let on, the range of variation is revealing itself to be far greater than previously imagined (but probably still not as great as Graeber and Wengrow suggest).

            Indeed, if a trace of impatience can be detected in my presentation, the reason is this: the question of how archeological sites like Göbekli Tepe and Poverty Point, with their massive scale, large earthen mounds, and monumental stonework, all built by hunter-gatherers, should rewrite our understanding of human social evolution is both fascinating and hugely consequential. That is why it was so disappointing to open The Dawn of Everything and find the authors riding their hobbyhorses and airing their petty grievances instead of genuinely engaging with the relevant research. Rather than offering readers their expert take on the science behind these mesmerizing discoveries, Graeber and Wengrow saw fit to exploit the intrinsic wonder to gin up support for their unscientific agendas. Though it just may have something to do with my own political concerns, I personally can’t wait until Jared Diamond, or someone writing in his tradition, takes up the topic anew.

            As for the political agenda in The Dawn of Everything, I may be less radical than Graeber and Wengrow, as I share Pinker’s conviction that while we should continue working to ensure marginalized peoples enjoy the same opportunities and protections as the most privileged among us, we also have a responsibility to both honor and safeguard the progress all the activists of past generations worked so hard to secure by exercising their own primordial right to experiment with new social arrangements. Who are we to sneer at their successes and narcissistically toss aside the fruits of their efforts? The most important starting point for any reform initiative is a clear-eyed understanding of the current reality, one that people outside the movement can be confident is based on our best methods for getting at the truth. That’s why it’s so important to keep science as separate from activism as humanly possible. Whether we are talking about anthropologists, climate scientists, or infectious disease specialists, we simply cannot afford for the view of scientists as mere members of this or that special interest group to gain any more traction than it already has. Science may have resisted committing suicide to date, but every time the public discovers an agenda driving research on important issues, its trust suffers one more potentially fatal blow.

***

Also read:

Just Another Piece of Sleaze: The Real Lesson of Robert Borofsky's "Fierce Controversy"

“The World until Yesterday” and the Great Anthropology Divide: Wade Davis’s and James C. Scott’s Bizarre and Dishonest Reviews of Jared Diamond’s Work

Violence in Human Evolution and Postmodernism’s Capture of Anthropology

Why Timothy Snyder Lied about Jonathan Gottschall and Steven Pinker in The New York Times

            My first thought after reading Timothy Snyder’s review of Jonathan Gottschall’s The Story Paradox in The New York Times was, “Jeez, did Gottschall sleep with this guy’s wife or something?” Snyder’s own most popular book, On Tyranny, is written as a series of lessons and includes chapters titled, “Remember Professional Ethics” and “Believe in Truth.” Yet something in The Story Paradox bothered him so much he jettisoned his own professional ethics by distorting—and flat-out lying about—its contents, and he did it in perhaps the most prestigious newspaper in the English-speaking world. The most likely explanation for the review’s copious errors is that Snyder never actually read the book; he instead flipped through it looking for points he could arrange into a narrative of his own about the evil Gottschall and his ridiculous ideas about the dangers of story. But why would a professor of history at Yale, one who’s garnered a modicum of fame over the past few years through his appearances on multiple news outlets, one whose book has been on the bestseller lists for the past five years—why would this guy suddenly forget all his own warnings about the dangers of propaganda so he could go on to create some of his own? 

            With his review, Snyder creates a fictional version of Gottschall and his book that bear a striking non-resemblance to their real-life counterparts. The version of The Story Paradox you’ll discover if you actually read the book has Gottschall acknowledging the much-touted benefits of becoming immersed in a good story, including a boost in empathy, particularly for the types of people represented by the protagonist. He goes on to point out, however, that the flipside is also true: stories often inspire suspicion, fear, and hatred as well. The haunting example he cites in the introduction is the Tree of Life killer, who believed an ancient story about evil Jews trying to take over the country, believed it so sincerely that he went to a synagogue with a gun and murdered 11 people, wounding several others. As effectively as storytellers seduce us into partisanship on behalf of their protagonists, along with real-life people embroiled in similar struggles, they also tempt us into indulging our darkest impulses when dealing with antagonists, which in fiction means cheering on the heroes as they mete out brutal justice, and in reality can mean cheering on violence against people thought to be in the same camp as those antagonists—or even actively participating in such violence. 

            Snyder’s made-up version of the book, on the other hand, has Gottschall fumbling through a bunch of books before concluding “that no one has ever undertaken his subject, the ‘science’ of how stories work.” Gottschall’s actual gripe in the relevant section near the end of the book (190) was that story science is absent from psychology textbooks; he writes in the introduction, “Today a broad consortium of researchers, including psychologists, communications specialists, neuroscientists, and literary ‘quants,’ are using the scientific method to study the ‘brain on story’” (13). No matter—Snyder goes on to whip up a tale of a quixotic scholar, ironically trapped in his own self-stroking story even as he warns of the dangers of becoming trapped in your own stories, ignorant or disdainful of every past scholar’s contribution, obsessed with statistics and algorithms to the point where he doesn’t even bother to read the great works of literature he’s subjecting to his brand of cold-blooded analysis, all so he can arrogantly declare he’s discovered insights that have been perfectly obvious to every real scholar of literature for decades. Oh, and his efforts somehow pander to the powerful while exacerbating economic inequality—or at least failing to offer keys for how to fix it. Gottschall himself satirized Snyder’s review in a postmortem for Quillette, writing, 

my reviewer began by dispensing with effete norms against ad hominem argument to spin a tale of a cartoon heel named Jonathan Gottschall—a fool who sees himself as an intellectual colossus. Gottschall also has an unfortunate mental condition that causes him to shout mad, dangerous things. All history is useless, Gottschall shouts, before going on to hypocritically cite a bunch of history books. Down with the humanities, Gottschall cries, and down with humans too! Up with Zuckerberg! Up with big data and the robot overlords! Down with the wretched of the earth! Up with the big evils of unrestrained capitalism and “power”!

What stands out about Snyder’s fictional characterizations when placed alongside the relevant passages in the book is that there’s almost no chance he arrived at his defamatory view of Gottschall through any good faith effort at understanding his positions. The review is a deliberate smear.

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Whose perspective?

            Snyder’s take on the subject matter of The Story Paradox is just as absurdly off-base. At one point, he suggests that Gottschall writes “creepily” about a young girl in a fictional snippet he composed himself, adding that “The story will be different when not narrated from a place of complacent omnipotence, for example if it is told from the perspective of the woman.” This is precisely the type of innuendo—see, Gottschall is a creepy misogynist—journalism students are taught to avoid (or used to be anyway). There’s also the small problem that Gottschall in fact did write the vignette from the girl’s perspective. This mistake is hardly the exception. The review’s central points are, to a one, based on bonkers misconstruals. Snyder somehow even managed to miss the book’s central thesis; he complains that Gottschall “promises a paradox in his title, but none is forthcoming.” I could quote the passage in the introduction where Gottschall describes the paradox in detail, but you don’t need to read beyond the subtitle to get the idea: How Our Love of Stories Builds Societies and Tears Them Down. 

Based on the number of errors and the quality of the prose, it looks as though Snyder devoted no more than a few hours to scanning the book and scribbling his takedown. Along with the myriad mischaracterizations, his review is filled with choppy non sequiturs and odd solecisms, like when he claims, “Little is original in his analysis. His notion that stories tell us arose out of the structuralist anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss in the 1950s.” His notion that stories tell us what? And how can Snyder know if Gottschall’s analysis is original if he can’t accurately state what that analysis entails? Even if we ignore the poor grammar, Snyder’s point is just silly. He’s referring to Lévi-Strauss’s theory of a universal language of myth, which the anthropologist posited operates on a dynamic juxtaposition of binary opposites. Though Gottschall does describe a “universal story grammar,” at no point in The Story Paradox does he put forth the idea that opposing binaries lie at the heart of effective stories, unless you count good guys versus bad guys, which wasn’t at all what Lévi-Strauss had in mind. The only similarity is that both Lévi-Strauss and Gottschall are interested in universals. (Also recall that this charge of unoriginality is coming from a guy who achieved notoriety among the politically left-leaning for comparing the opposition leader to Hitler.) 

Here’s Snyder’s take on the theory put forth in The Story Paradox: “The universal story hard-wired into our brains is, says Gottschall, one in which everything gets worse until it gets better.” Apparently, Snyder thinks that was Lévi-Strauss’s theory as well. He goes on to recite a list of stories that don’t have happy endings, supposedly exposing the absurdity of Gottschall’s argument. Now, Gottschall does at one point cite a research finding that stories which get worse and worse until a happy resolution occurs at the end are far more popular than those with other plot structures. But he never claims that structure is universal (102). What he says about the universal structure of stories is this: 

The universal grammar of storytelling has, I propose, at least two major components. First, everywhere in the world stories are about characters trying to resolve predicaments. Stories are about trouble. Stories are rarely about people having good days. Even comedies, though they often end happily, are usually about people gutting through bad days—often the very worst days of their whole lives. Second, as corny as it may at first sound, stories tend to have a deep moral dimension. Although sophisticated novelists, historians, or filmmakers may deny that they’d ever sink to expressing anything like a “moral of the story,” they’ve never stopped moralizing for a moment. “The poets,” says Nietzsche, “were always the valets of some morality.”

Stipulated: If you ransack your brain, you’ll be able to name exceptions. But they will be exceptions that prove the rule—statistical outliers dominated by experimental works like Finnegan’s Wake. On the other hand, maybe it seems obvious to you that stories are this way. But academic literary theorists would mostly deny it. And, if you think about it, it’s not a bit obvious that stories should be this way. Many of us might expect to find storytelling traditions where stories mostly function as escape pods into hedonistic paradises where pleasure is infinite and moral trespass in unknown.

We never do. (100)

It would be bad enough if Snyder had merely relied on the cheap strawman tactic of turning Gottschall’s qualified point about a statistical trend into an absolutist claim that can be refuted with reference to a few exceptions, but Snyder doesn’t even refer to the right section of the book in his effort to convince us of the weakness of Gottschall’s theory. (That, Professor Snyder, is what happens when you skim instead of reading.)

Okay, so what’s going on here? Why would a public intellectual of Snyder’s stature accept the commission to review a book he couldn’t bring himself to read, only to go on to write a review that’s so caustic, contemptuous, careless, and dishonest that anyone who does get around to picking up Gottschall’s book will see at a glance that the reviewer is sanctimonious, superior, mean-spirited, and completely full of shit? Something interesting must be happening behind the scenes to make Snyder so reckless with his reputation for honest scholarship, something urgent enough to overshadow any concern for his integrity. 

What might that something be? 

Gottschall sees a clue in Snyder’s outsized objection to his endorsement of the work of Steven Pinker. The section in The Story Paradox where Gottschall refers to Pinker is only a few paragraphs long, but Snyder devotes almost as much space in his short hit piece in the Times to a seemingly damning critique of Pinker’s findings. This prompts Gottschall to posit,

At the bottom of the reviewer’s contempt is an allergy to two traits Pinker and I share. We both seek to bring a scientific mindset to traditional humanities questions, and we both feel obliged to question the ideological excesses not only of the right wing, but also of the intellectual left.

I think Gottschall is correct on both points, but if Snyder simply despised these men’s positions on a few hot-button issues, he could have addressed them honestly. Instead, he does two things legitimate scholars aren’t supposed to do: he makes his criticisms personal, and he bases those criticisms on a deliberate and gross misreading of the work under review. 

            So, what made Snyder think Gottschall and his book must be so bad they didn’t deserve a fair hearing? Let’s look at both factors Gottschall identifies, beginning with ideological excesses, and see if they adequately account for what Snyder wrote in his hatchet job.   

Leftist Ideology at Elite Universities

In an ideal world, we could take book reviews at face value. Scholars would assess each other’s ideas and writing, then relay to the rest of us their expert take on what a book covers, what informs its perspective, and how successfully the author achieves her goals. Unfortunately, we don’t live in that world. Instead, with ideological positions taken in advance, reviewers all too often take it as their mission to campaign for or against the author of the book under consideration. And the rhetoric they use in the service of these campaigns has far more in common with what you hear on cable news than in any reason-based scholarly debate. 

The sad reality is that we live in an age when large swaths of academia have come under the sway of a political ideology which holds that ideas must be weighed, not by their truth value, but by their imagined consequences. What an author intends to convey to readers, in other words, is far less important than the impact these academics insist the work will have on the wider society. Surveys designed to explore the distinction between liberals and leftists find that the latter tend to define themselves in terms of their anti-capitalism and their radical antipathy toward the current societal order, with all its supposedly oppressive systems and structures. Liberals on the other hand are far more likely to define themselves according to their advocacy of choice and their embrace of science. Leftists understand liberals endorse many of the same progressive social reforms they do, but they fault liberals for wanting incremental, as opposed to radical change, often, the leftists insinuate, because the current order affords liberals some form of privilege they want to safeguard. Another way of looking at this is that while liberals want to tweak the system to move us ever closer to a world where everyone enjoys the same freedoms and opportunities, leftists see the system as inherently oppressive, so they want to tear it down and establish an altogether new one. 

Here’s how that precept plays out in academic disputes. The core assumption of the leftist ideology is that, whether we know it or not, whether we’re willing to acknowledge it or not, we are all engaged in a struggle either to maintain the political and social status quo or to dismantle it. As linguist John McWhorter describes this foundational tenet:

Battling power relations and their discriminatory effects must be the central focus of all human endeavor, be it intellectual, moral, civic or artistic. Those who resist this focus, or even evidence insufficient adherence to it, must be sharply condemned, deprived of influence, and ostracized.

The work of any author, leftists would have us believe, must therefore be understood in the context of this struggle to tear down the institutions and structures that empower some at the expense of others—whether that author has any desire to comment on that struggle or not. That’s why you get this bizarre passage in Snyder’s review of The Story Paradox: 

Part of Gottschall’s tale of himself is that his views will offend the powerful. Yet his own account of the world does nothing to challenge the status quo. He treats political conflict only as culture war, a view that is more than comfortable for those in power. His most feared enemy, he says, are left-wing colleagues; he portrays their thinking as entirely about culture. One would think, reading him, that left and right had nothing to do with economic equality and inequality, a subject Gottschall ignores.

Though he claims to have read “2,400 years of scholarship on Plato’s ‘Republic,’” Gottschall misses the famous point in Book IV about the city of the rich and the city of the poor. In a country where a few dozen families own as much wealth as half the population, the opportunities for storytelling are unevenly distributed. Gottschall has nothing to say about this. He believes that we live in a “representative democracy” in which the stories told by the powerful simply reflect our own stories. No need, then, to think about the Electoral College, campaign finance, gerrymandering, or the suppression and subversion of votes. Gottschall offers not a challenge to the powerful, but a pat on the back.

Recall that Gottschall’s book is about the effects of storytelling, not economics. Essentially, Snyder is criticizing The Story Paradox for what it’s not about. Nowhere in the book does Gottschall come down in favor of the political left or the right, as the book is not directly concerned with politics. He does express concern over the lack of viewpoint diversity in journalism and academia, as nearly everyone working in these fields is politically left of center, but that comes right after a long section about the dangerous, if entertaining, absurdity of “the Big Blare,” his epithet for Trump, who he won’t even name. Nowhere in the book does he express the view that “the stories told by the powerful simply reflect our own stories,” but he does discuss how the left has adopted “a history from the point of view of the enchained, the plundered, and all the restless ghosts of the murdered” (136). 

What’s going on here is that Snyder, not having read the book, is treating it as little more than a Rorschach, giving us a window onto his own menagerie of ideological bugbears. Is Gottschall concerned with inequality, campaign finance, and voter suppression? To leftists, it doesn’t matter if he is or not; what matters is whether his book deals with them explicitly enough—regardless of whether that’s what the book is about. 

There’s another point raised by this passage I only feel justified in adding because Snyder himself gets so personal. Gottschall is a research fellow at Washington and Jefferson College, while Snyder is a full professor at Yale. Snyder is probably also making quite a bit of money from his bestselling book On Tyranny, along with all his media appearances. So what we have here is a very rich and somewhat famous scholar at an elite institution using his privileged access to the pages of the paper of record to take to task a much less well-off researcher with no status to speak of, for not expressing adequate opposition to economic inequality. Makes you wonder how sincere Snyder’s calls for reforming the system really are; he certainly looks comfortable enjoying the benefits of that system himself. Your complaints about the evils of hierarchies ring a bit hollow when you’re shouting them down from your perch atop of one. (Such a resoundingly negative review in the Times almost certainly cost Gottschall considerable book sales as well.) Snyder can ridicule Gottschall for fearing that his “views will offend the powerful,” but Snyder himself is one of those powerful people. And there’s no mistaking how offended he was. 

            It’s an amusing irony that Snyder, without any supporting quotes, accuses Gottschall of portraying himself as “a heroic scholar whose original insight challenges our preconceptions, leading a charge against an enemy tribe of terrifying left-wing academics,” when Snyder himself told an interviewer for The Yale Daily News: “The bad news is that our republic is in a lot of trouble. The good news is that On Tyranny is a practical guide for how to defend a republic, how to defend individual freedoms, so if a lot of people are reading it, that’s good news.” Snyder’s renown as a popular historian has grown immensely over the past few years, as he’s been a go-to source for explaining how Trump poses the same kind of threat to American democracy as guys like Hitler and Stalin posed to their people. Writing for City Journal, journalist Lee Seigel charges that “Snyder has become a one-man industry of panic, a prophet whose profitability depends on his prophecies never coming true.” Seigel then argues that Snyder “could flourish only in a country so far removed from ‘totalitarianism’—a word he freely applies to America—as to seem historically blessed with eternal freedom.”

            I’m not sure what Gottschall’s politics look like, but the only “terrifying left-wing academics” he mentions in The Story Paradox are the ones who might come after him for “saying anything even mildly heretical regarding the Left’s sacred narratives” (176)—a line that doesn’t appear until the penultimate chapter in the book (and, given Snyder’s review, seems strikingly prescient). Gottschall in fact only brought up how he “managed to tread on powerful toes” (175) to emphasize how strange it is that he can criticize the Catholic Church, tech oligarchs, and Trump supporters without concern, but he nonetheless has to worry about what leftist academics like Snyder will do. 

Snyder tips his hand with this odd mischaracterization, in case we had any doubt regarding his own membership in that “enemy tribe” he hallucinates Gottschall charging against. In addition to all his dire warnings about Trump ushering in a new age of still greater authoritarianism in America (which, I admit, I don’t find all that implausible), Snyder has also recently compared Republican efforts to ban the teaching of The 1619 Project in public schools to Putin’s efforts to memory-hole elements of Russian history like the Great Famine—despite the fact that several of Snyder’s fellow historians have stated unequivocally that many of the central claims in The 1619 Project, in particular the notion that the American Revolution was fought to protect slavery, are completely wrong. As Seigel points out, “it is hardly undemocratic for two competing versions of history to clash, especially when it comes to what should be taught to young children.” 

The key point here is that Snyder isn’t using history to show us the dangers of tyranny; he’s using an insanely overstrained historical analogy to cudgel his partisan rivals. Perhaps uncoincidentally, Gottschall warns of historical narratives being put to just this sort of divisive use. 

Biophobia and Leftist Anti-Science

What Snyder probably knew before reading—i.e., scanning—The Story Paradox, was that Gottschall is part of a group of literary scholars who apply theories from psychology, in particular evolutionary psychology, to their research on narrative. Among leftist academics, evolutionary psychology is thought to be a thinly veiled effort at justifying the political status quo, helping to sustain all the wicked hierarchies and hegemonies baked into our civilization. Evolved traits and behaviors, these leftists believe, are not amenable to reform; if it’s in our genes, in other words, it can’t be changed. Since one of the central tenets of the Foucauldian ideology that holds sway among these academics is that ideas must be assessed according to their political implications and their imagined consequences—as opposed to being evaluated in terms of accuracy or truth—the idea that any behavior or social dynamic has a biological dimension is treated as anathema. 

            This isn’t the place to detail all that leftists get wrong about evolutionary psychology, which is pretty much everything. Suffice to say surveys show that adaptationist psychologists vote for liberal candidates at the same rate as any other psychologists, and while I’ve been reading books about evolutionary psychology for decades, I don’t know of a single one that argues against political reform by claiming that human nature is completely fixed or “hard-wired,” the term leftists insist applies. Think about it, these researchers are fascinated with hunter-gatherers because they live closer to the way humans have lived for most of their time on earth. One of the most fascinating through-lines in The Story Paradox connects research among the Agta hunter-gatherers of the Philippines to surveys of Western readers’ attitudes about characters in Victorian novels. How could anyone compare a hunter-gatherer society with a modern civilization and conclude that social dynamics can never change? (And hunter-gatherer societies are quite diverse in their own right.) 

            But Snyder’s prejudice against Gottschall probably goes deeper than his aversion to any single field in the behavioral sciences. Snyder complains that The Story Paradox is a “bonfire of the humanities.” Even though Gottschall only cites psychologist Steven Pinker as part of a three-paragraph-long aside about how material conditions are improving for most people in most parts of the world—despite the bad news from journalists and historians—Snyder felt obliged to comment on the reference: 

Gottschall’s view about our nonfictional world is that “almost everything is getting better and few things are getting worse.” It is hard to see how he can judge the past against the present, given his dismissal of both history and journalism. He relies upon Steven Pinker’s “data” on the issue of violence, though there is no such thing. Pinker cited others; his peculiar choices are usefully examined in “The Darker Angels of Our Nature.” In the fields I know something about, Pinker cherry-picked with red-fingered fervor; his best numbers on modern death tolls come from a source so obviously ideological that I was ashamed to cite it in high school debate. Like Gottschall, Pinker is a friend of contradiction. He supported his story of progress in part by pointing to rising I.Q.s at a time when I.Q.s were in fact in decline. He began his book by noting that the modern welfare states are the most peaceful polities in history, and concluded it by embracing a libertarianism that would lead to their dissolution. Pinker was telling us a story; it is a story Gottschall likes, and thus it is ennobled as “data.”

Of course, Snyder’s take on history is just as much a story as Pinker’s. The problem is the two stories have diametrically opposed plot trajectories. If there’s any data supporting Pinker’s version, it’s only natural Snyder would seek any justification on offer for dismissing them. I mean, the thought that a psycholinguist from Harvard, one who traffics in evolutionary psychology no less, managed to discover something astonishing and consequential about history, something which actual historians like Snyder never noticed or even bothered to look at—that must be infuriating.

At the risk of being indelicate, the entirety of Snyder’s passage about Pinker—and I mean every word aside from the quote—is bullshit. Gottschall criticizes both history and journalism for their negativity bias and for hewing to us-versus-them storytelling that adds vitriol and outright hatred to contests between identity groups. (Now, why might Snyder take that personally?) He at no point goes in for wholesale dismissal of these fields. “Of course, not all histories give us such sharp and rousing grammar,” Gottschall writes. “These tend to be academic accounts that lay out all the clutter of historical facts, while resisting the urge to neatly weave the true facts into merely truthy tales” (132). “Journalism performs an absolutely essential, and frequently heroic, social function as a de facto fourth estate,” he also writes. “But like every other sort of storytelling, journalism has great capacity to do harm as well as good” (107). 

It’s hard to know which of Pinker’s sources Snyder is so cravenly alluding to without any actual citation, because he relies on so many, and Pinker is far from alone in coming to the conclusions he does based on these sources. I have no illusions about being able to settle the controversy about whether violence has declined through history in this small space, but I can say it’s clear from the earliest pages of the introduction that the authors of the book Darker Angels (a play on the title of Pinker’s book on declining violence Better Angels) are reporting from inside the same ideological bubble as Snyder. On both sides of the ongoing debate, you have competing claims of cherry-picking and ideological bias, but I’ve yet to see an analysis that would call into question the general and quite dramatic downward trends Pinker writes about. 

On the topic of contradictions: how could Pinker have “cherry-picked” his data about violence through history when “there is no such thing” as data? And if there’s no such thing as data, how does Snyder know Pinker is wrong? Further, if there’s no such thing as data, how can disputes like this ever be resolved? IQs, meanwhile, rose an average of three points per decade through most of the 20th Century as part of a phenomenon known as the Flynn effect, which has reversed slightly in a few Western European countries where the increases had been going on the longest, a minor, localized reversal that has scant impact on the larger trajectory. So, this is Snyder showing us what real cherry-picking looks like.

As for Pinker’s embrace of libertarianism, well, it’s entirely fictional. He endorses social spending and market regulation. He even donated substantially to Obama’s 2012 campaign.  Here’s the operative quote from his book Enlightenment Now: “The facts of human progress strike me as having been as unkind to right-wing libertarianism as to right-wing conservatism and left-wing Marxism” (365). 

            Why this sloppy and mendacious attack on Pinker when his work plays such a small role in The Story Paradox? Early in his review, Snyder has Gottschall claiming that “no one has ever undertaken his subject, the ‘science’ of how stories work.” This is yet another lie, as Gottschall discusses and references the work of multiple other researchers and literary scholars. (The references section runs to 30 pages.) What Snyder is likely implying here is that Gottschall is neglecting the work of literary theorists who weren’t scientists (which is also untrue); the scare quotes are meant to call into question the distinction between what modern research psychologists do and what the people literary theorists enjoy citing, guys like Freud or Jung or Lacan, were doing, in the same way he calls into question Pinker’s work: “it is a story Gottschall likes, and thus it is ennobled as ‘data.’” The designation “science,” like the honorary term “data,” we’re to believe, serves merely to elevate some ideas over others based on arbitrary preferences—or worse, as part of an effort to secure the designator’s privileged status in society. (I feel I have to point out that if people on the left make these arguments, we can’t pretend to be outraged when those on the right throw them back at us—as they do when discussing evolution, climate change, or various pandemic interventions.)

             It occurred to me while reading Snyder’s pseudo-review that the recent emergence of radical leftist beliefs in arenas outside of academia can be thought of as the revenge of the humanities scholars. Both Pinker and Gottschall lament the total routing of the humanities by the sciences, as funding for the latter dwarfs that of the prior. But what gets lost in discussions about funding is the fact that many of the odd tropes and strictures of the left originated in humanities departments, including the prioritization of “lived-experience” over scientific evidence, the dismissal of scientific rigor in favor of Manichean ideologies, the emphasis on implicit forms of bigotry, and the obsession with power and its distorting, self-perpetuating influence on every aspect of culture. 

            Whatever bridge scholars like Gottschall and Pinker hope to build between science and the humanities, their counterparts on the other side are waiting to knock it down, hoping all the while that those waiting to cross with their olive branches wind up buried in the rubble. The alliance these pro-science, “third culture” advocates hope to form is seen by humanities scholars as a poorly disguised invasion. Just as Snyder sneers at Pinker’s “data,” he sees Gottschall’s commitment to psychology and science more generally as little more than the trappings of his membership in a rival tribe. He writes,

Gottschall chooses quantity over quality, tabulating surveys about novels rather than reading them himself. He cannot quite see that what the internet creates is an endless psychological experiment and not a story. By allowing the tools of big data and psychology to guide him, Gottschall blinds himself to this essential point about our contemporary reading experience. He is not wrong that social media algorithms draw us into unreflective narcissism. What he misses is that it is precisely psychology and big data, his own allies, that supply the digital commercial and political weapons that trap us in stories where we are always on the good side. Gottschall warns us of such stories and rightly so. But in his analysis of their multiplication and intensification he has confused the villain with the hero. In conflating human storytelling with automated manipulation, he has gone over to the side of the machines, without realizing that he has done so.

Gottschall didn’t just tabulate surveys about novels; he helped create the survey questions, which would be pretty difficult for someone who hadn’t read them. By now, you won’t find it at all surprising that Gottschall never claims the internet is a story and that he has no trouble seeing it as an experiment. “Social media,” he writes, “is a powerful if inadvertent experiment into what sort of narratives actually win out in story wars as measured by quantifiable views, likes, and shares” (85). And he at no point conflates human storytelling with automated manipulation; he instead warns that the manipulators are using the same tools as human storytellers: 

The cold scientific vocabulary of surveillance capitalism seems far away from the warm old craft of tale-telling. But these “behavior modification empires,” as the computer scientist Jaron Lanier calls them, collect this data largely toward the goal of targeting us with narratives that are more engaging, more emotionally arousing, and ultimately more persuasive. In the end, it’s about getting us to buy whatever’s on sale—from a harmless new widget to a socially toxic virus of thought. (66)

Has Gottschall really “gone over to the side of the machines”? Here Snyder is relying on the alchemy of ambiguity to convey a conclusion he reached through what Pinker calls “voodoo resemblance.” The psychology Gottschall relies on uses experiments and statistics; the behavior modification empires also use experiments and statistics; therefore, Gottschall is on the same side as the imperials. It must have never occurred to Snyder that the two may be using similar tools for completely different ends. After all, why would Gottschall warn us about what his supposed allies were doing if he wanted their manipulations to succeed? 

What the passage reveals more than anything is Snyder’s inability to escape from the tribalism at the heart of his belief system, which is itself based on a story of evil capitalists and their machines facing off against heroic academics who know the value of all things truly human. Even when he agrees with what Gottschall has written, he still strains to find fault with it. In the closing paragraphs of his review, Snyder, not realizing his points are becoming increasingly incoherent, attempts a grand finale of ad hominem dismissal. 

Gottschall confesses that he was “confused about this book,” and it is not hard to see why. If everything is story, then all we have is our own; and our own story makes us feel good, until the moment comes when it doesn’t. Gottschall visibly suffers in these pages as psychology becomes his personal tar pit. In the end, he flails in the direction of “facts” and “science,” terms he has already reduced to cliché by confusing them with common-sense nostrums. Even had he told us what he meant by “facts” and “science,” he gives no clue as to how our brains would escape their supposed hard-wiring for story and think in such terms.

In his last gasp, Gottschall invokes the Enlightenment. One of its mottoes was “dare to know.” Kant, who used that phrase, knew that the liberation from others’ stories begins with liberation from one’s own. Gottschall does the opposite: Drowning in his own story, he grabs us by the ankles. Voltaire’s Candide was miles ahead of Gottschall: Understanding stories means knowing when to laugh at them. This book is just sad.

Here Snyder, desperate for some secure footing to deliver his coup de grace, simply flipped back to the first page, where in the second sentence of the book, Gottschall explains what he was doing at a bar, at a point when he was trying to come up with a title and an organizing theme. He wasn’t claiming to be confused about how to help readers escape their own and other people’s stories. But how beautiful the irony, how poetic the justice, if the guy presenting himself as a hero sounding the alarm about the dangers of getting caught in stories could be shown to be trapped in his own. Silly Gottschall didn’t realize though that he’d happened upon a problem he lacked the cleverness to solve. His only recourse is to point to the same science and Enlightenment that have brought us to our current, terrible condition—the data showing that it’s not so terrible notwithstanding. 

            Sad indeed—but Snyder is lying here too. Gottschall couldn’t be trying to present himself as a genius hero if he opens his book talking about how confused he was in the late stages of writing it. Most importantly, Gottschall never claims our love of story is “hard-wired” in the sense that we can’t possibly escape it. Anytime we read a scientific journal article or sit through a PowerPoint presentation, we’re forgoing the joys of storytelling. And Gottschall does explain how science helps us to escape:

The strength of science resides not in individual geniuses like Newton or Darwin but in an ingenious collective process, which—with its demands for mathematical rigor, peer review, and replication—guards against predictable human failings from outright lying to unconscious prejudice. Though the scientific method is a prophylactic against bias, it’s not a perfect one. Academic scientists, too, lean strongly to the left, and we must assume this shapes the questions they ask and the interpretations they favor. (177)

How do you keep from drowning in your own story? Surround yourself with a bunch of people who have a bunch of stories of their own and have them check your work. 

This gets us to another of Gottschall’s ideas for a solution—viewpoint diversity in academia and journalism. Many of the points that set Snyder off come from the same section in The Story Paradox, where Gottschall discusses the political homogeneity of our scholars and reporters. One of the numbers he cites comes from a survey of history departments, where for every conservative you’ll find 33.5 liberals (these surveys don’t distinguish between liberals and leftists). This imbalance not only prevents the error correction that comes from pitting differing views against each other; it also leads to greater extremism. Gottschall explains,

When homogeneous groups are insulated from skepticism and counterarguing, they stampede toward the most extreme position in the room. When you have a room full of partisans, the question asked is seldom “Are we going too far?” It’s usually “Are we going far enough?” This tendency is so strong and predictable that [Cass] Sustein calls it “the law of group polarization.” (174)

When you factor in the negative characterizations of people holding rival views that are all too frequently embedded in ideologies, it’s easy to understand Gottschall’s concerns. Yet he finds that whenever he brings this issue up to his colleagues, they respond with a shrug. This is part of why the public outside of academia is often so skeptical of information emerging from campuses. In most academic departments, the left-right skew is between 8 and 13 to one. In the country as a whole, about 25% of people identify as liberal and 37% conservative. 

            It must have been this section of the book that gave Snyder the impression that Gottschall’s “most feared enemy” is the tribe of his “left-wing colleagues.” Recall that Snyder went so far as to characterize The Story Paradox as Gottschall’s story of himself “leading a charge against an enemy tribe of terrifying left-wing academics.” While it’s true Gottschall expresses his fears about left-wing cancel culture, his general point isn’t that the left is necessarily wrong about its beliefs. Indeed, he writes in this section that he’s focusing “on the failings of my own tribe, the academics” (174). So why does Snyder claim that Gottschall is charging against an enemy tribe? More importantly, why doesn’t Snyder say anything about Gottschall’s actual point? For Gottschall, the dangers of ideological homogeneity and the phenomenon of cancel culture are two sides of the same coin. He writes,

To proceed as though intolerance, intimidation, groupthink, and homogeneity of ideology would not lead to timid party-line scholarship (a sort of miniature version of Soviet Lysenkoism) would be to yield to the epistemological equivalent of flat earthism. It would be to cluelessly insist that the facts academics have ourselves uncovered about the deep biases of human cognition and ideology don’t apply to us. (176)

Yet this is precisely how Snyder proceeds. When confronted with a challenge to his ideology, he fabricates a series of lies about the nature of the challenge and attacks the heretic’s reputation, all the while certain of his own righteousness. 

            Gottschall’s true goal with The Story Paradox, however, wasn’t to call out viewpoint imbalances or push back against cancel culture. He hopes rather to spur others into action to explore all the remaining mysteries of storytelling and its effects on our thoughts and behavior. He writes in the conclusion,

If we hope to address civilization’s largest problems, we need a much better sense for the sneaky ways that stories work on our minds and our societies. This means encouraging scholars across the humanities and human sciences to embark on a massively interdisciplinary effort in the new field of narrative psychology, combining the thick, granular knowledge of the humanities with the special tools of the sciences. (191)

In the minds of humanities scholars like Snyder, however, such an interdisciplinary alliance would amount to a surrender in a much larger, much more consequential conflict. 

An Ideological License to Lie 

            Gottschall offers readers still other ways to ward off the potential harms of story. For one, while the universal story grammar puts trouble and conflict at the heart of nearly every narrative, that conflict needn’t be between individual humans or groups. Consider movies like Babel and Castaway. It’s conceivable we could arrange history into narratives with plenty of engaging conflict that nonetheless resist the temptation to cast entire groups as evildoers. We can even do this in our own personal lives. “For example,” Gottschall writes,

when I sense myself getting worked up into a fit of moralistic outrage—when I catch myself dehumanizing a person by turning them into a villain—I take a deep breath and try to imagine the story differently. In this way, I exert some sort of executive control over the automatic process of my brain. If I can’t or won’t do this, I’m not the master of the stories in my head, I’m just their slave, and I’m all the more degraded because I can’t even sense the chains that hold me. (192)

Astoundingly, Gottschall even resists casting Snyder as a villain. He writes in his Quillette article about the review and its fallout, “To be clear, I don’t think the reviewer told lies. If he meant to deceive readers he would have done so with a lot more care, without putting his own reputation for accuracy and trustworthy judgement at risk.” What’s happening, Gottschall goes on to theorize, is that Snyder has a story playing out in his head in which guys like Gottschall and Pinker are agents for the enemy, trying to sneak their way into the home camp, so they can lay waste to all he holds dear. “That someone as smart as the reviewer can read a book bristling with warnings about the pitfalls of narrative psychology,” Gottschall writes, “and still blunder into the biggest traps, leaves me feeling pessimistic indeed.”

            I’m afraid Gottschall is flattering himself if he believes Snyder actually read more than one or two of the warnings in his book. And it doesn’t make sense to say that Snyder didn’t lie but rather succumbed to story. The simple fact is that Snyder lied because he succumbed to story. I too was shocked that Snyder would make so many false claims in his review, claims whose falsity could be so easily detected. But if Snyder arrived at all those errors due to some confusion or misunderstanding, that would betray a level of incompetence almost as damaging to his reputation as dishonesty. There’s no denying Snyder made claims in his review that he could have easily seen were misrepresentations had he simply gone back to check the pages he was referring to. The man is a professional scholar. What Gottschall’s laudable, even heroic, efforts at graciousness are keeping him from either seeing or admitting is that Snyder obviously views him as so far beneath contempt that he doesn’t care whether he gets caught lying about his book.  

            Snyder despises Pinker and Gottschall both, and I doubt he’s ever really read either of their work. All he needed to know before smearing them in his review was that they belong to a particularly detestable tribe, one whose members are united in their mission to infiltrate the sacred bastions of Snyder’s own tribe, so they can continue to prop up the wealthy elites, those parasites who for generations have gotten fat on the suffering of the people whose stories go unheard. And Snyder isn’t the least bit worried that someone like me will expose his lies. He won’t read this post. He doesn’t have to worry about his fellow tribespeople reading it either, any more than he has to worry about them reading The Story Paradox.

            Even as I write this, I admit it’s still difficult for me to wrap my mind around how intellectuals can convince themselves it’s okay to lie. Whenever I encounter one of these dishonest reviews, my brain can’t resist imposing a truth-seeking frame on the reviewers’ moral and political campaigning. Isn’t it necessary, or at least optimal, to fully understand a problem before crafting a solution? If we discover our understanding is wrong or incomplete, then isn’t there an opportunity for a better solution? Aren’t solutions based on a faulty understanding of the issue bound to fail, almost certainly in a way that causes still more problems? And if we lack recourse to systematically collected evidence, i.e. data, then what are we left with aside from competing ideologies and stories with contradictory morals?

            Reading The Story Paradox played a big role in helping me see what was really going on. (Scott Alexander’s essay Conflict versus Mistake also helped a lot.) Throughout the book, Gottschall compares being trapped in a story to LARPing, or Live-Action Role-Playing. The only difference is LARPERs know the stories in which they’re casting themselves as protagonists are fiction; guys like the Tree of Life killer truly believe they’re saving the world. 

            The realization I came to was that, for many reporters and academics on the far left, our globalized civilization is a vast conspiracy of the ultrawealthy to steal from and otherwise exploit everyone else—which is strange in light of how many of these opinion-makers are themselves wealthy. These elite scholar-cum-activists believe us plebians are all living in a real-life version of The Matrix, just with billionaires playing the part of the machines. So, when someone like Pinker comes along and argues that capitalism is, on balance, better than any of the alternatives we’ve tried so far, they respond, not as though he’d made a claim that was verifiable or falsifiable, but as if he’d engineered a subroutine to the program that makes it harder to convince the clueless masses they need to wake up to the real world. That Pinker’s book was endorsed by Bill Gates didn’t exactly help. What those of us still trapped in this matrix see as texts making straightforward arguments, the academics who’ve woken from it see as cascading lines of green code spelling out the contours of our nightmarish alternate reality. Until the entire system is blown to smithereens, none of us is free, and some of us will continue to suffer far more than others. 

            For academics like Snyder, this real-life matrix really does share a lot in common with a machine. It runs on numbers and systems and its inhabitants are taught to worship charts and statistics. Those who’ve woken from it believe that what the world needs is more human interaction and more knowledge derived not from systems and data, but the poetic sharing of “lived experiences.” Recall Snyder’s line about how Gottschall “has crossed over to the side of the machines.” Sure, science is okay in its place, as long it’s guided by members of the woke elect. But any attempt at applying it beyond the bounds of its traditional remit, say, in fields like history or literature, must be resisted at all costs, resisted as strenuously as any invasion, lest the billionaires and their machines gain a foothold in the last redoubt of our humanity, sealing its doom. 

What it’s taken me a long time to appreciate is that leftists believe in their matrix not as a metaphor but as the true reality. They’re not LARPing, in other words; they’re acting out fantasies they believe are as real as the sun in the sky. That’s why it’s so easy for them to treat Pinker and Gottschall as beneath contempt; these defenders of the old oppressive order are not even human, not in any sense that matters. The great struggle of our time is not about figuring out whose ideas are right and whose are wrong so we can choose the best solutions to our society’s problems. That time has long since passed. What good is evidence or data anyway when it comes from the same matrix we’re on a mission to destroy? The great struggle now is about identifying the enemies to reform, the friends of the machines, and making sure everyone knows how bottomlessly evil they are. 

            Snyder tries to convince readers of his review that it’s Gottschall who’s trapped in a story, thinking he’s the hero. But it’s Snyder who has access to a ready supply of certainty about who deserves to be treated with fairness and dignity and who doesn’t. It’s Snyder who’s so sure of his own beliefs and so sure of his own assessments of others’ moral character that he has no compunction about publishing grotesque falsehoods if it keeps their evil from spreading. And he’s not alone. In campuses and newsrooms all over the country and beyond, academics and journalists are crusading to erode the boundaries between scholarship and activism, the personal and the political, what’s fair and what’s politically expedient, what counts as honest reporting and what’s deemed necessary to say by their fellow academics, all because they’re suffering aggressively from the same collective delusion. 

            Am I turning Snyder into a villain? I appreciate Gottschall’s point that Snyder has fallen victim to his tribe’s story, and that creating propaganda against Pinker and The Story Paradox may have seemed like a rational, even heroic course given his beliefs. Visiting Snyder’s website, I even see he’s helping to raise funds for humanitarian aid to Ukraine. So, no, I don’t have any interest in convincing anyone that Snyder is a bad person. That’s not to say I have a very high opinion of the man. The last thing this world needs is another demagogue, ideologue, or true believer of any stripe. One thing that’s clear is that as much as Snyder hates right-wing propaganda, after his review of The Story Paradox in the Times, he can no longer claim he’s doing anything qualitatively different with his own writing and commentary than guys like Mark Levin or Glenn Beck, his fancy Yale professorship notwithstanding. These guys are all playing the same damn game, just on different teams. But whereas sport often brings out the best in competitors, the game of left versus right brings out the very worst in citizens. 

That Snyder couldn’t see Gottschall’s wonderful, fascinating, and disturbing book as anything other than the latest move in that dreadfully stupid game is truly sad.

***

Also read:

THE STORYTELLING ANIMAL: A LIGHT READ WITH WEIGHTY IMPLICATIONS

TED MCCORMICK ON STEVEN PINKER AND THE POLITICS OF RATIONALITY

THE FAKE NEWS CAMPAIGN AGAINST STEVEN PINKER AND ENLIGHTENMENT NOW

THE SELF-RIGHTEOUSNESS INSTINCT: STEVEN PINKER ON THE BETTER ANGELS OF MODERNITY AND THE EVILS OF MORALITY

Ted McCormick on Steven Pinker and the Politics of Rationality

Concordia University historian Ted McCormick has serious reservations about Steven Pinker’s new book, Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems So Scarce, Why It Matters. His short review in Slate provides of long list of reasons why Pinker’s project was doomed from the outset. But the one issue that really seems to bother McCormick is that “instead of confronting his targets head on, the middle chapters engage in a kind of indirect culture warfare, dragging foes in as apparently incidental examples of irrationality or motivated reasoning.” You see, by McCormick’s lights, Rationality isn’t about rationality at all, but about scoring points against ideological rivals. 

            Throughout his review, McCormick is at pains to ward off the impression that he’s tilting at windmills. He admits “the bulk of the book is less an open culture war campaign than a May Day of rationality’s arsenal,” and he even goes so far as to call it “entertaining,” noting that if you skip the bad parts, “you can find an informative and briskly written book about types of reasoning and their applications.” In other words, the bulk of the book is entertaining and does exactly what Pinker says he wanted it to do. Still, McCormick makes it clear he isn’t giving Rationality his endorsement. “The trouble,” he writes, “begins when you read all the words,” by which he means read between the lines. Doing so, he seems convinced, will reveal that all this stuff about the methods of reasoning is little more than a smoke screen hiding Pinker’s real points, which are political. 

            This can be seen, McCormick insists, when you look at the examples of irrationality Pinker uses: “as the examples pile up, one wonders what is being defended.” McCormick is fine with all the examples of right wing or religious irrationality. “Where the shoe fits,” he writes, “fair enough.” But the small handful of examples from the left side of the political divide are another matter. Here’s an emblematic passage from the review: 

Pinker lets his own solidarities and enmities shape his concern for facts and argumentation. This results in large, unsupported claims, as when a Politico op-ed he co-wrote in defence of Bret Stephens is his sole footnoted source for the claim that logical fallacies are “coin of the realm” across academia and journalism. It also produces some mystifying assertions, such as that the 2020 murder of George Floyd led to “the sudden adoption of a radical academic doctrine, Critical Race Theory”—and that both CRT and Black Lives Matter are driven by an exaggerated sense of Black people’s statistical risk of being killed by police. While Pinker soon walks back what he suggests may be a “psychologically obtuse” account of BLM’s origins, the chronological nonsense of the claim and the characterization of CRT as a “doctrine” stand without evidence or argument. After all, he might say, they’re just examples.

Unsupported claims and nonsense sound pretty bad. But, given all the examples McCormick fails to look up the citations for and doesn’t fault as insufficiently supported, examples in the realms of climate change, creationism, anti-vaxxism, Q-Anon and the like, you could be forgiven for wondering if he’s just mad Pinker is poking at some of his own pet causes. 

            Did Pinker really claim that fallacies are the coin of the realm “across academia and journalism” with reference to a single citation? You can find the passage on pages 92 and 93 of the hardback edition:

The ad hominem, genetic, and affective fallacies used to be treated as forehead-slapping blunders or dirty rotten tricks. Critical-thinking teachers and high school debate coaches would teach their students how to spot and refute them. Yet in one of the ironies of modern intellectual life, they are becoming the coin of the realm. In large swaths of academia and journalism the fallacies are applied with gusto, with ideas attacked or suppressed because their proponents, sometimes from centuries past, bear unpleasant odors and stains. [Here’s where the footnote appears referring to the article on Bret Stephens; it begins “For discussion of one example…”] It reflects a shift in one’s conception of the nature of beliefs: from ideas that may be true or false to expressions of a person’s moral and cultural identity. It also bespeaks a change in how scholars and critics conceive of their mission: from seeking knowledge to advancing social justice and other moral and political causes. 

Pedantic of me to point out, I know, but McCormick’s “across academia and journalism” is a misrepresentation of Pinker’s phrase, “In large swaths of academia and journalism,” one that serves to increase the scope of a claim McCormick faults for being large and insufficiently supported. Still, the claim does require support, and it’s true that the footnote lists a single example. 

            The next question is what does the case of Bret Stephens reveal, if anything, about academia and journalism? The first point that jumps out is that the controversy surrounding Stephens involves The New York Times, the biggest name in journalism, and it began when critics faulted an article by Stephens for abhorrent arguments allegedly contained within it. The result was that the Times deleted large parts of the article. Since the Times is the source of record, you might assume the criticisms held some merit. Not so. The authors of the Politico article write,

the column incited a furious and ad hominem response. Detractors discovered that one of the authors of the paper Stephens had cited went on to express racist views, and falsely claimed that Stephens himself had advanced ideas that were “genetic” (he did not), “racist” (he made no remarks about any race) and “eugenicist” (alluding to the discredited political movement to improve the human species by selective breeding, which was not remotely related to anything Stephens wrote).

Those hyperlinks in the passage are to false charges leveled in the pages of The Guardian and Mother Jones, both newspapers with rather large circulations if my sources are correct. 

            So Pinker’s citation isn’t completely useless, but maybe it leaves something to be desired. It’s still just one case, and it doesn’t mention anything about academia. There is, however, another footnote at the end of the same paragraph. This one refers to a post by Jonathan Haidt arguing that universities must decide whether their main mission is to seek truth or to pursue social justice. Haidt writes,

As a social psychologist who studies morality, I have watched these two teloses come into conflict increasingly often during my 30 years in the academy. The conflicts seemed manageable in the 1990s. But the intensity of conflict has grown since then, at the same time as the political diversity of the professoriate was plummeting, and at the same time as American cross-partisan hostility was rising. I believe the conflict reached its boiling point in the fall of 2015 when student protesters at 80 universities demanded that their universities make much greater and more explicit commitments to social justice, often including mandatory courses and training for everyone in social justice perspectives and content.

Is 80 a significantly large number of universities to justify the phrase “large swaths”? Does demanding greater focus on social justice amount to succumbing to fallacies? Haidt’s position is in fact that campus activism is often motivated by faulty reasoning. The second part of the post Pinker cites lists some of these errors, including the conflation of correlation with causation. Haidt writes,

All social scientists know that correlation does not imply causation. But what if there is a correlation between a demographic category (e.g., race or gender) and a real world outcome (e.g., employment in tech companies, or on the faculty of STEM departments)? At SJU, they teach you to infer causality: systemic racism or sexism. I show an example in which this teaching leads to demonstrably erroneous conclusions [there’s an embedded video]. At Truth U, in contrast, they teach you that “disparate outcomes do not imply disparate treatment.” (Disparate outcomes are an invitation to look closely for disparate treatment, which is sometimes the cause of the disparity, sometimes not).

Of course, while these citations offer some support for Pinker’s claim, we can be sure McCormick isn’t convinced. 

            What about Pinker’s claims regarding Critical Race Theory and Black Lives Matter? First, the statistical matter: are CRT and BLM motivated by an overreaction to police shootings? McCormick doesn’t mention the numbers cited in the section he quotes: “A total of 65 unarmed Americans of all races are killed by the police in an average year,” Pinker writes on page 123, after making the claim McCormick objects to, “of which 23 are African American, which is around three tenths of one percent of the 7,500 African American homicide victims.” He cites the data on police shootings tracked by the Washington Post.* Pinker could have also cited a report by the Skeptics Research Center that shows Americans wildly overestimate the number of African Americans killed by police: “over half (53.5%) of those reporting ‘very liberal’ political views estimated that 1,000 or more unarmed Black men were killed, a likely error of at least an order of magnitude.” But his book isn’t about police shootings. 

Next, can the claim that the murder of George Floyd led to widespread adoption of CRT be supported? A 2020 article in the BBC by Anthony Zurcher called Critical Race Theory: The Concept Dividing America includes this passage, 

The term itself first began to gain prominence in the 1990s and early 2000s, as more scholars wrote and researched on the topic. Although the field of study traditionally has been the domain of graduate and legal study, it has served recently as a framework for academics trying to find ways of addressing racial inequities through the education system - particularly in light of last summer's Black Lives Matter protests. “The George Floyd murder caused this whole nation to take a look at race and racism, and I think there was a broad recognition that something was amiss,” says Marvin Lynn, a critical race theory scholar and professor of education at Portland State University.

What is it about Pinker’s chronology that strikes McCormick as nonsensical? He must understand that most people outside of academia only learned about CRT recently, and it’s been in the context of the newly heated discussion of racism instigated by Floyd’s killing. I suspect his issue is semantic—is it really CRT that’s being taught in schools? 

            The other semantic point here is whether Pinker should support his use of the term doctrine as applied to CRT; again, he goes so far as to call it a “radical academic doctrine.” I’m just going to refer to Richard Delgado’s definition from his 2012 textbook on the subject. 

The critical race theory (CRT) movement is a collection of activists and scholars interested in studying and transforming the relationship among race, racism, and power. The movement considers many of the same issues that conventional civil rights and ethnic studies discourses take up, but places them in a broader perspective that includes economics, history, context, group- and self-interest, and even feelings and the unconscious. Unlike traditional civil rights, which stresses incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.

Well, that sounds pretty radical to me. But does it amount to a doctrine? As far as I understand it, all CRT follows from the tenet that society is comprised of two groups, the oppressors and the oppressed, and the efforts of the oppressors to maintain their hegemony infect every institution imaginable, from universities, to courts, to scientific research programs. That’s why CRT “questions the very foundations of the liberal order.” That central division wasn’t discovered through any empirical methods; rather, it’s asserted as an axiom—or a doctrine. I have no doubt McCormick would call my take simplistic and naïve, but I’d counter that he’s using obfuscation to avoid legitimate criticism.

            Let’s briefly consider another point McCormick takes issue with. This one includes the serious allegation that Pinker has misrepresented an activist’s writing. 

Pinker treats Mariame Kaba’s 2020 New York Times op-ed in favor of police abolition as an example of confusing “less-than-perfect causation” with “no causation,” because it is based on the fact that, under the current system, few rapists are prosecuted. “The editorialist did not consider,” he writes, that fewer still might be prosecuted without the police. In fact, Kaba’s argument is not primarily based on rape at all; she begins by talking about how much time police spend on traffic violations and noise complaints, and proceeds through a century-plus history of failed attempts at police “reform” (the point of her piece). What good does such misrepresentation serve?

Pinker’s comments on the matter take up a whole three sentences on page 260, coming right after the example of people pointing to nonagenarian smokers as a refutation of the link between cigarettes and cancer. The idea is that people point to rare exceptions in their efforts to cast doubt on wider trends, and he does indeed suggest Kaba’s reason for wanting the police abolished is because “the current approach hasn’t ended” rape. But the quotation is accurate, and the failure of policing to end rape is part of her argument. 

Is it really a misrepresentation to cite one part of her argument without mentioning the others? Possibly, but if so McCormick himself has a lot to answer for. What good does the alleged misrepresentation do? Well, it provides an illustrative example of people thinking an intervention that’s not a hundred percent effective can’t be effective at all—precisely the purpose Pinker wanted it to serve. What McCormick failed to notice is that Kaba makes the same error throughout her argument. She writes, for instance,

Minneapolis had instituted many of these “best practices” but failed to remove Derek Chauvin from the force despite 17 misconduct complaints over nearly two decades, culminating in the entire world watching as he knelt on George Floyd’s neck for almost nine minutes.

So, the reforms didn’t save George Floyd, but did they save anyone else? Kaba doesn’t think to ask. We should also ask if Kaba really believes police tactics haven’t improved at all since 1894, the date of her first example of a failed reform. Pinker, in the same footnote he uses to cite Kaba’s article, refers to a quantitative analysis of how policing affects crime that avoids the all-or-nothing fallacy he’s discussing in this section of his book. It paints a more optimistic, though by no means Panglossian, picture. 

            BLM, CRT, fallacies running rampant in journalism and higher education, police abolitionism—are you noticing a pattern? The only thing missing is cancel culture. By now, you won’t be surprised to find out McCormick faults Pinker for mentioning that topic as well (though not by name): 

Blaming universities’ “suffocating leftwing monoculture” for popular mistrust of expertise, Pinker mentions two examples in the text: University of Southern California professor Greg Patton’s removal from a course after using the Chinese ne ga, which can sound like the N-word, and testimony from unnamed personal “correspondents.” (In a footnote, he invites readers to look to Heterodox Academy, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, and Quillette—all of it—for further examples.) The very next paragraph warns of “illusions instilled by sensationalist anecdote chasing.” Doctor, heal thyself!

If you’re following along, the offending section is on pages 313 and 314. What Pinker wrote is that “confidence in universities is sinking” and “A major reason for the mistrust is the universities’ suffocating left-wing monoculture.” It’s a fine point, to be sure, but explaining mistrust of “expertise” is different from explaining mistrust of “universities.” A few high-profile cases of stifled speech at universities may just be enough to account for public mistrust, though you’d need further evidence to support the same point about expertise in general. 

That’s a minor misrepresentation, it’s true, but McCormick also fails to mention that the same footnote referring readers to Heterodox Academy, FIRE, and Quillette includes the line, “For other examples, see…” before citing: The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on College Campuses by Kors and Silvergate, Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate by Lukianoff, and The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure by the same Lukianoff and Johnathan Haidt. Who can forget the Evergreen Incident, where Bret Weinstein was threatened by a group of student protesters in the middle of one of his classes? It was all over the news. It’s covered in detail in Lukianoff and Haidt’s book, along with the case of Nicholas Christakis at Yale, who was confronted by students protesting his racism—because he and his wife Erika argued that students were capable of choosing Halloween costumes themselves without being told how not to offend each other. 

Maybe McCormick has a point, though, that fears about cancel culture are overblown because of “sensationalist anecdote chasing” by right-wing news outlets. How is this different from African Americans fearing for their lives after seeing YouTube videos of police shootings, when the numbers show they’re much more likely to be killed by someone who’s not a cop? For one thing, the numbers on police killings, though difficult to acquire and analyze*, are relatively simple compared to any effort at quantifying the risks posed by Twitter mobs or campus protesters. How many cases amounts to cause for valid concern? Another difference is that cancel culture operates on the logic of terror: activists publicly take down offenders in order to send a message to anyone else who may consider giving voice to a forbidden idea. They also send the message to other activists on how to deal with figures who don’t toe the line. I could be wrong, but I don’t think most cops are eager to have their fatal interactions with African Americans made more public.**

It should be noted too that organizations like Heterodox Academy and FIRE take it as their mission to promote diversity of opinion and protect free speech on campuses. Johnathan Haidt, one of Heterodox Academy’s founders, writes, “Nowadays there are no conservatives or libertarians in most academic departments in the humanities and social sciences.” In case you want some other sources he adds in a parenthetical “See Langbert, Quain, & Klein, 2016 for more recent findings on research universities; and see Langbert 2018 for similar findings in liberal arts colleges.” Sounds a bit monoculture-y to me. Signing on to Quillette, I had to search all of about two minutes for the tag “Free Speech,” which quickly helped me find an article about a composer who was mobbed and lost his job for criticizing arsonists at BLM protests. A continued search brought up several more cases. (I’ve actually witnessed a couple Facebook and Twitter debates firsthand that culminated in references to workplaces and threats to contact employers.)

I grant that Pinker could easily have been more precise with his citations; for instance, he could have cited FIRE’s report on the largest survey ever conducted on campus free expression, which found that “Fully 60% of students reported feeling that they could not express an opinion because of how students, a professor, or their administration would respond. This number is highest among ‘strong Republicans’ (73%) and lowest among ‘strong Democrats’ (52%).” FAIR also reports on the worrying trend of scholars being targeted and sanctioned for what was once protected speech:

Over the past five and a half years, a total of 426 targeting incidents have occurred. Almost three-quarters of them (314 out of 426; 74%) have resulted in some form of sanction.

The number of targeting incidents has risen dramatically, from 24 in 2015 to 113 in 2020. As of mid-2021, 61 targeting incidents have already occurred.

Still, Pinker’s book isn’t about free expression in schools or newsrooms. Remember McCormick elsewhere takes Pinker to task for not properly citing evidence to justify his use of a single term (doctrine). How long and in-depth does a citation need to be for a sidebar discussion in a book on a different topic?  

It’s by now a standard retort among leftists that cancel culture is a myth promulgated by outlets like Fox News. That’s why McCormick only has to nod at Pinker’s example to signal to his readers what the book is really about. The Ad Fontes Media site, which assesses outlets for their bias and reliability, puts Slate, where McCormick published his review, in the hinterlands between “Skews Left” and “Hyper-Partisan Left.” (Quillette is incidentally closer to the center on the chart.) It’s not at all hard to imagine that McCormick would think fears of cancellation are overblown, since in this single article he’s shown himself willing and eager to defend any of the left’s central orthodoxies, regardless of the cost to his intellectual integrity. As a liberal historian, he’s far less likely to run afoul of campus speech codes than, say, a behavioral geneticist or evolutionary psychologist—to name two fields Pinker often reports on. (Pinker is no conservative though; he donated to Obama’s last campaign and released an embarrassing video of himself dancing in celebration of Trump’s 2020 defeat at the polls.) 

From a Twitter discussion (commenter is not McCormick)

Why am I searching through footnote references about BLM and cancel culture in response to a review of a book about rationality? In earlier times, McCormick’s review would rightly be denounced as a politically motivated hatchet job. The thing is, though, I don’t think McCormick or many of his readers would be bothered much by this verdict. Largely as a consequence of intellectuals’ move from truth-seeking to social justice activism, the very one that Pinker and Haidt lament, it’s become far more acceptable to attack one’s fellow intellectuals on political grounds, regardless of the nominal topic of discussion. Many believe that you’re either helping to dismantle the hegemony or you’re helping to keep it in place. Pinker is allegedly doing the latter. He’s an old-fashioned modernist in a newfangled postmodern world.

So, McCormick quibbles with Pinker’s citations and I quibble with McCormick’s quibbles. What’s the point? For me, it’s the sad state of book reviewing, where McCormick can write an entire review calling Pinker out for insufficiently supporting his claims about hot-button political issues when the book he’s supposed to be reviewing is about something else entirely.*** Sure, McCormick offers up some arguments in addition to his political issues. Everyone claims to be rational, he insists, so what good can encouraging people to use reason possibly do? Everyone? Recall critical race theorist Richard Delgado’s challenge to “Enlightenment rationalism” for one prominent counterexample. Pinker answers the question himself, pointing out that many people think rationality is “overrated” because “logical personalities are joyless and repressed, analytical thinking must be subordinated to social justice, and a good heart and reliable gut are surer routes to well-being than tough-minded logic and argument” (xvi). I guess McCormick has never encountered anyone saying things like that. 

McCormick’s strongest point is that, as Pinker admits, rationality must be in the service of some preestablished goal. What Pinker points to as an example of irrationality then might simply be an instance of competing goals. Let’s take Richard Delgado as an example. He says rationality is problematic because it might get in the way of racial justice. I imagine Pinker would respond, how do you know? (See page 42 of Rationality.) Why would you assume subordinating reason to social justice will lead to better outcomes? Even if it did, how would you know the approach worked? You’d have to use the tools of reason to find out and to convince others (unless you were prepared to use coercion). Tellingly, though, in this case, Pinker and Delgado actually share the same goal; they’re simply disagreeing about the best way to pursue it. 

McCormick’s supposedly damning point about goals can really only apply to a subset of disagreements anyway. True, some people may have the goal of reinstating Trump as the president, while others have the goal of keeping him as far away from the oval office as possible. Encouraging both sides to be more rational will do nothing to settle the conflict. But isn’t getting one president elected over another a sub-goal, with the larger goal being to ensure the well-being of our nation’s children in the future. This goal too will be hampered by competing values in many areas, but it allows for at least some overlap of visions. Unless McCormick is suggesting that every instance of irrationality really reduces to differing goals, then the criticism can only apply to some disagreements and not others. The ones it doesn’t apply to can rightly be called irrelevant to Pinker’s discussion. 

One of the things about McCormick’s review that will most frustrate anyone who’s actually read Rationality is that, contra McCormick’s central thesis, Pinker spends a lot of time describing how an idea that’s irrational from one point of view turns out to be rational from another. This includes BLM: “The goal of the narrative is not accuracy but solidarity,” he writes, explaining that “a public outrage can mobilize overdue action against a long-simmering trouble, as is happening in the grappling with systemic racism in response to the Floyd killing” (124-5).

It’s also not always the case that people are aware of which of their own goals are driving them. Recall Pinker’s line, quoted above, about “a shift in one’s conception of the nature of beliefs: from ideas that may be true or false to expressions of a person’s moral and cultural identity.” I’m sure if we ask McCormick if he was being rational when writing his review, he’d say yes. But I suspect his efforts were in large part motivated by his desire to signal his leftist bona fides to the other members of his tribe. (I’m probably doing the same thing right now, just for a different tribe.) If he has these two competing goals, might he be pursuing one rationally and the other irrationally? 

Here’s the larger point: regardless of whether I can convince McCormick that his review is irrational, anyone reading the exchange can get the takeaway message that to be rational, one must try to avoid the trap of letting our desire to belong and elevate our status distort our view of the matter in question. How might you do that? Well, seeking out friendships with people holding different views could help. Engaging in honest, open debates with people with competing perspectives wouldn’t hurt. It may even be a good idea to simply ask yourself, “Is this something I believe because I’ve really looked into it? Or is it just what the people around me think I should believe? Am I trying to impress everyone by taking down some figure they dislike?” The outcome of the debate about whether McCormick’s review is rational is irrelevant as long as the goal is to help people understand the principle and apply it to their own reasoning. 

Of course, if it really were the case that Pinker’s book bursts at the seams with dubious examples of the irrationality of one political group, that would amount to a good reason to believe he had ulterior motives. But we’re talking about a few passages and a handful of lines in a 340-page book. I’ve already quoted nearly all of them in this post. And he spends just as much time focusing on the reasoning behind showing up at a pizzeria with an assault rifle or storming the Capitol. The real reason McCormick likes the point about rationality serving goals, I suspect, is that it allows him to argue (mistakenly) that determining what’s rational “means choosing some values and imposing some goals.” 

That’s what McCormick wants us to believe Pinker is really up to in the pages of Rationality, imposing his values and goals, anointing himself arbiter of all things rational, and pointing readers to his own weird and dystopian vision of the world. McCormick writes,

This paradox of defining reason as a universal means while invoking it as a specific norm, which is what Pinker specializes in, has wider political implications now, much as it did in the Enlightenment. Remember the San hunters? It was one thing to appreciate their fine calculations when the point to be made was the universality of reason as a human tool. But by the time the theme of reality vs. mythology returns, late in the book, rationality has new heroes: the people Pinker identifies as W.E.I.R.D. (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic) “children of Enlightenment.” Unlike the San—indeed, unlike everyone else—these champions not only possess the tools of rationality but “embrace the radical creed of universal realism”. To them belongs an “imperial mandate … to conquer the universe of belief and push mythology to the margins,” so that a “technocratic state” can act on their rational beliefs. Welcome to Steven Pinker’s Kingdom of Ends.

Ah, the axe McCormick has come to grind is very large and very blunt indeed. Having argued that Pinker is using his discussion of rationality as a Trojan Horse to promote his goals and values, he paints a final picture of a world ruled by a bunch of the Enlightenment champion’s clones. 

If you’ll forgive me one last lengthy block quote, you can see McCormick’s distortions in action. First, it’s in a chapter titled, “What’s Wrong with People?” in which Pinker attempts to explain why it seems like people are so bad at reasoning. In one section of the chapter, he posits “Two Kinds of Belief: Reality and Mythology”, pointing out that throughout most of our run here on Earth, we humans have let the two realms peacefully coexist in our minds. This was partly because we lacked tools like telescopes and computers and sophisticated statistical methods. But part of it is simply that we lacked a commitment to applying reason to certain questions. The passage begins quoting Bertrand Russel: “It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatsoever for supposing it is true.” Pinker writes, 

Russell’s maxim is the luxury of a technologically advanced society with science, history, journalism, and their infrastructure of truth-seeking, including archival records, digital datasets, high-tech instruments, and communities of editing, fact-checking, and peer review. We children of the Enlightenment embrace the radical creed of universal realism: we hold that all our beliefs should fall within the reality mindset. We care about whether our creation story, our founding legends, our theories of invisible nutrients and germs and forces, our conceptions of the powerful, our suspicions about our enemies, are true or false. That’s because we have the tools to get answers to these questions, or at least to assign them warranted degrees of credence. And we have a technocratic state that should, in theory, put these beliefs into practice.

But as desirable as that creed is, it is not the natural human way of believing. In granting an imperialistic mandate to the reality mindset to conquer the universe of belief and push mythology to the margins, we are the weird ones—or, as evolutionary social scientists like to say, the WEIRD ones: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic. At least, the highly educated among us are, in our best moments. The human mind is adapted to understanding remote spheres of existence through a mythology mindset. It’s not because we descended from Pleistocene hunter-gatherers specifically, but because we descended from people who could not or did not sign on to the Enlightenment ideal of universal realism. Submitting all of one’s beliefs to the trials of reason and evidence is an unnatural skill, like literacy and numeracy, and must be instilled and cultivated.

Suddenly, the paradox McCormick trips over seems a lot less problematic; applying reason in some contexts is natural but applying it in all contexts is not. And what McCormick holds up as a prescriptive vision for the world turns out to be a descriptive—even somewhat humble—answer to the question of why people find rationality so difficult. 

Most importantly, McCormick dishonestly claims Pinker assigns an “imperialistic mandate” to the WEIRD—a group McCormick doesn’t seem to realize he belongs to as well—when he in fact writes that the WEIRD grant this mandate “to the reality mindset.” Pinker’s “Kingdom of Ends”—a reference to Kant’s idea that society should treat every individual not as a means but as an end unto themselves—now looks quite a bit more open-ended and far less autocratic. Is it going too far to suggest McCormick, in seeking out diverse tidbits to connect into a pattern revealing a dangerous hidden plot, must be relying on the same kind of conspiracy theory mindset that’s killing the vaccine hesitant and driving armies of Trump supporters to agitate for his reinstatement after a rigged election? 

            The reason people like Pinker and me are worried about activism invading intellectual spheres is that it undermines the trust the public once rationally placed in truth-seeking institutions. As long as universities, the editorial boards of scientific journals, and the staffs of journalistic websites openly proclaim their commitment to pursuing political agendas—no matter how well-intentioned—the public has good reason to doubt their commitment to truth and just as good reason to treat them each as just another special interest group. McCormick hasn’t written a review of Rationality so much as he’s participated in a campaign against Pinker, who many feel must be denounced because he doesn’t hold all the proper political opinions. (McCormick continues this campaign on Twitter if you’re interested.) A book reviewer should strive to represent the author’s work honestly and fairly, offering readers an accurate sense of what it’s about, how successfully the author is in meeting his goals, and what it’s like to read. McCormick’s review fails on all these counts, as you can see in comparing the passages above. Perhaps, he simply had other goals. 

*****

* Data from a recently published analysis shows that police killings have been underreported by a factor of 55.5% over recent decades. This changes the math on relative risks, but since the numbers are still so small, the outcome isn’t markedly different.

** Since I’ve already had someone complain about my “take” on BLM and police shootings, and because I fear [rationally?] being mobbed myself, let me stress here that I’m in no way giving my own personal take on these subjects here—and I don’t believe Pinker is giving his in Rationality either. The point here is to evaluate the underlying logic of some of the ideas and popular reasoning associated with the subjects. Later in the essay, you’ll find an example of how Pinker’s reasoning about BLM is more nuanced than his pointing to any single error in reasoning might suggest.

*** McCormick gave some brief, rather snarky, responses to this essay on Twitter. Most of his points were against straw men (in my opinion), but he did correctly call attention to this one line that was misleading. I complained of McCormick “bashing Pinker’s politics” throughout his review; he doesn’t. I’ve revised the line to be more precise and correct the error.

Also read:
THE FAKE NEWS CAMPAIGN AGAINST STEVEN PINKER AND ENLIGHTENMENT NOW

And:

THE SELF-RIGHTEOUSNESS INSTINCT: STEVEN PINKER ON THE BETTER ANGELS OF MODERNITY AND THE EVILS OF MORALITY

And:

NAPOLEON CHAGNON'S CRUCIBLE AND THE ONGOING EPIDEMIC OF MORALIZING HYSTERIA IN ACADEMIA

Violence in Human Evolution and Postmodernism's Capture of Anthropology

Anytime a researcher publishes a finding that suggests violence may have been widespread over the course of human evolutionary history, you can count on a critical response from one of just a few anthropologists. No matter who the original researcher is or what methodological and statistical approach are applied, one of these critics will invariably insist the methods were flawed and the analysis fails to support the claim. To be fair, these critics do have a theoretical basis for their challenges. By their lights, violence, especially organized, coalitional violence, emerged in complex societies as the result of differential access to prized resources. Hunter-gatherers and horticulturalists tend to roam widely, so they don’t accumulate much by way of property over their lifespans, which means there’s nothing much for them to fight over—at least according to the theory.

But these anthropologists also openly admit to a political agenda driving their engagement in the controversy. The idea that violence was rampant over the course of human evolution could imply that humans evolved to be violent—that violence is in our genes. And, if the view that humans are innately and hence irredeemably violent is allowed to take hold, war hawks can more credibly brush aside talk of peace as naively utopian. As Brian Ferguson, the single most cited advocate of the view that our hunter-gatherer past was markedly more peaceful than our civilized present, says in a documentary about the history of controversial research among the Yąnomamö of Brazil and Venezuela, “If we’re going to work against war, we need to work against the idea that war is human nature” (36:26). In other words, these scholars see a direct line connecting the science of human violence and the politics of war. If you want peace, according to this line of thinking, you must not let the contention that violence was widespread throughout human evolution go unchallenged. 

Of course, admitting to an agenda like this opens you to accusations of ideological bias. Are scholars like Ferguson insisting the evidence of violence in the Pleistocene is weak because they genuinely believe it is? Or is it because they believe they can prevent wars by convincing enough people it is? If some new evidence clearly demonstrated their view to be in error, would they admit this publicly? Or would they continue singing the same tune about our notionally peaceful past while casting aspersions on whoever reported the new evidence? The inescapability of questions like these are what makes it so odd that anyone would admit to a political agenda in a scientific context. So how do they justify it? 

Image by Canva’s Magic Media

Anthropology is an odd discipline. The political homogeneity of people in the field has made it particularly vulnerable to the encroachment of a certain set of ideas from nonscientific disciplines. Postmodernism is rife in the field, and one of the central tenets of postmodernism is that there are more or less covert political motivations driving every intellectual or artistic endeavor. From this perspective, all the scholars proclaiming their ambition to promote peace are doing differently from their seemingly apolitical colleagues is explicitly owning up to their political agenda. 

(Many scholars, no matter how well the label fits, chafe at being called postmodernist, complaining that the term is too vague or that it’s too broad to be meaningfully applied to them. I suspect this is mostly an effort at muddying the waters, but here I’ll simply define postmodernism as a philosophy that focuses on the role of power relations—oppressors versus the oppressed—in knowledge formation and which thus encourages a high degree of skepticism toward scientific claims, especially those that can be viewed as in any way negatively portraying or impacting some marginalized or disempowered group.)

This is where the situation gets scary, because the flipside to postmodernists’ presupposition of political motives is that any researcher who reports evidence of pre-state conflict or any theorist who emphasizes the role of violence in human evolution must likewise have an agenda—to promote war. This must be true even if the anthropologist in question explicitly denies any such agenda. Here’s Douglas Fry in an interview with Oxford University Press:

When the beliefs of a culture hold that humans are naturally warlike, people socialized in such settings tend to accept such views without much question. Cultural traditions influence the thinking and perceptions of scientists and scholars as well. I suspect that one reason that retelling this erroneous finding is so common is that it supposedly provides “scientific confirmation” of the warlike human nature view.

The specific “erroneous finding” Fry refers to is that Yąnomamö men who kill in battle father more children than those who never kill anyone. It was published by Napoleon Chagnon in Science, and Ferguson promptly responded with his criticisms, which Fry insists completely undermine Chagnon’s analysis. Whether the finding has truly been overturned is contested to this day, but Fry’s interview demonstrates a common pattern: Yes, of course, the evidence proves the findings about violence wrong, the postmodern anthropologist will claim, but just for good measure let’s also indict the anthropologist who reported them for his complicity in perpetuating a culture of war. They never seem to realize that the second part of this formula undermines the credibility of the claim made in the first. 

Chagnon’s Findings on Unokai (Killers)

Whether you accept the proposition that politics percolates beneath the surface of all forms of intellectual discourse, you can see how the postmodern activist stance provides a recipe for overly politicized debates, where instead of arguing on the merits of competing views, scholars are enjoined to imagine they’re engaged in righteous combat against their morally compromised colleagues. If you’re more of a traditional scientist, meanwhile—i.e., if you don’t take postmodernism seriously—then the sanctimonious tone taken by your detractors will strike you as evidence of an ideological commitment to sweeping inconvenient evidence under the rug.  

If you’ve ever debated someone who insists on arguing against your presumed ideological agenda while completely ignoring major parts of the case you’re actually making, you know how maddening and futile such exchanges can be. Indeed, many of the rules of scientific discourse—rules postmodernists believe only serve to allow justifications for oppression to fly in under the radar—exist to help intellectual rivals avoid the deadlock of competitive mind-reading and the attribution of sinister motives. Nonetheless, many scholars today take it for granted that science not only can coexist with postmodernism but that science needs postmodernism to prevent the reemergence of evils like eugenics, scientific racism, or colonialist exploitation. What they don’t understand is that you can’t take in the Trojan horse of an idea like ulterior agendas without opening the gates to the entire army of postmodern tenets. Once you let morality or politics or ideology into the debate, then that debate is no longer scientific; there’s no having it both ways. 

Ah, but the postmodernist critic will object that it’s impossible not to let politics and ideology into any debate. Pure objectivity is a fantasy. So, if hidden agendas and biases are going to continue operating despite our best efforts, we may as well call them out. And, having exposed them to the light of day, we may as well admit that our disagreement is as much political as it is scientific. As Allison Mickel and Kyle Olson write in a 2021 op-ed for Sapiens titled “Archaeologists Should Be Activists Too,” 

There are still some who argue that scientists maintain their authority only when they remain objective, separate from current political concerns. Many academics have decried this view for decades, demonstrating that fully objective science has always been more of a myth than a reality. Science has always been shaped by the contemporary concerns of the time and place in which research occurs.

This brings us back to the permissibility, even the moral necessity, of infusing our science with postmodernism. 

But this point rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of science. The point was never to thoroughly eradicate bias or to deny that individual perspectives are always shaped by forces beyond the individual’s awareness. The point is that by taking measures to reduce bias we can engage in more fruitful discussions that are more likely to lead to real insights and discoveries. True, bias can never be fully eliminated. Nor can pathogens ever be thoroughly annihilated from an operating theater. That doesn’t mean anyone should undergo surgery in a gas station bathroom. Seeing countless scientific debates degrade into petty moralizing and name-calling free-for-alls between tribalized groups of intellectuals for the past decade on social media ought to have convinced us all that at least trying to stick to the facts while avoiding ad hominem attacks has a lot to recommend it. 

The public trusts science—insofar as this is still true—precisely because scientists make a point of examining evidence as objectively as humanly possible while doing whatever they can to minimize bias. But, once scientists start proclaiming their activist agendas, they forfeit that trust, giving the public no reason to see scientists and scientific institutions as any different from all the other special interest groups vying for attention and resources. Indeed, this loss of trust is already well underway, as the Covid-19 pandemic made abundantly clear.

There are at least two other major problems with the melding of postmodernism onto science. The first is that, while it may be true that we all operate on unconscious beliefs and agendas, there currently exists no method that’s even remotely reliable for determining what those beliefs and agendas are. If you accuse some anthropologist of reporting on the violence she observed among the people she’s studying merely because she favors military expansionist policies, you can expect her to reply that, no, she’s simply telling everyone what she witnessed. How, without resorting to spectral evidence, would you then go about establishing that she in fact doesn’t know her own true motivation? How can others check the work you put into uncovering this hidden agenda? The awkward reality is that postmodern anthropologists routinely insist that their rivals have some reactionary agenda even when those rivals are on record supporting progressive causes. 

To see how catastrophically the attribution of unconscious motives can go awry, take a look at some of the earliest theories about the inner workings of the mind from the turn of the last century. Freud can be credited with the revelation that much of what goes on in our minds is outside of our awareness. But nearly every theory he put forth based on that revelation turned out to be wrong—and in the most grotesque ways. As the theory of the Oedipus Complex, which posits that infant boys want to kill their fathers and marry their mothers, ought to make clear, without sound methods for examining the contents of our unconscious minds, all this speculation about hidden biases and motivations all too easily morphs into fodder for the formation of cultic beliefs. 

The postmodernist anthropologists counter this point by insisting they’re not interested in the contents of individual minds. Rather, they’re interested in the impact those individuals’ actions and statements have on society. Whether, say, Napoleon Chagnon really intended to bolster the rationale for sending troops to Southeast Asia is beside the point. His case for widespread violence in human evolutionary history had that effect regardless of his intentions.

But did it really?

Leaving aside the question of whether someone should be held morally accountable for outcomes he didn’t intend, we still must ask how the postmodernists know what the impact of an idea will be—or has been. How do they know Chagnon’s work had the effect they claim it had? Is there any evidence that Kennedy or Johnson or any of the top generals were even aware of Chagnon’s work among the Yąnomamö? (His infamous paper on Yąnomamö warriors having more children wasn’t published until 1988.) Are there any survey data tying beliefs about pre-state warfare to voting behavior? As is the case with their efforts at revealing an individual’s unconscious motives, the absence of any viable methods for examining the societal impact of ideas essentially gives postmodern critics a blank check to assert whatever’s on offer from their darkest imaginings.  

This leads into the next flaw in the campaign to blend postmodernism with science. The connection between beliefs about human nature and the political or moral convictions one holds is hardly straightforward. Personally, I’ve gone back and forth on the issue of how violent our Pleistocene ancestors were, but I have never, and would never vote for any politician campaigning on the glories of conquest. Likewise, I believe there are consequential differences between male and female psychology, but I have never, and would never vote for a candidate who insists women should be banned from certain professions because of these differences. Indeed, I hold many views that are more compatible with the conception of human nature that gets ascribed to those with conservative politics, but I’ve never voted for a Republican in my life. In this supposed contradiction, I’m far from alone. 

Survey data show that adaptationist psychologists, whose stance allegedly serves to perpetuate the political status quo, are no more likely to vote conservative than any other psychologists, all of whom tend to be left-leaning. This however isn’t to say political leanings have no connection to the beliefs of anthropologists. One large, in-depth survey showed that while people in the field are almost invariably on the left, some are much farther to the left than others. And those who identify as Radical, as opposed to Liberal or Moderate, are more likely to agree with the statement, “Foraging societies in prehistory were more peaceful.” They’re also more likely to disagree with the statement, “Advocacy and fieldwork should be kept as separate as possible to help protect the objectivity of the research.” Not surprisingly, Radicals are also more likely to agree that “Postmodern ideas have made an important contribution to anthropology.” 

One of the most recent flareups over the role of violence in human evolution was fomented by Steven Pinker’s book The Better Angels of Our Nature, which argues that the story of civilization is one of progress toward greater peace. If Western societies are becoming less violent over time, then they must have been more violent in the past. To demonstrate this, Pinker includes a graph showing what percentage of various populations likely died at the hands of other people. (Like clockwork, Brian Ferguson went on record insisting the numbers for pre-state societies are exaggerated.) Many anthropologists and native rights activists believe the publication of these figures is unconscionable. But the interesting point here is that Pinker cannot be using his evidence of pre-state violence as a justification for war, because the whole point of his book is to examine the causes of the documented decline in violence. Let me emphasize this point: Pinker argues both that violence was rampant in our evolutionary past and that we as a species are entirely capable of transcending that past. Indeed, we’re not only capable of reducing violence; we’ve been doing it for centuries. Better Angels thoroughly obliterates the notion that believing violence played a significant role in human evolution makes one a de facto advocate for war in the present. 

There are plenty of other instances of this disconnect. Anthropologist Agustin Fuentes recently raised a kerfuffle by writing an op-ed for Science about all the racism and misogyny on display in Darwin’s Descent of Man. Fuentes contends it’s important to see that even someone as brilliant and insightful as Darwin was still a slave to the prejudices of his day, which ought to make us all consider how big of a role prejudice may be playing in our own thinking. To make this point, Fuentes explains how Darwin got so much about race right: he knew no clear line separates one race from another and that no feature is found in any one race that’s absent in all the others. Most importantly, as an outspoken abolitionist, he knew that slavery is evil. Fuentes can’t hide his frustration with Darwin for getting so close without quite reaching the modern understanding of race as a social construct. What Fuentes is missing is that Darwin demonstrates that it’s not necessary to believe all races or all individuals are completely equal in every regard for one to insist that all races and all individuals should be treated as equally human. The scientific belief in group differences, or gender differences, or individual differences, contra the postmodernists, can live peacefully alongside a commitment to equal and universal human rights.

Politics can never be completely decoupled from science. Beliefs about human nature can’t be completely disentangled from moral reasoning. But the lines connecting theory to policy, or paradigm to advocacy, are seldom as straight as postmodernists would have us believe. The notion that you can improve the circumstances of indigenous peoples, or reduce racism, or make way for military drawdowns simply by criticizing intellectuals you disagree with and making accusations against them you can’t prove strikes me as childish and absurd. That’s because my own deepest intuition is that to solve a problem it’s best to first try to reach as thorough an understanding of that problem as possible. Any insistence that activism supersede science is based on the pretense of already having the very answer you’re supposedly seeking. What if humans really are naturally violent in some circumstances? Isn’t it better to honestly investigate what those circumstances are than to zealously promote a fantasy of violence being some civilization-induced aberration from our history of angelic communalism?

            For many people, the addition of a second reason to reject an idea probably makes the criticism that much more plausible. Not only is the evidence not a hundred percent airtight, but if people believe this idea there’ll be hell to pay. But scientists ought to recognize the fallacy of an argument from adverse consequences when they see it. Plenty of anthropologists catch on to this trick when it’s played by creationists: If people believe they descended from apes, they’ll start to behave as if they had. The second part may seem plausible, but it still requires evidence to establish. More importantly, the first part may be true even if the second is. Scientists trained to recognize such flaws in human reasoning ought to know focusing on the reasons you want a claim to be true does nothing but detract from your credibility. 

            If your priority when engaging in science is to seek the truth, that will be reflected in your readiness to change your mind when new evidence emerges. If on the other hand your main concern is managing what ideas make their way into the prevailing culture, then you have no right to call yourself a scientist. What you’re trying to be is some sort of preacher, but what you’re probably engaging in more than anything else is censorship. Scientists are supposed to be truth-seekers first and foremost, not social engineers. Activism is well and good, but if you mix it with science, you degrade the integrity of both. Yes, neither you nor anyone else will escape bias and cultural programming, but that should make postmodernists just as intellectually and morally humble as they demand scientists be. The best way to rein in your bias after all is to engage regularly in discourse with people who hold different views and beliefs. Given postmodernism’s woeful effect on intellectual discourse of any sort, it seems a catalyst for more, not less bias, and more, not less tribalism. 

Also read:

Just Another Piece of Sleaze: The Real Lesson of Robert Borofsky's "Fierce Controversy"

The Self-Righteousness Instinct: Steven Pinker on the Better Angels of Modernity and the Evils of Morality

“The World until Yesterday” and the Great Anthropology Divide: Wade Davis’s and James C. Scott’s Bizarre and Dishonest Reviews of Jared Diamond’s Work

Napoleon Chagnon's Crucible and the Ongoing Epidemic of Moralizing Hysteria in Academia

The Fake News Campaign against Steven Pinker and Enlightenment Now

            Steven Pinker has already been proven right on at least one of the points he raises in Enlightenment Now: “Intellectuals hate progress,” he writes in a chapter titled “Progressophobia.” “Intellectuals who call themselves ‘progressive’,” he goes on, “really hate progress.” The many acerbic responses to his book in the pages of high-brow magazines have borne this out in spades.  

            From The New Stateman and The Nation, to The New York Times, The Evening Standard, ABC Religion and Ethics, and The American Spectator, major publications are rushing to give the disgruntled intelligentsia a platform to gripe about Pinker’s woefully misguided—or loathsomely inconvenient—arguments and views. (Though, to be fair, The New York Times has also published positive reviews.) But it’s not just progressives; conservatives like Ross Douthat and Andrew Sullivan have also rejected Pinker’s paean to human progress.

            What is it precisely these intellectuals hate so much? “It’s the idea of progress that rankles the chattering class,” Pinker opines, “the Enlightenment belief that by understanding the world we can improve the human condition” (39). On the one hand, it’s shocking anyone would bother making The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, as the book is subtitled. On the other, “nothing demonstrates the case for Pinker’s book, the non-obviousness of his thesis,” the computer scientist Scott Aaronson posits, “more clearly than the vitriolic reviews the book has been getting in literary venues.”

“Nothing demonstrates the case for Pinker’s book, the non-obviousness of his thesis, more clearly than the vitriolic reviews the book has been getting in literary venues.”

— Scott Aaronson

            Indeed, you get the impression early in the book that Pinker must’ve known how uncool the values and principles he’s celebrating have become, which is precisely why he felt so compelled to write it. “I’ve noticed that everything Pinker writes bears the scars of the hostile mistranslation tactic,” Aaronson writes, in one of the alarmingly few honest and thoughtful reviews I’ve come across. “Scarcely does he say anything before he turns around and says, ‘and here’s what I’m not saying’—and then proceeds to ward off five different misreadings so wild they wouldn’t have occurred to me, but then if you read Leon Wieseltier or John Gray or his other critics, there the misreadings are, trotted out triumphantly; it doesn’t even matter how much time Pinker spent trying to prevent them.”

            Reading Enlightenment Now is both an exhilarating and a curious experience. Somehow, the many measures of improvement to the human condition seem simultaneously banal—of course, medicine has made us healthier—and beyond belief. How, for instance, can we be living longer lives with all the unnecessary medical treatments our perversely incentivized healthcare providers subject us to? What about all the mystery chemicals we absorb into our bodies through polluted air and water, or through industrially farmed produce?

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            Yet live longer on average we do—much longer. That alone is incontrovertible proof of progress, for what meaningful improvement can there be if no one survives long enough to enjoy it? And Pinker is just getting started. Still, as Saloni Dattani writes in a revealing essay comparing Pinker’s critics to counter-Enlightenment figures through the ages, “As the bearer of these glad tidings, Pinker has received no thanks from his opponents. On the contrary, they appear to resent being asked to acknowledge this news.”

An Aversion to Reason

            While the general notion that life is improving for ever greater numbers of people is counterintuitive in this age of terrorism, summary executions by police of unarmed minorities, civil war in Syria, partisan rancor hamstringing pragmatic policy, populist demagoguery, and mass shootings in schools, the numbers Pinker reports are as stark as President Trump’s incompetence. So you’d expect the intellectuals who are so rankled by the idea of progress to aim their rebuttals at Pinker’s statistics, or the methods used to arrive at them.

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            But that’s not the type of criticism these writers are equipped to level. Indeed, it’s difficult to find a single point in a single one of these reviews that engages in good faith with Pinker’s arguments as he presents them in the book. This isn’t hyperbole, nor is it a matter of different shades of meaning; the discrepancies between Pinker’s arguments and the straw men his critics so superciliously disembowel are unmistakable to anyone who reads the reviews with the book close at hand. (For reviews that are only mildly unfair but nonetheless legitimate, you can go to Nature or The Atlantic. The aggregate valance of the reviews, as calculated by Literary Hub, has been positive.)

            You might say the mark of a comprehensively researched and presciently argued book is that critics desperate to find fault, any fault, with it are forced to pretend that the author never wrote certain of the passages and chapters contained within its pages, or that he wrote them in some way other than the way he did. Conversely, it’s the mark of a sloppy—or dishonest—critical review that all the main points can be fatally refuted via reference to relevant passages from the book in question.

            In the spirit of this principle, the editors of the publications referenced above owe their readers an apology for their reviewers’ many blind spots, inaccuracies, and mischaracterizations. Even more, the authors of these pseudo-reviews ought to be held to account for their wantonly unscholarly antics. As Aaronson notes, these reviews can’t even be classified as serious scholarship. We’re left wondering why on earth an intellectual would be so eager to forfeit his or her status as an honest and careful reader of books they’re so publicly discussing, especially since the inaccuracies and mischaracterizations are egregious enough to be perfectly plain to anyone who gets around to doing any cross-referencing.

            But when you take into account that these reviewers are attempting to undermine Pinker’s case for reason and science, it’s no wonder they’re so comfortable heaping their scorn on straw men. The debate, in their eyes, isn’t about discovering any truth, as only the most naïve understanding of scholarly pursuits might lead us to presume. The point is rather to persuade as many readers as possible to accept the ideas the reviewer already knows to be true. As Dattani points out:

            It is worth noticing that Pinker’s most trenchant critics are eager to flaunt their aversion to the very values Pinker sets out to defend – reason, science, humanism, and progress – and that their critiques display the traits and tics of exactly the kind of counter-Enlightenment thinking he attacks. These counter-Enlightenment trends include Catholic, Romantic, and Postmodern modes of thought which stand – and have always stood – in opposition to the values that Pinker’s book credits with the vast advances humankind has made since the 18th Century.

            But none of these critics defends or even avows any of the modes of thought they’re de facto espousing. The self-appointed champions of an alternative to Enlightenment values never bother offering, well, any alternative to reason or science, much less to humanism and progress.

            The irony is that Pinker’s most hostile reviewers bitchily bemoan our nation’s base consumerism, its misinformed politics, and its history of violence, even as they’re plying rhetorical tactics straight from the domains of marketing and campaign PR (the modern euphemism for propaganda) in an effort to silence an intellectual rival making a case for a dissenting view—or at the very least to ensure as few people as possible believe that view is worth hearing out.

            Reading reviews like John Gray’s, you can’t help experiencing a visceral discomfort at the injustice of the myriad distortions. Aaronson, catching Gray out in one particularly glaring misrepresentation, vividly captures the feeling: “You see, when Pinker says he supports Enlightenment norms of reason and humanism, he really means to say that he supports unbridled capitalism and possibly even eugenics. As I read this sort of critique, the hair stands on my neck, because the basic technique of hostile mistranslation is so familiar to me. It’s the technique that once took a comment in which I pled for shy nerdy males and feminist women to try to understand each other’s suffering, as both navigate a mating market unlike anything in previous human experience—and somehow managed to come away with the take-home message, ‘so this entitled techbro wants to return to a past when society would just grant him a female sex slave.’”

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            This “hostile mistranslation” provides a good illustration of why reason and humanism tend to go hand-in-hand. Without recourse to reliable methods for assessing the truth or falsity of an accusation, we’d all be vulnerable to whatever verdict is shouted from the highest platform through the biggest loudspeaker. It is this very failure to insist on the primacy of reason and science that has paved the way for fossil fuel companies to convince nearly half of Americans that the damage their products wreak on the climate is entirely fictional, a political weapon wielded by the big-government left. It’s this same failure that paved the way for the election of a conman to the highest office in the land.

Demagoguery to Fight Demagoguery

            The most seemingly substantive criticism the critics level against Pinker isn’t that he gets the numbers wrong—though they each have their pet causes they fault him for giving short shrift—but rather that he gets the Enlightenment wrong. Gray penned one of the earliest reviews, and his successors latched on to it as a useful template—or, more accurately, a good list of talking points for their campaign message. Gray writes:

you don’t need to bother about what the Enlightenment was actually like. By any standards, David Hume was one of the greatest Enlightenment thinkers. It was the sceptical Scottish philosopher who stirred Immanuel Kant – whose well-known essay on Enlightenment Pinker quotes reverently at the start of the book – from what Kant described as his “dogmatic slumber”. Pinker barely mentions Hume, and the omission is not accidental. He tell us that the Enlightenment is defined by a “non-negotiable” commitment to reason. [sic]

            Yet in A Treatise of Human Nature (1738), Hume wrote: “Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” Hume believed being reasonable meant accepting the limits of reason, and so too, in quite different ways, did later Enlightenment rationalists such as Keynes and Freud. Pinker’s Enlightenment has little in common with the much more interesting intellectual movement that historically existed.

            First, some context: David Hume is famous for his argument that you can’t derive moral values from knowledge, no matter how thoroughgoing, of the facts of the world. You can’t get ought from is. In the line Gray and so many of his fellow propagandists quote, Hume is in no way suggesting that reason isn’t worth its salt; he’s merely saying that it should be applied in service of values we already hold. Not only is he not denying the power or importance of reason; he’s implying the existence of values and passions that arise from our shared nature as humans. There’s no missing Pinker’s allusion to Hume when he explains, “It is humanism that identifies what we should try to achieve with our knowledge. It provides the ought that supplements the is” (410).

“Save 300 million people from smallpox, and you can expect in return a lecture about your naïve and arrogant scientistic reductionism.”

— Scott Aaronson

            The larger point is that even if Gray had found a lone philosophe who wrote something counter to what Pinker points to as the main takeaways of the Enlightenment, it still wouldn’t undermine the case he makes in his book. “The era was a cornucopia of ideas,” Pinker avers, “some of them contradictory, but four themes tie them together: reason, science, humanism, and progress” (8). Prior to the Enlightenment, people sought the truth in holy texts, and they adopted the policies enforced through political and religious authority of the sort critics like Gray aspire to harness for themselves. To effectively counter the notion that the Enlightenment was characterized by the elevation of reason above revealed truth and political authority, you’d need more than a quote or two. Hume, after all, wasn’t pronouncing on the proper relationship between reason and the passions based on his analysis of Bible verses. He was expressing a position he arrived at through the application of reason. Cherry-picking philosophers or citing quotes out of context is simply encouraging readers to concentrate on the trees so they miss the forest.

            To find the passage that best evidences Gray’s simple dishonesty, though, you need look no further than Pinker’s chapter titled “Reason,” in which he writes:

            By now many people have become aware of the research in cognitive psychology on human irrationality, explained in bestsellers like Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow and Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational. I’ve alluded to these cognitive infirmities in earlier chapters: the way we estimate probability from available anecdotes, project stereotypes onto individuals, seek confirming and ignore disconfirming evidence, dread harms and losses, and reason from teleology and voodoo resemblance rather than mechanical cause and effect. But as important as these discoveries are, it’s a mistake to see them as refuting some Enlightenment tenet that humans are rational actors, or as licensing the fatalistic conclusion that we might as well give up on reasoned persuasion and fight demagoguery with demagoguery.

            To begin with, no Enlightenment thinker ever claimed that humans were consistently rational. Certainly not the über-rational Kant, who wrote that “from the crooked timber of humanity no truly straight thing can be made,” nor Spinoza, Hume, Smith, or the Encyclopédistes, who were cognitive and social psychologists ahead of their time. What they argued was that we ought to be rational, by learning to repress the fallacies and dogmas that so readily seduce us, and that we can be rational, collectively if not individually, by implementing institutions and adhering to norms that constrain our faculties, including free speech, logical analysis, and empirical testing. (353)

Projecting Stereotypes

            Interestingly, heartbreakingly, Pinker’s list of cognitive traps in this passage can serve as a helpful map of the tactics implemented by the anti-Enlightenment campaigners. The instances of violence they cite as supposedly undermining the general trend of pacification is an example of extrapolating from anecdotes, as is the lone quote from Hume about the proper role of reason.

            The stereotyping comes in the form of lumping Pinker in with other historical figures who’ve had superficially similar ideas. Suggesting that Pinker is making essentially the same arguments as Herbert Spencer, the father of Social Darwinism, Gray writes,

Pinker is an ardent enthusiast for free-market capitalism, which he believes produced most of the advance in living standards over the past few centuries. Unlike Spencer, he seems ready to accept that some provision should be made for those who have been left behind. Why he makes this concession is unclear. Nothing is said about human kindness, or fairness, in his formula. Indeed, the logic of his dictum points the other way.

Pinker’s position is far more nuanced than Gray is making out here, and the comparison between Pinker’s advocacy for free markets and Spencer’s ideas about evolution is just silly. But Gray not only compares them; he conflates them so he can apply the well-earned ire toward Spencer that’s been building up over the past century and a half to this new bête noire.

            Any stereotype stretched to contain both Spencer and Pinker will inevitably be forced into the realm of loftiest, vaguest abstraction, as in the observation that everyone fitting the category believes in both evolution and progress. How many others would answer to this description? Would Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton? But where does Pinker really come down on the topic of economics? Is he an apologist for the one percent? “The facts of human progress strike me as having been as unkind to right-wing libertarianism as to right-wing conservatism and left-wing Marxism,” he writes. The passage that follows this line illustrates the futility of trying to fit Pinker into any ideological stereotype:

            The totalitarian governments of the 20th Century did not emerge from democratic welfare states sliding down a slippery slope, but were imposed by fanatical ideologues and gangs of thugs. And countries that combine free markets with more taxation, social spending, and regulation than the United States (such as Canada, New Zealand, and Western Europe) turn out to be not grim dystopias but rather pleasant places to live, and they trounce the United States in every measure of human flourishing, including crime, life expectancy, infant mortality, education, and happiness. As we saw, no developed country runs on right-wing libertarian principles, nor has any realistic vision of such a country ever been laid out.

            It should not be surprising that the facts of human progress confound the major -isms. The ideologies are more than two centuries old and are based on mile-high visions such as whether humans are tragically flawed or infinitely malleable, and whether society is an organic whole or a collection of individuals. A real society comprises hundreds of millions of social beings, each with a trillion-synapse brain, who pursue their well-being while affecting the well-being of others in complex networks with massive positive and negative externalities, many of them historically unprecedented. It is bound to defy any simple narrative of what will happen under a given set of rules. A more rational approach to politics is to treat societies as ongoing experiments and open-mindedly learn the best practices, whichever part of the spectrum they come from. The empirical picture at present suggests that people flourish most in liberal democracies with a mixture of civic norms, guaranteed rights, market freedom, social spending, and judicious regulation. As Pat Paulsen noted, “If either the right wing or the left wing gained control of the country, it would fly around in circles.” (365)

Confirmation Bias

            Falling prey to the human weakness for “seeking confirming and ignoring disconfirming evidence” for cherished beliefs, the anti-Pinker propagandists go in for the simple tactic of disparaging the very idea of keeping score. Gray for instance writes,

To think of the book as any kind of scholarly exercise is a category mistake. Much of its more than 500 pages consists of figures aiming to show the progress that has been made under the aegis of Enlightenment ideals. Of course, these figures settle nothing. Like Pinker’s celebrated assertion that the world is becoming ever more peaceful – the statistical basis of which has been demolished by Nassim Nicholas Taleb – everything depends on what is included in them and how they are interpreted.

Are the millions incarcerated in the vast American prison system and the millions more who live under parole included in the calculus that says human freedom is increasing? If we are to congratulate ourselves on being less cruel to animals, how much weight should be given to the uncounted numbers that suffer in factory farming and hideous medical experiments – neither of which were practised on any comparable scale in the past?

Sure, people are living longer, but a lot of them are incarcerated or on parole. Sure, we’re being kinder to some animals some of the time, but there’s factory farming and animal testing to consider.

            Gray doesn’t bother citing figures, because to him figures are meaningless, like the size of a crowd at a presidential inauguration. They can all be waved aside in the same manner that Taleb “demolished” the statistical underpinnings of any belief in declining violence—except Taleb’s actual argument wasn’t focused on the decline in violence per se but rather on the likelihood that another major war would break out (meaning he too mischaracterized Pinker’s position). It should be noted as well that while Taleb has won notoriety, along with some ridicule, for his alternative statistical methods, he is by no means recognized by anyone as an expert in warfare, mathematical or otherwise. The people who study these things for a living aren’t convinced he’s demolished anything.

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            But even if we grant Gray’s points against progress as valid—though they obviously require far more analysis—would they tip the balance in favor of a gloomier outlook for modernity? Here are the areas where Pinker presents well-documented and widely accepted evidence of improvement: lifespan, health, sustenance, wealth, inequality, the environment, peace, safety, terrorism, democracy, equal rights, knowledge, quality of life, and happiness. Inequality, the environment, and happiness are more complicated cases. But eradicating diseases like polio and small pox, while finding ways to save billions of people in underdeveloped nations from starving, is nothing to sneeze at—or sneer at. If sizeable portions of the population are imprisoned, they must be doing reasonably well for themselves behind bars. Once again, Aaronson has the best rebuttal to such glib dismissals of progress when he writes about the “colossal incomprehension and ingratitude” shown by the Enlightenment’s scholarly beneficiaries: “Save 300 million people from smallpox, and you can expect in return a lecture about your naïve and arrogant scientistic reductionism.”

Loss Aversion and Zero-Sum Games

            This charge of scientism, echoed by nearly all the critics, brings us to the cognitive trap of dreading harms and losses more than prizing benefits and gains. By scientism, the critics mean the belief that science is the only way to address any question of import. Indeed, Pinker does advocate for more quantification and hypothesis-testing in the humanities and other domains of academia. Humanities scholar Peter Harrison doesn’t like this idea one bit. In a review for ABC Religion and Ethics, he writes,

            As an aside, my own prediction is that future historians, if they haven’t all been replaced by cognitive psychologists, will regard misplaced faith in data, metrics and statistical analysis as the curse of the twenty-first century. Consider, for a start, the “replicability crisis” sweeping the social and medical sciences. And for those in academe, think also of the incessant and increasing demand that we measure and metricize every aspect of intellectual life. It is one of the saving graces of the humanities that it hasn’t fallen for this line, notwithstanding the undoubted insights yielded by some aspects of the digital humanities.

In the final line of his review, Harrison snarls that “if Enlightenment Now is a model of what Pinker’s advice to humanities scholars looks like when put into practice, I’m happy to keep ignoring it.”

            Dattani notes a strong similarity between modern charges of scientism and earlier arguments against C.P. Snow’s idea of a “Third Culture” brought by the likes of literary scholars like F.R. Leavis. The first culture, as Snow conceived of it, was the domain of the sciences, while the second was that of the humanities. Snow wanted there to be a place where the two cultures could meet to form a third. But Leavis and the other members of the second culture weren’t having it. Dattani observes that

Snow’s critics, like those who fret about scientism today, were unable or unwilling to think in anything other than zero-sum terms. Snow, on the other hand, recommended a positive-sum synthesis of science and the humanities that would be mutually enriching.

This zero-sum reasoning discounts what science may have to offer because it’s too wrapped up in what the humanities may have to lose. Once again, though, the important point here is that Harrison and Gray, along with nearly all the other propagandists railing against Pinker, are misrepresenting the position laid out in Enlightenment Now. Pinker himself sees the relationship between science and the humanities in purely positive-sum terms.

Snow, of course, never held the lunatic position that power should be transferred to the culture of scientists. On the contrary, he called for a Third Culture, which would combine ideas from science, culture, and history and apply them to enhancing human welfare across the globe. The term was revived in 1991 by the author and literary agent John Brockman, and it is related to the biologist E. O. Wilson’s concept of consilience, the unity of knowledge, which Wilson in turn attributed to (who else?) the thinkers of the Enlightenment. The first step in understanding the promise of science in human affairs is to escape the bunker mentality of the Second Culture, captured, for example, in the tag line of a 2013 article by literary lion Leon Wieselitier: “Now science wants to invade the liberal arts. Don’t let it happen.” (390)

But is Pinker just paying lip service to a mutually beneficial partnership? His disgust at certain strains of humanities scholarship is hard to miss. But those happen to be the strains most dismissive or antagonistic toward science. His thoughts about the Second Culture in general are more reverential. “No thinking person,” he writes, “should be indifferent to our society’s disinvestment in the humanities.” He goes on,

            A society without historical scholarship is like a person without memory: deluded, confused, easily exploited. Philosophy grows out of the recognition that clarity and logic don’t come easily to us and that we’re better off when our thinking is refined and deepened. The arts are one of the things that make life worth living, enriching human experience with beauty and insight. Criticism is itself an art that multiplies the appreciation and enjoyment of great works. Knowledge in these domains is hard won, and needs constant enriching and updating as the times change. (406)

Teleology and Voodoo Resemblance

            Harrison writes that “A final remarkable feature of Pinker’s vision is his teleological view of history - the idea that historical events are destined to unfold inexorably in a single direction.” He doesn’t have the definition of teleology quite right here, but the bigger problem is that Pinker explicitly disavows this idea early in his book:

            The Enlightenment belief in progress should not be confused with the 19th-century Romantic belief in mystical forces, laws, dialectics, struggles, unfoldings, destinies, ages of man, and evolutionary forces that propel mankind ever upward toward utopia. As Kant’s remark about “increasing knowledge and purging errors” indicates, it was more prosaic, a combination of reason and humanism. If we keep track of how our laws and manners are doing, think up ways to improve them, try them out, and keep the ones that make people better off, we can gradually make the world a better place. Science itself creeps forward through this cycle of theory and experiment, and its ceaseless headway, superimposed on local setbacks and reversals, show how progress is possible. (11)

            So the critics asininely accuse Pinker of teleological thinking, but do they engage in it themselves? Teleology, in its strictest sense, means the explanation for how something came to exist lies in the function it currently serves. It can also mean that something is developing toward some predetermined end, the idea Harrison wrongly attributes to Pinker’s understanding of history.

“Snow’s critics, like those who fret about scientism today, were unable or unwilling to think in anything other than zero-sum terms. ”

— Saloni Dattani

            I have to credit the propagandists with mostly avoiding this pitfall. Certain postmodern scholars do tend to intimate, or argue outright, that the evil ends to which science has historically been put are somehow inherent to the program itself, suggesting that science is fundamentally racist, colonialist, sexist, ableist, etc. But you don’t see this level of radicalism in most of the reviews of Enlightenment Now. David Bell, for instance, after playing Gray’s game of hiding the Enlightenment in the forest of diverse philosophical statements by individual Enlightenment figures, writes,

            Pinker’s problems with history are compounded even further as he tries to defend the Enlightenment against the many scholarly critics who have pointed, over the centuries, to some of its possible baleful consequences. Did Enlightenment forms of reasoning and scientific inquiry lie behind modern biological racism and eugenics? Behind the insistence that women do not have the mental capacity for full citizenship? Not at all, Pinker assures us. That was just a matter of bad science.

            Indeed, it was. But Pinker largely fails to deal with the inconvenient fact that, at the time, it was not so obviously bad science. The defenders of these repellent theories, used to justify manifold forms of oppression, were published in scientific journals and appealed to the same standards of reason and utility upheld by Pinker. “Science” did not by itself inevitably beget these theories, but it did provide a new language and new forms of reasoning to justify inequality and oppression and new ways of thinking about and categorizing natural phenomena that suggested to many an immutable hierarchy of human races, the sexes, and the able and disabled. The later disproving of these theories did not just come about because better science prevailed over worse science. It came about as well because of the moral and political activism that forced scientists to question data and conclusions they had largely taken for granted. Again, progress did not just occur because the ideals of the Enlightenment mysteriously percolated out through society.

Note that Bell here acknowledges that science didn’t bring about the various forms of oppression but merely provided a new language for justifying them. As Pinker pointed out in Better Angels, “Though the United States and other Western nations are often accused of being misogynistic patriarchies, the rest of the world is immensely worse” (413). These injustices are probably as old as humanity, so it’s no wonder it’s taken our species centuries to outgrow them, even when we should know better. Bell also tacitly credits “better” science with having at least some role in disproving oppressive theories when he insists their demise needed help from political activists.

            The last line of this passage from Bell is, however, a non sequitur. His main problem with Pinker is that he doesn’t give sufficient credit for societal progress to political thinkers and activists. “Almost entirely absent from the 576 pages of Enlightenment Now ,” he writes, “are the social movements that for centuries fought for equal rights, an end to slavery, improved working conditions, a minimum wage, the right to organize, basic social protections, a cleaner environment, and a host of other progressive causes.” And Bell takes Pinker’s admonition against politicizing debates as another dig at activism. Pinker does write far more about activist movements in his previous book, Better Angels. But Enlightenment Now is about the ideas driving the activism, not the activists themselves. Still, Pinker does discuss the movements Bell claims he’s neglected. In a section defending humanism from critics who claim it’s too similar to utilitarianism, he writes that

this approach to ethics has an impressive track record of improving human welfare. The classical utilitarians—Cesare Beccaria, Jeremy Bentham, and John Stuart Mill—laid out arguments against slavery, sadistic punishment, cruelty to animals, the criminalization of homosexuality, and the subordination of women which carried the day. Even abstract rights like freedom of speech and religion were largely defended in terms of benefits and harms, as when Thomas Jefferson wrote, “The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” Universal education, workers’ rights, and environmental protection also were advanced on utilitarian grounds. (417)

Is Bell so sure that “progress did not just occur because the ideals of the Enlightenment mysteriously percolated out through society”? At any rate, that was never Pinker’s argument. What Bell really means is that science alone can’t explain these instances of moral progress. Of course, Pinker never claimed that it could: “Science,” he states explicitly, “is not enough to bring about progress” (410). That’s why he includes humanism on his roster of enlightened values.

            So the propagandists aren’t quite guilty of teleology, but what about voodoo resemblance? An uncannily large number of the propagandists couldn’t resist comparing Enlightenment Now to a TED Talk, the implication being that the book is aimed at the cheap seats—despite its daunting length. Never mind that Nobel laureates like Daniel Kahneman have given TED Talks, along with scientists like Jennifer Doudna, a coinventor of the CRISPR Cas9 gene-editing technique. These lectures are not to be taken seriously because they’re directed at a popular audience. Bell even takes this tactic a step further by comparing Pinker to the novelist Dan Brown. You don’t get any more low-brow than that! What’s the basis of this comparison? Bell writes,

            Enlightenment Now is not a book that deserves a wide readership, but much like Dan Brown’s new novel, Origin, piles of it loom wherever books are sold. Oddly, Enlightenment Now has several points in common with Origin. They both, for instance, have long, windy passages musing about the relationship of the second law of thermodynamics to the meaning of life. Brown, riffing on the work of Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist Jeremy England, proposes that life is “the inevitable result of entropy. Life is not the point of the universe. Life is simply what the universe creates and reproduces in order to dissipate energy.” Pinker, alternately, believes that the “ultimate purpose of life” is “to deploy energy and knowledge to fight back the tide of entropy.” The principal male characters in Origin are a wise Harvard professor and a farseeing tech mogul, and the climax is a TED Talk–like lecture in which the mogul reveals the destiny of the human race. But while Origin does little more than provide transient entertainment, Enlightenment Now may well have real influence.

I haven’t read Brown’s novel, but the lines Bell quotes suggest his character’s ideas run perfectly counter to those of Pinker’s. The similarity doesn’t extend beyond the fact that both books feature discussions of entropy, a concept Bell betrays no understanding of. Fittingly, Pinker quotes C.P. Snow taking literary scholars to task for their ignorance of science as evidenced by none other than their obliviousness of the Second Law of Thermodynamics (the one about entropy):

A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: Have you ever read a work of Shakespeare? (17)

            Reading Bell’s harebrained argument about Dan Brown, I stopped to wonder why he would go to the trouble of making such a case, which can only diminish his stature as an honest scholar. I mean, he must know his case from voodoo resemblance isn’t valid, and yet in his desperation he stoops to using it anyway. (And this post you're currently reading is by no means an exhaustive inventory of the distortions and lies.) Then it occurred to me again that Bell and the other writers of the pseudo-reviews I was reading don’t accept the case for reason and science. To them, persuasion is persuasion, no matter how it’s accomplished. The only thing that’s important is that readers are persuaded in the right direction—toward the ideas and beliefs the reviewers already know to be true and morally correct.

“No thinking person should be indifferent to our society’s disinvestment in the humanities.”

— Steven Pinker

            So another point Pinker has proven right on is that “Intellectual culture should strive to counteract our cognitive biases, but all too often it reinforces them” (48). But why is this? Unfortunately, most scholars working today subscribe to one degree or another to the tenets of postmodernism, the conviction that reality is so difficult to understand, while human motives to distort that understanding are so overwhelming, that anything masquerading as a statement of fact is really nothing but an argument for the perpetuation of the status quo. Most of these implicit arguments, the postmodernists believe, are shot through with racist, sexist, ableist, cis-gendered messages.

            While any serious scholar must acknowledge there’s a kernel of truth, variable in size, to these suspicions, the proper response is hardly to abjure any effort at objectivity, much less to insist that anyone who disagrees with your own ideas must be harboring some yen for the existing hegemonies and hierarchies. The proper response is to identify the sources of bias and strive to correct for them.

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            Yet what most scholars who profess a cynical stance toward science do is simply elevate unscientific rhetoric to the level of unassailable moral truth, a move which allows them to carry on their debates, not as any fair weighing of evidence and counterapplication of reason, but rather as something more akin to political discourse, relying on the argumentation style of electoral campaigns or PR initiatives. Scientists meanwhile rightfully recognize many rhetorical tools in the ideologue’s repertoire as logical fallacies, such as the argument from adverse consequences, and the suggestion of guilt by association, both of which are favorite tactics among postmodern scholars. Naturally enough, many readers are taken in. 

             What the cynics are doing then is little more than giving themselves a blank check to invade the minds of readers, viewers, and students with any type of argument they like, validity be damned, and the more directed at emotions and intuitions the better. It’s difficult to see this trend as anything other than backsliding to the bad old days of appealing to authority and relying on the inerrant sanctity of divine revelation.

            However much academics may lament the fake news phenomenon, the ascendance of alternative facts, and the ushering in of the post-truth era, any honest accounting would leave them no choice but to admit they played a part in laying the intellectual foundation for all three. In granting themselves license to ascribe evil motives to anyone standing across an ideological divide, they were simultaneously arming their rivals with all the same invalid rhetorical weapons they were using themselves. Now people with truly loathsome messages can hide in the fun-house hall of mirrors that is our current political environment.

            Rather than smearing and demonizing Pinker, the academic propagandists should have taken Enlightenment Now as an opportunity to reflect on what scholarship is, what it could be, what it has to offer humanity, and how it can best be conducted. Alas, many of them are too entrenched in their ideologies, too loyal to their own tribes, too concentrated on guarding the borders of their own tiny sandboxes. Let’s just hope the generation of intellectuals that succeed them will be more open-minded, more enlightened. And there is cause for optimism: Enlightenment Now, despite the fake news campaign against it, has been on the best-seller lists for a couple months now.     

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