The World Is Better Than Ever. Why Are We Miserable?
Earlier this week, I went to a lecture given by Steven
Pinker on his latest book, Enlightenment
Now. I’m a huge and longtime fan of Pinker’s, and his book The Blank
Slate was, for me, a revelation. He’s become a deep and
important critic of the visceral hostility to nature and science now so sadly
prevalent on the left and right, a defender of reason and the Enlightenment
against the “social justice” movements on campus, and his new book is a
near-relentless defense of modernity. I sat there for an hour slowly being
buried in a fast-accumulating snowdrift of irrefutable statistics showing human
progress: the decline of violence and war, the rise and rise of democracy, the
astonishing gains against poverty of the last couple of decades, the rise of
tolerance and erosion of cruelty, lengthening lifespans, revolutions in health,
huge increases in safety, and on and on. It was one emphatic graph after
another that bludgeoned my current depression into a kind of forced rational
cheeriness. There were no real trade-offs here; our gloom is largely
self-imposed; and is entirely a function of our media and news diets.
At
the same time, I was finally reading another new book, Why
Liberalism Failed, by Patrick J. Deneen. If you really want a
point of view that is disturbingly persuasive about the modern predicament and
yet usually absent from any discussion in the mainstream media, I cannot
recommend it highly enough. A short polemic against our modern liberal world,
it too is relentless. By “liberal,” I don’t mean left-liberal politics; I mean
(and Deneen means) the post-Machiavelli project to liberate the individual from
religious authority and the focus of politics on individual rights and the
betterment of humankind’s material conditions. Deneen doesn’t deny any of the
progress Pinker describes, or quibble at the triumph of the liberal order. It
is, by and large, indisputable. He does something more interesting: He argues
that liberalism has failed precisely because it has succeeded.
As
we have slowly and surely attained more progress, we have lost something that
undergirds all of it: meaning, cohesion, and a different, deeper kind of
happiness than the satiation of all our earthly needs. We’ve forgotten the
human flourishing that comes from a common idea of virtue, and a concept of
virtue that is based on our nature. This is the core of Deneen’s argument, and
it rests on a different, classical, pre-liberal understanding of freedom. For
most of the Ancients, freedom was freedom from our natural desires and
material needs. It rested on a mastery of these deep, natural urges in favor of
self-control, restraint, and education into virtue. It placed the community —
the polis — ahead of the individual, and indeed could not conceive of
the individual apart from the community into which he or she was born. They’d
look at our freedom and see licentiousness, chaos, and slavery to desire.
They’d predict misery not happiness to be the result.
Pinker’s
sole response to this argument — insofar as he even acknowledges it . . .
Read more at http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/03/sullivan-things-are-better-than-ever-why-are-we-miserable.html?utm_source=fb&utm_medium=s3&utm_campaign=sharebutton-b
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