Steven Pinker's Statist Gospel

Evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker, who has saidthat he never “outgrew my conversion to atheism at thirteen,” has written atheodicy – a tract intended to validate the redemptive power of the LeviathanState. In his new book The Better Angelsof Our Nature, Pinkerinsists that humanity has “evolved to become less violent” through the ministryof elites who employ the State to evangelize on behalf of what he calls “enlightenmenthumanism.” 

According to Pinker, since the emergence of the modern secular state in the 18th century there has been a dramatic decline in primitive expressions ofaggressive violence. People who live in contemporary developed societies “no longer have to worry about abduction into sexualslavery; divinely commanded genocide; lethal circuses and tournaments;punishment on the cross, rack, wheel, stake, or strappado for holding unpopularbeliefs; decapitation for not bearing a son; disembowelment for having dated aroyal; pistol duels to defend their honor … or the prospect of a nuclear world warthat would put an end to civilization or to human life itself,” Pinker asserts. 

The precipitous decline in private violence,which Pinker heralds as “the most important thing that has ever happened in humanhistory,” is a triumph of the “social contract,” an arrangement in which political government asserts a monopoly on the “legitimate” use of force. By over-awingthose inclined toward individual acts of violence, the State supposedly suppresses“demonic” impulses – such as greed and sadism – while emancipating the “betterangels of our nature” – empathy, self-discipline, and peaceful cooperation.

"Oh Divine State, protect us from the unenlightened...."

 As is the case with most religious doctrines, Pinker’stheology of the divine State is built on a paradox – in this case the idea thatthe human tendency toward violence can be eradicated through the scientificapplication of the same by enlightened people who have supposedly transcendedsuch primitive impulses. 

Given that Pinker is one of the leading exponents ofthe “box with wires” view of the human brain, there is also a rich vein ofirony in Pinker’s unabashed use of the terms “demons” and “angels” indescribing a conflict over competing visions of morality. 

In an interview given more than a decade ago, Pinker describedhuman beings as “nothing more than a collection of ricocheting molecules in thehead.” Like others who subscribe to that view, Pinker has yet to submit a schematic explaining how morality is produced through molecular reactions.And like theologians from other traditions, Pinker is content to leave such mattersundisturbed in the unfathomable depths of mystery. This would be a perfectlyacceptable arrangement – were it not for the fact that Pinker, like fundamentalists from other traditions, embraces the use of sanctified coercion as a meansof purifying those less enlightened than he.

As a child, Pinker, says, he thought as a child, embracinganarchism at about the same time he converted to atheism. But as an adult, hehas put away childish things: “I was a Rousseauan then; now I’m a Hobbesian.”What this means in practice is that he merely abandoned one sect of totalitarianstatism for another.

Rousseau, it should be remembered, was  wasthe author of whathe called "The CivilReligion" — a doctrine that would enable themasses, in Rousseau's phrase, to "bear with docility the yoke of thepublic good." 

The most important article of Rousseau's Civil Religion was the absolute divinity of the State; the gravest transgressionwas "intolerance," which was regarded as evil not because it injured therights of individuals, but because it challenged the State's authority.

According to Rousseau, the ideal social arrangement would be a "form of theocracy, in which there canbe no pontiff save the prince, and no priests save the magistrates.... [W]hoever dares to say, 'Outside the church is nosalvation,' ought to be driven from the State, unless the State is the Church,and the prince the pontiff."

TheState would make belief in its dogmas compulsory, even as it denied it wasdoing so: "While it can compel no one to believe them, it can banish fromthe state anyone who does not believe them…..” Apostasy would be a capital offense: "If any one, after publicly recognizing these dogmas, behaves as if hedoes not believe them, let him be punished by death -- he has committed the worstof all crimes, that of lying before the law."

Rousseau believed that man --until corrupted by traditional institutions -- was intrinsically good. Thomas Hobbes– not to put too fine a point on the matter – didn’t share that opinion. He didagree that the State, as the embodiment of what could be called the “generalwill,” should combine the civil and ecclesial functions and exercise unlimitedpower to regiment the lives of its subjects. The objective wouldn’t be to savepeople’s souls, or elevate their morals, but merely to impose order.

Pinker claims to be “eclectically, non-dogmaticallylibertarian” in his political outlook. Given his unbuttoned embrace of Hobbesianabsolutism, that’s a bit like claiming to be an “eclectic, non-dogmatic vegan”while subsisting on a dietof steak tartare.  

Although Pinker began his academic career in a Montreal counter-culturalmilieu “dominated by hippies ... and US draft dodgers,” he has endorsed theexercise in State-inflicted violence called the “War on Drugs” in terms thatwould earn Hobbes’s approval:  “A regimethat trawls for drug users or other petty delinquents will get a certain numberof violent people as a by-catch, further thinning the ranks of the violentpeople who remain on the streets.”  

This process involves filling the streets with State-licensed“violent people” in military attire, and granting them a plenary indulgence to loot and terrorize the public. The “by-catch” gathered by thegovernment’s trawling net includes perfectly innocent people. But it is not ourplace to question the inscrutable wisdom of the divine State, which causes thepain to fall on the righteous and unrighteous alike.

Leviathan's "by-catch": A 71-year-old victim of a wrong-door drug raid.

 There is also the matter of quo warranto: By what authority doesthe State assault and imprison people who peacefully ingest mind-alteringsubstances? 

This is where Pinker’s Rousseauist background comes into play: It’snot necessary for subjects to understand the logic of the State’s decrees; theysimply must have faith in its bottomless competence and unalloyed goodness – orsuffer the penalty for their apostasy. 

All religious belief requires the acceptance “of thingshoped for, the evidence of things unseen.” Pinker’s dogma requires that weignore the evidence of things that are clearly visible in order to embrace hisvision of something yet to materialize. The most compelling argument againstPinker’s claim that humanity has evolved beyond violence is the systematic slaughter duringthe 20^th Century of at least 170 million people by governmentsclaiming and enforcing a monopoly on the “legitimate” use of force. 

In The Better Angelsof Our Nature, Pinker – to his credit – does recognize R.J. Rummel’s pioneeringresearch into the phenomenon of "democide." Given the body count compiledthrough war and politicized mass murder during the 20^th century, andthe persistent bloodshed in the Middle East, Africa and elsewhere, the ideathat humanity has progressed beyond violence “seems illogical and obscene,” Pinkeradmits. This is something else we simply have to take on faith as well, itappears. 

The rampages carried out by totalitarian states were atragic prelude to the “Long Peace” that has prevailed since WWII, Pinker insists.We’ve reached a point at which mass violence only among those sub-populationsthat have resisted signing on to a “social contract that [gives] government amonopoly on the legitimate use of violence.” That heathen population, he pointsout, includes Americans who reside in the southern and western states, wherepeople “retain the right to bear arms [and] believe it is their responsibility,not the government’s, to deter harm-doers.” This means that “private citizens,flush with self-serving biases, [can act] as judge, jury, and executioner….”

Of all the impious nerve! Such power can only be exercisedby those duly anointed as emissaries of the divine State – beginning with the ExaltedOne in the Oval Office, who commands the power to imprison, torture, or execute anybody  on the face of theplanet. 

In a 2007 TED lecture, Dr. Pinker urged Leviathan’s subjectsto count their blessings: A mere century ago, he pointed out, some of them mayhave been “burned at the stake for criticizing the king, after a trial thatmaybe lasted ten minutes.” Today, by way of contrast, a U.S. citizen who condemns Washington’s imperial aggression can be summarily executed by way of adrone-fired missile without the benefit of a trial. The latter approach is acceptable to at least some peopleof Pinker’s persuasion because the State’s priestly caste possesses themystical power to transubstantiate violence into “policy.” 

Although he followed a different vector, Steven Pinker, a proudly irreligious cultural Jew, has arrived at the same destination as the reactionary 18th Century Catholic writer Joseph de Maistre, who insisted that "all greatness, all power, all social order dependson the executioner; he is the terror of human society and tie that holds ittogether. Take away this incontrovertible force from the world, and at thatvery moment order is superseded by chaos, thrones fall, societydisappears." While Dr. Pinker criticizes the death penalty, his view of social order ultimately rests on the supposed authority of State functionaries to kill those who refuse to submit to them.

The modern material and ethical progress Pinker properly celebrates are not the product of State coercion. They are the result of private, mutually beneficial action based on reciprocal respect for individual rights -- in other words, the application of the Golden Rule, which Pinker acknowledges in passing while pointedly ignoring uncomfortable questions about its provenance and most notable Exponent. 

To use Pinker's categories: The impulses unleashed by the State are demonic, not angelic. 

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Dum spiro, pugno!