Back Towards The Locus

I’ve long admired John Gray, and the bracing pessimism of his Straw Dogs and Black Mass. Lately, though, I’ve felt that his campaign against the idea of human progress has become a little, er – stangant. In this month’s Prospect he casts a somewhat disdainful eye across Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature - which argues that humankind has been growing more peaceable. You will, I hope, forgive me if I indulge in that most meta of bloggish pursuits: the review of a review.

He writes…

All the trends that supposedly lie behind the Long Peace are contingent and reversible.

This is true. A few years ago I came across a book, A History of Torture, whose author warned that “surfaces changes on [human nature] are largely impermanent” and warned that “the outbreak of mass cruelty is never an impossibility”. That book was written in 1940. Even 60 years later, even in nations which pose as beacons of civilisation, this cruelty has been all too real.

On the other hand, reversible progress is still progress. We’re no angels but it’s pretty evident that we’re less barbarous than our ancestors – who, as explored by people such as Lawrence Keeley in War Before Civilisation, would kill men as easily as they’d eat steaks. And, indeed, I’ll go out on a limb and say we’re less vindictive than our witch-burning elders; less bigoted than our slave-owning forefathers and more averse to bloodshed than than the great-Grandfathers who’d drop everything – their hats n’ all – and go to war. I’m sure I’m not the only one who thinks this is valuable.

Gray also appears to underestimate the resilience of these developments. For example, illustrating the contention that “violence will surely return” he points to…

…attacks on minorities and immigrants by neo-fascists in Europe, the popular demonstrations against austerity in Greece and the English riots of the past summer…

Well, yes, but aside from an unhinged Norwegian we’ve seen no mass slayings of the untermensch, and for all the chaos of the riots in Greece and England we’ve seen no orgies of murder and rape. So, even the people who return to more barbarous states are constrained by fairly hardy inhibitions.

I’ll agree, however, that this progress has sprung from reversible trends. Thus, it’s in our interests to identify and preserve them. (It’s all very well to ponder the extent of moral progress but if it’s reversible it’s not an academic exercize. By Gray’s reckoning someone could charge in and behead me at any second.) Pinker claims that wealth has played a role but Gray offers a warning that I’m sympathetic to…

Steadily-growing prosperity may act as a kind of tranquilliser, but there is no reason to think the increase of wealth can go on indefinitely…

Indeed. And with only the descendants of Pangloss insisting that we’re in for anything but financial turbulence this is cause for concern.

Gray seems doubtful that ideas have a major role…

For a devoted Darwinist like Pinker to maintain that the world is being pacified by the spread of a particular world view is deeply ironic. There is nothing in Darwinism to suggest that ideas and beliefs can transform human life.

We’ve been here before. Me, I think ideas are very powerful. I mean, Gray notes that Pinker cites figures of the Enlightenment to show the “importan[ce] [of] the adoption of a particular view of the world” and responds…

…these are highly disparate thinkers, and it is far from clear that any coherent philosophy could have “coalesced” from their often incompatible ideas. The difficulty would be magnified if Pinker included Marx, Bakunin and Lenin, who undeniably belong within the extended family of intellectual movements that comprised the Enlightenment, but are left off the list. Like other latter-day partisans of “Enlightenment values,” Pinker prefers to ignore the fact that many Enlightenment thinkers have been doctrinally anti-liberal, while quite a few have favoured the large-scale use of political violence…

So, we have Marx and Lenin as examples of ideologues who had malign effects. But, hey, Gray, you can’t deny they had effects. As, indeed, did elements of Enlightenment humanism, which – if not, indeed, a “coherent philosophy” – helped develop and popularise concepts like rationalism, liberalism and secularism.

One might say, correctly, that ideas don’t spring from an environmental vacuum. While they’re influenced by the conditions of their time, through – and gain appeal through their responses to them – that needn’t mean they’re determined by their situation. (The state of Weimar Republic, for example, meant anti-establishment ideas with an emphasis on collectivism and comradeship seemed appealing, but they could still be as divergent as the commies’ and the fascists’.)

Such ideas, good or bad, the proceed to influence new social conditions. Promoting the helpful ones and opposing the bad is thus a crucial task. That, I guess, is why people feel moved to write long articles in magazines like Prospect.