Steven Pinker is an exemplary modern thinker. A naturalist enamored of reason's power to lead us to truth about the grand metaphysical questions concerning life's meaning, moral conduct and human rights, Pinker lays out his views on these critical questions in his recent work, Enlightenment Now. I'm afraid, however, that his faith in enlightenment reason and, even more, his faith in it's hold on the thinking of moderns, is seriously misplaced.
For example, Pinker claims that "liberal values are on a long term escalator" with each generation "more tolerant and liberal" than its predecessor.
I wonder what Bret Weinstein, an erstwhile biology professor at Evergreen College or Amy Wax, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, would think of that, given that both of these academics have had very unpleasant encounters with the "more tolerant and liberal" current generation. Nor have their experiences been outliers.
Tolerance and a respect for liberal values has died in many precincts of our culture and is on life support in many others. For many progressives today tolerance means agreeing with them about race, gender, abortion and sexual issues. If we agree with progressive orthodoxy on these matters, well, then, we're "tolerated." But those who disagree find themselves shouted off the stage, fired from their jobs, smeared in the media and refused service in restaurants. Such is the nature of tolerance in much of 21st century America.
Even odder is Pinker's claim that "humans are sentient, possessing of dignity and rights and infinitely precious." [emphasis mine] We are? Pinker's a metaphysical naturalist. How does human dignity derive from a metaphysics that tells us that we're just globs of protoplasm? How does naturalistic evolution, a theory predicated on survival of the fittest, ground human rights? And what on earth could possibly make us "infinitely precious"? To whom, exactly, are we precious? The State?
Pinker's just hanging these rhetorical baubles on skyhooks. Given his naturalism there's no basis for thinking we have any special dignity, no reason to think that human rights are anything more substantial than words on paper, and certainly no warrant for thinking of ourselves as infinitely precious (infinite, no less).
On the contrary, reason leads us to recognize that human beings are simply one kind of animal among others, that we have no free will, that morality reduces to egoism, or even nihilism, and that our only value is whatever value is placed on us by the collective, i.e. those in power.
What Pinker is doing, in these passages, at least, is what moderns have often done. He's deftly pilfering from a traditionally theistic worldview, plagiarizing the notions of dignity and rights - which we possess solely because we're creatures created in the image of God and loved by Him - and the notion that we're infinitely precious, which can only be true if we're precious to an infinite being. And he's pulling all these rabbits out of his hat while insisting that there is no such being.
It's a remarkable piece of philosophical legerdemain he has performed for us, but to anyone paying attention to what he's saying it's the purest flummery.