Refuting a hoary falsehood about the elites’ favorite punching bags.
It is honestly amazing to be noticed, even if negatively, by someone of the eminence of Steven Pinker. I respect Pinker because (among other reasons) Steve Sailer, whom I also respect, respects him and has explained in terms I can understand why Pinker’s work is worthy of respect.
Pinker and I have one major disagreement (and I assume many others), which is brought out in his tweet: I have a foreboding sense of apprehension about the future; Pinker by contrast wrote two whole books arguing that now is the greatest time to be alive. What I recall of them is that Pinker’s case centers around, first, a decline in violence. Which I don’t doubt is true in many respects, though as Sailer points out, it can be made easier or harder to argue the world is less violent than it used to be depending on when you start the clock. Second, Pinker enthuses about various advances of science and technology, much of which I would have to concede, especially since I am a beneficiary and consumer of so much of it.
However, my case for pessimism—which is long and involved and so I will not here restate; but see my “A Tyranny Perpetual and Universal?” from five years ago (not updated, alas)—is fundamentally political and spiritual. And, for the record, I do think the technology that Pinker finds to be a blessing is accelerating both. Time will tell who is right, but I will repeat for the record that all the bad things I predicted in “The Flight 93 Election” came true—just not in 2017 with President Hillary Clinton, but in 2021-2025 under President Joe Biden. And that’s leaving aside the parts that were not predictions but mere observations of things that were already happening.
Pinker’s fundamental point in his tweet is that “everything is fine.” I wouldn’t expect him to think or say anything different, but he might benefit from making more of an effort to understand why many of us think everything is not fine. A political movement that can garner more than 214 million votes in eight years must be based on something.
I don’t know how familiar Pinker is with the work of David French, whom he quotes in that tweet, but I would caution a scientist of Pinker’s caliber against taking anything French says at face value. French is a propagandist for the pre-Trump (and, he hopes, post-Trump) socio-political order. His value consists in only two things: he can pose as a “conservative” while constantly knifing actual conservatives in the back, and he tells his (elite, blue coastal) readers what they want to hear, viz., that Trump supporters are mouth-breathing racist-fascists with no legitimate reasons to be dissatisfied with the (pre-Trump) reigning order. I don’t expect to change Pinker’s mind on anything, but he would be better off, as one of the last defenders of Enlightenment rationalism, not taking on faith what Trump supporters’ enemies say about us but instead trying to understand us as we understand ourselves.
Speaking of which, I would also caution Pinker against taking anything Laura Field says at face value. Pinker just yesterday tweeted that Field “explains”—that is, not argues, asserts, or alleges but “explains” something that is apparently self-evidently true, namely that “one of the intellectual foundations of MAGA” is “that the root of all evil is the West’s rejecting a universal moral order based on religion.”
As it happens, I just finished reading Field’s book in preparation to review it. I say now, with all (sincere) due respect to the world’s greatest living cognitive scientist, the above may be a fair summary of what Laura Field believes, but it is not a fair summary of what “MAGA” intellectuals (of whom she counts me as one) believe.
First of all, I am not aware that any of us believes there is one single “root of all evil.” It is a sign of Field’s uncharity as an analyst that she consistently presents all of us as borderline idiots with no sense of nuance or complexity, who present simplistic monocausal “explanations” for everything. But we actually are aware that evil has many roots, among them inexpungable human passions that humans must find ways to manage, and in some cases suppress, for there to be society and the good life.
Second—and this is especially important—we do not assert “a universal moral order based on religion,” nor do we believe “the West” ever had one. If there is one strong conviction we all firmly hold, it is that the twin pillars of the West are Biblical faith and rational argument—i.e., Jerusalem and Athens, or in the American context “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God”—both of which uphold a morality that is, if not in all cases identical, significantly overlapping. Hence “the West” could not reject something it never had. Field was trained in political philosophy by scholars who have spent their whole careers on this theme, and so she should know this. Whether she does and suppresses it to make this attack, or just doesn’t, I don’t know, but either would undermine her credibility.
Furthermore, one of Field’s chief accusations against me and my teachers and colleagues is that we fetishize the American Founding as a modern version of the classical “best regime,” which, according to Field, is absurd. Maybe so; we’ll leave that for another time. But Field surely “knows,” because the following is one of the chief tenets of her teachers (and former colleagues), that the American regime is a pure product of Enlightenment rationality. If that is so, then it cannot possibly be true that “the West” has rejected “a universal moral order based on religion,” at least not within the last 250 years, because it did not have or assert such an order. And it could not have happened before that, for as Field ought to know, modern rationalism emerged in the early 16th century. And neither could it have occurred even before that, because medieval scholasticism was a sincere attempt to synthesize Biblical (Christian) and classical (Aristotelian) teachings on morality, among other things.
For my part, this particular “MAGA intellectual” believes that America is, or was, a successful mixture of classical and modern rationalism that gives proper space and respect to religious faith. It never rested solely on “a universal moral order based on religion,” nor has any part of the West going back to ancient Greece.
Pinker went on to write that Field “could have added to this excellent exposition that in fact many secularists are in fact ‘moral realists,’ believing in a universal morality, but one that is based on reason & well-being rather than dogma and scripture.” Of this I have little doubt. This is the “Athens,” or “nature,” half of the above formulation and has been true for 2,500 years. What troubles me and many of my fellow “MAGA intellectuals”—and many of my teachers before me—is the twin collapse of these two sources of moral authority.
By “collapse” I do not mean refutation, for I do not believe either has been or can be refuted. I mean rather their repudiation by credentialed elites. Pinker will no doubt dispute this, at least the claim that elites have abandoned reason-based morality. I don’t doubt that in his case, he is correct. But what we “MAGA intellectuals” see in the broader culture are elites and elite institutions that attack every known tenet of Biblical and rational morality, celebrate every kind of degeneracy, and preach cultural relativism out of one side of its collective mouth while decreeing (and enforcing) ever-changing new rules of progressive “morality” out of the other.
But all this is of interest only to intellectuals. The real root of MAGA is the pervasive sense among at least a third of the country (and probably closer to half) that they have been getting screwed for decades, that this country’s elites despise them and want to hurt them, and that no matter what they vote for, they will always get more immigration, more war, more trade giveaways, more wokeness, and more of whatever else the progressive elites thought up yesterday but is today the world’s number one moral imperative. And if the flyover losers don’t lie back and take it, they are Hitler. This is, to say the least, annoying to a lot of people.
