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Enlightenment

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Enlightenment

The Enlightenment — the eighteenth-century intellectual movement centred on reason, science, individual liberty, and the authority of evidence over tradition — produced the political and epistemic institutions through which most measurable dimensions of human well-being have improved since roughly 1700. Whether these gains are fragile, self-sustaining, or already in reversal is one of the live debates in the public intellectual sphere.

Pinker’s ‘Enlightenment Now’ thesis

Steven Pinker‘s case (The Better Angels of Our Nature, 2011; Enlightenment Now, 2018; Conversations with Tyler, 2016 and 2025) is both empirical and institutional.

The empirical claim: quantifiable dimensions of human well-being — violence (interstate, civil, domestic, criminal), absolute poverty, infectious disease mortality, death in childbirth, hours of forced labour, illiteracy — have declined across most of the world since the Enlightenment, in many cases dramatically. The data are real and the trends persist through the twentieth century’s catastrophes. This is not optimism by temperament; it is empirical argument.

The institutional claim: these gains trace to the Enlightenment’s specific contributions — free inquiry (science is the instrument of secular knowledge), liberal democracy (checks and balances, rule of law, freedom of conscience), and markets with rule of law. These are not moral axioms but institutional technologies that have been tested against alternatives.

The counter-intuitive claim (most developed in the 2025 conversation): liberal enlightenment is not the natural equilibrium of human social organisation. Tribalism, in-group loyalty, deference to authority, and conformity are the default settings of a primate social organism. Liberal democracy, universal rights, and markets are ‘counter-intuitive discoveries of organised rationality,’ produced by hard intellectual work in specific historical conditions. They do not maintain themselves; they require active cultivation.

This explains why Enlightenment values are in retreat in 2025 without requiring that they be wrong, or that bad actors are stronger. The retreat is caused by the cessation of the active maintenance that any counter-intuitive institution needs — the equivalent of stopping to exercise.

The Hume distinction: Hume’s claim that reason is a slave to the passions is conceptual, not psychological. It means you cannot derive values from logic alone; you cannot get an ought from an is. It does not mean people are permanently irrational. The frontal cortex allows periodic override of passion, and this is sufficient for the Enlightenment case. Progress is not the victory of reason over passion; it is the design of institutions that channel passion toward better outcomes.

On Fermi and civilisational self-destruction: in 2016 Pinker challenged the premise that advancing civilisations converge on self-destruction. An absence of signals from other civilisations in the universe (Fermi paradox) could reflect: early filtering (life rarely arises); late filtering (civilisations destroy themselves); or silence without extinction (they don’t broadcast). Pinker’s reframe: the historical record of human civilisation gives no particular reason to expect the third option unless nuclear conflict counts as extinction.

McGilchrist’s critique: Enlightenment as left-hemisphere dominance

Iain McGilchrist does not frame the Enlightenment as an enemy, but his analysis of the drift in Western culture maps onto the Enlightenment period as the moment in which the left hemisphere’s mode of attending — narrow, focused, certainty-seeking, mechanistic — achieved cultural dominance at the expense of the right hemisphere’s broad, contextual, value-sensitive awareness.

The gains Pinker identifies (science, democratic governance, mechanistic medicine) are real. McGilchrist’s concern is the cost — not to those gains but to what was marginalised in the process: imagination, intuition, the sense of the sacred, embodied wisdom, and the kind of attending that grasps meaning rather than mechanism.

Four pathways to knowledge: science, reason, intuition, imagination. The Enlightenment brought science and formal reason into institutions; it did not institutionalise intuition or imagination to the same degree. The result is that the four-pathway map of knowledge shrank to two. ‘The most important breakthroughs in fundamental science have come from imagination and intuition, not from methodical procedure.’ Faraday’s electromagnetic field was imaginative before it was mathematical.

McGilchrist explicitly does not endorse a return to pre-Enlightenment institutions; he calls for a rebalancing of attention, not a regression. His position: the high points of Western civilisation (he cites fifth-century Athens and the German Romantic period) were moments of genuine hemispheric balance, not left-hemisphere dominance.

Lennox’s engagement: the Enlightenment’s missing diagnosis

John Lennox does not primarily frame his arguments as a critique of the Enlightenment, but the gap he identifies is structural. The Enlightenment assumed that the central human problem was ignorance — that better education, more science, and reformed institutions would resolve human dysfunction. What it could not provide was a solution to guilt, moral failure, and the desire to be something more than a rule-follower.

The pattern recurs in every Enlightenment-descended political project: liberal, socialist, and therapeutic culture all identify a problem (ignorance, inequality, psychological disorder) and offer a prescription (education, redistribution, therapy). None provides the capacity to change at the level of motivation — the power to become different, not merely to know better. See John Lennox on AI as God, Science versus Atheism, and the Return to Theism.

Le grand renversement — Lennox’s term for the current return of serious intellectuals from atheism toward Christianity (Jordan Peterson, Tom Holland, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Douglas Murray) — he reads as a recognition that the Enlightenment’s diagnostic framework was incomplete, not that its institutional achievements were wrong.

Sunstein’s account: norms without a self-generating mechanism

Cass Sunstein approaches the same maintenance question from law rather than cognitive science, and gives Pinker’s open recursion a more concrete, if still partial, answer. His claim (On Liberalism, 2025; Conversations with Tyler, 2025): liberal societies are not self-undermining — the risk runs the other way, from external illiberal and anti-liberal forces — but liberalism has no internal mechanism for generating the norms of cooperation, charity, and mutual support that a flourishing society also depends on. Liberalism does not damage those norms; it simply has no particular resources to defend or replenish them once something else starts eroding them. See Cass Sunstein on Liberalism and Rights in the Age of AI.

This locates the retreat Pinker describes in 2025 in a specific structural gap rather than a cognitive one: not a failure of attention (McGilchrist) or a missing answer to guilt and motivation (Lennox), but an absence at the level of institutional design — liberalism was built to protect individual freedom, not to manufacture the social glue that freedom’s exercise presupposes. Sunstein locates part of the threat ‘in the human heart’ itself, reading Orwell’s 1984 as secretly ambivalent about the tyranny it depicts rather than simply opposed to it — a darker supplement to Pinker’s more institutional account of retreat.

Where mainstream views differ

In defence of Pinker: the empirical progress data are real and multi-source. His critics largely dispute the causal attribution (was it really Enlightenment institutions, or demographic transitions, Pax Americana, fossil-fuel energy?), not the trends themselves. The 2025 ‘in retreat’ assessment weakens some of the earlier confidence.

Against Pinker: critics including John Gray (Enlightenment’s Wake, Black Mass) argue that Enlightenment progress narratives are themselves a form of secular eschatology — history-as-salvation story. The twentieth century’s mass murders were not pre-Enlightenment atavisms but modernist projects: technologically sophisticated, scientifically legitimated, institutionally organised. Progress is real but does not aggregate into a coherent direction; Gray reads history as cyclical, not trending.

On the counter-intuitive claim: if liberal enlightenment must be actively maintained, the question is: what does maintenance require, and who does it? Pinker’s 2025 answer is somewhat circular: maintain common knowledge of liberal norms (see Common Knowledge). But common knowledge of liberal norms does not self-generate; it requires institutions, and institutions require political will, which requires… Pinker leaves the recursion incomplete. Sunstein’s answer only partly closes it: he names the gap precisely (liberalism cannot manufacture the cooperative norms it depends on) but, like Pinker, stops short of specifying who does the manufacturing, or how, once those norms are already under attack.

McGilchrist vs. Pinker: they do not directly debate, but their frames diverge. Pinker treats human cognition as roughly adequate for Enlightenment reasoning (the frontal cortex provides the necessary override). McGilchrist treats cognition itself as the problem: the mode of attending that the Enlightenment privileges is structurally impoverished. They would interpret the same trends differently.

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