Alan Jacobs picks up on another odd feature of that Pinker essay - its apparent horror at the notion that the humanities, and particularly literature, might have any bearing on contemporary bioethics debates.
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Pinker vs. Humanism
16 May 2008 02:04 pm
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Jacobs is misrepresenting him there; Pinker was not suggesting that Kass believes in the Greek Gods (which should be obvious, raising the question of whether he was willfully misrepresenting him.)
Kass was arguing that immortality is bad, among other things because it would not allow for "seriousness and aspiration." His argument for this claim was that the Greek Gods lived shallow and meaningless lives (and some quote from a psalm). Does this have any bearing on whether human immortality would in fact be empty and meaningless.
Some bearing, I'd say, but one could just as well cite some other fictional work wherein immortal humans live wildly meaningful and fulfulling lives, and then where have we gotten? It
certainly is not any kind of evidence.
And I would argue that if your argument is relying for most of it's weight on fiction, you may be in trouble...
Obviously, you'd do so through reasoned argument. I would present an interpretation of a work of literature that I find relevant to the debate, and you would respond either by challenging my interpretation or the relevance of that work. We could locate the discussion historically in terms of the world in which the text was written, or attempt to transpose it to our current situation, or keep the two in tension.
Pinker, like the rest of the Dawkins crowd, wants to skip past all the hard work of putting together ethics and base his views in the hard truth of science. The problem is that he both fails to grasp the nature of the science that he thinks forms the basis of his argument (Jerry Fodor's takedown, linked by Jacobs is a great example, and though I don't agree with Fodor on every point, every critique of Pinker is spot on), and he fails to articulate a theory of science that could allow science to do the hard work of practical reason in any and all places.
My bioethics doesn't much resemble Leon Kass' - or most likely Douthat's or Jacobs' - but I think it's necessary to clear the floor of the selfish gene idiots before we can have a good debate.
I'd pay good money to see Ross debate Pinker in person and I'm very confident that Pinker would wipe the floor with him.
There's a passage from a great literary work that always come to mind whenever the word "dignity" gets bandied about (Eggers was raised a Catholic):
Fictionalized interviewer for MTV's The Real World: What about dignity?
Fictionalized Dave Eggers: You will die, and when you die, you will know a profound lack of it. It's never dignified, always brutal. What's dignified about dying? It's never dignified. And in obscurity? Offensive. Dignity is an affectation, cute but eccentric, like learning French or collecting scarves. And it's fleeting and incredibly mercurial. And subjective. So fuck it.
We could locate the discussion historically in terms of the world in which the text was written, or attempt to transpose it to our current situation, or keep the two in tension.
Alternatively, or at least additionally, you could state your policy preferences, what you expect the outcomes of those policies to be, and why you think those policies and outcomes are better than the ones Pinker favors. I don't think the fact that I prefer this approach to some kind of literary analysis of Brave new world makes me especially autistic or philistine.
Pinker and Dawkins believe a lot of crazy things, and have a kind of bad attitude, but I'm speechless if you think that they can't contribute to a good debate. I don't think you mean it.
Given the makeup of the council that Pinker lists (no psychologists, anthropologists, sociologists or historians), I can understand why the inclusion of literary members on the council might be frustrating.
Pinker does not have a problem with the humanities being relevant, at least not if you count philosophy as a humanity.
Pinker in this essay reminds me, to use another literary analogy, of the Laputians in Swift's Gulliver's Travel's - brilliant in his own narrow sphere, but so intellectually myopic as to be unable to think outside the constraints his field imposes on him, or even remotely see the whole picture when it comes to incorporating his work into a larger, more complex worldview. His out-of-his-rear end reasoning about why human beings read literature is particularly absurd.
I've got my issues with Leon Kass and co., but Pinker is not remotely an effective critic of their position, at least not here.
I've always wondered why Brave New World is cited as some inexorable future if we don't clamp down on cloning/abortion/free drugs/whatever. Isn't it obviously just a satire of 1920s America? Looking to it for guidance about the future is like looking to Animal Farm for pig behavior or Lolita for a scientific examination of pedophilia--completely missing the point.
Ross, I've been reading your blog because you seem like a fair-minded spokesman for conservative viewpoints, but you're not being fair-minded here in these posts on Pinker. First, I'm betting that you've presumed to judge the cogency of Pinker's critique of the Bioethics Commission essays without having actually read the essays -- yes? Second, if you can't be bothered to do that or to explain how Pinker is actually wrong, and instead are relying on links to National Review and the like to do the explaining (or maybe to do your thinking for you too), then you should at least look closely at what you're linking to and compare it with what Pinker says. If there's any hysterical hyperbole here, it's in sentences like this, from the National Review essay: "After briefly introducing the subject, [Pinker's] essay manages almost entirely to ignore the substance of the volume under consideration (taking up no particular essay in the book, for instance) and addresses itself instead to what the author imagines is a sinister Catholic conspiracy to subject the nation to a papist theology of death." He never talks about any "sinister" "papist" "conspiracy" "of death." He points out what I think most of the Bioethics Commission people themselves would probably consider a virtue: that they approach their work from the standpoint of particular religious commitments. Trying to locate those commitments in a particular institutional and faith tradition is not calling it a "conspiracy." (When similar points are made about political ideas and movements of earlier eras, it's called "intellectual history.") As to whether the ideas in questions favor death, well, (a) Pinker quotes Kass belittling health and longevity as values (were those quotes misunderstood? taken out of context? do you even known?), and (b) the Commission is a public-policy-shaping agency, which means that in a democracy it's completely fair and appropriate to point out that the policies it's advocating pose a significant risk of slowing the search for cures to diseases and thus increasing the world's total of suffering and premature death. Indeed, it sounds like the whole point of the Commission's essay collection isn't so much to deny this as to embrace and justify it by appeal to other (faith-based) values. So, Pinker is disagreeing and pointing out the downsides. Why shouldn't he?
And there's one further gem buried in the parenthesis of the sentence I quoted: the criticism that Pinker takes up no particular essay in the collection. No, but he quotes a bunch of them and looks for overall themes. That's where the "substance" is and also where the problem lies, since the issue here isn't one contributor's views but the work of a Commission. But if Pinker had focused on one or two essays, guess what the National Review would be saying? "Pinker unfairly singles out X and Y and neglects the overall themes"! Do you mean to say that you really don't recognize this as the old shell game that it is?
It's one of the interesting paradoxes of history that those people who begin by denying death will end by denying life. Consider the Manichaeans, who rejected war, carnivory and procreation with equal scorn. Consider the Buddhists. Consider the Jains. Consider Gandhi. Consider Tolstoy. Consider the people today who try to starve themselves in order to extend their lifespan. And in a much more sordid and vulgar way, consider many people today. The drive to abort as many as possible of the nation's children is of a piece with the desire to extend life and to do away with such things as war, capital punishment, etc. The more strongly people like Pinker hate death, the more strongly they also hate life.
Consider the people today who try to starve themselves in order to extend their lifespan
What in the world are you talking about?
The drive to abort as many as possible of the nation's children
Seriously, what in the world are you talking about?
Can you name a single person who believes either of these nonsensical ideas?
I don't know what Huxley intended when he wrote Brave New World, but I think the reason that it's so attractive to moral philosophers is because it illustrates the problem with hedonistic moral theories (including some forms of Utilitarianism). That is, it very vividly and persuasively demonstrates the difficulty with the claim that pleasure/happiness is the sole ultimate value.
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Tell me how to decide which science fiction novels should influence public policy. I doubt you'd be happy with appeals to Greg Egan's vision of the future, or Ron Hubbard's.
Posted by 1658 | May 16, 2008 2:57 PM