Two Cheers For Steven Pinker
One thing that really drives me off the deep end is the attitude that says science is the only form of legitimate knowledge, or the only form of knowledge worth having, and the often congruent attitude that science, if we would only leave it unfettered, can save the world. They’re two extremely myopic and lazy notions, and unfortunately I see them pop up a lot on the Left. So when Yuval Levin, Ross Douthat and Alan Jacobs started laying into Steven Pinker for his response to the collection of essays released by the President’s Council on Bioethics, I was ready to be sympathetic. Anyone who dismisses references to Greek mythology or Brave New World as beneath the consideration of Serious Scientifically-Minded People and indicative of a “disconcerting habit of treating fiction as fact” most certainly suffers from the myopia I just mentioned.
Then I actually read the thing.
Now, Pinker does make some silly arguments. His cheap shot at the aforementioned mythological and literary references – which were made by Leon Kass – is as bad as it seems, and Pinker deserves to get dinged for it. And as Jacobs points out, it is of a piece with Pinker’s apparent conviction that literature and the humanities are somehow beneath science when it comes to contributing to the moral discourse. But it actually has little to do with the bulk of Pinker’s argument.
I also cannot speak to Yuval Levin’s claim that Pinker misrepresents the internal deliberations of the Council, but he brushes aside Pinker’s concern about the ideological tilt of the Council far too easily for my lights. I am sorry, but there is a big difference between merely “mentioning the Bible” and what Pinker describes as essays “that assume the divine authorship of the Bible, that accept the literal truth of the miracles narrated in Genesis (such as the notion that the biblical patriarchs lived up to 900 years), that claim that divine revelation is a source of truth, that argue for the existence of an immaterial soul separate from the physiology of the brain, and that assert that the Old Testament is the only grounds for morality.” If Pinker is misrepresenting that as well, great, let’s here about it. But all Levin offers in rebuttal is the lame excuse that, in comparison to its predecessor under Clinton, the Council spent less time “considering any explicitly religious views or discussing religious issues.” That’s also a great deal of Bible-talk Pinker cites for Levin to claim that the Council “in no way sought to ground any positions, arguments, or recommendations in religion.” If your essay views the Bible as divinely authored, then I think the average person would call that grounding your arguments religiously. Same with calling the Old Testament the only grounds for morality, even if you don’t think the Old Testament is divine, strictly speaking. I could be wrong, but my guess is that Levin is doing some serious hair-splitting here.
Even if I did trust Levin’s opinion on what does and does not constitute acceptable uses of religion in such a debate, which I don’t, I do not find it comforting that we’ve simply gone from bad to not-quite-as-bad. Also, in the end the buck still stops with the president, and Bill Clinton, unlike George W. Bush, never called Richard John Neuhaus – the founder of the theoconservative magazine First Things and one of Leon Kass’ major ideological compatriots – “Father Richard” as far as I know. As Pinker says, “institutional affiliation does not entail partiality, but, with three-quarters of the invited contributors having religious entanglements, one gets a sense that the fix is in.” Yes, one does. And I say that as someone who is religiously entangled myself. Levin may want to think again about how the makeup of the Council looks to someone who does not share his worldview.
And yes, Pinker should have made clear that the passage he cites by Kass upbraiding the practice of licking ice-cream cones (“This doglike feeding, if one must engage in it, ought to be kept from public view, where, even if we feel no shame, others are compelled to witness our shameful behavior”) did not come from the essays but was lifted from another of Kass’ works. But of course, this does not change the fact that Kass did say it, and that it is quite literally an insane sentiment – as is a worrisome amount of what Kass says, due to his tendency to confuse pure symbolism with essentialist moral substance. Licking an ice-cream cone may bare a certain visual resemblance to a dog lapping at water, but that is an observation that tells us absolutely nothing about anything. Nor does the oversight change the fact that the placement of a man who makes such arguments at the head of the President’s Council on Bioethics should be setting off alarm klaxon’s far and wide.
And how about that dignity? Here is one of Jacobs’ main complaints against Pinker’s essay:
Pinker is exercised by the fact that Padre Kass and some of the the other monks and nuns of the Council think that human beings possess intrinsic dignity. Au contraire, says Pinker, finger held aloft, “Dignity can be harmful.” And why is that? Because “Every sashed and be-medaled despot reviewing his troops from a lofty platform seeks to command respect through ostentatious displays of dignity.” There you have it: Stephen Pinker actually thinks that the dignity assumed by tyrants is the same thing that Kass et al. are writing about. What a shock Pinker will receive when, someday, he opens a dictionary and discovers that some words have more than one meaning.
What Jacobs fails to mention is that Pinker’s point comes in the larger context of a few paragraphs laying out how scattered and even self-contradictory the concept of dignity is as it currently functions in bioethics. At least by my reading, the multiple meanings to be found in Jacob’s dictionary of this particular word, Pinker is saying, is precisely the point and precisely the problem. It is not that the dignity defended by Kass and the Council is the same as the dignity invoked by the dictator, but merely that – by the Council’s own admission, no less – the concept of dignity remains so nebulous that the dictator’s version would have as equal a claim to bioethical enforcement as any other. And given that a conception of dignity need not go as far as the dictator’s in order to still be inexcusably authoritarian, it’s worth remembering that the theocon crowd in which Kass runs has been arguing for a stifling, regimented and ugly theocracy-lite approach to American society and government. As they say, the best cure for a bad argument is a good counter-argument, and I’d much prefer that the bad arguments get spiked early and forcefully, as opposed to letting them fester and gain some ground. I don’t blame Ross Douthat for feeling differently, but then, as he himself says, he comes down on the other side of the debate.
In any event, whatever slip-shod points Pinker puts forward, and as I said there are several, his key point still deserves to be shouted from the rooftops:
A free society disempowers the state from enforcing a conception of dignity on its citizens. Democratic governments allow satirists to poke fun at their leaders, institutions, and social mores. And they abjure any mandate to define “some vision of ‘the good life’” or the “dignity of using [freedom] well” (two quotes from the Council’s volume). The price of freedom is tolerating behavior by others that may be undignified by our own lights. I would be happy if Britney Spears and “American Idol” would go away, but I put up with them in return for not having to worry about being arrested by the ice-cream police. This trade-off is very much in America’s DNA and is one of its great contributions to civilization: my country ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty.
The unsettling thing about Kass and Co. is that they think this disempowering of the state from enforcing dignity was a bad thing, even while they fail to nail down precisely what it is that would be enforced. If the “war on terror” has taught us anything, it’s that government power – not mention executive power – linked to a nebulous operating concept is a prescription for destructive mischief. As a part of the moral discourse of our culture, the concept of dignity is of great import, as squishy as it may be. Squishy is just fine in that arena. But as a part of the bioethical discourse, in which the rules and laws of biotechnological research, as well as the contours of the governments’ power to enforce those laws, will be determined? Not so much.
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