"I realize that most intellectuals and journalists think it is serious and responsible to sound the alarm on everything that’s going wrong, and frivolous or panglossian or whiggish or Polyannish to point out what’s going right, but I argue that this is mistaken. If people are constantly told that their society is a flaming dumpster, they’ll be receptive to demagogues and firebrands who say that reform is futile and that the institutions of liberal democracy and applied expertise must be wrecked. They will be complacent about the rollback of measures that have—the data show—done tremendous good, such as ones that have combated poverty, pollution, and workplace accidents. And they’ll be cynical about the very possibility of improving life, and fatalistic about looming threats. If poverty, war, pollution, and crime are permanent and intractable problems, why even bother trying to solve them?"
Pinker, here... https://www.amazonbookreview.com/post/866e8865-5672-4b52-939a-635d63472d7f/talking-to-stephen-pinker
This ethical claim of Pinker's definitely makes a certain kind of sense.... I am one of those of the view that intellectuals who claimed or claim that there's no morally important difference between Clinton and Trump are very irresponsible! I think that those academics who say stuff like "Capitalism is intolerable, and we should rise up in revolution!" are also kind of irresponsible - or they would be, if they had major influence. I think that the intellectuals who encourage political violence are definitely irresponsible, even if they have limited influence (I think encouraging Anti-fa is a pretty silly idea, because, so far as I can tell, the only effect of Anti-fa demonstrations is to increase political violence). Although Chomsky still encourages people to vote for Democrats, it's not impossible that his very passionate rhetoric about, e.g., Obama's drone campaign, reinforces for a nontrivial portion of his audience the idea that there is no point voting for mainstream parties - which would definitely be a bad thing if it is the case (even on Chomsky's own lights). And it seems pretty plausible that Pinker plays a positive activist role himself (even from a lefty-type perspective) in converting some number of extremist libertarians to a more moderate neoliberalism which sees a role for a strong welfare state and environmental regulations.
All this said, I think Pinker takes this attitude significantly too far. My major gripe is that I think climate change is a far too fast-moving problem for the technocratic, neoliberal, centrist establishment to deal with effectively, mired as it is in the wet concrete of Capital, with its 'thought-leaders' in possession of a linear and gradualist mindset much like Pinker's. I strongly believe that Pinker's linear mindset is a big flaw in his thinking, and that, at least on the issue of climate change, intellectuals probably do have a responsibility to be quite alarmist. Allow me to explain, in slightly more detail than I have done before on this blog.
A lot of the stuff Pinker writes and claims seems to betray a pretty naive understanding of both complex systems and how to interpret statistics. I've written about this before, but it never fails to annoy me that he says in The Better Angels of our Nature and (in an extract I saw in The Guardian from) Enlightenment Now (and in many of his interviews) that he is not in the business of prophecy and can't say with high confidence that things will keep on improving, and yet simultaneously loves to trumpet the idea not just that things have gotten better but that things are "getting better" and that we need to remind ourselves of "what's working". This strongly suggests (unless he is literally just contradicting himself) that he does think that, if we maintain the institutions of liberal democracy (by which I suppose he means roughly, 'Keep voting for the centrists!') then he does think that there is very good reason to think that all the happy trends he identifies will either continue or level off in a non-destructive way. But this is pretty dumb! It's a very naive kind of induction, which makes it sound as if he's never read an ecology or biology textbook. Yes, human ingenuity and technological improvements have helped us get this far while growing the global economic pie at a very fast rate. Yes, we have so far been able to 'deal with' pollution, soil erosion, climate change and all the rest to the extent that we have not really seen a growing food or health crisis in most places of the world. Yes, we are improving our recycling methods and consumption habits across the developed world. And yes, many doomsayers have been wrong - sometimes very wrong - in predictions of overshoot (though, contra libertarian myth, reality has not at all falsified the modelling framework of those involved in the Limits to Growth project (http://sustainable.unimelb.edu.au/sites/default/files/docs/MSSI-ResearchPaper-4_Turner_2014.pdf) (given that we are in a pessimistic scenario in terms of how much action we've taken on climate change and waste, if we make it through the next twenty years without growing problems with food production, declining lifespans and weaker economic growth, then the framework will have been shown to be in error)).
But none of this should even reduce your credence more than a fraction in the idea that we, as a civilisation, are heading for a fall, once you realise that we are living on a planet with a carrying capacity, that pollution is far easier to create than to remove (that, e.g. plastic pollution, has been on its own dramatic upward trend for several decades), that problems like soil erosion and salinisation and pesticide-pollution have only been getting worse for decades and cannot be remediated by any existing technology, that insect populations may well be collapsing (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/dec/14/a-different-dimension-of-loss-great-insect-die-off-sixth-extinction), and that climate breakdown is a rapidly accelerating juggernaut, with very worrying feedback loops starting to kick in (see my Wadhams extracts for how the Arctic albedo is dramatically diminishing while we are probably experiencing the beginning of a major methane leak).
To be clear, I do still lean towards the view that our only hope for dealing with climate change to the extent that we don't cause a dramatic reduction in health outcomes, wealth and living standards for tens of millions of people comes from doing it 'within existing institutions' (roughly speaking). As I remarked to H, saying that we need to "destroy capitalism" to deal with the impending climate crisis is like a surfer responding to the massive 5m wave about to crash on top of him not by trying his best to duck-dive and swim under the swell, but by deciding to try to ascend the crest with superhuman, gravity-defying paddling even as the wave is foaming at the top, then, once he reaches the top, doing an ollie and triple backflip, to finally glide smoothly back down to the safety of flat ocean while doing a handstand.
But, to my way of thinking, that still means that it is absolutely the right thing (probably) to vote for the hardline greenies among mainstream politicians, like the Sanders and Corbyns, and support the hardline lefy factions, over the centrists still beholden to corporate interests and not radical about environmental problems. Pinker clearly doesn't agree with this! In fact, I suspect that he may well think that Sanders counts as a "demagogue". I personally really don't think Sanders counts as a demagogue (you can't say "Oh, but what about the cult of personality around the guy", unless you also want to indict Clinton or Obama as demagogues, or most politicians (it's certainly wrong to say that Sanders has tried to cultivate a cult of personality around himself (his advertising campaigns barely focus on him at all))), nor is Corbyn much of a demagogue: Corbyn's rhetorical style is very quiet and understated (yes, his rhetoric can be passionate, but it is not highly rousing and dramatic), and he has not campaigned in a way that is self-focussed (I concede that many of his supporters have focussed on him in a cultish way). My strong worry is that if we fail to support the lefty factions of 'social democratic' parties in the developed world, that will be like responding to the 5m wave by simply swimming towards it as if it is not there at all. Which is to say, it will turn out very badly indeed. If this is our course, we will realise just as we are being pushed beneath the water that we didn't do enough, but, by that point, there will be nothing we can do to avoid the impending washing machine experience. In a situation of massive overshoot, there is no stopping the disaster.
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