Men and Their Machine Gods
Excuse the rather inadequate image. I liked it but couldn’t find a better version, and so will replace it when I have more time.
Last year I subjected Steven Pinker’s new book Enlightenment Now to extensive criticism. A book about the Enlightenment that makes scant reference to Kant – totally glossing his incredibly complex philosophy for Pinker's cheerleading purposes – and none at all to David Hume and Jean-Jacques Rousseau is not really about the Enlightenment at all. Kant wrote ‘the motto of Enlightenment’ (Sapere aude), which Pinker quotes, but you can read Pinker and completely forget that Kant wrote three great critiques. Having the courage to use your understanding entails much, much more than scientism and the deification of technology. I have subjected Pinker’s book to detailed criticism, and shall supply references below. His view is valuable in highlighting much that is right about modernity, which gives us the potential for a much better future than doomsters allow us. But his apologetics betray that potential to the very social institutions and relations that will doom civilization.
Which brings me to the point of this blog post. On the occasion of the opening of The Hay Festival, putting global issues and polarised politics in the spotlight, The Guardian Review of 25 May 2019 asked a number of authors to select the books which have transformed the way that they think. Steven Pinker selects a book for which I have a particular loathing: Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Discipline. This is what Pinker writes:
“In his countercultural magazine Whole Earth Catalog, Stewart Brand changed the image of technology from corporate and malevolent to human and cool. In his more recent Whole Earth Discipline, he has exploded our understanding of how to protect the environment. The subtitle tossed off one grenade after another: “Why dense cities, nuclear power, transgenic crops, restored wildlands, and geoengineering are necessary.” Before you rage, consider whether orthodox environmentalism – with its romantic, luddite, and apocalyptic streaks – is succeeding in safeguarding the planet, and open your mind to Brand’s ‘ecomodernist’ alternative.”
I was asked to read and report back on this book when it was published. I’m a speed reader – and writer – with great research skills, and so have made myself useful in getting to the crux of complex environmental matters as well as distilling the essence of long and complex books. I rather regret having had to read Brand’s book because, if ‘rage’ is ever appropriate, this is the book. Sweeping generalisations, caricature, left-baiting, distortion, apologetics, assertion, and a total failure to take ethics and politics seriously – the book is an abomination and I felt like vomitting the whole thing up. In a way I did. I took Whole Earth Discipline apart sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, chapter by chapter. I forget how long Brand’s book was. My ‘report’ turned into the book Of Gods and Gaia, and it was a systematic rage that was sustained over more than 900 pages. Brand’s assertions didn’t merely need to be countered, his entire thinking needed to be demolished flat and ground into the dust. The influence of this kind of thinking is pernicious.
Many times I have felt my review to have been a wild overreaction, but when I see someone like Pinker, whose book Enlightenment Now is subtitled The Case for Science, Reason, Humanism and Progress, endorse it so enthusiastically, I know I have chosen my targets well. The ‘progress’ that Pinker underscores here is merely Divine Providence without the theological underpinnings that keep it sane and grounded. Without God, and the meaning and purpose that Providence writes into the design of the universe, the belief that humankind is impelled to advance, and has an inner motive to do so, is groundless. Worse, putting human beings in the place of God is the oldest, and most destructive and self-destructive, of delusions. And worse still, it is not even humanity that Brand is deifying at all but technology. Either way, it's an old sin - the prideful worship of the things of the human hands. And an ancient delusion. It's the kind of thinking that got us in this mess in the first place. I really don’t care to revisit that book, so I shall go from memory. It opens with a statement along the lines of: “we have become as gods, we now need to get used to being good at being gods.” It is more correct to say that God made us in His own image, and that we ought to aspire to live up to that divine nature within, not supplant divinity. I take Brand’s case apart line by line, but here, because I really do have better things to be spending my time on, I shall just shake my head dismissively and say ‘drivel.’
I shall also challenge the way that Pinker splits the alternatives between a ‘romantic, luddite, and apocalyptic’ environmental movement on the one hand and an eco-modernization on the other. That’s a convenient way to reduce the political options to just two. If neither of these are compelling, then the failures of the one do not provide a justification of the other. I have noticed a tendency for my views to be misinterpreted here; when I launch criticisms of one side of this divide, many presume that I am a defender of the other. Not so. In criticizing eco-modernization at length, revealing it to be a part of the very mentalities and modalities driving environmental crisis, I have also become increasingly vocal in exposing the political and social failures of the dominant form of environmentalism. I shall add more references here at the bottom. To put the matter shortly, I reject a scientism that uses science and facts and figures as an authority to dictate to government and politics and to legislate over the heads of people; I reject an elitism that privileges expert views and knowledge over the creative agency and moral choice of the citizen body; I expose ‘back to nature’ thinking in all its forms as the hallmark of the decadent bourgeois mind; I establish the true meaning of luddism, which is the wise use of technology for communal purposes and social ends; I emphasize the importance of appropriate and intermediate technology and eco-design; and I attempted to get environmentalists to stop telling us we have x-amount of time to ‘save the Earth’ and instead do politics and ethics properly by emphasising a positive vision of an ecological society that is worth living in, that is, as something more than a necessity imposed on us, whether by increasingly straitened circumstances or by those who claim to have special insight into the bad times to come.
That’s enough from me. I don’t want to hang around too long with this kind of issue. I have spent too long with these questions in the past and they have taken me away from much more interesting work, draining my energies in the process. My forthcoming Dante book is an altogether higher league than this kind of thing. Dante's Sweet Symphony of Paradise.
Books by me which criticize Pinker’s Enlightenment Now
The book in which I criticize Stewart Brand’s apologetics at length:
A shorter version of the above, with a specific focus on social relations of production – the very thing which romantic, apocalyptic, and technocratic greens of all stripes ignore. I refuse Pinker’s false choices and can condemn both a failing environmental movement and his eco-modernizing alternative. They are part of the same bourgeois mentality and I reject both.
And I gathered up some of the work I did for the Green cause over the years and wrote them up as essays and issued them as books that no-one reads – that’s the nature of environmentalism as science based, the reports change as the science changes, and the science changes as the planet changes. The planet is on the move, so all my work on this was always destined to become nothing more important than yesterday’s news. Although I will say that my essay reports contain certain timeless truths that environmentalists and others should actually take note of.
Looking at these, I note that I was always identifying ‘Global Warming’ as ‘Global Heating.’ A recent Guardian editorial has just made a big thing of the need to change language in reporting on the severity of the environmental crisis. From now on, it says, it will refer not to ‘Global Warming’ but to ‘Global Heating.’ I’ve been doing that from the start.
Briefly examining these old reports on environmental news, I see that I challenge the identification of those highlighting the crisis that is upon as ‘alarmists.’ Critics refer disparagingly to the ‘new religion of climate alarmism.’ I’m not in favour of false religions, the old one will do fine, and is more than enough to raise the alarm on where the world is heading. The climate alarm being sounded is founded on good sound science, I make clear. But I also make clear that good sound science is not enough; we need the ethical underpinning. I seek to put the worlds of fact and value together.
This collection of philosophical essays was written around the same time as I gathered my old environmental reports together, and goes deeper into the metaphysics and morals. In a nutshell, I argue that human beings, over-impressed by their scientific and technological power, have abolished the true religion that tempers power by Love and constrains ambitions within the limits. The true cause of the environmental crisis is the way in which 'men as gods' have horizontalized the vertical, bringing the infinity that is God's alone down to Earth in pursuit of dreams of Heaven on a planet of finite resources.
Looking back, I can now see this as an important piece of writing for me, because it is here that I start to analyse themes that I came to develop much further in subsequent works, culminating in 2018's A Home and A Resting Place: Homo Religiosus: The Reality of Religious Truth and Experience.
I have been busy over the years. I hope it has done some good in some way.