Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

Another variety of declinism agonizes about the opposite problem—not that modernity has made life too harsh and dangerous, but that it has made it too pleasant and safe. According to these critics, health, peace, and prosperity are bourgeois diversions from what truly matters in life. In serving up these philistine pleasures, technological capitalism has only damned people to an atomized, conformist, consumerist, materialist, other-directed, rootless, routinized, soul-deadening wilderness. In this absurd existence, people suffer from alienation, angst, anomie, apathy, bad faith, ennui, malaise, and nausea; they are “hollow men eating their naked lunches in the wasteland while waiting for Godot.”¹⁰ (I will examine these claims in chapters 17 and 18.) In the twilight of a decadent, degenerate civilization, true liberation is to be found not in sterile rationality or effete humanism but in an authentic, heroic, holistic, organic, sacred, vital being-in-itself and will to power. In case you are wondering what this sacred heroism consists of, Friedrich Nietzsche, who coined the term will to power, recommends the aristocratic violence of the “blond Teuton beasts” and the samurai, Vikings, and Homeric heroes: “hard, cold, terrible, without feelings and without conscience, crushing everything, and bespattering everything with blood.”¹¹ (We’ll take a closer look at this morality in the final chapter.)

Herman notes that the intellectuals and artists who foresee the collapse of civilization react to their prophecy in either of two ways. The historical pessimists dread the downfall but lament that we are powerless to stop it. The cultural pessimists welcome it with a “ghoulish schadenfreude.” Modernity is so bankrupt, they say, that it cannot be improved, only transcended. Out of the rubble of its collapse, a new order will emerge that can only be superior.

A final alternative to Enlightenment humanism condemns its embrace of science. Following C. P. Snow, we can call it the Second Culture, the worldview of many literary intellectuals and cultural critics, as distinguished from the First Culture of science.¹² Snow decried the iron curtain between the two cultures and called for a greater integration of science into intellectual life. It was not just that science was, “in its intellectual depth, complexity, and articulation, the most beautiful and wonderful collective work of the mind of man.”¹³ Knowledge of science, he argued, was a moral imperative, because it could alleviate suffering on a global scale by curing disease, feeding the hungry, saving the lives of infants and mothers, and allowing women to control their fertility.

Though Snow’s argument seems prescient today, a famous 1962 rebuttal from the literary critic F. R. Leavis was so vituperative that The Spectator had to ask Snow to promise not to sue for libel before they would publish it.¹⁴ After noting Snow’s “utter lack of intellectual distinction and . . . embarrassing vulgarity of style,” Leavis scoffed at a value system in which “‘standard of living’ is the ultimate criterion, its raising an ultimate aim.”¹⁵ As an alternative, he suggested that “in coming to terms with great literature we discover what at bottom we really believe. What for—what ultimately for? What do men live by?—the questions work and tell at what I can only call a religious depth of thought and feeling.” (Anyone whose “depth of thought and feeling” extends to a woman in a poor country who has lived to see her newborn because her standard of living has risen, and then multiplied that sympathy by a few hundred million, might wonder why “coming to terms with great literature” is morally superior to “raising the standard of living” as a criterion for “what at bottom we really believe”—or why the two should be seen as alternatives in the first place.)

As we shall see in chapter 22, Leavis’s outlook may be found in a wide swath of the Second Culture today. Many intellectuals and critics express a disdain for science as anything but a fix for mundane problems. They write as if the consumption of elite art is the ultimate moral good. Their methodology for seeking the truth consists not in framing hypotheses and citing evidence but in issuing pronouncements that draw on their breadth of erudition and lifetime habits of reading. Intellectual magazines regularly denounce “scientism,” the intrusion of science into the territory of the humanities such as politics and the arts. In many colleges and universities, science is presented not as the pursuit of true explanations but as just another narrative or myth. Science is commonly blamed for racism, imperialism, world wars, and the Holocaust. And it is accused of robbing life of its enchantment and stripping humans of freedom and dignity.