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

Wieseltier, too, has issued crippling diktats on what scholarship in the humanities may not do, such as make progress. “The vexations of philosophy . . . are not retired,” he declared; “errors [are] not corrected and discarded.”⁶¹ In fact, most moral philosophers today would say that the old arguments defending slavery as a natural institution are errors which have been corrected and discarded. Epistemologists might add that their field has progressed from the days when Descartes could argue that human perception is veridical because God would not deceive us. Wieseltier further stipulates that there is a “momentous distinction between the study of the natural world and the study of the human world,” and any move to “transgress the borders between realms” could only make the humanities the “handmaiden of the sciences,” because “a scientific explanation will expose the underlying sameness” and “absorb all the realms into a single realm, into their realm.” Where does this paranoia and territoriality lead? In a major essay in the New York Times Book Review, Wieseltier called for a worldview that is pre-Darwinian—“the irreducibility of the human difference to any aspect of our animality”—indeed, pre-Copernican—“the centrality of humankind to the universe.”⁶²

Let’s hope that artists and scholars don’t follow their self-appointed defenders over this cliff. Our quest to come to terms with the human predicament need not be frozen in the last century or the century before, let alone the Middle Ages. Surely our theories of politics, culture, and morality have much to learn from our best understanding of the universe and our makeup as a species.

In 1778 Thomas Paine extolled the cosmopolitan virtues of science:

Science, the partisan of no country, but the beneficent patroness of all, has liberally opened a temple where all may meet. Her influence on the mind, like the sun on the chilled earth, has long been preparing it for higher cultivation and further improvement. The philosopher of one country sees not an enemy in the philosophy of another: he takes his seat in the temple of science, and asks not who sits beside him.⁶³

What he wrote about the physical landscape applies as well to the landscape of knowledge. In this and other ways, the spirit of science is the spirit of the Enlightenment.

CHAPTER 23HUMANISM

Science is not enough to bring about progress. “Everything that is not forbidden by laws of nature is achievable, given the right knowledge”—but that’s the problem. “Everything” means everything: vaccines and bioweapons, video on demand and Big Brother on the telescreen. Something in addition to science ensured that vaccines were put to use in eradicating diseases while bioweapons were outlawed. That’s why I preceded the epigraph from David Deutsch with the one from Spinoza: “Those who are governed by reason desire nothing for themselves which they do not also desire for the rest of humankind.” Progress consists of deploying knowledge to allow all of humankind to flourish in the same way that each of us seeks to flourish.

The goal of maximizing human flourishing—life, health, happiness, freedom, knowledge, love, richness of experience—may be called humanism. (Despite the word’s root, humanism doesn’t exclude the flourishing of animals, but this book focuses on the welfare of humankind.) It is humanism that identifies what we should try to achieve with our knowledge. It provides the ought that supplements the is. It distinguishes true progress from mere mastery.

There is a growing movement called Humanism, which promotes a non-supernatural basis for meaning and ethics: good without God.¹ Its aims have been stated in a trio of manifestoes starting in 1933. The Humanist Manifesto III, from 2003, affirms:

Knowledge of the world is derived by observation, experimentation, and rational analysis. Humanists find that science is the best method for determining this knowledge as well as for solving problems and developing beneficial technologies. We also recognize the value of new departures in thought, the arts, and inner experience—each subject to analysis by critical intelligence.

Humans are an integral part of nature, the result of unguided evolutionary change. . . . We accept our life as all and enough, distinguishing things as they are from things as we might wish or imagine them to be. We welcome the challenges of the future, and are drawn to and undaunted by the yet to be known.