The Better and Worse Angels of Steven Pinker

I am really enjoying Steven Pinker's company.  Frighteningly clever, original, a smooth writer and often generous to the Christian church. What's not to admire? And when he does criticise the faith (my particular interest I suppose) sometimes he gives us a lot to think about. All good and I'm giving him as a Christmas present and recommending him to everyone I can.

But--well--just sometimes his humanist slip shows, which is a shame. For example:

'The Bible is one long celebration of violence' (p7). 'Catalogue' would be better than 'celebration'. You have to read it to the end. 'You have heard it was said ... but I say to you, love your enemies'. Jesus put a stop to it. Since he's the destination of the scriptures, the fulfilment of everything that was foreshadowed (and foreshortened before), that's a bit of a misreading.

Then,he  blames  the Church for the worst excesses of the Inquisition and witch burning, but claims that good old humanists reclaimed that bloody heritage.

'What made Europeans finally decide that it was all right to let their dissenting compatriorts risk eternal damnation [rather than torturing the heresy out of them] .... One gets a sesne that people started to place a higher value on human life ... The gradual replacement of lives for souls as the locus of moral value was helped along by the ascendancy of skeptiicism and reason' (pp 172-173).

Except these 'skeptical and reasoning' humanists he quotes were passionate Christians - Erasmus (commemorated in stone in the theology department of the very city I live in) and even John Milton (spin doctor to the Puritans and greatest Christian poet since King David). Nicking our saints and clsiming they were working for your side all along is cheating. Get your own saints.What was actually happening was that these were pioneering, prophetic figures in the Church.

The renewal of the church is behind much of the decline in violence through the centuries. Another example: he notes (proper atheist) Jeremy Bentham speaking out against animal cruelty (p178) but totally neglects his friend and contemporary, the passionate evangelical William Wilberforce, who in between abolishing slavery, practically singlehandedly invented the NGO and among other things founded the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, whch actually did something about the problem, and also was (I think) the source of the anti-cruelty laws in Parliament that Pinker praises. It was pioneering, prophetic Christian figures who led the revolution. Which Steven Pinker fails to mention a little too often.

The source of the decline in violence - and perhaps a little case of prejudice.

'... A moral way of life often requires a decisive rejection of instinct, culture, religion, and standard practice. In their place is an ethics that is inspired by empathy and reason and stated in the language of rights. We force ourselves into the shoes (or paws) of other sentient beings and consider their interests ....

'This conclusion, of course, is the moral vision of the Enlightenment and the strands of humanism and liberalism that have grown out of it' (Pinker pp 572-573).

This is Stephen Pinker's main thesis -- humanism and rationalism has civilised the world, overriding several things including what he calls 'religion'. It's a grand and impressive argument.

I think, though, that he misses the truly original figure who defined this whole movement: Jesus Christ. Christ scrapped all the Jewish laws, food laws, customs and regulations, junking the lot to replace them with 'love God' and 'love your neighbour' -- the second being the very thing that Stephen Pinker attributes to humanism. Christ abolished the death penalty, and practiced and preached non-violence. It was said of him 'of the increase of his government and of peace there will be no end' and Stephen Pinker's wonderful book documents the increase of peace through the centuries, much as predicted.

Pinker is also, uncharacteristically, rubbish on the subject of Christ himself.  'There's no direct evidence for anything Jesus said or did' (p15),  when every other document of antiquity that has come down to us is either a later copy of the original, or less well attested than the NT documents (or both). He doesn't answer the startling question of if Christ didn't say that stuff, what moral genius, operating in the narrow window between ad 30 and the first NT manuscripts a generation later, came up  with it all, and then managed to persuade the primitive Christian community, including people who'd met Jesus, to hang it all on the figure of Cbrist.

Then he gets a bit ridiculous, I'm afraid:  ' ... Jesus was by no means unique. A number of pagan myths told of a saviour who was sired by a god, born of a virgin at the winter solstice,  surrounded by twelve zodiacal disciples, sacrificed as a scapegoat at the spring equinox, sent into the underworld, resurrected amid much rejoicing, and symbolically eaten by his followers to gain salvation and immortality.' (p15)  Quite apart from everything else that's wrong with that sentence, I find my world crowded with followers of these other pagan myths, bumping against the two billion notional followers of Christ in the world. They also, like Christ, conquered the Roman Empire, and inspired law, art, literature, music, science and architecture for two thousand years. I mean it's appalling trying to get planning permission for a church when all these followers of Mithras are building their temples everywhere in the country, and followers of Orpheus in the Underworld are crowding out the market for faith schools, not to mention running all the hospices, recruiting street pastors, and helping the homeless off the streets.

Stop being prejudiced. Who said 'blessed are the peacemakers': Oh, that was Christ, not in an off-moment, not in an unplanned bit of mispeaking, but at the heart of his message and life. How can Stephen Pinker, so brilliant, so good to read, making me see the world differently after reading him, how can he miss this?

Who terrorists are - Pinker

'... What inspires the most lethal terrorists in the world today is not so much the Koran or religious teachings as a thrilling cause and call to action that promises glory and esteem in the eyes of friends, and through friends, eternal respect and remembrance in the wider world that they will never live to enjoy ... Jihad is an egalitarian, equal-opportunity employer ... Fraternal, fast-breaking, thrilling, glorious, and cool. '

(Atran S, 2010, Pathways to and from violent extremism, Senate Armed Services Committee statement, Masrch 2010, quoted in Pinker p431)

Pascal on people - 'the glory and scum of the universe'

What a chimera then is man! What a novelty, what a monster, what a chaos, what a contradiction, what a prodigy! Judge of all things, feeble earthworm, repository of truth, sewer of uncertainty and error, the glory and scum of the universe. 
--Blaise Pascal

Quoted in the frontispiece to Steven Pinker The Better Angels of Our Nature: A History of Violence and Humanity.

Steven Pinker - the Better Angels of our Nature

Having got my eyesight back after two years of drug-induced cataracts and with migraine headaches most days, I am enjoying some heavy-duty reading again. Steven Pinker's book is getting me very excited.

His thesis is that violence in the human species is continuing a dramatic fall, stretching over millenia, dating indeed from the agricultural revolution. Because this is so counter-cultural, he needs the book's 900 pages to prove it and hypothesise about it.  Bill Gates' cover blurb ('one of the most important books I've read -- not just this year, but ever') is for once more than the polite puffing of friends.

The book is so counter-cultural because those  of us who read the news in the 60s, 70s and 80s saw a world going to pot; Pinker shows this was just a counter-cultural eddy against a much longer flow, and the fall in crime in the1990s and beyond is merely a resumption of that old norm. Totally fascinating.

So much to think about! (This is me speculating, not Steven Pinker)
1. So history has a direction after all and 'human progress' means something? The twentieth century rather left that 19th-century view bleeding in the street.
2.  Here is evidence-for me--though certainly not for the convinced non-Christian Steven Pinker--that Christ is King and 'of the increase of his government and peace there will be no end.' It is not the case that the world was going bad until Jesus came and fixed it. But it can surely be argued that here we have the 'left hand of God' and the 'right hand of God' working together. God guides human history generally into a more fruitful and less violent place; and at the epicentre, acclerating this trend and filling it out with revelation, is the life, death and resurrection of Christ and the peace-making activity of his people. I don't think Prof Pinker would enjoy this conclusion (I would like to write another blog about his so-called humanism and measured disapproval of the Christian faith) but I find it a bit stunning-- a large body of unsuspected social-science evidence that beautifully complements natural theology, not completely unlike the body of physical evidence that leads physicists to conclude the Universe began in a moment of creation at the Big Bang.

You gotta read the book.

Memories of Mandela

Recently heard a talk about Nelson Mandela by the former chaplain of his Robben Island prison. (It was actually on April 23 2015 at St Bede's School but I am only just now clearing out some notes.)

--becoming bitter and resentful, Mandela is quoted as saying, is like drinking poison yourself and hoping it will kill someone else. 

-- when Nelson Mandela left prison, he said that unless he left the hate and bitterness behind, he would remain in prison, but this time in one of his own making.

He was a very big man, who claimed his only regret was not becoming world heavyweight boxing champion. At Robben Island initially they just were given a thin mat to lie on; black prisoners had to wear shorts year-round while 'coloured' ones were given long trousers. They worked in a limestone quarry as their hard labour, then were locked up from 4:30pm to 5:30 am each night. 

He entered prison angry young man, but somewhere along the way (according to Desmond Tutu) became a Christian while inside. He was always warm in his greeting of Colin, the Chaplain, from the outset, in 1981 or so.

Colin reckoned that F W de Klerk, who replaced P W Botha as president and was thought to be equally hard-line also had an encounter with Christ and then 'Mandela and de Klerk found each other.' Mandela made de Klerk vice-president after the first election.

Jane Austen's Emma and the meaning of life

Here's a talk I gave about Jane Austen's Emma, the meaning of life, and the story behind the story. Bit of autobiography as well.

The end of our exploring

'The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know it for the first time' 

T S Eliot, 'Little Gidding'

A theology of mission in one sentence

Thanks my dear friend Insomnia, here's what I read at 4.01 this morning:

 'The whole action [redemptive history] has its action in the eternal being of the Triune God before the creation; it has its goal in the final unity of  the whole creation in Christ; and meanwhile the secret of this cosmic plan, the foretaste of its completion, has been entrusted to these little communities of marginal people scattered through the towns and cities of Asia Minor' {Lesslie Newbiggin, The Open Secret, SPCK 1995, p 71-72)

Imagination as the best route from head to heart

'The devotional masters of nearly all persuasions counsel us that we can descend with the mind into the heart most easily through the imagination.ⁱ

i

Richard Foster, Sanctuary of the Soul - A Journey into Meditative Prayer (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2011), Kindle edition. Quoted to me by WEC missionary David Macmillan.

'i came not to call the righteous, but sinners'

'...God accepts only the forsaken, cures only the sick, gives sight only to the blind, restores life only to the dead, sanctifies only the sinners, gives wisdom only to the unwise. In short, He has mercy only on those who are wretched.' Luther, Luther's works, volume 29, Lectures on Titus, Philemon and Hebrews, ed Jaruslav Pelikan (Concordia,1968) p 189.

Wanna start a new charity? Here's one we actiually need

Have just been exploring an American site called Charity Navigator. A charity itself,  it looks at the financial efficiency, governance and transparency of charities in the USA, providing a star rating and all kinds of information. 

What a good idea. It highlights total clunkers. For example, the Autism Disorder Spectrum Organization (in the US) which raised $3.8m but spent $3.4m of it on fundraising.

It has top ten lists. Worst in all America for paying professional fundraisers? Stand up, Cancer Survivors' Fund which pays 90% of its income out in fundraising. Yet it claims to provide 'scholarships for young cancer survivors, give them a new purpose and meaning in life and enable them to continue their college education.' Actually, it mostly gives professional fundraisers a new purpose and meaning in life.

However, try the '10 best charities everyone has heard of' list and take a bow, Samaritan's Purse and Compassion International. Samaritan's Purse puts just a shade under 90% of every dollar it receives into its charitable programs. (Though it still manages to pay Franklin Graham a to my mind eye-popping annual salary of $437,000. Compassion International's Wesley Stafford gets by on $130,000 less.)

Others are still good but not quite so good: Oxfam America burns through nearly 14% of its income in fundraising and pays its main guy more than half a million dollars a year. (Its revenue is a mere $65m.) World Vision raises over a billion dollars a year (a billion!), pays its guy $400,000 (perhaps decent value), but still blows through $100m )(a hundred million dollars!) each year in fundraising. WV only gets three stars out of a possible four from the good burghers of Charity Navigator.

Here in the UK I know of no similar charity. Does anyone? Instead, we are assailed by various groups in various ways with no very easy way to figure out whether we are dealing with the gruesome UK equivalent of the Cancer Survivor's Fund or the more uplifting examples like Compassion International and Samaritan's Purse. Of course those two have UK arms, which is probably reassuring.

What we need, clearly, is not (yet) another fund in aid of a dead soldier's memory (well-intentioned and cathartic though that may be for people who have suffered an awful loss) but a bit of robust accounting and analysis.

Wish fulfilment

Stephen Hawking: 'religion is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.'

John Lennox: 'atheism is a fairy story for people afraid of the light.'

(And as Lennox points out, each statement sounds good but means nothing. The truth of either depends on whether or not God really does exist. )

A spiritual North Korea

The cruel death of Mohan Amir Aslani: this Iranian psyschologist was hanged--hanged--eight days ago for teaching that the story of Jonah in the Qur'an may have been symbolic, not literal. He may have been collateral damage in a wider war within Iran of extremists trying to de-stablise Iran's reforming President Rouhani. But he is another martyr to the way radical Islamists make Islam a spiritual North Korea: it's paradise here, and we'll kill you if you try to leave.

And the Qur'an needs some fresh interpreting. Without it, radical Islam, unbending, will continue to bang and smash violently around in the world. God have mercy on his soul, and his family.

A tale of two cathedrals

On Ascension Day 1573, just after the congregation had filed out of the building, the cathedral tower at Beauvais in Northern France fell through the roof. A monument to mediaeval hubris (it was, for a few short years, the tallest building in Europe), it  has never been finished. But at least nobody died.

On All Saints' Day 1755 the Great Lisbon Earthquake struck, while the churches and Lisbon cathedral were packed with worshippers. Thousands died. Meanwhile the non-worshippers, walking or picnicking away from the city, survived the quake and also the following fire and tsunami.

Christians 1, Atheists 1.


(Beauvais Cathedral reference: James Hannam God's Philosophers (Icon Books 2009), p 106-7

Fantasy therapy for distressed Americans

Reamde by Neal Stephenson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

He is my favourite writer of the several thousand authors I have read in my life, so you can't complain. And yet. Reamde mostly lacks the pilates-for-the-mind that is Stephenson's special skill and hallmark. This is much simpler, a thriller. It's great fun, but in the end is just one more on the pile of a world full of 'action' and 'adventure' novels and films. You can only take so many taxis or boats hijacked at gunpoint, or shootouts around mountains, before yawning. Without giving too much away, jihadis -- conveniently monochrome baddies -- hijack the book and turn it into fantasy therapy for traumatized Americans.

The genius who wrote Cryptonomicon and the Baroque Trilogy is, like his war-game character Egdod in Reamde, mostly slumbering as he strolls across the landscape followed by eager acolytes.

Of course it's not a bad book. But unlike those titles, you don't feel obliged to compare it with War and Peace or Barchester Towers, greatest novels that have ever been written. Worth reading? Definitely. Worth forgetting? Sadly.

View all my reviews

Neal Stephenson, it's been too long

Two nice fat books for my holidays, William Hague's biography of William Wilberforce, and Neal Stephenson's 2011 offering, Reamde, which itself takes up more than 10% of my baggage allowance on Monarch Air. Stephenson is not, like so many UK-based literati, gloomy, nihilistic, pretentious, obscene and technophobic and his writing is just such a delight.

Here's a random sentence:

'Richard's ex-girlfriends were long gone, but their voices followed him all the time and spoke to him, like Muses or Furies. It was like having seven superegos arranged in a firing squad before a single beleagured id, making sure he didn't enjoy that last cigarette.'

See you in 1042 pages.

Board games

It started when prospective son-in-law bought us Carcassonne, a game about building cities and occupying farmland in medieval France. His family is half German and it seems the Germans are big into board games. (Or, perhaps, into occupying France. Some habits die hard...)

After that came 10 Days Across Asia (competitively plan travel itineraries), and then the start of a board games evening in church where I learnt Ra (gain in political influence over successive Egyptian Dynasties) and The Hunt for Red November (play collaboratively to keep your submarine afloat while it is hit by multiple disasters).

I bought my wife Lost Cities, a game for two based on the simple unfolding of a deck of cards, to while away our evenings as empty-nesters.

And two nights ago we played Puerto Rico (colonize a country by owning plantations and factories) as part of a social evening organized by a club my son is in. Slightly geeky (they are all strategy games), less class-bound than bridge, and very sociable, at least, very sociable for the slightly geeky.

Updates: since writing that post in late 2014, we've discovered Catan (which, like Carcassonne is described as a 'gateway drug' of board games), Rivals of Catan (a fiendish two-player version of this settle-rob-and-trade game) Splendor (jewel-trading), Pandemic (work collaboratively to prevent Armageddon) among others. Some fabulous evenings, new friends, new groups, a bit of an addiction, in the holidays at least. And not a computer screen in sight.

Alister McGrath on C S Lewis

I wanted to write a detached, cool-headed evaluation of this book and even had thought of some suitably ironic ways of describing it: 'ostrich prose', for example (covering a lot of ground with great enthusiasm but never quite taking off). 

Unfortunately, I can't do it. I shamelessly and unapologetically absolutely loved this book. I have to confess some shared interests. Alister McGrath is a professor at my old college. He's a scientist and atheist who turned to Christ. In some of his other writings, he has discovered the loveable pinata-like qualities of Professor Dawkins. So I was predisposed to like this book and therefore quite determined not to.

I don't know if it's a masterpiece or not but I found it an entirely satisfying retelling and re-evaluation of the man that I will treasure for a long time. They even got A N Wilson, big-beast among Lewis biographers and newly -returned-to-the-faith-Christian, to say something mildly pleasant about McGrath's work. So, perhaps, it must be good. It's not just me. Generally I prefer reading Lewis to reading books about Lewis but this is the business.

The publishing business

2013 figures in the Bookseller describe an unusual industry. They are for print titles, hardback and softback for the UK. I've rounded them.

Total sales appryearox £1.5 billion

Total titles sold (ie the number of new books now on the nation's bookshelves) approx 200m.


So:

If Amazon offers around 6m books for sale, the mean sales of any single title in a year is around 30.

If a typical author has three books on the market, a total guess, mean total sales are likely to be 90/year

If each book sells for approx £7, the mean annual income of the average author is of the order of £60.

Anecdotally: you are about as likely to earn a living from writing books as you are to play on the professional tennis circuit.