The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,115

had been articulated, and the sequence in which some abolition movements gave the coup de grâce to practices that were already in decline. They may explain why today it is so hard to impose liberal democracy on countries in the developing world that have not outgrown their superstitions, warlords, and feuding tribes.151

Civilization and Enlightenment need not be alternatives in explaining declines of violence. In some periods, tacit norms of empathy, self-control, and cooperation may take the lead, and rationally articulated principles of equality, nonviolence, and human rights may follow. In other periods, it may go in the other direction.

This to-and-fro may explain why the American Revolution was not as calamitous as its French counterpart. The Founders were products not just of the Enlightenment but of the English Civilizing Process, and self-control and cooperation had become second nature to them. “A decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation,” the Declaration politely explains. “Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes.” Prudence, indeed.

But their decency and prudence were more than mindless habits. The Founders consciously deliberated about just those limitations of human nature that made Burke so nervous about conscious deliberation. “What is government itself,” asked Madison, “but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?”152 Democracy, in their vision, had to be designed to counteract the vices of human nature, particularly the temptation in leaders to abuse their power. An acknowledgment of human nature may have been the chief difference between the American revolutionaries and their French confrères, who had the romantic conviction that they were rendering human limitations obsolete. In 1794 Maximilien Robespierre, architect of the Terror, wrote, “The French people seem to have outstripped the rest of humanity by two thousand years; one might be tempted to regard them, living amongst them, as a different species.”153

In The Blank Slate I argued that two extreme visions of human nature—a Tragic vision that is resigned to its flaws, and a Utopian vision that denies it exists—define the great divide between right-wing and left-wing political ideologies.154 And I suggested that a better understanding of human nature in the light of modern science can point the way to an approach to politics that is more sophisticated than either. The human mind is not a blank slate, and no humane political system should be allowed to deify its leaders or remake its citizens. Yet for all its limitations, human nature includes a recursive, openended, combinatorial system for reasoning, which can take cognizance of its own limitations. That is why the engine of Enlightenment humanism, rationality, can never be refuted by some flaw or error in the reasoning of the people in a given era. Reason can always stand back, take note of the flaw, and revise its rules so as not to succumb to it the next time.

BLOOD AND SOIL

A second counter-Enlightenment movement took root in the late 18th and early 19th centuries and was centered not in England but in Germany. The various strands have been explored in an essay by Isaiah Berlin and a book by the philosopher Graeme Garrard.155 This counter-Enlightenment originated with Rousseau and was developed by theologians, poets, and essayists such as Johann Hamann, Friedrich Jacobi, Johann Herder, and Friedrich Schelling. Its target was not, as it was for Burke, the unintended consequences of Enlightenment reason for social stability, but the foundations of reason itself.

The first mistake, they said, was to start from the consciousness of an individual mind. The disembodied individual reasoner, ripped from his culture and its history, is a figment of the Enlightenment thinker’s imagination. A person is not a locus of abstract cogitation—a brain on a stick—but a body with emotions and a part of the fabric of nature.

The second mistake was to posit a universal human nature and a universally valid system of reasoning. People are embedded in a culture and find meaning in its myths, symbols, and epics. Truth does not reside in propositions in the sky, there for everyone to see, but is situated in narratives and archetypes that are particular to the history of a place and give meaning to the lives of its inhabitants.

In this way of thinking, for a rational analyst to criticize traditional beliefs or customs is to miss the point. Only if one enters into the experience of those who live by those beliefs can one truly understand them. The Bible, for example, can be