The twisted enlightenment

I've heard lots of criticism of the Enlightenment as to a certain over-simplistic world view and a re-writing of history, but this is a new one on me.

Why do people do good? In the history of western philosophy, there are basically two answers to that question. The first is that people act morally because they are virtuous, because they’re committed to certain principles like honor or fairness. The second answer is that people act morally out of self-interest, because it is good — and ultimately profitable — to be known as someone who does the right thing.

Okay, the first isn't really an explanation at all. "People do good because they are good" is almost a tautology. It just shifts the question back a stage to what makes them become good in the first place.

A new book by David Wootton, a British historian of ideas, argues that the second interpretation has prevailed in the West, and that it has permeated every aspect of our lives. Today, we take it for granted that humans are hardwired to pursue power, pleasure, and profit. According to Wootton, this isn’t true at all.

What ? Who takes this for granted ? Why the hell world is the author living in ? Anecdotally, by far and away the most common problem in "analyses" I see of a myriad of sociological problems is that they are actually just descriptions. "People are cutting down trees because they want shiny new furniture and they should just stop wanting new furniture", they say. Or, "if people stopped wanting to hurt each other the world would be a better place". I mean, these things aren't wrong, but they tell you absolutely nothing about the cause of the problem. "Be better people" is not in any way a practical solution, but it seems the knee-jerk response of analysts everywhere is to point to a problem and say, "don't do that", as though we all just need a bit more knowledge and a massive dose of self-discipline. Far from taking it for granted that we're hardwired to pursue pleasure, the default assumption seems to be that we have an astonishing capacity of free will and we're just not exercising it properly.

In fact, he argues, this view of human nature is an invention of modernity, handed down to us by influential Enlightenment philosophers like Adam Smith, Machiavelli, and Thomas Hobbes. Wootton believes this cultural revolution overturned an entirely different way of thinking about human behavior and morality, and replaced it with what he calls “instrumental reasoning or cost-benefit analysis.”

Again, what ? I think the whole premise here is flawed. Plato is notorious for a) being much, much earlier than Enlightenment thinkers and b) postulating that society influences behaviour and morality. This is much more subtle than the notion that people act so as to be socially rewarded for good behaviour and punished for bad behaviour (although there is that aspect to the issue). Does the author really believe that people don't go around a stealing and killing only out of fear of becoming a pariah* ? Surely both society and innate desire have a role to play, and more besides.

* He doesn't, as he says in the discussion (which is more interesting than the summary).

Now, he concludes, we’re trapped in a world of hedonism and competition, in which the only real goal of society is the satisfaction of wants. And our ethical virtues are bound up with our ideas of material success — namely wealth and power.

Because that was never evident in previous societies ? And, perhaps more importantly, who is the guy hanging out with ? Has he gone through life in a permanent rat race ? While their undeniably is an element of competition and consumerism, do everyday people seem like they're so desperate for material success at any cost ? They don't to me. Competition feels more like an emergent property of the network than an individual driver.

The puzzling question is trying to understand the causal mechanisms. Did capitalism produce selfish behavior? Or did selfish behavior produce a capitalist society? Instead of saying it’s the economy that shapes how we understand the world, I wanted to argue it’s how we understand the world that shapes our thinking about economy.

I think we taught ourselves to be power-maximizing first, to be hyper-competitive, and then created political and economic systems suited to that view of human nature.

Well, Plato was commenting on selfishness as a widespread societal problem thousands of years before the Enlightenment, but I'm not sure you can even demark cause and effect in this case. Selfishness is an innate facet of human nature. So is selflessness. Both are appropriate behaviours depending on context. The challenge is to design a system in which people expresses those behaviours properly.

But again, I deny the premise that individuals are even excessively selfish at all - or at best this needs an in-depth discussion as to what is meant here. Do people in general really look out for their own interests while consciously choosing to do this at the expense of others ? I don't think they do. I certainly don't deny that a few rare individuals, who on occasion can exert disproportionate influence over the rest of us, do this, but as a typical world view... no, I don't see it. Sure, people want things, but society has facilitated the situation where they can readily get them. There's nothing "selfish" about wanting things which are readily available. One can of course argue that a lot of the things we take for granted have some pretty awful environmental consequences, but by itself, wanting to live in comfort in a nice house is not selfish and it certainly isn't hyper-competetive.

How the Enlightenment sold us a twisted view of human nature

Why do people do good? In the history of western philosophy, there are basically two answers to that question. The first is that people act morally because they are virtuous, because they're committed to certain principles like honor or fairness.