The Only Metric That Matters: Or, Pinker’s Folly

I can’t recommend the debate—surely too strong a word; let’s instead say the sit-down—between Ross Douthat, a New York Times employee, and Stephen Pinker, an academic, except for one thing. It is a fine illustration of argument with hidden or tacit premises. Which, astoundingly, neither of the sit-downers were even aware of.

Here’s a two-minute clip, with the link below it to the very-much-longer-than-two-minutes video. I’ll summarize:

Pinker: “The more religious the society, the worse the problems are.” (He used his fingers to point at each word in the air as he said it. Why, I do not know.)

Douthat: “No way, dude. USA! USA! USA!

I might have misheard Douthat, but it’s close. It is a word-for-word quotation from Pinker, though. Who does not see that he has assumed what he wants to prove, and therefore that his argument is viciously circular.

He did not miss that some religions are good and some bad. A bad one is the one where they marched people by the thousands up some steps and hacked their beating hearts out of their chests with dull stone knives. Don’t mistake that for the Enlightened French Revolution, and its many later Enlightened emulations. They didn’t use stone knives there, but, thanks to Science, sharp steel ones (later, blunt lead ones). And it was heads, the seat of reason, they hacked off, not hearts, the home of the soul.

Pinker instead points to Scandinavia as a pleasant place to spend one’s time trying to have as many self-inflicted orgasms as possible in front of small screens before the MAID van comes to pick you up and try to salvage what’s left of your organs (an allusion I borrow from Stove). He contrasts Scandinavia with Afghanistan, which he implies is a nasty place to live.

And I’m with him. I’d rather live in Sweden myself, if forced to choose. But that’s because I like herring sandwiches and could never bring myself to be fond of goat cheese, which I assume is daily fare in Afghanistan.

No. What Pinker missed was that if a religion is true, then living by its tenets is best. And that if none of them are true, which he assumes, then it does not matter which way you live. All ways are equally bad. Or, rather, they are all equally nothing. There is no consequence that follows from all religions, including the ones we have not yet thought up (Scientology is losing its luster), being false, except that nothing matters.

Pinker (and Douthat) never bothers to define or defend his notion of The Good. He assumes we all share, or ought to share, whatever notion he has planted under his I’m-A-Scientist wig. Whatever these notions are, even if some of them are in fact the same as some that you or I hold, they are all his opinion, and nothing but his opinion, if all religions are false.

His life, the life of anybody, the life of the species, the life of the planet make no difference if all religions are false. His pain, his health, anybody’s pain or heath, the pain or health of any beast are irrelevant if all religions are false. Everything is irrelevant. You may say pain is bad; yet others disagree, and some enjoy giving it. On what authority do you say they are wrong? Even the supposed authority of fifty-plus-epsilon coming to agree is nothing, because there is no justification for saying a majority, or even old-fashioned might, makes right.

Whereas is one religion is true, and the others not, or if some are only approximations, to varying degree, to the one true religion, then it is your duty to find it. And draw moral authority from it. It is a fallacy to suppose this is an impossible task: the One True Spartacus Fallacy. That would be if Crassus concluded there was no one true real Spartacus because hundreds of other men claimed to be the one true real Spartacus. Or if Crassus said, “Oh, well, there are too many for me to bother checking any of them.”

Pinker should know this as a scientist, because scientists are always proposing new theories for the one true theory of the universe. He would not dismiss all science because there have been many false theories, or because best theory we have is incomplete. He would scoff, and probably even giggle—anybody with hair like that would giggle—and dismiss the idea that there can’t be real science because there has been a lot of fake bad lousy misleading and fraudulent science.

And that brings us to the Only Metric That Matters. Pinker would enumerate some thing, I don’t know, perhaps lymphomas, and said that the best society is the one that minimizes it. Or the one that maximizes smiles. Whatever it is will be wholly arbitrary and subject to dispute. But if the religion I say is the one true religion really is the one true religion, then the only metric that matters is how many souls make it to Heaven. Everything else, however you paint it, would be superfluous.

If you say that is wrong, then it is your job to find the One True Religion and discover its supreme metric. If you say they are all by necessity, then raw complete uncountable unmeasurable nihilism is the only answer.

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