Steven Pinker states the Enlightenment ideal in one line: “we should use reason to improve human flourishing.” He said it in a 2023 debate (part one, part two) with the political scientist John Mearsheimer.
I hold the ideal as he states it, and I would like to think its core is the foundation of this site.
He spells out both halves of the line. Reason means open deliberation, science, and history. Its fruits are institutions: liberal democracy, regulated markets, and international bodies. Flourishing is what each of us wants and cannot deny to others: life, health, sustenance, prosperity, peace, freedom, safety, knowledge, leisure, happiness.
He also says what the ideal is not. It is not reverence for some great men of the eighteenth century. “They were just guys.” The ideas are what count. And it is not praise of the West, which “has always been ambivalent in its commitment” to it.
The rivals are old and still with us. Religion says we should obey God’s commandments in holy scripture. Romantic nationalism says nations, embodied in strong leaders, should strive for historic greatness. Zero-sum struggle says subjugated groups must overcome their oppressors. Reactionary ideology says we should reject modernity and return to a golden age.
Mearsheimer’s objection deserves its weight. Free reasoning, he says, does not bring people to agree on first principles or on the good life. It brings “significant disagreement”, which is why politics matters. And people are social animals who belong to tribes, today called nations, with their identities bound up in them.
I think he is right about how people are. My own entries say as much: politics is identity-first, and we read facts through our groups. But that is a description. Pinker’s line is an aim. The gap between what is and what ought to be, Hume’s guillotine, is the space in which the ideal works. We are tribal, and we should reason anyway.
One caution of my own. Regulated markets are a fruit of reason, but defending them calls for care about historical timing. There are moments when the defense shades into deference to money.