For some people at least, Brexit is now a pretext for simply standing back and smugly scoffing at the fate of the places where a majority of people voted for it. In a recent issue of the anti-Brexit newspaper the New European, one columnist articulated the basic argument: “The north-east and the Midlands voted for Brexit. Yes, I know they almost certainly did so unwittingly against their own economic interests, but democracy isn’t, ‘Get what you vote for, unless you’re wrong and then we’ll fudge it for you from there.’ I’m sorry that those areas will suffer, but such is the price of democracy.”
If this kind of thinking is your cup of tea, it now has intellectual underpinning. The Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker has just published Enlightenment Now, a doorstep-sized statement of the case for “reason, science, humanism and progress” against what he calls “progressophobia”. Among other things, Pinker believes that across the west and beyond, people are actually “getting healthier, richer, safer, and freer”, and that inequality “is not in itself a dimension of human wellbeing, and … should not be confused with unfairness or with poverty”. [...]
Pinker’s book evokes the same liberal misanthropy now swirling around Brexit. “Most voters are ignorant not just of current policy options, but basic facts,” he says. And woe betide anyone who publicly questions the idea that progress is continuing apace, and no fundamental rethinks are required. “I believe that the media and intelligentsia were complicit in populists’ depiction of modern western nations as so unjust and dysfunctional that nothing short of a radical lurch could improve them,” he says, seemingly ignoring the fact that 10 years after the crash there is still rather a lot of injustice and dysfunction around.
No comments:
Post a Comment