The alarming thing is that it now starts to look like the Enlightenment was the aberration, and the violent assertion of irrational dogma the norm. Asserting that a man can become a woman by saying he’s a woman is infinitely crazier than anything the most gormless ancients believed. There was a mesoAmerican “civilisation” – and I use the word in the strict sense of “having civic structures”, not in the sense of being morally competent – that worshipped a god that required tributes of children’s tears. To provide these, the priests tore toddlers’ fingernails out and gathered the tears from their faces. If you were to interrogate one of these priests now, the conversation would presumably be: Q. Why are you being so cruel to these children? A. The gods demand it. Q. Why do the gods demand it? A. Dunno. They’re gods. In other words, they at least had the get-out of an appeal to authority. f you asked a latter-day Twitter bully why they attempt to destroy the lives of people who suggest that women do not have a Y chromosome, the appeal would to the authority of other Twitter bullies. It’s hard to avoid the feeling that in terms of moral and intellectual competence there is a strand of thinking today that is actually more backward than those mesoAmericans.
Hi,
there is a great interview with Pinker by Reason magazine where, I think, he both acknowledges and addresses your point. I see him being painfully aware of the perspicacity of your point and hopeful about human’s ability to overcome the dilemma.
I should imagine we will see the same when he chats with Freddie on Friday.
Hells bells Freddie, that should be a regular show. “Freddie on Friday”: mend your week with UnHerd ideas. I bet it can be seriously monetized on social media.
Peace be with us all.
It’s easy to believe that the follies of our time are exceptional, but a tour through the history books shows that whatever our problems currently are, people in the past had ideas every bit as crazy as the most lunatic fringe of the left today. Some random examples:
For all their achievements the Victorians had to contend with phrenology being a respected science, a widespread fashion for seancés with the dead, a belief that much of our air intake was through the skin (leading to people being afraid of wearing clothes at night in case they suffocated), and quack doctors who thought Coca-Cola was miracle cure.
WW1 was pretty much the pinnacle of human irrationality and stupidity. Not content with a massive war that had ambiguous and ill-defined goals beyond generic glory for empires, it also pioneered forcing men to march straight into the line of machine gun fire on a massive scale because the generals couldn’t think of anything else to do.
The Middle Ages was overrun with totally irrational behaviour even apart from religious fanaticism, like the “dancing mania” in which people literally danced for weeks on end in large groups, sometimes dancing themselves to death, or the flagellants who travelled around whipping themselves.
The French Revolution was of course a purified form of delusional ideological fanaticism, quite apart from religion. Nothing as bad as that is happening these days thank god, and most of the concern about “wokeism” is actually concern about a projection of where it might be going vs genuine fear about the antics of some dumb “intellectuals” and corporate CEOs.
Perfectly put. It is an EXTRAORDINARY fact that despite mass education – even up to 3rd level – we are as profoundly irrational and subject to unfounded beliefs and biases as our forebears who couldn’t even read or write.
David Morley
2 years ago
Donald Trump, whose rise and popularity as an emotive demagogue triggered a reactionary flare-up of identity politics on the cultural Left.
This is becoming a common idea,but I think it is false. It was developments on the left which predated Trump. I think this was clear to many of us living through the time – but I’ve also read evidence in support of this based on word frequency on the internet (sorry I don’t have a reference).
Identity politics started taking off in 2010, so yes it predates Trump by a lot. You’re probably thinking of these graphs of word counts in the New York Times which show it clearly.
Matthew Baker
2 years ago
I haven’t read the book but from the synopsis in this article it sounds like the same straw man arguments employed by Pinker in the past (and which are a favorite of the new atheists).
They typically define logic and rationality in a broad manner (establish axioms, develop prepositions from those axioms, test the prepositions against competing arguments) and then argue or strongly imply this logical method was developed during the Enlightenment, allowing them to align their pet causes with the idea of rationality itself. A cursory glance through Greek/Roman philosophy, Jewish Talmudic study, the Christian Scholastic tradition etc. shows formal logic and the rational method is far older than the Enlightenment.
So if the argument is that rationality applied in the public sphere derives from the Enlightenment, it’s wrong. If the argument is simply “rationality is good, don’t be irrational” then it’s such a vacuous argument there’s no reason to give it more than five minutes thought.
Like his friend Dawkins, Pinker has accomplished a lot in his field but his forays into the vexing problems of philosophy, theology, etc. leave a lot to be desired.
You obviously know little of Pinker’s work if you think he indulges in straw men arguments, he is one of the few public intellectuals today who puts evidence rather than dogma or wishful thinking centre stage.
Historically, whatever the merits of those – very limited – essays into rational thinking you cite, they had very little wider cultural power. This of course is why extremely irrational dogma was imposed, by extreme force if necessary, in Western and Orthodox Christianity, for many hundreds of years. The Enlightenment stands as being an at least very unusual if not unique revolution in thought which led, eventually, to a wholescale change in Western ideas. Certainly nothing similar happened in the Islamic world or China say.
Don’t mean to pick on you but you can’t accuse Pinker of straw manning then straw man him back. Nobody sensible has ever said the above and meant it in absolute terms.
Rationality is not binary. It doesn’t have to be either or. The argument is that by applying rationality you can get as close as possible to the truth. That doesn’t mean that there can’t be flaws in the application of rationality. It’s not a faith – a good and honest use of rationality can still result in error, but that is likely because there is an error somewhere along the way, perhaps known or unknown.
If we’re keeping score, enlightened (rational) thinking has allowed us to progress and understand the world in exceptional ways, unlike any other previous type of thinking. It has had many failures on the way, even created more problems, but we now know so much more than before. No other thought process has come close, whether we like that fact or not. To say otherwise is literally denying reality.
We will never ever know everything, but we will get a damn sight closer to it with rational thought than without it.
Fair enough, it was a trite way to end the comment. I’m in agreement overall on your last few paragraphs, with one twist. I never attacked rational thought, I’m saying one still must still ground ultimate reasoned arguments in axioms. Many axioms can be rigorously tested but not all, and not some of the most important.
To use an example, Pinker’s argument in The Blank Slate is well argued and presents a good critique of the tabula rasa idea and shows how biology plays a huge role in differences in intellect, behavioral preferences etc. He also argues the tabula rasa idea leads to social engineering and usually tyranny, which is a compelling argument. He then argues a strong commitment to the rights of the individual can safeguard against the inequality of biological largesse.
This is all largely true, I would say, but the problem is establishing (rationally) the link between the innate biological differences between humans and the human rights which will protect the individual. In other books, such as Enlightenment Now, Pinker employs several rhetorical tricks (the straw man arguments I referenced) to imply individual dignity was developed during the 1700s by thinkers such as Kant. But Kant largely derived his ideas of innate human rights based on the idea of tabula rasa.
The ideals of human rights and individual identity largely arose in the West because of axioms which predate the Enlightenment. Human right are largely based on theological and metaphysical statements arising thousands of years ago, developed by legal scholars of Latin Christendom, and given new impetus to be universally implemented during the last medieval appeal to “reform.”
So, as I said in my original comment, rational thinking is not the sole invention of the Enlightenment thinkers. Their contribution (and it is no small one) was to turn the process against more and more of the assumed axioms of the day. My problem with Pinker in his prior arguments is he ignores the historical development of ideas such as human rights in the West so as to present them as axioms which can be assumed.
If one reads Seneca on the subject of reason, or Socrates, 2000 and 2500bp one realizes that objective reason has been striven for for a very long time. And for a very long time that reason has been mostly swamped by the unreasoned chaos that most humans seem to live in. This is merely the status quo. As Jesus said (paraphrased) ‘the gormless will be with you always”. A bit naive to hope that much has or will change – unless i am missing something in the contemporary situation ??
“So if the argument is that rationality applied in the public sphere derives from the Enlightenment, it’s wrong. “ That’s not anything like the whole the argument. From Wikipedia:
If you must boil the argument down to a straw man then at least acknowledge that it was the sovereignty of reason that was key to the Enlightenment.
Peter LR
2 years ago
Rationality seems a most peculiar way to make every choice in life. Do you fall in love rationally? Does it determine the wine you choose to drink, or the film you watch? How do you manage to complete your shopping in the supermarket before dying of starvation when there is so much choice and you are required to rationally select each item? I think it’s easier being human.
No, but that’s the point. To use your shopping analogy:
You rationally decide that you cannot (or don’t want to) spend an entire evening in the supermarket choosing the perfect shop. You balance out taking time picking, against what time you want to spend on it.
Whether you like it or not you apply some rational logic to what you purchase. A toddler with a tenner is going to come back with very different things in a supermarket to that of an adult.
Just because you cannot apply rationality 100% of the time to all things, doesn’t therefore mean rationality is therefore bunk
What an excellent point. I don’t know the answer but the one that occurs to me is that some of the choices you outline are at bottom trivial – the Barolo or the Amarone? – so it doesn’t matter if you get them “wrong”; wrong is still quite good. Other choices have an embedded economic component (the Amarone or the Bull’s Blood?), so rationality does help you choose; others are not really choices at all (falling in love).
I do confess to buying quite a lot of things at random though. If I want to spend £12 on a bottle of wine it’s a pretty random decision which to buy.
For love? No. For everything else yes, because a part of rationality is Bayesian reasoning of the form “I liked this before, so the chances of me liking it again is high”. Our brains can evaluate this sort of probability very fast. The belief that logic/rationality requires ignoring subjective prior experience is not really quite true. It only requires that the conclusions of an argument are derived logically from their premises. If one of the premises is “I drank this wine/a wine from this region before and it tasted good” then “and therefore I should buy it again” is a logical argument, even if it may not be 100% comprehensive.
Saul D
2 years ago
A better analogy is that we’re like ants trying to find our way to food in a maze. As we search the successful outcomes lead to trails that are explored more often and become the everyday heuristics since they were pathways to success. Those that fail are discarded. Rationality adds a bit to this in that as humans we can think ahead a bit, but real rational thinking (maths, quantum physics) is hard work plus trial and error, and most of us are just happy with a few simpler heuristic rules.
Up to the internet, the ‘lead ants’ were leff to experts because only they had maps and tools. Now anyone can explore, which of course creates chaos initially as all the old rejected paths are re-explored, but eventually more searchers will lead to better and deeper paths by pure weight of numbers. Human rationality is mostly just exploration over time.
Laura Creighton
2 years ago
There are some people — who sometimes become great artists — whose rational decisions are substantially inferior to the ones they make entirely irrationally, based only on their feelings. These people are rare. Some of them seem to have a diminished capacity for reason — cognitive disability? simple disuse? But many do not — they just don’t reason much. The rest of us get better results when we use our reason, if only to verify ‘is that thing that feels like a good idea, really a good idea?’.
LCarey Rowland
2 years ago
Thank you for your report on the current state of supposed rationality.
The Faith is dead; long live the Faith!
Martin Johnson
2 years ago
Our children will know in the fullness of time, but it seems likely that we are in the midst of a rather complete reordering of how society understands itself, comparable to the Protestant Reformation or the Enlightenment or the Industrial and Scientific Revolutions.
Writing personally, I will regret what we lose, but these things happen as an intellectual regime ages and encounters (even, creates) problems it cannot resolve. What bothers me the most about it is that the people driving it are ignoramuses and the movement has no intellectual value–which I suppose gets at what Pinker tries to say. Those past intellectual regime changes were driven by people like Luther, Hobbes, Locke, Diderot, Voltaire, Faraday… Now we have Kendi and Coates and DiAngelo and a whole bunch of people who cannot even write a bad book but are only grifters.
That does not bode well for the “Successor Regime” (as Wesley Yang has dubbed it) doing anything worthwhile as it destroys the old and replaces it with sh*t. (And if you don’t recognize it, I allude to John McWhorter describing wokeism as a new, “sh*tty religion.”)
Meanwhile, serious countries (esp. China), prepare for a real future.
Neven Curlin
2 years ago
Rationality has become a religion.
Edward De Beukelaer
2 years ago
The comments here are very interesting: just a few question: can we ever be really rational only? Is truth not always the results of a convention: we set the parameters within which we can settle for a truth? Is it possible to capture (our) life on earth though rationality only?
Worth reading: https://channelmcgilchrist.com/steven-pinkers-essay/ with McGilchrist’s reply..
The alarming thing is that it now starts to look like the Enlightenment was the aberration, and the violent assertion of irrational dogma the norm. Asserting that a man can become a woman by saying he’s a woman is infinitely crazier than anything the most gormless ancients believed.
There was a mesoAmerican “civilisation” – and I use the word in the strict sense of “having civic structures”, not in the sense of being morally competent – that worshipped a god that required tributes of children’s tears. To provide these, the priests tore toddlers’ fingernails out and gathered the tears from their faces.
If you were to interrogate one of these priests now, the conversation would presumably be:
Q. Why are you being so cruel to these children?
A. The gods demand it.
Q. Why do the gods demand it?
A. Dunno. They’re gods.
In other words, they at least had the get-out of an appeal to authority. f you asked a latter-day Twitter bully why they attempt to destroy the lives of people who suggest that women do not have a Y chromosome, the appeal would to the authority of other Twitter bullies.
It’s hard to avoid the feeling that in terms of moral and intellectual competence there is a strand of thinking today that is actually more backward than those mesoAmericans.
Pinker appears to be thoroughly in denial and actually NOT being rational about the human situation ??
Hi,
there is a great interview with Pinker by Reason magazine where, I think, he both acknowledges and addresses your point. I see him being painfully aware of the perspicacity of your point and hopeful about human’s ability to overcome the dilemma.
I should imagine we will see the same when he chats with Freddie on Friday.
Hells bells Freddie, that should be a regular show. “Freddie on Friday”: mend your week with UnHerd ideas. I bet it can be seriously monetized on social media.
Peace be with us all.
It’s easy to believe that the follies of our time are exceptional, but a tour through the history books shows that whatever our problems currently are, people in the past had ideas every bit as crazy as the most lunatic fringe of the left today. Some random examples:
You could say that a time of better education, more advanced knowledge and greater wealth, we are now crazier than ever.
Perfectly put. It is an EXTRAORDINARY fact that despite mass education – even up to 3rd level – we are as profoundly irrational and subject to unfounded beliefs and biases as our forebears who couldn’t even read or write.
This is becoming a common idea,but I think it is false. It was developments on the left which predated Trump. I think this was clear to many of us living through the time – but I’ve also read evidence in support of this based on word frequency on the internet (sorry I don’t have a reference).
Identity politics started taking off in 2010, so yes it predates Trump by a lot. You’re probably thinking of these graphs of word counts in the New York Times which show it clearly.
I haven’t read the book but from the synopsis in this article it sounds like the same straw man arguments employed by Pinker in the past (and which are a favorite of the new atheists).
They typically define logic and rationality in a broad manner (establish axioms, develop prepositions from those axioms, test the prepositions against competing arguments) and then argue or strongly imply this logical method was developed during the Enlightenment, allowing them to align their pet causes with the idea of rationality itself. A cursory glance through Greek/Roman philosophy, Jewish Talmudic study, the Christian Scholastic tradition etc. shows formal logic and the rational method is far older than the Enlightenment.
So if the argument is that rationality applied in the public sphere derives from the Enlightenment, it’s wrong. If the argument is simply “rationality is good, don’t be irrational” then it’s such a vacuous argument there’s no reason to give it more than five minutes thought.
Like his friend Dawkins, Pinker has accomplished a lot in his field but his forays into the vexing problems of philosophy, theology, etc. leave a lot to be desired.
You obviously know little of Pinker’s work if you think he indulges in straw men arguments, he is one of the few public intellectuals today who puts evidence rather than dogma or wishful thinking centre stage.
Historically, whatever the merits of those – very limited – essays into rational thinking you cite, they had very little wider cultural power. This of course is why extremely irrational dogma was imposed, by extreme force if necessary, in Western and Orthodox Christianity, for many hundreds of years. The Enlightenment stands as being an at least very unusual if not unique revolution in thought which led, eventually, to a wholescale change in Western ideas. Certainly nothing similar happened in the Islamic world or China say.
Don’t mean to pick on you but you can’t accuse Pinker of straw manning then straw man him back. Nobody sensible has ever said the above and meant it in absolute terms.
Rationality is not binary. It doesn’t have to be either or. The argument is that by applying rationality you can get as close as possible to the truth. That doesn’t mean that there can’t be flaws in the application of rationality. It’s not a faith – a good and honest use of rationality can still result in error, but that is likely because there is an error somewhere along the way, perhaps known or unknown.
If we’re keeping score, enlightened (rational) thinking has allowed us to progress and understand the world in exceptional ways, unlike any other previous type of thinking. It has had many failures on the way, even created more problems, but we now know so much more than before. No other thought process has come close, whether we like that fact or not. To say otherwise is literally denying reality.
We will never ever know everything, but we will get a damn sight closer to it with rational thought than without it.
Fair enough, it was a trite way to end the comment. I’m in agreement overall on your last few paragraphs, with one twist. I never attacked rational thought, I’m saying one still must still ground ultimate reasoned arguments in axioms. Many axioms can be rigorously tested but not all, and not some of the most important.
To use an example, Pinker’s argument in The Blank Slate is well argued and presents a good critique of the tabula rasa idea and shows how biology plays a huge role in differences in intellect, behavioral preferences etc. He also argues the tabula rasa idea leads to social engineering and usually tyranny, which is a compelling argument. He then argues a strong commitment to the rights of the individual can safeguard against the inequality of biological largesse.
This is all largely true, I would say, but the problem is establishing (rationally) the link between the innate biological differences between humans and the human rights which will protect the individual. In other books, such as Enlightenment Now, Pinker employs several rhetorical tricks (the straw man arguments I referenced) to imply individual dignity was developed during the 1700s by thinkers such as Kant. But Kant largely derived his ideas of innate human rights based on the idea of tabula rasa.
The ideals of human rights and individual identity largely arose in the West because of axioms which predate the Enlightenment. Human right are largely based on theological and metaphysical statements arising thousands of years ago, developed by legal scholars of Latin Christendom, and given new impetus to be universally implemented during the last medieval appeal to “reform.”
So, as I said in my original comment, rational thinking is not the sole invention of the Enlightenment thinkers. Their contribution (and it is no small one) was to turn the process against more and more of the assumed axioms of the day. My problem with Pinker in his prior arguments is he ignores the historical development of ideas such as human rights in the West so as to present them as axioms which can be assumed.
If one reads Seneca on the subject of reason, or Socrates, 2000 and 2500bp one realizes that objective reason has been striven for for a very long time. And for a very long time that reason has been mostly swamped by the unreasoned chaos that most humans seem to live in. This is merely the status quo. As Jesus said (paraphrased) ‘the gormless will be with you always”. A bit naive to hope that much has or will change – unless i am missing something in the contemporary situation ??
“So if the argument is that rationality applied in the public sphere derives from the Enlightenment, it’s wrong. “
That’s not anything like the whole the argument. From Wikipedia:
If you must boil the argument down to a straw man then at least acknowledge that it was the sovereignty of reason that was key to the Enlightenment.
Rationality seems a most peculiar way to make every choice in life. Do you fall in love rationally? Does it determine the wine you choose to drink, or the film you watch? How do you manage to complete your shopping in the supermarket before dying of starvation when there is so much choice and you are required to rationally select each item? I think it’s easier being human.
No, but you probably buy your house or car with a strong rational component!
No, but that’s the point. To use your shopping analogy:
You rationally decide that you cannot (or don’t want to) spend an entire evening in the supermarket choosing the perfect shop. You balance out taking time picking, against what time you want to spend on it.
Whether you like it or not you apply some rational logic to what you purchase. A toddler with a tenner is going to come back with very different things in a supermarket to that of an adult.
Just because you cannot apply rationality 100% of the time to all things, doesn’t therefore mean rationality is therefore bunk
What an excellent point. I don’t know the answer but the one that occurs to me is that some of the choices you outline are at bottom trivial – the Barolo or the Amarone? – so it doesn’t matter if you get them “wrong”; wrong is still quite good. Other choices have an embedded economic component (the Amarone or the Bull’s Blood?), so rationality does help you choose; others are not really choices at all (falling in love).
I do confess to buying quite a lot of things at random though. If I want to spend £12 on a bottle of wine it’s a pretty random decision which to buy.
Horses for courses.
For love? No. For everything else yes, because a part of rationality is Bayesian reasoning of the form “I liked this before, so the chances of me liking it again is high”. Our brains can evaluate this sort of probability very fast. The belief that logic/rationality requires ignoring subjective prior experience is not really quite true. It only requires that the conclusions of an argument are derived logically from their premises. If one of the premises is “I drank this wine/a wine from this region before and it tasted good” then “and therefore I should buy it again” is a logical argument, even if it may not be 100% comprehensive.
A better analogy is that we’re like ants trying to find our way to food in a maze. As we search the successful outcomes lead to trails that are explored more often and become the everyday heuristics since they were pathways to success. Those that fail are discarded. Rationality adds a bit to this in that as humans we can think ahead a bit, but real rational thinking (maths, quantum physics) is hard work plus trial and error, and most of us are just happy with a few simpler heuristic rules.
Up to the internet, the ‘lead ants’ were leff to experts because only they had maps and tools. Now anyone can explore, which of course creates chaos initially as all the old rejected paths are re-explored, but eventually more searchers will lead to better and deeper paths by pure weight of numbers. Human rationality is mostly just exploration over time.
There are some people — who sometimes become great artists — whose rational decisions are substantially inferior to the ones they make entirely irrationally, based only on their feelings. These people are rare. Some of them seem to have a diminished capacity for reason — cognitive disability? simple disuse? But many do not — they just don’t reason much. The rest of us get better results when we use our reason, if only to verify ‘is that thing that feels like a good idea, really a good idea?’.
Thank you for your report on the current state of supposed rationality.
The Faith is dead; long live the Faith!
Our children will know in the fullness of time, but it seems likely that we are in the midst of a rather complete reordering of how society understands itself, comparable to the Protestant Reformation or the Enlightenment or the Industrial and Scientific Revolutions.
Writing personally, I will regret what we lose, but these things happen as an intellectual regime ages and encounters (even, creates) problems it cannot resolve. What bothers me the most about it is that the people driving it are ignoramuses and the movement has no intellectual value–which I suppose gets at what Pinker tries to say. Those past intellectual regime changes were driven by people like Luther, Hobbes, Locke, Diderot, Voltaire, Faraday… Now we have Kendi and Coates and DiAngelo and a whole bunch of people who cannot even write a bad book but are only grifters.
That does not bode well for the “Successor Regime” (as Wesley Yang has dubbed it) doing anything worthwhile as it destroys the old and replaces it with sh*t. (And if you don’t recognize it, I allude to John McWhorter describing wokeism as a new, “sh*tty religion.”)
Meanwhile, serious countries (esp. China), prepare for a real future.
Rationality has become a religion.
The comments here are very interesting: just a few question: can we ever be really rational only? Is truth not always the results of a convention: we set the parameters within which we can settle for a truth? Is it possible to capture (our) life on earth though rationality only?
Worth reading: https://channelmcgilchrist.com/steven-pinkers-essay/ with McGilchrist’s reply..