Enlightenment Now
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Of course the cohorts of the present say nothing about the politics of the future if people change their values as they age. Perhaps if you are a populist at twenty-five you have no heart, and if you are not a populist at forty-five you have no brain (to adapt a meme that has been said about liberals, socialists, communists, leftists, Republicans, Democrats, and revolutionists and that has been attributed to various quotation magnets, including Victor Hugo, Benjamin Disraeli, George Bernard Shaw, Georges Clemenceau, Winston Churchill, and Bob Dylan). But whoever said it (probably the 19th-century jurist Anselme Batbie, who in turn attributed it to Edmund Burke), and regardless of which belief system it’s supposed to apply to, the claim about life-cycle effects on political orientation is false.45 As we saw in chapter 15, people carry their emancipative values with them as they age rather than sliding into illiberalism. And a recent analysis of 20th-century American voters by the political scientists Yair Ghitza and Andrew Gelman has shown that Americans do not consistently vote for more conservative presidents as they age. Their voting preferences are shaped by their cumulative experience of the popularity of presidents over their life spans, with a peak of influence in the 14–24-year-old window.46 The young voters who reject populism today are unlikely to embrace it tomorrow.
Figure 20-1: Populist support across generations, 2016
Sources: Trump: Exit polls conducted by Edison Research, New York Times 2016. Brexit: Exit polls conducted by Lord Ashcroft Polls, BBC News Magazine, June 24, 2016, http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-36619342. European populist parties (2002–2014): Inglehart & Norris 2016, fig. 8. Data for each birth cohort are plotted at the midpoint of their range.
How might one counter the populist threat to Enlightenment values? Economic insecurity is not the driver, so the strategies of reducing income inequality and of talking to laid-off steelworkers and trying to feel their pain, however praiseworthy, will probably be ineffective. Cultural backlash does seem to be a driver, so avoiding needlessly polarizing rhetoric, symbolism, and identity politics might help to recruit, or at least not repel, voters who are not sure which team they belong to (more on this in chapter 21). Since populist movements have achieved an influence beyond their numbers, fixing electoral irregularities such as gerrymandering and forms of disproportionate representation which overweight rural areas (such as the US Electoral College) would help. So would journalistic coverage that tied candidates’ reputations to their record of accuracy and coherence rather than to trivial gaffes and scandals. Part of the problem, over the long term, will dissipate with urbanization: you can’t keep them down on the farm. And part will dissipate with demographics. As has been said about science, sometimes society advances funeral by funeral.47
Still, a puzzle in the rise of authoritarian populism is why a shocking proportion of the sectors of the population whose interests were most endangered by the outcome of the elections, such as younger Britons with Brexit, and African Americans, Latinos, and American millennials with Trump, stayed home on election day.48 This brings us back to a major theme of this book, and to my own small prescription for strengthening the current of Enlightenment humanism against the latest counter-Enlightenment backlash.
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. “Charge the cockpit or you die!” shrieked a conservative essayist, comparing the country to the hijacked flight on 9/11 that was brought down by a passenger mutiny.49 “I’d rather see the empire burn to the ground under Trump, opening up at least the possibility of radical change, than cruise on autopilot under Clinton,” flamed a left-wing advocate of “the politics of arson.”50 Even moderate editorialists in mainstream newspapers commonly depict the country as a hellhole of racism, inequality, terrorism, social pathology, and failing institutions.51
The problem with dystopian rhetoric is that if people believe that the country is a flaming dumpster, they will be receptive to the perennial appeal of demagogues: “What do you have to lose?” If the media and intellectuals instead put events into statistical and historical context, they could help answer that question. Radical regimes from Nazi Germany and Maoist China to contemporary Venezuela and Turkey show that people have a tremendous amount to lose when charismatic authoritarians responding to a “crisis” trample over democratic norms and institutions and command their countries by the force of their personalities.
A liberal democracy is a precious achievement. Until the messiah comes, it will always have problems, but it’s better to solve those problems than to start a conflagration and hope that something better arises from the ashes and bones. By failing to take note of the gifts of modernity, social critics poison voters against responsible custodians and incremental reformers who can consolidate the tremendous progress we have enjoyed and strengthen the conditions that will bring us more.
* * *
The challenge in making the case for modernity is that when one’s nose is inches from the news, optimism can seem naïve, or in the pundits’ favorite new cliché about elites, “out of touch.” Yet in a world outside of hero myths, the only kind of progress we can have is a kind that is easy to miss while we are living through it. As the philosopher Isaiah Berlin pointed out, the ideal of a perfectly just, equal, free, healthy, and harmonious society, which liberal democracies never measure up to, is a dangerous fantasy. People are not clones in a monoculture, so what satisfies one will frustrate another, and the only way they can end up equal is if they are treated unequally. Moreover, among the perquisites of freedom is the freedom of people to screw up their own lives. Liberal democracies can make progress, but only against a constant backdrop of messy compromise and constant reform:
The children have obtained what their parents and grandparents longed for—greater freedom, greater material welfare, a juster society; but the old ills are forgotten, and the children face new problems, brought about by the very solutions of the old ones, and these, even if they can in turn be solved, generate new situations, and with them new requirements—and so on, forever—and unpredictably.52
Such is the nature of progress. Pulling us forward are ingenuity, sympathy, and benign institutions. Pushing us back are the darker sides of human nature and the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Kevin Kelly explains how this dialectic can nonetheless result in forward motion:
Ever since the Enlightenment and the invention of science, we’ve managed to create a tiny bit more than we’ve destroyed each year. But that few percent positive difference is compounded over decades into what we might call civilization. . . . [Progress] is a self-cloaking action seen only in retrospect. Which is why I tell people that my great optimism of the future is rooted in history.53
We don’t have a catchy name for a constructive agenda that reconciles long-term gains with short-term setbacks, historical currents with human agency. “Optimism” is not quite right, because a belief that things will always get better is no more rational than the belief that things will always get worse. Kelly offers “protopia,” the pro- from progress and process. Others have suggested “pessimistic hopefulness,” “opti-realism,” and “radical incrementalism.”54 My favorite comes from Hans Rosling, who, when asked whether he was an optimist, replied, “I am not an optimist. I’m a very serious possibilist.”55
PART III
REASON, SCIENCE, AND HUMANISM
The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas.
—John Maynard Keynes
Ideas matter. Homo sapiens is a species that lives by its wits, concocting and pooling notions of how the world works and how its members can best lead their lives. There can be no better proof of the power of ideas than the ironic influence of the political philosopher who most insisted on the power of vested interests, the man who wrote that “the ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.” Karl Marx possessed no wealth and commanded no army, but the ideas he scribbled in the reading room of the British Museum shaped the course of the 20th century and beyond, wrenching the lives of billions.
This part of the book wraps up my defense of the ideas of the Enlightenment. Part I outlined those ideas; part II showed they work. Now it’s time to defend them against some surprising enemies—not just angry populists and religious fundamentalists, but factions of mainstream intellectual culture. It may sound quixotic to offer a defense of the Enlightenment against professors, critics, pundits, and their readers, because if they were asked about these ideals point-blank, few would disavow them. But intellectuals’ commitment to those ideals is squirrely. The hearts of many of them lie elsewhere, and few are willing to proffer a positive defense. Enlightenment ideals, thus unchampioned, fade into the background as a bland default, and become a catch basin for every unsolved societal problem (of which there will always be many). Illiberal ideas like authoritarianism, tribalism, and magical thinking easily get the blood pumping, and have no shortage of champions. It’s hardly a fair fight.
Though I hope Enlightenment ideals will become more deeply entrenched in the public at large—fundamentalists, angry populists, and all—I claim no competence in the dark arts of mass persuasion, popular mobilization, or viral memes. What follow are arguments directed at people who care about arguments. These arguments can matter, because practical men and women and madmen in authority are affected, directly or indirectly, by the world of ideas. They go to university. They read intellectual magazines, if only in dentists’ waiting rooms. They watch talking heads on Sunday morning news shows. They are briefed by staff members who subscribe to highbrow papers and watch TED talks. They frequent Internet discussion forums that are enlightened or endarkened by the reading habits of the more literate contributors. I like to think that some good might come to the world if more of the ideas that trickle into these tributaries embodied the Enlightenment ideals of reason, science, and humanism.
CHAPTER 21
REASON
Opposing reason is, by definition, unreasonable. But that hasn’t stopped a slew of irrationalists from favoring the heart over the head, the limbic system over the cortex, blinking over thinking, McCoy over Spock. There was the Romantic movement of the counter-Enlightenment, captured in Johann Herder’s avowal “I am not here to think, but to be, feel, live!” There’s the common veneration (not just by the religious) of faith, namely believing something without a good reason. There’s the postmodernist credo that reason is a pretext to exert power, reality is socially constructed, and all statements are trapped in a web of self-reference and collapse into paradox. Even members of my own tribe of cognitive psychologists often claim to have refuted what they take to be the Enlightenment belief that humans are rational agents, and hence to have undermined the centrality of reason itself. The implication is that it is futile even to try to make the world a more rational place.1
But all these positions have a fatal flaw: they refute themselves. They deny that there can be a reason for believing those very positions. As soon as their defenders open their mouths to begin their defense, they have lost the argument, because in that very act they are tacitly committed to persuasion—to adducing reasons for what they are about to argue, which, they insist, ought to be accepted by their listeners according to standards of rationality that both accept. Otherwise they are wasting their breath and might as well try to convert their audience by bribery or violence. In The Last Word, the philosopher Thomas Nagel drives home the point that subjectivity and relativism regarding logic and reality are incoherent, because “one can’t criticize something with nothing”:
The claim “Everything is subjective” must be nonsense, for it would itself have to be either subjective or objective. But it can’t be objective, since in that case it would be false if true. And it can’t be subjective, because then it would not rule out any objective claim, including the claim that it is objectively false. There may be some subjectivists, perhaps styling themselves as pragmatists, who present subjectivism as applying even to itself. But then it does not call for a reply, since it is just a report of what the subjectivist finds it agreeable to say. If he also invites us to join him, we need not offer any reason for declining, since he has offered us no reason to accept.2
Nagel calls this line of thinking Cartesian, because it resembles Descartes’s argument “I think, therefore I am.” Just as the very fact that one is wondering whether one exists demonstrates that one exists, the very fact that one is appealing to reasons demonstrates that reason exists. It may also be called a transcendental argument, one that invokes the necessary preconditions for doing what it is doing, namely making an argument.3 (In a way, it goes back to the ancient Liar’s Paradox, featuring the Cretan who says, “All Cretans are liars.”) Whatever you call the argument, it would be a mistake to interpret it as justifying a “belief” or a “faith” in reason, which Nagel calls “one thought too many.” We don’t believe in reason; we use reason (just as we don’t program our computers to have a CPU; a program is a sequence of operations made available by the CPU).4
Though reason is prior to everything else and needn’t (indeed cannot) be justified on first principles, once we start engaging in it we can stroke our confidence that the particular kinds of reasoning we are engaging in are sound by noting their internal coherence and their fit with reality. Life is not a dream, in which disconnected experiences appear in bewildering succession. And the application of reason to the world validates itself by granting us the ability to bend the world to our will, from curing infections to sending a man to the moon.
Despite its provenance in abstract philosophy, the Cartesian argument is not an exercise in logic-chopping. From the most recondite deconstructionist to the most anti-intellectual purveyor of conspiracy theories and “alternative facts,” everyone recognizes the power of responses like “Why should I believe you?” or “Prove it” or “You’re full of crap.” Few would reply, “That’s right, there’s no reason to believe me,” or “Yes, I’m lying right now,” or “I agree, what I’m saying is bullshit.” It’s in the very nature of argument that people stake a claim to being right. As soon as they do, they have committed themselves to reason—and the listeners they are trying to convince can hold their feet to the fire of coherence and accuracy.
* * *
By now many people have become aware of the research in cognitive psychology on human irrationality, explained in bestsellers like Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow and Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational. I’ve alluded to these cognitive infirmities in earlier chapters: the way we estimate probability from available anecdotes, project stereotypes onto individuals, seek confirming and ignore disconfirming evidence, dread harms and losses, and reason from teleology and voodoo resemblance rather than mechanical cause and effect.5 But as important as these discoveries are, it’s a mistake to see them as refuting some Enlightenment tenet that humans are rational actors, or as licensing the fatalistic conclusion that we might as well give up on reasoned persuasion and fight demagoguery with demagoguery.
To begin with, no Enlightenment thinker ever claimed that humans were consistently rational. Certainly not the über-rational Kant, who wrote that “from the crooked timber of humanity no truly straight thing can be made,” nor Spinoza, Hume, Smith, or the Encyclopédistes, who were cognitive and social psychologists ahead of their time.6 What they argued was that we ought to be rational, by learning to repress the fallacies and dogma
s that so readily seduce us, and that we can be rational, collectively if not individually, by implementing institutions and adhering to norms that constrain our faculties, including free speech, logical analysis, and empirical testing. And if you disagree, then why should we accept your claim that humans are incapable of rationality?
Often the cynicism about reason is justified with a crude version of evolutionary psychology (not one endorsed by evolutionary psychologists) in which humans think with their amygdalas, reacting instinctively to the slightest rustle in the grass which may portend a crouching tiger. But real evolutionary psychology treats humans differently: not as two-legged antelopes but as the species that outsmarts antelopes. We are a cognitive species that depends on explanations of the world. Since the world is the way it is regardless of what people believe about it, there is a strong selection pressure for an ability to develop explanations that are true.7