Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

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 21REASON

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