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

Intellectual and political polarization feed each other. It’s harder to be a conservative intellectual when American conservative politics has become steadily more know-nothing, from Ronald Reagan to Dan Quayle to George W. Bush to Sarah Palin to Donald Trump.⁷³ On the other side, the capture of the left by identity politicians, political correctness police, and social justice warriors creates an opening for loudmouths who brag of “telling it like it is.” A challenge of our era is how to foster an intellectual and political culture that is driven by reason rather than tribalism and mutual reaction.

Making reason the currency of our discourse begins with clarity about the centrality of reason itself.⁷⁴ As I mentioned, many commentators are confused about it. The discovery of cognitive and emotional biases does not mean that “humans are irrational” and so there’s no point in trying to make our deliberations more rational. If humans were incapable of rationality, we could never have discovered the ways in which they were irrational, because we would have no benchmark of rationality against which to assess human judgment, and no way to carry out the assessment. Humans may be vulnerable to bias and error, but clearly not all of us all the time, or no one would ever be entitled to say that humans are vulnerable to bias and error. The human brain is capable of reason, given the right circumstances; the problem is to identify those circumstances and put them more firmly in place.

For the same reason, editorialists should retire the new cliché that we are in a “post-truth era” unless they can keep up a tone of scathing irony. The term is corrosive, because it implies that we should resign ourselves to propaganda and lies and just fight back with more of our own. We are not in a post-truth era. Mendacity, truth-shading, conspiracy theories, extraordinary popular delusions, and the madness of crowds are as old as our species, but so is the conviction that some ideas are right and others are wrong.⁷⁵ The same decade that has seen the rise of pants-on-fire Trump and his reality-challenged followers has also seen the rise of a new ethic of fact-checking. Angie Holan, the editor of PolitiFact, a fact-checking project begun in 2007, noted:

[Many of] today’s TV journalists . . . have picked up the torch of fact-checking and now grill candidates on issues of accuracy during live interviews. Most voters don’t think it’s biased to question people about whether their seemingly fact-based statements are accurate. Research published earlier this year by the American Press Institute showed that more than eight in 10 Americans have a positive view of political fact-checking.

In fact, journalists regularly tell me their media organizations have started highlighting fact-checking in their reporting because so many people click on fact-checking stories after a debate or high-profile news event. Many readers now want fact-checking as part of traditional news stories as well; they will vocally complain to ombudsmen and readers’ representatives when they see news stories repeating discredited factual claims.⁷⁶

This ethic would have served us well in earlier decades when false rumors regularly set off pogroms, riots, lynchings, and wars (including the Spanish-American War in 1898, the escalation of the Vietnam War in 1964, the Iraq invasion of 2003, and many others).⁷⁷ It was not applied rigorously enough to prevent Trump’s victory in 2016, but since then his fibs and those of his spokespeople have been mercilessly ridiculed in the media and popular culture, which means that the resources for favoring truth are in place even if they don’t always carry the day.

Over the long run, the institutions of reason can mitigate the Tragedy of the Belief Commons and allow the truth to prevail. For all of our current irrationality, few influential people today believe in werewolves, unicorns, witches, alchemy, astrology, bloodletting, miasmas, animal sacrifice, the divine right of kings, or supernatural omens in rainbows and eclipses. Moral irrationality can be outgrown as well. As recently as my childhood, the Virginia judge Leon Bazile upheld the conviction of Richard and Mildred Loving for their interracial marriage with an argument that not even the most benighted conservative would advance today:

The parties were guilty of a most serious crime. It was contrary to the declared public law, founded upon motives of public policy . . . upon which social order, public morality and the best interests of both races depend. . . . Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.⁷⁸

And presumably most liberals would not be persuaded by this defense of Castro’s Cuba by the intellectual icon Susan Sontag in 1969: