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

The Cubans know a lot about spontaneity, gaiety, sensuality and freaking out. They are not linear, desiccated creatures of print-culture. In short, their problem is almost the obverse of ours—and we must be sympathetic to their efforts to solve it. Suspicious as we are of the traditional Puritanism of left revolutions, American radicals ought to be able to maintain some perspective when a country known mainly for dance music, prostitutes, cigars, abortions, resort life and pornographic movies gets a little up-tight about sexual morals and, in one bad moment two years ago, rounds up several thousand homosexuals in Havana and sends them to a farm to rehabilitate themselves.⁷⁹

In fact, these “farms” were forced labor camps, and they arose not as a correction to spontaneous gaiety and freaking out but as an expression of a homophobia that was deeply rooted in that Latin culture. Whenever we get upset about the looniness of public discourse today, we should remind ourselves that people weren’t so rational in the past, either.

What can be done to improve standards of reasoning? Persuasion by facts and logic, the most direct strategy, is not always futile. It’s true that people can cling to beliefs in defiance of all evidence, like Lucy in Peanuts who insisted that snow comes out of the ground and rises into the sky even as she was being slowly buried in a snowfall. But there are limits as to how high the snow can pile up. When people are first confronted with information that contradicts a staked-out position, they become even more committed to it, as we’d expect from the theories of identity-protective cognition, motivated reasoning, and cognitive dissonance reduction. Feeling their identity threatened, belief holders double down and muster more ammunition to fend off the challenge. But since another part of the human mind keeps a person in touch with reality, as the counterevidence piles up the dissonance can mount until it becomes too much to bear and the opinion topples over, a phenomenon called the affective tipping point.⁸⁰ The tipping point depends on the balance between how badly the opinion holder’s reputation would be damaged by relinquishing the opinion and whether the counterevidence is so blatant and public as to be common knowledge: a naked emperor, an elephant in the room.⁸¹ As we saw in chapter 10, that is starting to happen with public opinion on climate change. And entire populations can shift when a critical nucleus of persuadable influencers changes its mind and everyone else follows along, or when one generation is replaced by another that doesn’t cling to the same dogmas (progress, funeral by funeral).

Across the society as a whole the wheels of reason often turn slowly, and it would be nice to speed them up. The obvious places to apply this torque are in education and the media. For several decades fans of reason have pressured schools and universities to adopt curricula in “critical thinking.” Students are advised to look at both sides of an issue, to back up their opinions with evidence, and to spot logical fallacies like circular reasoning, attacking a straw man, appealing to authority, arguing ad hominem, and reducing a graded issue to black or white.⁸² Related programs called “debiasing” try to inoculate students against cognitive fallacies such as the Availability heuristic and confirmation bias.⁸³

When they were first introduced, these programs had disappointing outcomes, which led to pessimism as to whether we could ever knock sense into the person on the street. But unless risk analysts and cognitive psychologists represent a superior breed of human, something in their education must have enlightened them about cognitive fallacies and how to avoid them, and there is no reason those enlightenments can’t be applied more widely. The beauty of reason is that it can always be applied to understand failures of reason. A second look at critical thinking and debiasing programs has shown what makes them succeed or fail.

The reasons are familiar to education researchers.⁸⁴ Any curriculum will be pedagogically ineffective if it consists of a lecturer yammering in front of a blackboard, or a textbook that students highlight with a yellow marker. People understand concepts only when they are forced to think them through, to discuss them with others, and to use them to solve problems. A second impediment to effective teaching is that pupils don’t spontaneously transfer what they learned from one concrete example to others in the same abstract category. Students in a math class who learn how to arrange a marching band into even rows using the principle of a least common multiple are stymied when asked to arrange rows of vegetables in a garden. In the same way, students in a critical thinking course who are taught to discuss the American Revolution from both the British and American perspectives will not make the leap to consider how the Germans viewed World War I.