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

Indeed, in one realm after another we are seeing the conquest of dogma and instinct by the armies of reason. Newspapers are supplementing shoe leather and punditry with statisticians and fact-checking squads.⁹³ The cloak-and-dagger world of national intelligence is seeing farther into the future by using the Bayesian reasoning of superforecasters.⁹⁴ Health care is being reshaped by evidence-based medicine (which should have been a redundant expression long ago).⁹⁵ Psychotherapy has progressed from the couch and notebook to Feedback-Informed Treatment.⁹⁶ In New York, and increasingly in other cities, violent crime has been reduced with the real-time data-crunching system called Compstat.⁹⁷ The effort to aid the developing world is being guided by the Randomistas, economists who gather data from randomized trials to distinguish fashionable boondoggles from programs that actually improve people’s lives.⁹⁸ Volunteering and charitable giving are being scrutinized by the Effective Altruism movement, which distinguishes altruistic acts that enhance the lives of beneficiaries from those that enhance the warm glow in benefactors.⁹⁹ Sports has seen the advent of Moneyball, in which strategies and players are evaluated by statistical analysis rather than intuition and lore, allowing smarter teams to beat richer teams and giving fans endless new material for conversations over the hot stove.¹⁰⁰ The blogosphere has spawned the Rationality Community, who urge people to be “less wrong” in their opinions by applying Bayesian reasoning and compensating for cognitive biases.¹⁰¹ And in the day-to-day functioning of governments, the application of behavioral insights (sometimes called Nudge) and evidence-based policy has wrung more social benefits out of fewer tax dollars.¹⁰² In area after area, the world has been getting more rational.

There is, of course, a flaming exception: electoral politics and the issues that have clung to it. Here the rules of the game are fiendishly designed to bring out the most irrational in people.¹⁰³ Voters have a say on issues that don’t affect them personally, and never have to inform themselves or justify their positions. Practical agenda items like trade and energy are bundled with moral hot buttons like euthanasia and the teaching of evolution. Each bundle is strapped to a coalition with geographic, racial, and ethnic constituencies. The media cover elections like horse races, and analyze issues by pitting ideological hacks against each other in screaming matches. All of these features steer people away from reasoned analysis and toward perfervid self-expression. Some are products of the misconception that the benefits of democracy come from elections, whereas they depend more on having a government that is constrained in its powers, responsive to its citizens, and attentive to the results of its policies (chapter 14). As a result, reforms that are designed to make governance more “democratic,” such as plebiscites and direct primaries, may instead have made governance more identity-driven and irrational. The conundrums are inherent to democracy and have been debated since the time of Plato.¹⁰⁴ They have no instant solution, but identifying the worst of the current problems and setting the goal of mitigating them is the place to start.

When issues are not politicized, people can be altogether rational. Kahan notes that “bitter public disputes over science are in fact the exception rather than the rule.”¹⁰⁵ No one gets exercised over whether antibiotics work, or whether driving drunk is a good idea. Recent history proves the point in a natural experiment, complete with a neatly matched control group.¹⁰⁶ The human papillomavirus (HPV) is sexually transmitted and a major cause of cervical cancer but can be neutralized with a vaccine. Hepatitis B is also sexually transmitted, also causes cancer, and also can be prevented by a vaccine. Yet HPV vaccination became a political firestorm, with parents protesting that the government should not be making it easier for teenagers to have sex, while hepatitis B vaccination is unexceptionable. The difference, Kahan suggests, lies in the way the two vaccines were introduced. Hep B was treated as a routine public health matter, like whooping cough or yellow fever. But the manufacturer of the HPV vaccine lobbied state legislatures to make vaccination mandatory, starting with adolescent girls, which sexualized the treatment and raised the dander of puritanical parents.