Robert Wright's Nonzero (private feed for eveningglass@gmail.com)
Society & Culture:Philosophy
Steven Pinker, in his new book Rationality, says he sees a paradox within the world view of the woke—at least, those of the woke who subscribe to postmodernism.
On the one hand, postmodernists “hold that reason, truth, and objectivity are social constructions that justify the privilege of dominant groups.” On the other hand, their moral convictions “depend on a commitment to objective truth. Was slavery a myth? Was the Holocaust just one of many possible narratives? Is climate change a social construction? Or are the suffering and danger that define these events really real—claims that we know are true because of logic and evidence and objective scholarship?”
I guess he has a point (though, honestly, I’m not conversant enough in postmodern thought to say how many postmodernists are indeed hoist with this petard). But there’s also a kind of paradox within Pinker’s world view—not a logical contradiction, but an interesting tension.
Pinker is sympathetic to evolutionary psychology. (As am I; in 1994 I published an ev-psych manifesto called The Moral Animal that was favorably reviewed in the New York Times Book Review by… Steven Pinker.) And evolutionary psychology suggests that the human brain was designed by natural selection to, among other things, advance self-serving narratives that may stray from the truth.
Indeed, some of the “cognitive biases” that get so much attention these days—including in this newsletter and in Pinker’s new book—may exist for that very purpose. Confirmation bias, for example, leads us to uncritically embrace evidence that seems to support our world view, thus helping us mount rhetorically powerful arguments on behalf of our interests and the interests of groups we belong to.
Evolutionary psychology also suggests that people are naturally inclined to use whatever power they have to amplify these dubious narratives. So, really, Pinker should be willing to entertain the possibility that the world described by woke postmodernists—a world in which the powerful construct a version of reality that works to their advantage and to the disadvantage of the less powerful—is the real world.
I just recorded a conversation with Pinker for the Wright Show. (It will go public Tuesday evening, but paid newsletter subscribers can watch it—below—or listen to it—above—now.) I somehow failed to ask him about this seeming harmony between evolutionary psychology and postmodernism—the fact that the two world views support similarly cynical views of human discourse. But that’s OK, because I’m pretty sure I know what he’d say in response:
Yes, he agrees that human nature inclines people to sometimes embrace self-serving falsehoods, and that this tendency can work to the advantage of the powerful and the disadvantage of the powerless. But he still diverges from the postmodernist perspective (as he defines it) by insisting that there is such thing as objective truth, even if none of us has reliable access to it. He writes in Rationality, “Perfect rationality and objective truth are aspirations that no mortal can ever claim to have attained. But the conviction that they are out there licenses us to develop rules we can all abide by that allow us to approach the truth collectively in ways that are impossible for any of us individually.”
I share Pinker’s belief that the objective truth is in some sense “out there”—and that humans can do things that move them closer to it. And I consider his new book a big contribution to that cause. It illuminates both some paths that can carry us toward the truth (how to infer causality, interpret statistics, assess hypotheses, etc.) and some obstacles in those paths (common errors in reasoning, cognitive biases that may foster such errors, etc.).
But I’m not as sanguine as Pinker seems to be about this progress happening fast—at least, I’m not sanguine about the kind of progress toward truth we need in order to head off various big crises facing humankind. Or, to put it another way: I feel a need to take radical action, and I don’t get the radical action vibe from him.
Reflecting on Pinker’s book, and on my conversation with him, gave me a clearer idea of why I’m so far from sanguine—not just why I think radical action is in order, but why I think making that action successful will be a challenge. A lot of the problem, as I see it, is rooted in some distinctive properties of the evolutionary psychology version of cynicism about human discourse.
I should confess, before elaborating, to one difference between me and Pinker that may partly account for our different degrees of sanguineness: I’m apocalyptically inclined. Witness my belief—abundantly familiar to regular readers of this newsletter—in the need for an “apocalypse aversion project.”
One of this project’s numerous goals is to somehow liberate American foreign policy from the dominating influence of “the Blob”—the influential collection of think tankers, journalists, academics, and politicians that I wrote about last week. This goal of dethroning the Blob from its place of privilege in foreign policy discourse is a good example of how, in light of evolutionary psychology, moving humankind closer to the truth can seem challenging.
I don’t mean to suggest, by the way, that my negative opinion of the Blob sharply distinguishes me from Pinker. I don’t really know much about his foreign policy views—and I was delighted to find, in our conversation, that there is at least some overlap; he shares my belief that the US, even as it extols a “rules-based international order,” flagrantly flouts the rules. (He said he had become aware of this hypocrisy while working on his bestseller The Better Angels of Our Nature. I’d say the fact that this hypocrisy wasn’t previously very apparent to him is itself an example of how the powerful—in this case the US government and influential defenders of its foreign policy, which is to say the Blob—can promulgate a self-serving and false narrative.)
What distinguishes me from Pinker in this realm is that, whatever doubts about US foreign policy he may have, they haven’t turned him into an anti-Blob jihadist. I, in contrast, believe that the world won’t be safe until the Blob has been uprooted, destroyed, obliterated, annihilated, and, for good measure, fed through a paper shredder, or maybe a wood chipper—metaphorically speaking, I mean. Plus: sow their fields with salt! (Maybe the Blob is to me what postmodernists in academia are to Pinker. Naaah—he can’t be that worked up about them.)
My revolutionary zeal has led me to ponder the question of how exactly one would go about bringing the Blob’s reign to an end. Which brings us back to evolutionary psychology.
One way to put the mainstream ev-psych view of cognitive biases (or at least some of them) is this: their function is to let people argue in bad faith while feeling like they’re arguing in good faith. If you’re going to argue, say, that you deserve some reward—or don’t deserve some punishment—it helps to argue with firm moral conviction. And it’s easier to do that if you’re not thinking, “I can’t believe how selectively I’m citing evidence, how dishonest the argument I’m making is.” So your brain conceals the dishonesty from you. If, guided by confirmation bias, you don’t even notice evidence inconsistent with your position, then you needn’t feel guilty about not mentioning it.
One corollary of this approach to explaining certain kinds of self-deception is that, as a rule, when people do bad things, they don’t think of themselves as doing bad things. In my conversation with Pinker, he and I agreed that the actor Will Smith was making a reasonable conjecture when he said in 2007, "Even Hitler didn't wake up going, 'Let me do the most evil thing I can do today,'" (We also agreed it was ridiculous that Smith had to retract this and apologize for it to appease some speech police.)
This built-in tendency of people to believe in their own goodness strikes me as a big problem for an anti-Blob insurgency. After all, if you want to rally support for tearing down the foreign policy establishment, it helps to paint its occupants as evil, as willfully and mercilessly destructive. As in: These coastal elites will gladly sacrifice the lives of 18-year-olds from flyover country on the altar of profit and power and empire! And it’s harder to say things like that if you believe, as I do, that pretty much everyone in the Blob is in fact convinced that they’re doing God’s work.
Which isn’t to say that the policies they favor don’t bring them profit or power or serve empire. It’s just to say that, even when these policies do have these properties, most blobsters have a nobler narrative in mind, thanks in part to our evolutionarily ingrained gift for building, and buying into, self-serving narratives.
To put the challenge faced by the anti-Blob insurgency in slightly different terms:
One thing that typically energizes revolutionaries is seeing the existing regime as the enemy. And of course, the Blob is in a sense the enemy—but it’s not (according to my takeaway from evolutionary psychology, at least) an enemy that deserves to be depicted the way we’re accustomed to depicting enemies: as malicious, barbarous, and various other adjectives that let us abide, or even take active pleasure in, the enemy’s suffering. If social media has taught me anything, it’s that one sure path to building grassroots support for a movement is to demonize people—and it’s harder to demonize people when you don’t consider them demonic.
This challenge of keeping the insurgency emotionally energized is far from the only ev-psych-related obstacle to dethroning the Blob. There’s also the whole vast subject of how some of the reality-distorting features of the human mind make Americans easy prey for narratives fostered by the Blob.
Consider the cognitive bias known as attribution error. I won’t here fully explain it, since I’ve done that in a previous issue of NZN, but among its consequences is this: Once we consider someone an enemy, we tend to attribute any bad things they do to their disposition, their basic character, and we tend to explain away any good things they do as fleeting products of temporary circumstances. So once the Blob has succeeded in framing, say, the Iranian leadership as the enemy—once most Americans have bought into that framing—it’s hard for Iran’s leaders to escape that framing; bad things they do strengthen the enemy framing, but good things they do don’t undermine it, since these things are dismissed as ephemeral, as not reflective of the enemy’s true nature.
This powerful dynamic (which is often at work within the blobbish elites who construct the “enemy” framing, not just within the grassroots Americans who accept it) is also a subtle dynamic; becoming aware of how attribution error shapes your thinking—and staying aware of it—is hard. After all, cognitive biases are built to exert their distorting influence without being detected.
I could go on, but that would lead us into a whole jungle of subtle influences on cognition that complicate the job of dethroning the Blob—to say nothing of achieving the larger mission of apocalypse aversion. We’ll no doubt explore other parts of this jungle in future editions of the newsletter.
For now I’ll just say this much about these subtle influences: They tend to be mediated by feelings. In the case of attribution error, for example, it’s the feelings triggered by the mention of an enemy that shape our interpretation of the enemy’s good and bad behaviors.
I think the role of feelings, of affect, in cognitive biases is underappreciated by many psychologists, even evolutionary psychologists. (This was one theme of my critique, in Wired, of Pinker’s previous book, Enlightenment Now.) And one reason the role of feelings is underappreciated is because it’s hard to appreciate: the interface of cognition and affect, the shaping of thoughts by feelings, evades our conscious awareness unless we work hard to see it. This generic fact—as it plays out in all kinds of people via various kinds of cognitive biases—may in some sense be the biggest single obstacle to progress toward truth, the biggest challenge facing aspiring apocalypse averters.
I hope my emphasis on the challenges ahead doesn’t seem too dispiriting. Though averting the various global calamities that I lump under the “apocalypse” label may be a long hard slog, it’s a slog with some redeeming features (even aside from saving the world, I mean).
For one thing, it involves attaining a clearer view of human nature—of how the human mind works, and why, for better and for worse, it works that way.
This view of human nature suggests (to me, at least) that we should try to go about our work without hating people or demonizing them, even if we think that, left unchecked, they will bring the world to ruin. This stance toward adversaries can feel uncomfortable, and it’s certainly not natural. But I do think it brings us closer to moral truth—which, like the objective truth about the physical world, is, I think, in some sense “out there”.
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