Topics
News ChannelsMuslims
India has entered 2020 in a state of overflowing passions. Editorial pages in newspapers are filled with prose—much of it written by people considered learned by any normal criteria—that would put apocalyptic preachers to shame. News channels are populated more than ever by fervid town criers. Facts are fought with rhetoric; invitations to objective debate meet righteous rage. The end is nigh, since we all know what everything implies. We know that tenders are already being floated to build vast concentration camps, possibly in ecologically fragile areas, for Muslims, atheists, transgenders and women wearing jeans. So here’s my New Year’s wish, a few days late, and totally unlikely to be fulfilled: That Reason prevails in our public life.
Let me lay out my case. Opposing Reason is, by definition, unreasonable. By rejecting Reason, we elevate our brain’s limbic system over the cortex, or, as cognitive scientist Steven Pinker puts it, blinking over thinking. The trouble, of course, is that most people believe that they are reasonable, when actually they may be ill-informed, easily influenced, insecure, unable to grasp the rudiments of logic, egotistic, bigoted, or plain old-fashioned stupid. But I’ll come to that later—why people imagine they are paragons of Reason, and what the tests of Reason are. First, those who do not trust Reason.
Post-modern philosophers, currently very popular among leftists, decree that Reason is a pretext to exert power, and all statements are ultimately self-referential and collapse into paradox. The obvious and fatal flaw here, as any fool can see, is that this also means there is no reason to believe them—so the theory self-combusts every time someone tries to defend it.
What about the claim “Everything is subjective”? Well, for that to be true, as the philosopher Thomas Nagel has pointed out, the statement itself would have to be either subjective or objective. It cannot be objective, because if so, it would be false if true. And it cannot be subjective, because then it would not rule out any objective claim, including the claim that it is objectively false.
But all of us suffer from cognitive infirmities. We estimate probability from available anecdotes; project stereotypes onto individuals; seek confirming or ignore contrary evidence; and reason from superstitions and “higher purpose” rather than mechanical cause and effect. All of us also belong to some tribe or sub-culture. A given belief, depending on how it is framed and who endorses it, can become a motto, shibboleth, sacred tenet, or pledge of loyalty. The tribe’s values are often defined by its favourite demons: For instance, greedy corporations, out-of-touch elites, religious majorities or minorities.Yale Law School professor Dan Kahan’s Cultural Cognition Project confirms that certain beliefs become symbols of cultural allegiance. People affirm or deny these beliefs to express not what they know, but what they are. For instance, Kahan found that the principal reason people disagree on climate change is not that they do not understand the science, but because their positions convey values—communal concern versus individual self-reliance; humility versus ingenuity; harmony with nature versus mastery over it—that divide them over cultural lines.
But it gets more interesting. Kahan concludes that people’s tendency to treat their beliefs as oaths of allegiance rather than reasoned appraisal is, in a sense, rational. Conforming within your social and work circle gets you acceptance and respect, and the fallout of voicing the wrong opinion can be serious—from social ostracization to career suicide. In effect, what is rational for every individual to believe (esteem) can be irrational for the whole society to act upon (based on reality).
Similarly, “progressives” continue to deny progress to the point of being progressophobes. American data scientist Kalev Leetaru “sentiment mined” every article published in that most progressive of newspapers, The New York Times, between 1945 and 2010, and found that it has been getting gloomier and gloomier since the early 1960s. Yet, there has been spectacular human progress in every aspect in the last 60 years, documented widely, not merely in dense footnote-rich reports, but in accessible books written by Nobel laureates and best-sellers like the late Hans Rosling’s Factfulness. Or, one can just go to websites like gapminder.org or
ourworldindata.org, where the numbers are presented simply and without ideological bias. I mention ideology since, one, people on both sides of any debate are prone to cherry-pick data and, two, post-modern leftists (not surprisingly) hate numbers and numeracy.
Reason demands critical thinking, and what American psychologist Jonathan Baron has called “active open-mindedness”. The principles Baron recommends include the following: People should take into consideration evidence that goes against their beliefs; it is more useful to pay attention to those who disagree with you than to those who agree; and changing your mind is not a sign of weakness.
So, I make this wish for 2020: Let Reason prevail. And, yes, that is utterly unreasonable.
