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A review by yogajohn
Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters by Steven Pinker
4.0
Pinker (the thinker) strikes again!
24 hour news cycles can be brutal to our world view and to our general opinion of humans and human nature. Newsworthy stories - if it bleeds it leads - can skew our ability to accurately estimate how violent, how safe, or how wild and crazy this world really is. At the height of a tragic news story, it can seem like people couldn’t be any worse and our existence couldn’t be more precarious. Yet despite these horrors, our world is indeed much better off than it was just a few short decades and centuries ago. Pinker’s 2 previous books - The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined and Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress - both demonstrate just how far we’ve come in reducing war, increasing life expectancy, maintaining safer work spaces, eradicating many communicable diseases, and practically eliminating illiteracy and extreme poverty. Yes we have a long way to go yet, but we are well on our way!
In this book, Pinker defends rationality because (sadly) it needs a defender. Being rational gets ridiculed in mainstream pop and art culture as if it's lame and uncool. Creative and spiritual systems love to throw rationality out the window as a way to stop our tendencies to overthink or over analyze. But yet thinking and analyzing are good facilities that we can and should access especially in light of our many cognitive biases - and we all have them. Pinker talks about many of them; one in particular was interesting - the Myside Bias. This bias, sometimes known as Confirmation Bias, occurs when people evaluate evidence, generate evidence, and test hypotheses in a manner biased toward their own prior opinions and attitudes. By viewing the world with this my team/their team dichotomy, we can easily point out all the failures of ethics, morality, and irrationality beholden to those fools on the other side, yet the bias somehow blinds us from seeing our own shortcomings and the detractors of our own side. Essentially our minds have a tendency to be lawyers partial to our pet narrative than to be impartial scientists open to shaping conclusions based on all relevant information.
If someone tells you that rationality doesn’t matter or isn’t important, all you need to do is ask them why. If they try to give you reasons as to why reason doesn’t matter, they are relying on reason and rationality to prove their point - thus contradicting their original statement. In other words, there is no intelligent way to defend irrationality.
Clever semantics aside, Pinker’s core argument is on page 317 - Rationality is moral because when done right, it leans on impartiality:
"The ultimate explanation for the paradox of how our species could be both so rational and so irrational is not some bug in our cognitive software. It lies in the duality of self and other: our powers of reason are guided by our motives and limited by our points of view...the core of morality is impartiality: the reconciliation of our own selfish interests with others'. So, too, is impartiality the core of rationality: a reconciliation of our bias and incomplete notions into an understanding of reality that transcends any one of us. Rationality, then, is not just a cognitive virtue but a moral one."
But just because something is moral might not be reason enough for some to think rationality is worth elevating. Pinker closes out his book with many historical examples of rational argument leading the way to broad societal change. The formula seems to be:
Rampant injustice
Rational argument against injustice
Activists rally against injustice (motivated by rational argument)
Injustice (finally) ceased by revolution or capitulation
Justice prevails
Pinker outlines this formula throughout history with human sacrifice, animal sacrifice, violent conquest, slavery, divine rights of kings, racism, sexism, homophobia, and animal cruelty. Many more examples could be given.
If we zoom out and take a look at the bigger picture, we can see that rationality was crucial to each of these monumental historical changes. Each had an activist philosopher using rational argument to plead their case. The subsequent steps of activism and so on don’t start without first a rational argument. If we value a world without slavery, monarchs, tyrants, war, bigotry and violence, we must first thank rationality for making this world possible in the first place.
Pinker gives some practical advice as to how we can become more rational. If rationality is based on impartiality, it becomes necessary that we come to know how our choices impact the lives of others and the environment around us. We cannot be selfish and impartial at the same time so therefore we can’t be selfish and rational. The only way we can know what it is like to be in the shoes of another is to try our best to be in their shoes. We can educate ourselves, shut up and listen, or just travel and observe. All are ways to see what it might be like to be another person and to have another person’s wants, needs, and desires. Rationality demands we consider other points of view. Another way is to utilize committees whenever possible. Our selfish thinking can be offset when we sit around a table with others to workshop a problem together. Committee actions are more likely to be rational because they are more likely to be impartial having taken into consideration many more points of view. The more broad the points of view, the more likely we are to land closer to an optimum outcome.
The first 100 pages and the last 40 were the most impactful. Don’t let all the technicalities in the middle of the book discourage you from the last 2 chapters - they are gems worth the wait.
24 hour news cycles can be brutal to our world view and to our general opinion of humans and human nature. Newsworthy stories - if it bleeds it leads - can skew our ability to accurately estimate how violent, how safe, or how wild and crazy this world really is. At the height of a tragic news story, it can seem like people couldn’t be any worse and our existence couldn’t be more precarious. Yet despite these horrors, our world is indeed much better off than it was just a few short decades and centuries ago. Pinker’s 2 previous books - The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined and Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress - both demonstrate just how far we’ve come in reducing war, increasing life expectancy, maintaining safer work spaces, eradicating many communicable diseases, and practically eliminating illiteracy and extreme poverty. Yes we have a long way to go yet, but we are well on our way!
In this book, Pinker defends rationality because (sadly) it needs a defender. Being rational gets ridiculed in mainstream pop and art culture as if it's lame and uncool. Creative and spiritual systems love to throw rationality out the window as a way to stop our tendencies to overthink or over analyze. But yet thinking and analyzing are good facilities that we can and should access especially in light of our many cognitive biases - and we all have them. Pinker talks about many of them; one in particular was interesting - the Myside Bias. This bias, sometimes known as Confirmation Bias, occurs when people evaluate evidence, generate evidence, and test hypotheses in a manner biased toward their own prior opinions and attitudes. By viewing the world with this my team/their team dichotomy, we can easily point out all the failures of ethics, morality, and irrationality beholden to those fools on the other side, yet the bias somehow blinds us from seeing our own shortcomings and the detractors of our own side. Essentially our minds have a tendency to be lawyers partial to our pet narrative than to be impartial scientists open to shaping conclusions based on all relevant information.
If someone tells you that rationality doesn’t matter or isn’t important, all you need to do is ask them why. If they try to give you reasons as to why reason doesn’t matter, they are relying on reason and rationality to prove their point - thus contradicting their original statement. In other words, there is no intelligent way to defend irrationality.
Clever semantics aside, Pinker’s core argument is on page 317 - Rationality is moral because when done right, it leans on impartiality:
"The ultimate explanation for the paradox of how our species could be both so rational and so irrational is not some bug in our cognitive software. It lies in the duality of self and other: our powers of reason are guided by our motives and limited by our points of view...the core of morality is impartiality: the reconciliation of our own selfish interests with others'. So, too, is impartiality the core of rationality: a reconciliation of our bias and incomplete notions into an understanding of reality that transcends any one of us. Rationality, then, is not just a cognitive virtue but a moral one."
But just because something is moral might not be reason enough for some to think rationality is worth elevating. Pinker closes out his book with many historical examples of rational argument leading the way to broad societal change. The formula seems to be:
Rampant injustice
Rational argument against injustice
Activists rally against injustice (motivated by rational argument)
Injustice (finally) ceased by revolution or capitulation
Justice prevails
Pinker outlines this formula throughout history with human sacrifice, animal sacrifice, violent conquest, slavery, divine rights of kings, racism, sexism, homophobia, and animal cruelty. Many more examples could be given.
If we zoom out and take a look at the bigger picture, we can see that rationality was crucial to each of these monumental historical changes. Each had an activist philosopher using rational argument to plead their case. The subsequent steps of activism and so on don’t start without first a rational argument. If we value a world without slavery, monarchs, tyrants, war, bigotry and violence, we must first thank rationality for making this world possible in the first place.
Pinker gives some practical advice as to how we can become more rational. If rationality is based on impartiality, it becomes necessary that we come to know how our choices impact the lives of others and the environment around us. We cannot be selfish and impartial at the same time so therefore we can’t be selfish and rational. The only way we can know what it is like to be in the shoes of another is to try our best to be in their shoes. We can educate ourselves, shut up and listen, or just travel and observe. All are ways to see what it might be like to be another person and to have another person’s wants, needs, and desires. Rationality demands we consider other points of view. Another way is to utilize committees whenever possible. Our selfish thinking can be offset when we sit around a table with others to workshop a problem together. Committee actions are more likely to be rational because they are more likely to be impartial having taken into consideration many more points of view. The more broad the points of view, the more likely we are to land closer to an optimum outcome.
The first 100 pages and the last 40 were the most impactful. Don’t let all the technicalities in the middle of the book discourage you from the last 2 chapters - they are gems worth the wait.