What Steven Pinker gets so wrong about reason

Rationality. Steven Pinker. Penguin

The decade of the 2010s has not been kind to the “new rationalists”, those writers and thinkers who emerged from the years following 9/11 with bold manifestos about religion.

Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins were the two most prominent, and for a time the movement was pretty much nothing more than the “new atheism”, an invitation by them to take the most literal and mythologised forms of religion, construct them as the only possible expression of such, and then blame them for all the ills of the world.

“Religion poisons everything,” said Hitchens — who was, at the time, wont to smoke on stage at venues in defiance of the new wave of anti-smoking laws before dying of lung cancer at the age of 62. So along with religion, cigarette tar did a pretty good job.

The “new atheists” constituted themselves as a “left” of the Western civilisation crowd, seeing in Western multiculturalism and an alleged global relativism by progressives, a coddling of Islam and other religions, in whose crucible mass violence and ignorance was flaring anew. The steady spread of Western secular enlightenment — in the argument of Hitchens, through the Iraq war, with more to follow — would advance the frontier of reason.

Now? Ha. In the West, as abstract knowledge systems and expertise have expanded to become the centre rather than periphery of economic and social life, society has been subject to a wave of irrationalism and its mass acceptance not seen since before the World War II, a genuine collapse in public reasoning that has seen the rise of the conspiracy theory as a mass practice and belief, a form of counter-knowledge largely, though far from exclusively, wielded by those excluded from the knowledge power-prestige-capital nexus.

As scientific-mathematical discourse and a technocratic language of cultural transmission expands to every corner of life, such a counterforce becomes cruder in its conspiracies, more attached to them, and more appreciative, gleeful even, of the rich meaning they bring to everyday life. Who would conclude, faced with this revolt against reason — or what it is determined to be these days — that what we need to counteract it is more of that idea of reason itself?

Steven Pinker for one. The Harvard psychologist and philosopher was later to the “new rationalist” party, and joined it largely because of the attacks on free/unrestrained speech that began to occur as a mass practice around 2013-14, but which had been bubbling away on campuses since the mid-2000s. From the left, but with an analytical philosophical background rather than the “synthetic” continental tradition — Hegel, Marx, Foucault etc — Pinker has tracked a familiar path to Dawkins; starting as a conscientious critic of certain tendencies, he has developed a certain swagger and bluster, directed against postmodernism, and what he imagines to be “critical theory”.

These are not the central explicit targets of his attack in Rationality, which is mainly a guide to the numerous fallacies we make in applying cod-logical thinking to everyday life, such as the confusions of correlation and causation, elementary, and sometimes lethal, misunderstandings of probability and so on.

Pinker’s target audience appears to be not the followers of Q or Pizzagate, or believers that Bill Gates’ vaccines implant nanochips, but those who might be reached by an intellectual argument about, say, the prevalence of certain types of crime, or of serious medical side effects, etc — the creeping irrationality among those whose work practice is in the world of some knowledge, but whose training is not sufficient to see through bad reasoning.

That cause, and Pinker’s approach to it, will be celebrated and used as a touchstone by a certain type of technocratic rationalist in mainstream parties of both left and right, bureaucracies, etc, as inspiration for a further “no-nonsense” approach, not only to grassroots-level conspiracy, but also to the “synthetic” arguments of movements such as Black Lives Matter, and its variants, certain types of feminism, etc, to largely deny any critical account of the social whole.

Pinker is no fool, and his advance of “reason” argues for more than a simple mathematical-scientific version of it, and championing of that. Reason, or a validation of it, he argues, is embedded in the practices of everyday life, even if we fall short of applying it often. Thus many people will fail a simple test called the “P and Q”: if you have two chances to inspect elements in a four-grid matrix, to find errors do you check the positive or negative elements? The answer is one of each, something most people fail if it’s a test using random pairing of symbols, but pass when it concerns a scenario involving standard prices, and extra charges for premium services.

Pinker’s point is that in everyday life, the bias is towards reason at every level of life — it’s a pre-emptive strike against charges that he is simply mathematising complex, multidimensional reality.

But this doesn’t work, and its manner of not working shows the limits of Pinker’s chosen intellectual tradition — of analytic thinking, parsing of parts to build a whole, really in service to the technocratic domination of social life. It only looks like the only possible way of being “rational” when you treat such technocracy as the only possible way by which a good or meaningful social life can be judged. Thus along the way, in looking at social complexities, he can get only so far.

Thus, In noting, as numerous right-wing commentators did, that American Black people murdered by non-police is far higher than those killed, while unarmed, by cops, he can concede that the BLM protests can change cop practices by protest and scrutiny, and that such movements thus have a rationality about them. But he cannot see the deeper protest, that to have the possibility of being killed capriciously by a cop — and have it much stronger than white people — is a form of social annihilation, that it is as much about you might die as whether you will live or die.

That simple inability to see a qualitative form of reasoning, which fully declares its non-quantitative status, renders the book unable to see its own grand assumptions, and thus resolves time and again into incuriosity or platitudes.

In that respect, Pinker is often less rational than folk processes he tries to depict through a psychologistic frame. The widespread abhorrence for cash payment for living kidney donations, for example, he constructs as a form of social taboo. He’s not advocating overturning it, but he cannot see that people, at some level, understand that drawing this part of life into the cash nexus — while possibly mutually advantageous in individual cases — undermines the general meaning of what it is to be human, and opens the possibility to a more widespread social dismemberment.

He imagines that a quantitative meta-examination of quantitative reasoning — not merely does this bell curve work, but what assumptions are being made in applying bell curves in general — is critical thinking.

It isn’t, and the critical theory he passingly insults — which underlies many of the movements he is criticising — would give him a clue that thinking about thinking is a different sort of process from the one he’s describing.

In response to his several critics, Pinker is wont to make a standard circular claim: that in trying to make a case against him, they are using the “reason” they purport to despise. But what they are reasoning against is his self-limiting frame of what reason is. This is revealed in the final chapter when, inevitably, he retreats into progressivist boosterism, a quite outdated utilitarianism. Prisons and punishment were terrible places before reform, he argues, as an example in the last chapter; now, no one gets whipped, drawn and quartered etc.

But of course what they get is isolation, decades-long sentences, hellish blocks of time to contemplate time passing — a torture beyond the worst the Middle Ages could bring.

But if your reasoning is already quantitative — life as a contentless allotment of time — you can’t see it. One example among many, which gives a clue to why such allegedly smart people can’t answer the question of our era heading into the 2020s: why, when the population is better educated than it has ever been, has a gleeful irrationalism become the default setting for hundreds of millions of people, in a way unimaginable even 15 years ago?