Steven Pinker
Steven Pinker giving a lecture for Humanists UK (Wikimedia Commons)

Steven Pinker’s Rationality is a tour de force training manual on how to think. Lessons in logical deduction, in avoiding cognitive biases and probability blunders, and in how to recognise fallacies all provide stimulus for vital mental spring-cleaning. Not merely instructive, Rationality is also an affirmation of many of the most fundamental humanist commitments: the simple beauty of the recursive nature of reason, the indispensability of rationality to deliberative democracy, the celebration of science, ethics and law as the greatest achievements of human rationality.

But Rationality aspires to do more than just explain, define and describe its eponymous concept. Its full subtitle asks not just “What [rationality] is”, but “Why it seems scarce, Why it matters”. And it isn’t a utopian tract, arguing for human beings as perfect rational actors who go astray only when manipulated or misled. In many forms, Pinker says, rationality is counterintuitive – we often need to engineer it. So, bookending the chapters that deal with the many aspects of the nature of rationality is Pinker’s most urgent call: to understand that rationality does matter, that it needs defending, and that we must advance it.

The book’s focus is a natural extension of the Canadian-American’s inquiries to date. As a public intellectual and committed member of the humanist movement – as well as a cognitive psychologist and psycholinguist – Pinker’s work, especially his 2011 book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined and its sequel, Enlightenment Now (2018), has argued consistently and forcefully for the importance of science, reason and humanism to the advancement of our species. As Chief Executive of Humanists UK, I was especially keen to discuss the book with Pinker – particularly the idea, as he summarised it to me, that “good things only happen as a result of human ingenuity and reason deployed toward humanistic goals”. I enthusiastically agree. But it’s easy to entice someone like me to embrace and celebrate the case for rationality. What about those who are not yet convinced, who may be the very people fighting for social change?

“One of the reasons that I’m active in the humanist movement,” he tells me, “is I think we can provide reasons why some goals are better than others by pointing out how they are consistent with other values that virtually everyone claims to believe.” Yet for Pinker’s aim of advancing rationality to be meaningfully fulfilled, it does seem to me that we must do more than rationally point out the inconsistencies in the thinking of others.

Making use of myth?

Towards the end of Rationality, Pinker classifies beliefs into two types. The first belong in our “reality” mindset. We arrive at and sustain these beliefs by reasoning about facts in our direct experience: water will boil at 100 degrees; cooking food will make it edible and nourishing. As these examples imply, beliefs of the reality type are also those that are essential to our everyday lives.

Beliefs of the second type – those in our “mythology” mindset – operate in a different zone. They relate to the worlds beyond our direct experience: the long ago, the far away, the metaphysical. The functions of these beliefs are different from the beliefs in our reality mindset, and broader. They provide entertainment, moral lessons, a sense of meaning, social solidarity and more. Conspiracy theories, superstitions, comforting falsehoods, religions and tribalisms all live in our mythology mindset.

As inheritors of the enlightenment tradition, committed to its dynamic continuation, we are duty-bound – so Rationality argues – to make sure that as many of our beliefs as possible fall into the “reality” mindset. But I realised, reflecting on the book, that my own commitment to rationality has a considerable amount of the mythological about it.

I remember the first time I read a legal judgement. I can recall the admirable clarity with which the judge assessed the evidence presented to her. The arguments lawyers had made were considered, and – step by logical step – a judicious conclusion was reached. I found the experience of reading her words enormously satisfying. I didn’t just regard the rationality of her process as an effective way of getting to the truth. I felt a sort of pleasure as the judgement unfolded and took shape. At the end, I felt an aesthetic appreciation at something having been done properly.

It reminded me of my favourite work of theatre, Aeschylus’ Oresteia. Its final scene is an enactment of the first ever court, presided over by the goddess Athena, where adversarial truth-seeking justice replaces blood guilt and vengeance. Written two and a half millennia ago, it depicted the mythical world of centuries before that, providing an inspiring origin story for rational adjudication.

Thinking about that scene and the Oresteia brings to mind what Einstein said about the Greeks, that they were the first to “overcome man’s insecurity before himself and before nature” and the first who “wrought a system of thought whose conclusions no one could escape” – a beautiful way of describing both the art of reasoning and its profound consequences. What the broadcaster and humanist Jacob Bronowksi called this Greek “assertion of confidence” evokes the 20th-century scientific confidence that people like Bronowski and Einstein represent. I see the centuries-long chain of men and women who have carved out a space for truth and justice in an indifferent universe – their effort, their commitment, their inspiring struggle. In this timeless community, as the humanist philosopher Harold Blackham put it, “Nothing is exempt from human question. There is no immemorial tradition, no revelation, no authority, no privileged knowledge . . . which is beyond question because [it is] beyond experience and which can be used as a standard by which to interpret experience. There is only experience to be interpreted in the light of further experience, the sole source of all standards of reason and value, forever open to question.” Rationality is the golden thread that runs through so much that makes the human story vital and vivid in my mind’s eye.

All this may lack the sensuousness of Proust’s madeleine, but it’s plain that my own commitment to rationality at least in part resides in the category of mythological belief, a weaving together of all these narratives and more. This mythology even has its own magic. The three little words “Let’s be reasonable” always have the power to recall me to calmness. “Yes,” I think, “we should be reasonable. I was being unreasonable and overheated. I should stop that.” I wouldn’t want to let Athena down.

This is very personal, but it is not merely by way of autobiography. I am not the only one whose most powerful motivations come from my “mythological” beliefs, nor the only person who is more likely to be rational if the case for doing so can be made more vivid and warm. So, to return to my question arising from Pinker’s new book: if we do need to find ways to promote rationality – and it won’t do to just tell people it is fact-based and true – should we make use of the mythology mindset, and not just the principles exhorted in Rationality? I put this to Pinker.

“Do we want to have humanist preachers rolling back their eyes and pumping copies of Spinoza’s Ethics on the pulpit?” he responds. “Probably not.” But, he says, “we do need something. We are human. We are motivated by ideals, images, heroes. I think that is reasonable to the extent that we know how to bottle them so that they don’t infect our understanding of reality. If it’s a way to engage our emotions toward ends that we can justify on humanist grounds, then it’s probably wise, it’s probably a challenge that we ought to step up to.”

I expressed the hope that this could be achieved through “mythologies”, but Pinker is much more comfortable with the idea that rhetoric will provide motivation: “Maybe we have to study the cases of successful political leadership and rhetoric that managed to engage people’s emotions toward goals that we all can best justify.” He singles out Martin Luther King, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Barack Obama. “It is an art that I think probably requires a rare combination of talents – intellectual and interpersonal and emotional. I do what I’m capable of doing, which is making the case. It ain’t Martin Luther King. But, you know, maybe it would inspire some future version of Martin Luther King!”

In fact, the prose of Rationality frequently inspires, and there are many passages that would qualify as required reading on any curriculum of “rationalist myth-making”, if such a thing were thought desirable after all. But I come to my next question, on advancing the case for rationality. In his book, Pinker argues that being rational has an image problem and that this is one cause of the current crisis of reason. To be rational is not seen as “cool”; it’s an unattractive thing to aspire to. This may be true, but it’s not my biggest concern. Perhaps I am defeatist, but I have taken it as read that many people are going to behave irrationally a lot of the time and that rationality will never be the predominant fashion. What worries me most today is the possibility that the people most inspired by justice, equality and human dignity may be averse to the idea of rationality.

Rationalism and social change

Pinker takes aim in Rationality at what he sees as an unhelpful trend: that young people on university campuses are pursuing social justice while adhering to “fashionable academic movements” that “hold that reason, truth and objectivity are social constructions that justify the privilege of dominant groups”. Because the students aligned with these movements also, he says, believe that “western philosophy and science are parochial, old-fashioned, and naive to the diverse ways of knowing found across periods and cultures”, Pinker places them outside of the rational.

I certainly don’t think rationality is a parochial cultural product. But I do see that it can be preached in aid of the privilege of dominant groups, especially economically dominant ones, and I understand why the people Pinker is talking about feel that way.

The plea of “Let’s be reasonable” from friend to friend might annoy you in the instant, but it does no harm. Between colleagues who share a certain discipline it may be vital, recalling us both to a shared standard. But a plea to be reasonable in the context of the struggle for equality or justice has less palatable associations. I, the rational actor, am calling on you to bring yourself into line. The implication is that you are too emotional, perhaps overly demanding. It’s obvious why the suspicion arises that rationality works against the interests of the less powerful and the vulnerable. This is worrying, especially if we have a particular obligation to persuade those committed to humanistic goals that human reason is the way to realise their hopes. So I ask how we can make rationality appealing to those who promote social justice, democracy and human rights.

Pinker responds that it is rational arguments, not angry protestors, that have historically triggered social change, disputing the idea advanced by his campus radicals that progress is “a story of struggle, with the downtrodden rising up and overcoming their oppressors”. His general theory of social progress is that “the first domino [is] a reasoned argument”. A philosopher wrote a text or manifesto and “eventually the conclusion was absorbed into the conventional wisdom and common decency of a society, erasing the tracks of the argument that brought it there”.

We agree, however, that rationality is not the only tool required to achieve moral progress and that, as the book clearly states, there is no iron law of history. Human societies are not laboratories and no firm conclusions can be drawn about what “works”. Nonetheless, Pinker strongly prefers the rational argument theory. I am not so sure. Even the Enlightenment-soaked founding fathers of the US didn’t reason George III out of his malfeasance. They overthrew him.

On the other hand, Pinker does persuade me that we have a strong argument for convincing progressives of the importance of rationality to achieving social change. “The rights of the downtrodden, the oppressed and the less privileged ought to be fostered and I for one am not willing to say that’s an irrational argument, quite the contrary,” he says. “It’s ultimately a rational one, stemming from the principle of the equality of all humans. This itself is an inherently rational proposition, because it simply hinges on the fact that the pronouns ‘I’ and ‘You’ have no logical status. The idea ‘Whatever I claim for myself, I have to grant to you equally’ is just built into rational discourse.”

In Rationality, Pinker says much of the need to re-engineer our world for rationality, from working to valorise it in popular culture to building it further into our school curricula. It’s a powerful manifesto: we do need to build and maintain resilient rationality-based institutions in every area of our common life. But I am left thinking that the main path out of our present difficulties may be the one that he expresses later – and quite beautifully – in our conversation. Putting rationality at the very heart of the case we make for our love and care for each other is what can in turn give rationality itself back its heart.

This piece is from the New Humanist spring 2022 edition. Subscribe here.