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—see below—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:
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