Jonathan Rauch > Quotes

“Leave an extrovert alone for two minutes and he will reach for his cell phone. In contrast, after an hour or two of being socially “on,” we introverts need to turn off and recharge. My own formula is roughly two hours alone for every hour of socializing. This isn’t antisocial. It isn’t a sign of depression. It does not call for medication. For introverts, to be alone with our thoughts is as restorative as sleeping, as nourishing as eating. Our motto: “I’m okay, you’re okay—in small doses.”
― Jonathan Rauch

“Those who claim to be hurt by words must be led to expect nothing as compensation. Otherwise, once they learn they can get something by claiming to be hurt, they will go into the business of being offended.”
― Jonathan Rauch

“For not only is wiping out bias and hate impossible in principle, in practice eliminating prejudice through central authority means eliminating all but one prejudice—that of whoever is most politically powerful.”
― Jonathan Rauch, Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought

“If we care about knowledge, freedom, and peace, then we need to stake a strong claim: anyone can believe anything, but liberal science—open-ended, depersonalized checking by an error-seeking social network—is the only legitimate validator of knowledge, at least in the reality-based community. Other communities, of course, can do all kinds of other things. But they cannot make social decisions about objective reality.

That is a very bold, very broad, very tough claim, and it goes down very badly with lots of people and communities who feel ignored or oppressed by the Constitution of Knowledge: creationists, Christian Scientists, homeopaths, astrologists, flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers, birthers, 9/11 truthers, postmodern professors, political partisans, QAnon followers, and adherents of any number of other belief systems and religions.”
― Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth

“the plural of “anecdote” is “data.”
― Jonathan Rauch, Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought

“Minorities are always better off in a culture which protects dissent than in a culture which protects us from dissent.”
― Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth

“people don’t always understand their own true desires and feelings, and, even if they do, they might not give a straight answer.”
― Jonathan Rauch, The Happiness Curve: Why Life Gets Hard in the Middle, Then Gets Much Better

“More specifically, this book will try to establish the following points. First, there are not two great liberal social and political systems but three. One is democracy—political liberalism—by which we decide who is entitled to use force; another is capitalism—economic liberalism—by which we decide how to allocate resources. The third is liberal science, by which we decide who is right. Second, the third system has been astoundingly successful, not merely as a producer of technology but also, far more important, as a peacemaker and builder of social bridges. Its great advantages as a social system for raising and settling differences of opinion are inherent, not incidental. However, its disadvantages—it causes pain and suffering, it creates legions of losers and outsiders, it is disorienting and unsettling, it allows and even thrives on prejudice and bias—are also inherent. And today it is once again under attack. Third, the attackers seek to undermine the two social rules which make liberal science possible. (I’ll outline them in the next chapter and elaborate them in the rest of the book.) For the system to function, people must try to follow those rules even if they would prefer not to. Unfortunately, many people are forgetting them, ignoring them, or carving out exemptions. That trend must be fought, because, fourth, the alternatives to liberal science lead straight to authoritarianism. And intellectual authoritarianism, although once the province of the religious and the political right in America, is now flourishing among the secular and the political left. Fifth, behind the new authoritarian push are three idealistic impulses: Fundamentalists want to protect the truth. Egalitarians want to help the oppressed and let in the excluded. Humanitarians want to stop verbal violence and the pain it causes. The three impulses are now working in concert. Sixth, fundamentalism, properly understood, is not about religion. It is about the inability to seriously entertain the possibility that one might be wrong. In individuals such fundamentalism is natural and, within reason, desirable. But when it becomes the foundation for an intellectual system, it is inherently a threat to freedom of thought. Seventh, there is no way to advance knowledge peacefully and productively by adhering to the principles advocated by egalitarians and humanitarians. Their principles are poisonous to liberal science and ultimately to peace and freedom. Eighth, no social principle in the world is more foolish and dangerous than the rapidly rising notion that hurtful words and ideas are a form of violence or torture (e.g., “harassment”) and that their perpetrators should be treated accordingly. That notion leads to the criminalization of criticism and the empowerment of authorities to regulate it. The new sensitivity is the old authoritarianism in disguise, and it is just as noxious.”
― Jonathan Rauch, Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought

“What the country faces is not a crisis of leadership but a crisis of followership.”
― Jonathan Rauch, Political Realism: How Hacks, Machines, Big Money, and Back-Room Deals Can Strengthen American Democracy

“That was the day I realized that he could not cope and I could not cope and, emotionally, he could take me down with him. And I discovered in myself an awful determination not to let that happen. From that moment, I was determined to get him out of his apartment and under professional eyes, or, failing that, to protect myself. How to protect myself, I didn’t know. Hire help over his objections? Take him to court and seek to have him declared incompetent? Report him to Adult Protective Services? Use my ownership of his apartment to force him out? All I knew was that, at that point, I believed myself capable of doing such things, or even of washing my hands of the situation if he would not listen to reason. I imagined telling an indignant world that I had tried my best and could do no more. You have no idea what a thing it is to have that sort of conversation with yourself about a parent.”
― Jonathan Rauch

“In a conflict of opinion between Einstein and a fool, one wishes for Einstein to prevail. And in a conflict between Einstein and thousand fools or a million, one wishes all the more for Einstein to prevail.”
― Jonathan Rauch, Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought

“Fundamentalism—the intellectual style, not the religious movement—is the strong disinclination to take seriously the notion that you might be wrong.”
― Jonathan Rauch, Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought

“(As Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf put it, propaganda “must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.… [P]ersistence is the first and most important”
― Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth

“A poll for the Knight Foundation in 2019 found that “more than two-thirds (68 percent) of college students say their campus climate precludes students from expressing their true opinions because their classmates might find them offensive.”
― Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth

“Transactional politics is not always appropriate or effective, but a political system which is not reliably capable of it is a system in a state of critical failure. Deal-making”
― Jonathan Rauch, Political Realism: How Hacks, Machines, Big Money, and Back-Room Deals Can Strengthen American Democracy

“Society, not science, determines what is normal in the lives we lead, and that, right now, is the problem.”
― Jonathan Rauch, The Happiness Curve: Why Life Gets Hard in the Middle, Then Gets Much Better

“how aging equips us to be happier and kinder, even as our bodies get frailer. I’ll introduce social thinkers and reformers who are exploring and mapping a whole new stage of adult development.”
― Jonathan Rauch, The Happiness Curve: Why Life Gets Hard in the Middle, Then Gets Much Better

“In the real world, however, the claim that censorship or enforced orthodoxy protects minorities and the marginalized has been comprehensively disproved, again and again and again. “Censorship has always been on the side of authoritarianism, conformity, ignorance, and the status quo,” write Erwin Chemerinsky and Howard Gillman in their book Free Speech on Campus, “and advocates for free speech have always been on the side of making societies more democratic, more diverse, more tolerant, more educated, and more open to progress.”30 They and former American Civil Liberties Union president Nadine Strossen, in her powerful book Hate: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship, list the horrors and oppressions which have befallen minorities in the name of making society safe from dangerous ideas. “Laws censoring ‘hate speech’ have predictably been enforced against those who lack political power,” writes Strossen.31 In America, under the Alien and Sedition Acts, authorities censored and imprisoned sympathizers of the opposition party (including members of Congress) and shut down opposition newspapers; under the Comstock laws, they censored works by Aristophanes, Balzac, Oscar Wilde, and James Joyce (among others); under the World War I anti-sedition laws, they convicted more than a thousand peace activists, including the Socialist presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs, who ran for president in 1920 from a prison cell.32 In more recent times, when the University of Michigan adopted one of the first college speech codes in 1988, the code was seized upon to charge Blacks with racist speech at least twenty times.33 When the United Kingdom passed a hate-speech law, the first person to be convicted was a Black man who cursed a white police officer.34 When Canadian courts agreed with feminists that pornography could be legally restricted, authorities in Toronto promptly charged Canada’s oldest gay bookstore with obscenity and seized copies of the lesbian magazine Bad Attitude.35 All around the world, authorities quite uncoincidentally find that “hateful” and “unsafe” speech is speech which is critical of them—not least in the United States, where, in 1954, the U.S. Postal Service used obscenity laws to censor ONE, a gay magazine whose cover article (“You Can’t Print It!”) just happened to criticize the censorship policies of the U.S. Postal Service.”
― Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth

“27 If we go in for quackery or conspiracy theories, that is often because the personal cost of believing is low and the personal reward of believing is high. Believing that 9/11 was a government plot or that Barack Obama was not born in America does us no personal harm, but it can help us feel enmeshed in a special group of insiders with privileged information. Experiments show that a good way to help people think more rigorously and accurately is to pay them to get the right answer; when they have skin in the game, the personal cost of being wrong goes up.”
― Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth

“Voyage set, there to be encountered by millions, one of whom was me.”
― Jonathan Rauch, The Happiness Curve: Why Life Gets Hard in the Middle, Then Gets Much Better

“Wrong beliefs and wrong perceptions are contagious whether or not they are sincere, because dissidents tend to self-censor and act like believers. That is how entire societies, such as the Soviet Union, can be built on everyone’s publicly pretending to believe what many privately know to be false. After a while, in a community where people are struggling to conform with each other, it can be very hard, even in principle, to know whether people are sincere or faking, or even which is which.”
― Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth

“In times of stress, psychological pressures compel us to deny or dismiss inconsistent evidence, pushing us to perceive certainty and clarity where there is neither.”
― Jonathan Rauch, The Happiness Curve: Why Life Gets Hard in the Middle, Then Gets Much Better

“The curve seems to be imprinted on us as a way to repurpose us for a changing role in society as we age, a role that is less about ambition and competition, and more about connection and compassion.”
― Jonathan Rauch, The Happiness Curve: Why Life Gets Hard in the Middle, Then Gets Much Better

“An Ivy League teacher told me, “I’ve found that if students have an opportunity to jump on someone, they usually take it.”
― Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth

“Anyone—pope, propagandist, anti-Communist, anti-racist—who wants to silence criticism or regulate an argument in order to keep wrong-thinking people out of power has no moral claim to be anything but ignored.”
― Jonathan Rauch, Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought

“the happiness cost of unemployment has been calculated at the equivalent of about $60,000 a year,”
― Jonathan Rauch, The Happiness Curve: Why Life Gets Hard in the Middle, Then Gets Much Better

“A very dangerous principle is now being established as a social right: Thou shalt not hurt others with words.”
― Jonathan Rauch, Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought

“The amateur asserts that principles, rather than interest, ought to be both the end and the motive of political action,” Wilson writes. Far from taking a detached attitude, the amateur “sees each battle as a ‘crisis,’ and each victory as a triumph and each loss as a defeat for a cause.”10 The choice of candidates and leaders, for the amateur, should be based on their commitment to principles and policies rather than on personal loyalty or party label or parochial advantage. Parties, rather than being “neutral agents” to mobilize majorities and gain power, should be “the sources of program and the agents of social change.”
― Jonathan Rauch, Political Realism: How Hacks, Machines, Big Money, and Back-Room Deals Can Strengthen American Democracy

“Your Gain Is My Pain: Negative Psychological Externalities of Cash Transfers.”
― Jonathan Rauch, The Happiness Curve: Why Life Gets Hard in the Middle, Then Gets Much Better

“As Lincoln hoped, by using their hearts and their heads, Americans have kept their experiment alive long past the age when most democracies die.”
― Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth