I learn a ton and get a lot of pleasure from reading Steven Pinker’s books.  At present, I have two of them on my Kindle—Rationality and The Sense of Style.  It’s the first of these two that’s on my mind right now.  

Pinker does a masterful job of reminding us what rationality consists of, how subtle it is, and how elusive it can be.  His chapter on Bayesian probability was a game-changer for me because I was finally able to process the core concept and (hopefully) install it in my mind.  All in all, for nine straight chapters things were going well.  But then we hit Chapter 10.

The chapter is titled “What’s Wrong with People?”  Here’s how it opens:

This is the chapter most of you have been waiting for. I know this from conversations and correspondence. As soon as I mention the topic of rationality, people ask me why humanity appears to be losing its mind.”

The truth is, this is the chapter Pinker has been waiting to write.  It is an extended exercise in what he elsewhere criticizes as motivated reasoning.  Here’s how he defines it:

The mustering of rhetorical resources to drive an argument toward a favored conclusion is called motivated reasoning. The motive may be to end at a congenial conclusion, but it may also be to flaunt the arguer’s wisdom, knowledge, or virtue.”

Now, to be fair to Pinker, he is taking on the horror show of false information and fake news that is currently challenging the core institutions of democracy and civility.  I am in total support of this agenda, so he does indeed drive things to a congenial conclusion.  And as a fellow author, I am a big proponent of motivated reasoning, particularly when it is humble enough to remember that when you ask, what is wrong with people, you remember that you are one of them.  But that is not Pinker’s agenda, nor is it that of his correspondents and fellow conversationalists.  They want to assert their superiority of the hoi polloi by pledging allegiance to the Enlightenment and the enshrinement of Reason.  Now, again to be fair, this is a book titled Rationality, so I get that it should celebrate Reason.  What I resent, and what the rest of this blog will argue, with my own highly motivated reasoning, is that in so doing, Pinker throws narrative under the bus, and tosses in imagination after it. 

Let’s play this out as a dialog between Pinker’s prose and Moore’s commentary.  

Pinker: It’s never a good explanation to say that people embrace some false belief because it gives them comfort or helps them make sense of the world, because that only raises the question of why people should get comfort and closure from beliefs that could not possibly do them any good. Reality is a powerful selection pressure. A hominid that soothed itself by believing that a lion was a turtle or that eating sand would nourish its body would be outreproduced by its reality-based rivals.

Moore: Why should people get comfort and closure from beliefs that could not possibly do them any good?  Who says they don’t do them good?  What is comfort if not good?  What is closure if not good?  When you say, “reality is a powerful selection pressure,” you are only thinking of natural selection.  You are completely ignoring sexual, selection.  A hominid who sang a soothing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” or brought flowers to a potential mate might very well outreproduce your rationalists. 

Pinker: No matter how effectively a false belief flaunts the believer’s mental prowess or loyalty to the tribe, it’s still false, and should be punished by the cold, hard facts of the world. As the novelist Philip K. Dick wrote, reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away. Why doesn’t reality push back and inhibit people from believing absurdities or from rewarding those who assert and share them?

Moore: With your choice of the word punished, your motivated reasoning begins to tilt toward the dark side.  Tribal loyalty is a real force in the world, and it is protective.  Violating tribal loyalty is likely to be punished socially—it is reality because, even if you don’t believe in it, it does not go away.  In this case, reality is pushing people toward believing absurdities—although your choice of words again represents another step toward the dark side.

Pinker: People divide their worlds into two zones. One consists of the physical objects around them, the other people they deal with face to face, the memory of their interactions, and the rules and norms that regulate their lives. People have mostly accurate beliefs about this zone, and they reason rationally within it. Within this zone, they believe there’s a real world and that beliefs about it are true or false. They have no choice: that’s the only way to keep gas in the car, money in the bank, and the kids clothed and fed. Call it the reality mindset. The other zone is the world beyond immediate experience: the distant past, the unknowable future, faraway peoples and places, remote corridors of power, the microscopic, the cosmic, the counterfactual, the metaphysical. People may entertain notions about what happens in these zones, but they have no way of finding out, and anyway it makes no discernible difference to their lives. Beliefs in these zones are narratives, which may be entertaining or inspiring or morally edifying. Whether they are literally “true” or “false” is the wrong question. The function of these beliefs is to construct a social reality that binds the tribe or sect and gives it a moral purpose. Call it the mythology mindset.

Moore: This division into two zones is a keeper.  It makes a great distinction and helps locate the kind of irrationality you are seeking to uproot.  But your two terms—reality mindset and mythology mindset—are particularly unfortunate.  Reality is not a land of “no choice.”  There are many ways to keep gas in the car, money in the bank, and the kids clothed and fed.  There are no “cold, hard facts,” although to be fair, there are a lot of Bayesian probabilities that add up to almost the same thing.  I would rather call this the everyday mindset where we make an enormous number of decisions by routine, honed by experience. 

My real beef, though, is with your use of the term mythology mindset.  The less pejorative term is narrative.  In The Infinite Staircase, my exercise in motivated reasoning, I argue that narrative is more fundamental than reason, that storytelling precedes theorizing not only historically but ontologically.  Human beings are storytelling animals first, reasoning animals subsequently.  Reason is a counterbalance to narrative, a course-correcting capability.  It cannot set the course.  It can only steer.  

I agree that narratives do indeed construct social purposes that bind the tribe and that give moral purpose.  But that is not all they do.  They create the self.  Without narrative there is no Pinker and there is no Moore.  We are both characters in a set of narratives that were begun before we were born and will continue after we die.  You have located yourself within a narrative of a heroic tribe of Enlightenment Radicals pushing back against the dark forces of malicious, self-serving, shameless narratives, and I am with you on this one to a large extent.  My point is, without such narratives, there is no meaning, no direction, no purpose.  To call that mythology is to strip reality of everything that makes it meaningful. 

Pinker:  We children of the Enlightenment embrace the radical creed of universal realism: we hold that all our beliefs should fall within the reality mindset.

Moore: Be careful what you wish for.  This led Russell and his generation into the dead-end of analytical philosophy where anything not verifiable was declared meaningless.  Fictional characters are forces in the real world.  Hamlet is more famous than you or me and will have more impact on people’s lives than all our books put together.

Pinker: The human mind is adapted to understanding remote spheres of existence through a mythology mindset. It’s not because we descended from Pleistocene hunter-gatherers specifically, but because we descended from people who could not or did not sign on to the Enlightenment ideal of universal realism. Submitting all of one’s beliefs to the trials of reason and evidence is an unnatural skill, like literacy and numeracy, and must be instilled and cultivated.

Moore: I agree with this last sentence wholeheartedly.  I just want to position this exercise as one of editing, not authoring.  To put reason in charge of living is like putting finance in charge of a business.  It does not know what to do.  It only knows how to keep the doing within proper bounds. 

Pinker: And for all the conquests of the reality mindset, the mythology mindset still occupies swaths of territory in the landscape of mainstream belief. The obvious example is religion. . .  Another zone of mainstream unreality is the national myth. . .  A scientific education is supposed to stifle these primitive intuitions, but for several reasons its reach is limited.

Moore: With the word stifle, you went all the way over to the dark side.  The function of education is not to stifle.  It is to absorb, appreciate, critique, and refine.  Primitive intuitions are the motor that drives all conscious beings—even you.  Stifle at your own peril!

Pinker: The remaining key to understanding the appeal of weird beliefs is to put the beliefs themselves under the microscope. Evolution works not just on bodies and brains but on ideas. A meme, as Richard Dawkins defined it when he coined the word, is not a captioned photograph circulated on the internet but an idea that has been shaped by generations of sharing to become highly shareable. Examples include earworms that people can’t stop humming or stories they feel compelled to pass along. Just as organisms evolve adaptations that protect them from being eaten, ideas may evolve adaptations that protect them from being refuted.

Moore: This paragraph is ironic in the extreme.  Having privileged natural selection over sexual selection for the entire chapter, you now marginalize memes as essentially agents of the latter only.  All ideas are memes.  All contain an element of strategy against which natural selection will act.  All contain an element of viral attraction against which sexual selection will act.  What makes ideas so fundamental to culture is that they live at the intersection of these two great forces and are the product of their marriage, not their divorce. 

OK, enough is enough.  Steven and Geoffrey have both said what they think.  What do you think?