Ted McCormick on Steven Pinker and the Politics of Rationality

Concordia University historian Ted McCormick has serious reservations about Steven Pinker’s new book, Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems So Scarce, Why It Matters. His short review in Slate provides of long list of reasons why Pinker’s project was doomed from the outset. But the one issue that really seems to bother McCormick is that “instead of confronting his targets head on, the middle chapters engage in a kind of indirect culture warfare, dragging foes in as apparently incidental examples of irrationality or motivated reasoning.” You see, by McCormick’s lights, Rationality isn’t about rationality at all, but about scoring points against ideological rivals. 

            Throughout his review, McCormick is at pains to ward off the impression that he’s tilting at windmills. He admits “the bulk of the book is less an open culture war campaign than a May Day of rationality’s arsenal,” and he even goes so far as to call it “entertaining,” noting that if you skip the bad parts, “you can find an informative and briskly written book about types of reasoning and their applications.” In other words, the bulk of the book is entertaining and does exactly what Pinker says he wanted it to do. Still, McCormick makes it clear he isn’t giving Rationality his endorsement. “The trouble,” he writes, “begins when you read all the words,” by which he means read between the lines. Doing so, he seems convinced, will reveal that all this stuff about the methods of reasoning is little more than a smoke screen hiding Pinker’s real points, which are political. 

            This can be seen, McCormick insists, when you look at the examples of irrationality Pinker uses: “as the examples pile up, one wonders what is being defended.” McCormick is fine with all the examples of right wing or religious irrationality. “Where the shoe fits,” he writes, “fair enough.” But the small handful of examples from the left side of the political divide are another matter. Here’s an emblematic passage from the review: 

Pinker lets his own solidarities and enmities shape his concern for facts and argumentation. This results in large, unsupported claims, as when a Politico op-ed he co-wrote in defence of Bret Stephens is his sole footnoted source for the claim that logical fallacies are “coin of the realm” across academia and journalism. It also produces some mystifying assertions, such as that the 2020 murder of George Floyd led to “the sudden adoption of a radical academic doctrine, Critical Race Theory”—and that both CRT and Black Lives Matter are driven by an exaggerated sense of Black people’s statistical risk of being killed by police. While Pinker soon walks back what he suggests may be a “psychologically obtuse” account of BLM’s origins, the chronological nonsense of the claim and the characterization of CRT as a “doctrine” stand without evidence or argument. After all, he might say, they’re just examples.

Unsupported claims and nonsense sound pretty bad. But, given all the examples McCormick fails to look up the citations for and doesn’t fault as insufficiently supported, examples in the realms of climate change, creationism, anti-vaxxism, Q-Anon and the like, you could be forgiven for wondering if he’s just mad Pinker is poking at some of his own pet causes. 

            Did Pinker really claim that fallacies are the coin of the realm “across academia and journalism” with reference to a single citation? You can find the passage on pages 92 and 93 of the hardback edition:

The ad hominem, genetic, and affective fallacies used to be treated as forehead-slapping blunders or dirty rotten tricks. Critical-thinking teachers and high school debate coaches would teach their students how to spot and refute them. Yet in one of the ironies of modern intellectual life, they are becoming the coin of the realm. In large swaths of academia and journalism the fallacies are applied with gusto, with ideas attacked or suppressed because their proponents, sometimes from centuries past, bear unpleasant odors and stains. [Here’s where the footnote appears referring to the article on Bret Stephens; it begins “For discussion of one example…”] It reflects a shift in one’s conception of the nature of beliefs: from ideas that may be true or false to expressions of a person’s moral and cultural identity. It also bespeaks a change in how scholars and critics conceive of their mission: from seeking knowledge to advancing social justice and other moral and political causes. 

Pedantic of me to point out, I know, but McCormick’s “across academia and journalism” is a misrepresentation of Pinker’s phrase, “In large swaths of academia and journalism,” one that serves to increase the scope of a claim McCormick faults for being large and insufficiently supported. Still, the claim does require support, and it’s true that the footnote lists a single example. 

            The next question is what does the case of Bret Stephens reveal, if anything, about academia and journalism? The first point that jumps out is that the controversy surrounding Stephens involves The New York Times, the biggest name in journalism, and it began when critics faulted an article by Stephens for abhorrent arguments allegedly contained within it. The result was that the Times deleted large parts of the article. Since the Times is the source of record, you might assume the criticisms held some merit. Not so. The authors of the Politico article write,

the column incited a furious and ad hominem response. Detractors discovered that one of the authors of the paper Stephens had cited went on to express racist views, and falsely claimed that Stephens himself had advanced ideas that were “genetic” (he did not), “racist” (he made no remarks about any race) and “eugenicist” (alluding to the discredited political movement to improve the human species by selective breeding, which was not remotely related to anything Stephens wrote).

Those hyperlinks in the passage are to false charges leveled in the pages of The Guardian and Mother Jones, both newspapers with rather large circulations if my sources are correct. 

            So Pinker’s citation isn’t completely useless, but maybe it leaves something to be desired. It’s still just one case, and it doesn’t mention anything about academia. There is, however, another footnote at the end of the same paragraph. This one refers to a post by Jonathan Haidt arguing that universities must decide whether their main mission is to seek truth or to pursue social justice. Haidt writes,

As a social psychologist who studies morality, I have watched these two teloses come into conflict increasingly often during my 30 years in the academy. The conflicts seemed manageable in the 1990s. But the intensity of conflict has grown since then, at the same time as the political diversity of the professoriate was plummeting, and at the same time as American cross-partisan hostility was rising. I believe the conflict reached its boiling point in the fall of 2015 when student protesters at 80 universities demanded that their universities make much greater and more explicit commitments to social justice, often including mandatory courses and training for everyone in social justice perspectives and content.

Is 80 a significantly large number of universities to justify the phrase “large swaths”? Does demanding greater focus on social justice amount to succumbing to fallacies? Haidt’s position is in fact that campus activism is often motivated by faulty reasoning. The second part of the post Pinker cites lists some of these errors, including the conflation of correlation with causation. Haidt writes,

All social scientists know that correlation does not imply causation. But what if there is a correlation between a demographic category (e.g., race or gender) and a real world outcome (e.g., employment in tech companies, or on the faculty of STEM departments)? At SJU, they teach you to infer causality: systemic racism or sexism. I show an example in which this teaching leads to demonstrably erroneous conclusions [there’s an embedded video]. At Truth U, in contrast, they teach you that “disparate outcomes do not imply disparate treatment.” (Disparate outcomes are an invitation to look closely for disparate treatment, which is sometimes the cause of the disparity, sometimes not).

Of course, while these citations offer some support for Pinker’s claim, we can be sure McCormick isn’t convinced. 

            What about Pinker’s claims regarding Critical Race Theory and Black Lives Matter? First, the statistical matter: are CRT and BLM motivated by an overreaction to police shootings? McCormick doesn’t mention the numbers cited in the section he quotes: “A total of 65 unarmed Americans of all races are killed by the police in an average year,” Pinker writes on page 123, after making the claim McCormick objects to, “of which 23 are African American, which is around three tenths of one percent of the 7,500 African American homicide victims.” He cites the data on police shootings tracked by the Washington Post.* Pinker could have also cited a report by the Skeptics Research Center that shows Americans wildly overestimate the number of African Americans killed by police: “over half (53.5%) of those reporting ‘very liberal’ political views estimated that 1,000 or more unarmed Black men were killed, a likely error of at least an order of magnitude.” But his book isn’t about police shootings. 

Next, can the claim that the murder of George Floyd led to widespread adoption of CRT be supported? A 2020 article in the BBC by Anthony Zurcher called Critical Race Theory: The Concept Dividing America includes this passage, 

The term itself first began to gain prominence in the 1990s and early 2000s, as more scholars wrote and researched on the topic. Although the field of study traditionally has been the domain of graduate and legal study, it has served recently as a framework for academics trying to find ways of addressing racial inequities through the education system - particularly in light of last summer's Black Lives Matter protests. “The George Floyd murder caused this whole nation to take a look at race and racism, and I think there was a broad recognition that something was amiss,” says Marvin Lynn, a critical race theory scholar and professor of education at Portland State University.

What is it about Pinker’s chronology that strikes McCormick as nonsensical? He must understand that most people outside of academia only learned about CRT recently, and it’s been in the context of the newly heated discussion of racism instigated by Floyd’s killing. I suspect his issue is semantic—is it really CRT that’s being taught in schools? 

            The other semantic point here is whether Pinker should support his use of the term doctrine as applied to CRT; again, he goes so far as to call it a “radical academic doctrine.” I’m just going to refer to Richard Delgado’s definition from his 2012 textbook on the subject. 

The critical race theory (CRT) movement is a collection of activists and scholars interested in studying and transforming the relationship among race, racism, and power. The movement considers many of the same issues that conventional civil rights and ethnic studies discourses take up, but places them in a broader perspective that includes economics, history, context, group- and self-interest, and even feelings and the unconscious. Unlike traditional civil rights, which stresses incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.

Well, that sounds pretty radical to me. But does it amount to a doctrine? As far as I understand it, all CRT follows from the tenet that society is comprised of two groups, the oppressors and the oppressed, and the efforts of the oppressors to maintain their hegemony infect every institution imaginable, from universities, to courts, to scientific research programs. That’s why CRT “questions the very foundations of the liberal order.” That central division wasn’t discovered through any empirical methods; rather, it’s asserted as an axiom—or a doctrine. I have no doubt McCormick would call my take simplistic and naïve, but I’d counter that he’s using obfuscation to avoid legitimate criticism.

            Let’s briefly consider another point McCormick takes issue with. This one includes the serious allegation that Pinker has misrepresented an activist’s writing. 

Pinker treats Mariame Kaba’s 2020 New York Times op-ed in favor of police abolition as an example of confusing “less-than-perfect causation” with “no causation,” because it is based on the fact that, under the current system, few rapists are prosecuted. “The editorialist did not consider,” he writes, that fewer still might be prosecuted without the police. In fact, Kaba’s argument is not primarily based on rape at all; she begins by talking about how much time police spend on traffic violations and noise complaints, and proceeds through a century-plus history of failed attempts at police “reform” (the point of her piece). What good does such misrepresentation serve?

Pinker’s comments on the matter take up a whole three sentences on page 260, coming right after the example of people pointing to nonagenarian smokers as a refutation of the link between cigarettes and cancer. The idea is that people point to rare exceptions in their efforts to cast doubt on wider trends, and he does indeed suggest Kaba’s reason for wanting the police abolished is because “the current approach hasn’t ended” rape. But the quotation is accurate, and the failure of policing to end rape is part of her argument. 

Is it really a misrepresentation to cite one part of her argument without mentioning the others? Possibly, but if so McCormick himself has a lot to answer for. What good does the alleged misrepresentation do? Well, it provides an illustrative example of people thinking an intervention that’s not a hundred percent effective can’t be effective at all—precisely the purpose Pinker wanted it to serve. What McCormick failed to notice is that Kaba makes the same error throughout her argument. She writes, for instance,

Minneapolis had instituted many of these “best practices” but failed to remove Derek Chauvin from the force despite 17 misconduct complaints over nearly two decades, culminating in the entire world watching as he knelt on George Floyd’s neck for almost nine minutes.

So, the reforms didn’t save George Floyd, but did they save anyone else? Kaba doesn’t think to ask. We should also ask if Kaba really believes police tactics haven’t improved at all since 1894, the date of her first example of a failed reform. Pinker, in the same footnote he uses to cite Kaba’s article, refers to a quantitative analysis of how policing affects crime that avoids the all-or-nothing fallacy he’s discussing in this section of his book. It paints a more optimistic, though by no means Panglossian, picture. 

            BLM, CRT, fallacies running rampant in journalism and higher education, police abolitionism—are you noticing a pattern? The only thing missing is cancel culture. By now, you won’t be surprised to find out McCormick faults Pinker for mentioning that topic as well (though not by name): 

Blaming universities’ “suffocating leftwing monoculture” for popular mistrust of expertise, Pinker mentions two examples in the text: University of Southern California professor Greg Patton’s removal from a course after using the Chinese ne ga, which can sound like the N-word, and testimony from unnamed personal “correspondents.” (In a footnote, he invites readers to look to Heterodox Academy, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, and Quillette—all of it—for further examples.) The very next paragraph warns of “illusions instilled by sensationalist anecdote chasing.” Doctor, heal thyself!

If you’re following along, the offending section is on pages 313 and 314. What Pinker wrote is that “confidence in universities is sinking” and “A major reason for the mistrust is the universities’ suffocating left-wing monoculture.” It’s a fine point, to be sure, but explaining mistrust of “expertise” is different from explaining mistrust of “universities.” A few high-profile cases of stifled speech at universities may just be enough to account for public mistrust, though you’d need further evidence to support the same point about expertise in general. 

That’s a minor misrepresentation, it’s true, but McCormick also fails to mention that the same footnote referring readers to Heterodox Academy, FIRE, and Quillette includes the line, “For other examples, see…” before citing: The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on College Campuses by Kors and Silvergate, Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate by Lukianoff, and The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure by the same Lukianoff and Johnathan Haidt. Who can forget the Evergreen Incident, where Bret Weinstein was threatened by a group of student protesters in the middle of one of his classes? It was all over the news. It’s covered in detail in Lukianoff and Haidt’s book, along with the case of Nicholas Christakis at Yale, who was confronted by students protesting his racism—because he and his wife Erika argued that students were capable of choosing Halloween costumes themselves without being told how not to offend each other. 

Maybe McCormick has a point, though, that fears about cancel culture are overblown because of “sensationalist anecdote chasing” by right-wing news outlets. How is this different from African Americans fearing for their lives after seeing YouTube videos of police shootings, when the numbers show they’re much more likely to be killed by someone who’s not a cop? For one thing, the numbers on police killings, though difficult to acquire and analyze*, are relatively simple compared to any effort at quantifying the risks posed by Twitter mobs or campus protesters. How many cases amounts to cause for valid concern? Another difference is that cancel culture operates on the logic of terror: activists publicly take down offenders in order to send a message to anyone else who may consider giving voice to a forbidden idea. They also send the message to other activists on how to deal with figures who don’t toe the line. I could be wrong, but I don’t think most cops are eager to have their fatal interactions with African Americans made more public.**

It should be noted too that organizations like Heterodox Academy and FIRE take it as their mission to promote diversity of opinion and protect free speech on campuses. Johnathan Haidt, one of Heterodox Academy’s founders, writes, “Nowadays there are no conservatives or libertarians in most academic departments in the humanities and social sciences.” In case you want some other sources he adds in a parenthetical “See Langbert, Quain, & Klein, 2016 for more recent findings on research universities; and see Langbert 2018 for similar findings in liberal arts colleges.” Sounds a bit monoculture-y to me. Signing on to Quillette, I had to search all of about two minutes for the tag “Free Speech,” which quickly helped me find an article about a composer who was mobbed and lost his job for criticizing arsonists at BLM protests. A continued search brought up several more cases. (I’ve actually witnessed a couple Facebook and Twitter debates firsthand that culminated in references to workplaces and threats to contact employers.)

I grant that Pinker could easily have been more precise with his citations; for instance, he could have cited FIRE’s report on the largest survey ever conducted on campus free expression, which found that “Fully 60% of students reported feeling that they could not express an opinion because of how students, a professor, or their administration would respond. This number is highest among ‘strong Republicans’ (73%) and lowest among ‘strong Democrats’ (52%).” FAIR also reports on the worrying trend of scholars being targeted and sanctioned for what was once protected speech:

Over the past five and a half years, a total of 426 targeting incidents have occurred. Almost three-quarters of them (314 out of 426; 74%) have resulted in some form of sanction.

The number of targeting incidents has risen dramatically, from 24 in 2015 to 113 in 2020. As of mid-2021, 61 targeting incidents have already occurred.

Still, Pinker’s book isn’t about free expression in schools or newsrooms. Remember McCormick elsewhere takes Pinker to task for not properly citing evidence to justify his use of a single term (doctrine). How long and in-depth does a citation need to be for a sidebar discussion in a book on a different topic?  

It’s by now a standard retort among leftists that cancel culture is a myth promulgated by outlets like Fox News. That’s why McCormick only has to nod at Pinker’s example to signal to his readers what the book is really about. The Ad Fontes Media site, which assesses outlets for their bias and reliability, puts Slate, where McCormick published his review, in the hinterlands between “Skews Left” and “Hyper-Partisan Left.” (Quillette is incidentally closer to the center on the chart.) It’s not at all hard to imagine that McCormick would think fears of cancellation are overblown, since in this single article he’s shown himself willing and eager to defend any of the left’s central orthodoxies, regardless of the cost to his intellectual integrity. As a liberal historian, he’s far less likely to run afoul of campus speech codes than, say, a behavioral geneticist or evolutionary psychologist—to name two fields Pinker often reports on. (Pinker is no conservative though; he donated to Obama’s last campaign and released an embarrassing video of himself dancing in celebration of Trump’s 2020 defeat at the polls.) 

From a Twitter discussion (commenter is not McCormick)

Why am I searching through footnote references about BLM and cancel culture in response to a review of a book about rationality? In earlier times, McCormick’s review would rightly be denounced as a politically motivated hatchet job. The thing is, though, I don’t think McCormick or many of his readers would be bothered much by this verdict. Largely as a consequence of intellectuals’ move from truth-seeking to social justice activism, the very one that Pinker and Haidt lament, it’s become far more acceptable to attack one’s fellow intellectuals on political grounds, regardless of the nominal topic of discussion. Many believe that you’re either helping to dismantle the hegemony or you’re helping to keep it in place. Pinker is allegedly doing the latter. He’s an old-fashioned modernist in a newfangled postmodern world.

So, McCormick quibbles with Pinker’s citations and I quibble with McCormick’s quibbles. What’s the point? For me, it’s the sad state of book reviewing, where McCormick can write an entire review calling Pinker out for insufficiently supporting his claims about hot-button political issues when the book he’s supposed to be reviewing is about something else entirely.*** Sure, McCormick offers up some arguments in addition to his political issues. Everyone claims to be rational, he insists, so what good can encouraging people to use reason possibly do? Everyone? Recall critical race theorist Richard Delgado’s challenge to “Enlightenment rationalism” for one prominent counterexample. Pinker answers the question himself, pointing out that many people think rationality is “overrated” because “logical personalities are joyless and repressed, analytical thinking must be subordinated to social justice, and a good heart and reliable gut are surer routes to well-being than tough-minded logic and argument” (xvi). I guess McCormick has never encountered anyone saying things like that. 

McCormick’s strongest point is that, as Pinker admits, rationality must be in the service of some preestablished goal. What Pinker points to as an example of irrationality then might simply be an instance of competing goals. Let’s take Richard Delgado as an example. He says rationality is problematic because it might get in the way of racial justice. I imagine Pinker would respond, how do you know? (See page 42 of Rationality.) Why would you assume subordinating reason to social justice will lead to better outcomes? Even if it did, how would you know the approach worked? You’d have to use the tools of reason to find out and to convince others (unless you were prepared to use coercion). Tellingly, though, in this case, Pinker and Delgado actually share the same goal; they’re simply disagreeing about the best way to pursue it. 

McCormick’s supposedly damning point about goals can really only apply to a subset of disagreements anyway. True, some people may have the goal of reinstating Trump as the president, while others have the goal of keeping him as far away from the oval office as possible. Encouraging both sides to be more rational will do nothing to settle the conflict. But isn’t getting one president elected over another a sub-goal, with the larger goal being to ensure the well-being of our nation’s children in the future. This goal too will be hampered by competing values in many areas, but it allows for at least some overlap of visions. Unless McCormick is suggesting that every instance of irrationality really reduces to differing goals, then the criticism can only apply to some disagreements and not others. The ones it doesn’t apply to can rightly be called irrelevant to Pinker’s discussion. 

One of the things about McCormick’s review that will most frustrate anyone who’s actually read Rationality is that, contra McCormick’s central thesis, Pinker spends a lot of time describing how an idea that’s irrational from one point of view turns out to be rational from another. This includes BLM: “The goal of the narrative is not accuracy but solidarity,” he writes, explaining that “a public outrage can mobilize overdue action against a long-simmering trouble, as is happening in the grappling with systemic racism in response to the Floyd killing” (124-5).

It’s also not always the case that people are aware of which of their own goals are driving them. Recall Pinker’s line, quoted above, about “a shift in one’s conception of the nature of beliefs: from ideas that may be true or false to expressions of a person’s moral and cultural identity.” I’m sure if we ask McCormick if he was being rational when writing his review, he’d say yes. But I suspect his efforts were in large part motivated by his desire to signal his leftist bona fides to the other members of his tribe. (I’m probably doing the same thing right now, just for a different tribe.) If he has these two competing goals, might he be pursuing one rationally and the other irrationally? 

Here’s the larger point: regardless of whether I can convince McCormick that his review is irrational, anyone reading the exchange can get the takeaway message that to be rational, one must try to avoid the trap of letting our desire to belong and elevate our status distort our view of the matter in question. How might you do that? Well, seeking out friendships with people holding different views could help. Engaging in honest, open debates with people with competing perspectives wouldn’t hurt. It may even be a good idea to simply ask yourself, “Is this something I believe because I’ve really looked into it? Or is it just what the people around me think I should believe? Am I trying to impress everyone by taking down some figure they dislike?” The outcome of the debate about whether McCormick’s review is rational is irrelevant as long as the goal is to help people understand the principle and apply it to their own reasoning. 

Of course, if it really were the case that Pinker’s book bursts at the seams with dubious examples of the irrationality of one political group, that would amount to a good reason to believe he had ulterior motives. But we’re talking about a few passages and a handful of lines in a 340-page book. I’ve already quoted nearly all of them in this post. And he spends just as much time focusing on the reasoning behind showing up at a pizzeria with an assault rifle or storming the Capitol. The real reason McCormick likes the point about rationality serving goals, I suspect, is that it allows him to argue (mistakenly) that determining what’s rational “means choosing some values and imposing some goals.” 

That’s what McCormick wants us to believe Pinker is really up to in the pages of Rationality, imposing his values and goals, anointing himself arbiter of all things rational, and pointing readers to his own weird and dystopian vision of the world. McCormick writes,

This paradox of defining reason as a universal means while invoking it as a specific norm, which is what Pinker specializes in, has wider political implications now, much as it did in the Enlightenment. Remember the San hunters? It was one thing to appreciate their fine calculations when the point to be made was the universality of reason as a human tool. But by the time the theme of reality vs. mythology returns, late in the book, rationality has new heroes: the people Pinker identifies as W.E.I.R.D. (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic) “children of Enlightenment.” Unlike the San—indeed, unlike everyone else—these champions not only possess the tools of rationality but “embrace the radical creed of universal realism”. To them belongs an “imperial mandate … to conquer the universe of belief and push mythology to the margins,” so that a “technocratic state” can act on their rational beliefs. Welcome to Steven Pinker’s Kingdom of Ends.

Ah, the axe McCormick has come to grind is very large and very blunt indeed. Having argued that Pinker is using his discussion of rationality as a Trojan Horse to promote his goals and values, he paints a final picture of a world ruled by a bunch of the Enlightenment champion’s clones. 

If you’ll forgive me one last lengthy block quote, you can see McCormick’s distortions in action. First, it’s in a chapter titled, “What’s Wrong with People?” in which Pinker attempts to explain why it seems like people are so bad at reasoning. In one section of the chapter, he posits “Two Kinds of Belief: Reality and Mythology”, pointing out that throughout most of our run here on Earth, we humans have let the two realms peacefully coexist in our minds. This was partly because we lacked tools like telescopes and computers and sophisticated statistical methods. But part of it is simply that we lacked a commitment to applying reason to certain questions. The passage begins quoting Bertrand Russel: “It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatsoever for supposing it is true.” Pinker writes, 

Russell’s maxim is the luxury of a technologically advanced society with science, history, journalism, and their infrastructure of truth-seeking, including archival records, digital datasets, high-tech instruments, and communities of editing, fact-checking, and peer review. We children of the Enlightenment embrace the radical creed of universal realism: we hold that all our beliefs should fall within the reality mindset. We care about whether our creation story, our founding legends, our theories of invisible nutrients and germs and forces, our conceptions of the powerful, our suspicions about our enemies, are true or false. That’s because we have the tools to get answers to these questions, or at least to assign them warranted degrees of credence. And we have a technocratic state that should, in theory, put these beliefs into practice.

But as desirable as that creed is, it is not the natural human way of believing. In granting an imperialistic mandate to the reality mindset to conquer the universe of belief and push mythology to the margins, we are the weird ones—or, as evolutionary social scientists like to say, the WEIRD ones: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic. At least, the highly educated among us are, in our best moments. 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.

Suddenly, the paradox McCormick trips over seems a lot less problematic; applying reason in some contexts is natural but applying it in all contexts is not. And what McCormick holds up as a prescriptive vision for the world turns out to be a descriptive—even somewhat humble—answer to the question of why people find rationality so difficult. 

Most importantly, McCormick dishonestly claims Pinker assigns an “imperialistic mandate” to the WEIRD—a group McCormick doesn’t seem to realize he belongs to as well—when he in fact writes that the WEIRD grant this mandate “to the reality mindset.” Pinker’s “Kingdom of Ends”—a reference to Kant’s idea that society should treat every individual not as a means but as an end unto themselves—now looks quite a bit more open-ended and far less autocratic. Is it going too far to suggest McCormick, in seeking out diverse tidbits to connect into a pattern revealing a dangerous hidden plot, must be relying on the same kind of conspiracy theory mindset that’s killing the vaccine hesitant and driving armies of Trump supporters to agitate for his reinstatement after a rigged election? 

            The reason people like Pinker and me are worried about activism invading intellectual spheres is that it undermines the trust the public once rationally placed in truth-seeking institutions. As long as universities, the editorial boards of scientific journals, and the staffs of journalistic websites openly proclaim their commitment to pursuing political agendas—no matter how well-intentioned—the public has good reason to doubt their commitment to truth and just as good reason to treat them each as just another special interest group. McCormick hasn’t written a review of Rationality so much as he’s participated in a campaign against Pinker, who many feel must be denounced because he doesn’t hold all the proper political opinions. (McCormick continues this campaign on Twitter if you’re interested.) A book reviewer should strive to represent the author’s work honestly and fairly, offering readers an accurate sense of what it’s about, how successfully the author is in meeting his goals, and what it’s like to read. McCormick’s review fails on all these counts, as you can see in comparing the passages above. Perhaps, he simply had other goals. 

*****

* Data from a recently published analysis shows that police killings have been underreported by a factor of 55.5% over recent decades. This changes the math on relative risks, but since the numbers are still so small, the outcome isn’t markedly different.

** Since I’ve already had someone complain about my “take” on BLM and police shootings, and because I fear [rationally?] being mobbed myself, let me stress here that I’m in no way giving my own personal take on these subjects here—and I don’t believe Pinker is giving his in Rationality either. The point here is to evaluate the underlying logic of some of the ideas and popular reasoning associated with the subjects. Later in the essay, you’ll find an example of how Pinker’s reasoning about BLM is more nuanced than his pointing to any single error in reasoning might suggest.

*** McCormick gave some brief, rather snarky, responses to this essay on Twitter. Most of his points were against straw men (in my opinion), but he did correctly call attention to this one line that was misleading. I complained of McCormick “bashing Pinker’s politics” throughout his review; he doesn’t. I’ve revised the line to be more precise and correct the error.

Also read:
THE FAKE NEWS CAMPAIGN AGAINST STEVEN PINKER AND ENLIGHTENMENT NOW

And:

THE SELF-RIGHTEOUSNESS INSTINCT: STEVEN PINKER ON THE BETTER ANGELS OF MODERNITY AND THE EVILS OF MORALITY

And:

NAPOLEON CHAGNON'S CRUCIBLE AND THE ONGOING EPIDEMIC OF MORALIZING HYSTERIA IN ACADEMIA