Vote Reason!

The last post alluded to what might happen to a Presidential candidate who decided to demonstrate his or her critical thinking activity in public, and noted the irony of how the voters might react negatively to such a demonstration, given that most of us hope our leaders will think and act deliberately once in office. But if “I reason well!” is tough to pull off as a Presidential campaign tagline, could reason become a campaign slogan in some other context?

This issue was brought home recently when looking at two authors (well, three actually) who appeal to reason in the context of political decision making.

The first is former US Vice President Al Gore whose 2007 book The Assault on Reason was a political broadside published during the last years of the Bush administration.

While much of the book is dedicated to listing what Gore perceives to be the many failings of the man to whom the author lost the 2000 US elections, undergirding these criticisms is an argument that “reason, logic and truth seem to play a sharply diminished role in the way America now makes important decisions.”

According to Gore, a combination of political corruption and dumbed-down public dialog (created by saturation media distorted by partisan and corporate interests) has reduced the country’s ability to think clearly, to base important decision on reason and logic, rather than ideology and superstition.

No doubt skepticism over global warming (the subject of Gore’s best-selling An Inconvenient Truth) was playing a role in the author’s analysis that both the public and its leaders were failing to act logically and reasonably. And without getting into the substance of the global warming debate, the relevant point for readers of this blog is that a skilled politician and celebrated political author felt that the public (or at least a large segment of it) would sympathize with the argument that reason should prevail in politics and public policy.

If your position on one of Gore’s issues (or Gore himself) prevents you from looking at his work from a non-partisan perspective, a second book that makes a similar argument (albeit from a completely opposite political perspective) might provide some distance.

The World Turned Upside Down by British journalist and author Melanie Phillips makes the same argument as Gore (that the world is rapidly losing its ability to reason and think critically about important political subjects). But in her case, the issues we debate irrationally are the very ones Gore sees reason providing settled answers to (such as global warming and how the US got into a war with Iraq).

Now Phillips ties her observations into what she perceives as a growth in superstitions belief, lumping together New Age cults, 9/11 conspiracy theories and unquestioned faith in subjects such as man-made global warming and even human evolution into a single phenomena which she traces to people desperately searching for meaning in a post-religious age.

And while her choice of targets may not fit together as well as the author thinks, again we should note that she is not calling for a return to decision-making based on religious belief. Rather, she is claiming that in our post-religious age, reason does not take the lead but instead morphs into its own cult of irrationality.

Again, separating out the writer’s particular politics (as we did with Gore’s), we are left with a political writer (this one from the opposite end of the political spectrum to the former Vice President’s) who feels that her audience will respond positively to the argument that our polity should be informed by logic and reason, even if she feels that logic and reason lead to a very different place than where Al Gore had ended up.

The third author I alluded to earlier is Lee Harris, author of such books as Civilization and Its Enemies and The Suicide of Reason. While his political point of view (notably as a critique of radical Islam) makes him controversial as well, his arguments regarding politics and reason takes aim at reason itself.

His main thesis is that the culture of reason that many in the West live under (and both Gore and Phillips are playing to) is not the result of mankind taking the next evolutionary step towards progress (leading to an end of history, with all societies eventually being run by rational actors). Rather, he sees the reasoning society as itself a sub-culture, a sub-culture that could never have been created by reason alone.

I will leave the details of his arguments for another time, but suffice to say that whenever we are trying to apply the principles of critical thinking (logic, reason, analytical weighing of evidence) to political debate we are embarking on a highly artificial project, a project that would confuse (and possibly appall) most people throughout history, as well as a fair number of people living today.