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Steven Pinker or Ayn Rand: Who is the Real “Champion of Reason?”

By Marco den Ouden

September 28, 2022

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Since the publication of her novel, Atlas Shrugged, in 1957 and her subsequent nonfiction writing in her newsletters, Ayn Rand has been regarded by many as the doyenne of reason, and its leading advocate. In more recent times, a challenger to that title has arisen. Steven Pinker, the Harvard polymath and professor of psychology, who published Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress in 2018 and Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters in 2021 has argued passionately for reason. But his understanding of reason differs from Rand’s. The question arises, who is the real champion of reason?

Pinker’s Rationality is a follow-up to Enlightenment Now, ably reviewed by my colleague, Walter Donway.

That book made the case that by every measure of human flourishing, our liberal democratic capitalist system has produced abundance. But hardly anyone knows it. It is reason, science and humanism that has made this progress possible. Yet the chattering classes seem to suffer from “Progressophobia.” Sure, they don’t begrudge the fruits of progress, but they deny the tenets that made progress possible.

In that book, Pinker described in great detail the tremendous progress made since the Industrial Revolution in every aspect of human flourishing from health care to life expectancy to the declines in violence and racial and other discriminations. He concluded with a chapter each on reason, science and humanism.

His follow-up book expands on the chapter on reason, exploring what reason is, the common errors in thinking that people make, and how to become a better thinker.

In Enlightenment Now, Pinker stresses that “no Enlightenment thinker ever claimed that humans were consistently rational.” (Italics in original). What they argued was that we “ought to be rational” and more, that “we can be rational.”

Rationality can be considered a textbook on how to think effectively, how we can be rational. Specifically he elaborates on the various modes of analysis that together make up being rational, devoting a chapter to each: Logic and Critical Thinking, Probability and Randomness, Beliefs and Evidence (Bayesian Reasoning), Risk and Reward (Rational Choice and Expected Utility), Hits and False Alarms (Signal Detection and Statistical Decision Theory), Self and Others (Game Theory), and Correlation and Causation.

Ayn Rand was one of the preeminent modern thinkers to emphasize the importance of rationality when all about her were losing theirs.

Ayn Rand, of course, was one of the preeminent modern thinkers to emphasize the importance of rationality when all about her were losing theirs, to paraphrase Kipling’s poem If.

What is reason? Rand defined it as “the faculty that identifies and integrates the material provided by man’s senses.” (The Virtue of Selfishness, 20). Elsewhere, she added:

Reason integrates man’s perceptions by means of forming abstractions or conceptions, thus raising man’s knowledge from the perceptual level, which he shares with animals, to the conceptual level, which he alone can reach. The method which reason employs in this process is logic—and logic is the art of non-contradictory identification. (Philosophy: Who Needs It, 62)

Pinker answers the question “What is reason?” in quite a different way than Ayn Rand does. Pinker writes that reason is “the ability to use knowledge to attain goals.” Knowledge he defines as “justified true belief.”

Rand focused on fundamentals. “The method which reason employs in this process is logic—and logic is the art of non-contradictory identification.” Non-contradictory identification is the application of the law of identity to the real world. It is, in fact, empirical. Observe and identify.

Pinker focuses on goals:

A rational agent must have a goal, whether it is to ascertain the truth of a noteworthy idea, called theoretical reason, or to bring about a noteworthy outcome in the world, called practical reason. (37)

“Do you want things or don’t you?” he asks. “If you do, rationality is what allows you to get them.”

This focus on the practical ends of reasoning leads him to argue that “logic is not the same thing as reasoning” although “they are closely related.” (39)

In Enlightenment Now, he disdains Rand’s ethics and politics, dismissing her views as Nietzschean, even though she specifically repudiates Nietzsche. In Rationality, Rand is not mentioned at all.

In the Introduction to The Virtue of Selfishness, Rand explains that she is promoting an ethics of rational self-interest. She distinguishes it from the Comtean ideal of altruism. Comte wrote that the “social point of view cannot tolerate the notion of rights, for such notion rests on individualism. We are born under a load of obligations of every kind, to our predecessors, to our successors, to our contemporaries.” (Catéchisme Positiviste)

Rand argues that this alleged ideal requires sacrifice and she writes forcefully against the idea of sacrifice which she describes as the giving up of a higher value for a lower value. She is not opposed to benevolence, which she sees as quite different. Benevolence does not require sacrifice. It is a fine distinction that seems to be lost on many of her critics, including Pinker.

On Nietzsche she writes that acting in one’s rational self-interest “is not a license ‘to do as he pleases.’”

This is said as a warning against the kind of “Nietzschean egoists” who, in fact, are a product of the altruist morality and represent the other side of the altruist coin: the men who believe that any action, regardless of its nature, is good if it is intended for one’s own benefit. (The Virtue of Selfishness, xiv)

Observe the two sides of this coin: sacrifice yourself to others or sacrifice others to yourself. Rand opposes the very idea of sacrifice. She promotes and lauds the idea of people as traders, exchanging value for value. The two sides of the altruist coin propose a win-lose situation. Rand proposes a win-win outcome.

Rand, of course, does not disdain striving after goals. She lauds and glorifies purposeful (goal-directed) behavior. She goes so far as to name reason, productivity and pride as the cardinal virtues of the Objectivist ethics. (The Virtue of Selfishness, 20–22)

In Enlightenment Now, Pinker explicitly criticizes political ideology, arguing that “When issues are not politicized, people can be altogether rational.” He believes that science is rational whereas politics is usually irrational. Without specifically mentioning Rand’s argument for laissez-faire capitalism, he argues that the left’s disdain for capitalism and free markets is based on a false dichotomy. He explains that leftist

brains autocorrect these terms to unbridled, unregulated, unfettered, or untrammeled free markets, perpetuating a false dichotomy: a free market can coexist with regulations on safety, labor, and the environment, just as a free country can coexist with criminal laws. And a free market can coexist with high levels of spending on health, education and welfare—indeed, some of the countries with the greatest amount of social spending also have the greatest amount of economic freedom. (Enlightenment Now, 364)

He ignores completely Rand’s ethical argument against the initiation of force, namely that a free mind cannot fully function under compulsion.

A society that robs an individual of the product of his effort, or enslaves him, or attempts to limit the freedom of his mind, or compels him to act against his own rational judgment—a society that sets up a conflict between its edicts and the requirements of man’s nature—is not, strictly speaking, a society, but a mob held together by institutionalized gang rule. (145)

Though Pinker does not discuss Rand’s ideas or other ideologies specifically in Rationality, he does provide an answer to why he holds ideology in contempt. In the chapter on Logic and Critical Thinking, he wonders why there are still squabbles over different issues. “Why don’t we just say ‘Let us calculate’ and see who is right?” (94) This was Leibniz’s utopian dream, for a universal logical language that would clarify all thought and pinpoint the truth in everything. Leibniz’s dream was what inspired Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell in creating modern Quantified First Order Logic. Scott Soames notes Russell’s “goal was to bring the rigor and scientific spirit found in mathematics to the philosophy of mathematics, and all of philosophy.” (The Dawn of Analysis Volume 1, 94)

Pinker doesn’t specifically look at analytic philosophy but notes that “one reason logic will never rule the world is the fundamental distinction between logical propositions and empirical ones.” (Rationality, 94):

It’s often said that the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century was launched when people first appreciated that statements about the physical world are empirical and can be established only by observation, not scholastic argumentation. (94)

Clearly his favorite approach to reason is what is known as Bayesian Reasoning. Bayesian reasoning, as many of the other modes of reasoning he describes, is concerned with the empirical, the imprecise, the approximate, and the probable.

Formal deductive logic is just one element of many in the reasoning process. While formal deductive logic produces definitive and certain answers that follow from true premises, certainty is not always assured in the real world. Roll a fair die and there is a one in six chance that a six will come up. There is no certainty that any specific number will come up. This uncertainty is magnified manifold times in the social world.

The chapter on Bayesian Reasoning is called Beliefs and Evidence. He quotes a definition:

Bayes’ rule or Bayes’ theorem is the law of probability governing the strength of evidence—the rule saying how much to revise probabilities (change our minds) when we learn a new fact or observe new evidence. (149)

This comes from a group known as the Rationality Community “whose members strive to be ‘less wrong’ by compensating for their cognitive biases and embracing standards of critical thinking and epistemic humility.” It is a very empirical notion and not conducive to a rationalist approach to thinking.

Bayesian reasoning is, according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on Inductive Logic, a widely used approach to inductive logic “often called a Bayesian Inductive Logic or a Bayesian Confirmation Theory. Much of the article focuses on Bayesian reasoning.

NLab notes that “Bayesian reasoning is an application of probability theory to inductive reasoning. It relies on an interpretation of probabilities as expressions of an agent’s uncertainty about the world, rather than as concerning some notion of objective chance in the world.”

“In probability-speak,” Pinker continues, “we can say that our credence should be conditional on the evidence.” (151)

Pinker is clearly disturbed by the irrationality we see around us every day, whether it’s “a carnival of cockamamie conspiracy theories” (283) to fake news and “alternative facts.” Belief in the supernatural is widespread. “Three quarters of Americans hold at least one paranormal belief,” (285) he notes. He lists a few such beliefs followed by the percentage of Americans believing it:

Possession by the devil, 42 percent

Extrasensory perception, 41 percent

Ghosts and spirits, 32 percent

Astrology, 25 percent

Witches, 21 percent

But “how can we explain this pandemic of poppycock?” he asks. He suggests the popular explanations are “too glib to be satisfying.” It’s not just the sort of logical and statistical fallacies he’s spent the book explaining. Nor can we blame social media.

Conspiracy theories and viral falsehoods are probably as old as language. What are the accounts of miracles in scriptures, after all, but fake news about paranormal phenomena? For centuries Jews have been accused of conspiring to poison wells, sacrifice Christian children, control the world economy, and foment communist uprisings. (287)

And fake news was popular in tabloids like Weekly World News and The National Enquirer long before the Internet. Urban legends abounded.

Pinker argues there is another factor at play, what he calls motivated reasoning.

The obvious reason that people avoid getting onto a train of reasoning is that they don’t like where it takes them….The mustering of rhetorical resources to drive an argument towards a favored conclusion is called motivated reasoning. (289–290)

This he calls the myside bias. He cites studies that show that in politically touchy issues, reason goes out the window. Regardless of what the evidence shows, gun control advocates and gun control opponents will come to the conclusions they want or disparage the evidence. It has nothing to do with their respective literacy, numeracy or scientific acumen. Two sides will even read the same data differently to support their own particular view.

But is this irrational? Pinker says not necessarily. He argues that there are two kinds of belief: reality and mythology:

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 memories of their interactions, and the rules and norms that regulate their lives.

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. (299–300)

“The other zone,” he continues, “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.” (300)

While people are generally rational in the reality mindset, in the real world, beliefs in the mythology zone “are narratives, which may be entertaining or inspiring or morally edifying. Whether they are literally ‘true’ or ‘false’ is the wrong question.”

When people believe something in the reality zone, it is something they act upon. When people believe something in the mythology zone, their actions are lacklustre and don’t reflect the supposed gravity of what they believe in. Those who do take their mythology zone beliefs seriously, in other words, treat them as if they were in the reality zone, sometimes do so with tragic results such as the suicides that accompanied the belief aliens were coming with the Hale-Bopp comet.

If the religious who believe nonbelievers are doomed to hellfire acted on their beliefs, they would try to forcibly convert nonbelievers for their own good. Centuries ago, this mythology was reality for some and the Spanish Inquisition did just that. In the modern world, some radical Islamists still treat myth as reality and issue fatwas against authors like Salman Rushdie, and their followers act on them.

“Thankfully,” Pinker notes, “Western religious belief is safely parked in the mythology zone, where people are protective of its sovereignty.” (302)

Pinker heads the chapter this discussion is in with a quote from comedian George Carlin: “Tell people there’s an invisible man in the sky who created the universe, and the vast majority will believe you. Tell them the paint is wet, and they have to touch it to be sure.”

The so-called New Atheists weren’t countered with the claim that God in fact exists. Critics “implied that it is inappropriate, or uncouth, or just not done, to consider God’s existence a matter of truth or falsity. Belief in God is an idea that falls outside the sphere of testable reality.” (302) God is not wet paint.

Once we appreciate that humans can hold beliefs they don’t treat as factually true, we can make sense of the rationality paradox—how a rational animal can embrace so much claptrap….Pseudoscience, paranormal woo-woo, and medical quackery engage some of our deepest cognitive intuitions. (304)

Pinker explains some of these deep-seated intuitions that give rise to the “woo-woo” including an inherent dualist mindset, intuitions about foreign adulterants polluting the body (the source of anti-vaxxer hysteria), and our inherent teleology—we are goal-oriented—so why shouldn’t the world or the universe have some inherent purpose?

Such notions are continuing to be eroded but they are deep-seated and “not easily surrendered.” (305) “The boundary between the scientific establishment and the pseudoscientific fringe is obscure….Even among the highly educated, scientific understanding is shallow.”

And, he adds, “to understand viral humbug such as urban legends, tabloid headlines, and fake news, we have to remember that it is fantastically entertaining.”

So, what can be done to stem the irrationality in our midst? Number one, Pinker avows, is “a valorization of the norm of rationality itself.” (311) It cannot be imposed from the top down, but “we can each do our part in smiling or frowning on rational and irrational habits.” (312)

Looking to government, he suggests, may be futile because “legislatures are largely populated by lawyers, whose professional goal is victory rather than truth.” And both “major American [political] parties indulge in industrial-strength myside bias.”

Clearly, Pinker, like Rand, has contempt for the irrational. He opposes mysticism as a means of obtaining knowledge. He opposes emotion as a means of obtaining knowledge, calling it myside bias.

But as noted above, he sees logic as limited. He wrote “one reason logic will never rule the world is the fundamental distinction between logical propositions and empirical ones.” (94)

He offers two more reasons. His second reason is that “logic is formal, blinkered from seeing anything but the symbols and their arrangement as they are laid out in front of the reasoner. It is blind to the content of the proposition….Logical reasoning in the strict sense means forgetting everything you know….Logic, in this sense, is not rational.” (95) His third reason “that rationality will never be reduced to logic is that the concepts that people care about differ in crucial ways from the predicates of classical logic.” (98) He goes into a discussion of Wittgenstein’s argument that concepts are characterized by “family resemblances, not necessary and sufficient features.” (99)

All these reasons contribute to his view that “statements about the physical world are empirical and can be established only by observation, not scholastic argumentation.” (94)

His casual dismissal of Ayn Rand’s philosophy in Enlightenment Now belies a certain ignorance of Rand’s ideas. His only citation is the Jennifer Burns biography and even here he distorts Burns argument. His footnote on Rand reads “Nietzsche’s influence on Rand and her cover-up: Burns 2009.” No page numbers. Nothing specific. But Burns acknowledges Rand’s shift away from Nietzsche’s elitism. Burns elaborates on this in her own footnote 4 to Chapter 2 which runs a half page. All the other references to Nietzsche in the book are in passim. In this footnote, Burns explains her position. She notes that

many scholars focus on Rand’s explicit rejection of Dionysius and her dislike of The Birth of Tragedy, arguing that she experienced only a brief “Nietzsche phase….These scholars share Rand’s understanding of Nietzshean ethics as solely a call for the strong to dominate the weak….I agree that there are many differences between Rand and Nietzsche, most strikingly her absolutism as opposed to his antifoundationalism. Yet I approach the question of influence from a different angle, focusing primarily on Nietzsche’s transvaluation of values and his call for a new morality. From this perspective, though Rand’s reliance on Nietzsche lessened over time, her entire career might be considered a “Nietzsche phase.” (303-304)

 

According to Wikipedia, the focus of Nietzsche’s transvaluation of all values was an attack on Christian morality.

Nietzsche contrasts Christianity with Buddhism. He posits that Christianity is “the struggle against sin”, whereas Buddhism is “the struggle against suffering”; to Nietzsche, Christianity limits and lowers humankind by assailing its natural and inevitable instincts as depraved (“sin”), whereas Buddhism advises one merely to eschew suffering. While Christianity is full of “revengefulness” and “antipathy” (e.g., the Last Judgment), Buddhism promotes “benevolence, being kind, as health-promoting.” Buddhism is also suggested to be the more “honest” of the two religions, for its being strictly “phenomenalistic”, and because “Christianity makes a thousand promises but keeps none.” Martyrdom, rather than being a moral high ground or position of strength, is indicative of an “obtuseness to the question of truth.” (Wikipedia)

But the transvaluation of values is not the aspect of Nietzsche that Pinker attacks. What he attacks are the elements of Nietzsche that Rand explicitly repudiated in her mature work.

With respect to reason, Pinker explicitly repudiates scholastic argumentation. Presumably he views Rand’s arguments as such. But scholasticism, according to a number of sources, is more a method of argumentation than an actual philosophy, though it was used to justify Roman Catholic theology in the middle ages.

Essentially, Scholasticism is a tool and method for learning which places emphasis on dialectical reasoning (the exchange of argument, or thesis, and counter argument, or antithesis, in pursuit of a conclusion, or synthesis), directed at answering questions or resolving contradictions. In medieval Europe, dialectics (or logic) was one of the three original liberal arts (the “trivium”), in addition to rhetoric and grammar. (Philosophy Basics)

Scholasticism originally began as a reconciliation of the philosophy of the ancient classical philosophers with medieval Christian theology. It was not a philosophy or theology in itself, but a tool and method for learning which emphasized dialectical reasoning. The primary purpose of scholasticism was to find the answer to a question or resolve a contradiction. (New World Encyclopedia)

 

Scholasticism placed a strong emphasis on Aristotelian philosophy, particularly his metaphysics and epistemology. Despite its connection with Catholicism, as a method it strived to be empirical and scientific.

Pinker’s argument that logic is formal and bereft of content is absurd. The content is inherent in the premises of a logical argument. Rand’s philosophy is certainly not bereft of content. It stands or falls on its premises and to attack it, Pinker needed to show a fault in its premises, not its peripheral association with Nietzsche. Which, of course, is the logical fallacy of guilt by association and ad hominem argument.

His dismissal of logic because of the vagueness of some words such as game is barely an argument. The issue is addressed in Rand’s Introduction to Objectvist Epistemology. Rand notes that “All definitions are contextual.” (42, 43 in Second Edition)

While Pinker seems to have great disdain for ideology, his view of reason does not actually disparage it as much as he makes out.

Throughout the book Pinker makes it clear that he supports a Humean approach to knowledge. He calls Hume “one of the hardest-headed philosophers in the history of Western thought” (45) and “that hero of reason.” (158) Hume is perhaps the pre-eminent philosopher of empiricism as contrasted with rationalism.  Rationalism, notes Wikipedia, argues that “the criterion of the truth is not sensory but intellectual and deductive.”

Rand argues for the integration of theory and evidence. The opposition of empiricism to rationalism poses a false dichotomy. One without the other is an incomplete approach to reason. Rationalism disparages “the perception of physical facts” while empiricism operates “by direct perception of immediate facts, with no recourse to concepts.” (For the New Intellectual, 30) Metaphysics, which Pinker dismisses as part of the mythology zone, provides the framework for understanding the empirical world we observe.

In fact, Pinker, though he is unaware of it, shares Rand’s metaphysical view.

In fact, Pinker, though he is unaware of it, shares Rand’s metaphysical view. She summarizes her metaphysics as “Existence exists,” in other words, this is the only world you got, baby. There is no woo-woo land, no heaven, no hell, nothing outside of reality. This is exactly Pinker’s position when he argues that “there’s a real world and that beliefs about it are true or false.”

But recall that Pinker also argued that

A rational agent must have a goal, whether it is to ascertain the truth of a noteworthy idea, called theoretical reason, or to bring about a noteworthy outcome in the world, called practical reason. (37)

Pinker here supports what he calls theoretical reason, “to ascertain the truth of a noteworthy idea.” Ideology, including Ayn Rand’s Objectivism, is, in fact, an attempt to ascertain the truth of a noteworthy idea, in Rand’s case the supremacy of reason as the hallmark of what it means to be human. It fits right in with Pinker’s goal to promote rationality.

Rather than disdaining Rand’s ideas as he did in Enlightenment Now, he could well have enlisted her ideas in support of his own. That he failed to do so reveals a blind spot in an otherwise well-thought-out worldview.

Recall also Pinker’s assertion that “the obvious reason that people avoid getting onto a train of reasoning is that they don’t like where it takes them….The mustering of rhetorical resources to drive an argument towards a favored conclusion is called motivated reasoning.” (289–290)

Pinker’s dismissal of Rand’s arguments could well be considered an example of this flaw in action. He dislikes where Rand’s arguments take him so he musters his rhetorical resources to disdain ideology in general. All ideology. He misrepresents Rand as a Nietzschean. He misrepresents Burns to support this view. All of it without digging into original sources. A perfect example of motivated reasoning.

Pinker argued in Enlightenment Now that “A more rational approach to politics is to treat societies as ongoing experiments and open-mindedly learn the best practices, whichever part of the spectrum they come from. The empirical picture at present suggests that people flourish most in liberal democracies with a mixture of civic norms, guaranteed rights, market freedom, social spending, and judicious regulation.” (365)

Yet he also argues in Rationality that we can discern a rational morality. He advocates a morality remarkably like Rand’s. He advocates a reciprocal respect for an individual’s rights to their life and property.

When you combine self-interest and sociality with impartiality—the interchange of perspectives—you get the core of morality. You get the Golden Rule, or variants that take note of George Bernard Shaw’s advice “Do not do unto others as you would have others do unto you; they may have different tastes.” This sets up Hillel’s version, “What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow.” (68)

 

That is about as clear a description of Rand’s ethical-political position as you can get. Paraphrased, her position is that there are three different uses of force or compulsion. It can be initiated, it can be used in self-defense, and it can be used in later retaliation against those who have initiated force. For Rand, the only proper use of individual force is in self-defense, retaliatory force must be placed under objective law.

That is the essence of both Rand’s and Pinker’s morality. But Pinker does not follow this moral code to its logical conclusion, which is Rand’s advocacy of laissez-faire capitalism. He dislikes where the logic takes him so he scuttles it with motivated reasoning.

Pinker advocates a mixed economy. He advocates the idea that “governments, prepared to face technical problems without ideological preconceptions, can coordinate the elements of a national economy to bring about unexampled growth and prosperity.”

That quote is not from Pinker, but from President John F. Kennedy in 1962. Kennedy went on to argue that “What is at stake in our economic decisions today is not some grand warfare of rival ideologies, but the practical management of the modern economy.”

At the time, Ayn Rand was writing a weekly column for the Los Angeles Times. She castigated Kennedy, not for his economic views, but for his attack on ideology as such. She wrote:

At a time when every country in the world (including the enslaved ones) is torn by the life-and-death struggle of two opposite ideologies—freedom vs. statism—Mr. Kennedy permits himself to sneer at “some grand warfare of rival ideologies.” (The Ayn Rand Column, 16)

 

She goes on to argue that Kennedy is, in effect, declaring that “statism—a government-managed economy—has won.”

Kennedy speaks of a “necessary partnership of government with all the sectors of our society in the steady quest for economic progress.” Rand counters that “Partnership is an indecent euphemism for government control.”

In Enlightenment Now Pinker writes that “the totalitarian governments of the 20th century did not emerge from democratic welfare states sliding down a slippery slope, but were imposed by fanatical ideologues and gangs of thugs.” (365) Yet he does not recognize that bad ideology must be countered by good ideology. Rand’s philosophy eschews the initiation of violence in all forms. It is the antithesis of the thug morality. And, contrary to Pinker’s assertion, the rise of Nazi Germany took place within the framework of democracy and its avowed enemy was bourgeois capitalism. As colonialism was reversed, many newly-formed democratic states slid into totalitarian and corrupt practices. And even the promise of a liberated and democratic Russia has degenerated into plutocracy and strongman rule.

That said, Rationality is chock full of great ideas on how we often err and how we can improve our thinking. Enlightenment thinkers, as he noted, argued that we “ought to be rational” and more, that “we can be rational.”

Rand effectively argues the ought portion of this formulation. She argues that reason is man’s defining characteristic and that only by reason, not by mysticism or force or fraud, can we achieve the progress that Pinker holds so dear.

Pinker adds significantly to the “how we can do it” side. He explains the different elements that make for a rational approach to life. He explains the many fallacies humans are prey to. And he explains how we can improve our thinking.

Rand sets the target by declaring that reason and a rational life are the mainstay of morality. Pinker gives us some insight into how we can achieve this lofty goal.

The question “who is the real champion of reason?” proffers a false dichotomy. Both are and both do a superb job of it. Both condemn mysticism and superstition. Both condemn the anti-capitalist mindset of the left. Both support a market economy and property rights. Both oppose the idea of sacrifice. Both condemn totalitarianism as the bailiwick of “fanatical ideologues and gangs of thugs.”

Rand is more consistent in her position, but this is not to say she is infallible. Pinker cannot disregard her own explicitly stated position and dismiss her as a Nietzsche clone. That is just the “mustering of rhetorical resources to drive an argument towards a favored conclusion” and unworthy of his dedication to reason.

 

 

 

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