Against Reason?

In a review of Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by Steven Pinker, Simon McCarthy-Jones argues that the dictates of reason can conflict with the need for autonomy.

For example, imagine there is a political candidate or option being widely portrayed as the obvious and perhaps only sane choice. Could this drive some voters to vote for the alternative (potentially even against their own rational self-interests) in order to feel they are choosing freely?

And Elizabeth Preza reports on a study that found fear to be a more effective factor in recent elections.

According to University of Austin psychology professor Sam Gosling—one of the study’s co-authors—of the Big Five personality traits (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism), "regions highest on neuroticism are particularly receptive to political campaigns that emphasize danger and loss and that previous campaigns have not tapped into these themes as strongly as we saw in 2016".

Chauncey DeVega makes the connection between that appeal to fear and a growing sense of unhappiness.

A public that is miserable and in pain will often withdraw from politics and communal life. As seen with Republicans' high levels of support among precisely those voters who are most likely to be hurt by their policies, political sadism can be used as a type of fuel for racism, prejudice and white supremacy. There the pain and anger of White America is directed at some enemy Other who is black or brown, an immigrant or a Muslim, instead of at the corporate elites and gangster capitalists who drive the Republican agenda.

Conor Lynch takes issue with how Pinker overlooks the problems stemming from the Enlightenment.

[I]n Pinker’s account, what he calls “progressophobia” is not just prevalent on the right, where reactionaries long for the “good old days” and reject modernity out of hand, but on the left, where pessimistic progressives constantly deny or ignore much of the progress of the 20th century.

Being ruthlessly critical of the modern world does not make one anti-modern, just as being critical of American foreign policy does not make one anti-American. Modernity is a mixed and often contradictory affair, and acknowledging that does not make one a pessimist, a postmodernist or a “progressophobe.” In fact, it is necessary for any true progressive.

DeVega agrees that quietism is not the same as optimism.

While they are often easy vulnerable prey for demagogues, a public that is in misery and pain is also one which can be mobilized for radical, forward-thinking social and political change that can reinvigorate our democracy.

Update (January 26, 2019):  Phil Torres is not kind to Steven Pinker's book.

Mined quotes, cherry-picked data, false dichotomies, misrepresented research, misleading statements and outright false assertions on nearly every page.

Update (October 20, 2019):  Torres is generally annoyed with white, male "intellectuals".

Pinker and his ilk don't acknowledge errors when they make them; they are ideologues rather than truth-seekers, willing to bend the facts, launch personal attacks and censor critics to "win" debates. At exactly the moment in history when we need true intellectual leadership, people who exemplify intellectual honesty and integrity, the most, we get stubborn tribespeople.