ratiocinator
Lightly seared on the reality grill.
Recently finished reading Rationality by Steven Pinker. There is much that could be said about it but this passage in particular stood out to me:
Although this has an obvious relevance to certain types of religious beliefs, it's worth pointing out that Pinker applies it more widely to include, for example, modern conspiracy theories. He illustrates this by pointing out the followers of QAnon very often do not act as if they really believe (reality mindset) that there is paedophile ring operating out of a pizza restaurant, say, by calling the police. Apparently somebody, instead, gave the restaurant a one-star review that talked about shady looking characters eyeing up his kids.
For myself, I unashamedly aspire to universal realism, but what do others here think? Do you think it's a fair summary? Do you too aspire to universal realism or do you regard the mythology mindset as valuable and as something that should be preserved? If you have religious beliefs, which mindset do you think they belong to?
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.
Bertrand Russell famously said, “It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatsoever for supposing it is true.” The key to understanding rampant irrationality is to recognize that Russell’s statement is not a truism but a revolutionary manifesto. For most of human history and prehistory, there were no grounds for supposing that propositions about remote worlds were true. But beliefs about them could be empowering or inspirational, and that made them desirable enough.
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.
Although this has an obvious relevance to certain types of religious beliefs, it's worth pointing out that Pinker applies it more widely to include, for example, modern conspiracy theories. He illustrates this by pointing out the followers of QAnon very often do not act as if they really believe (reality mindset) that there is paedophile ring operating out of a pizza restaurant, say, by calling the police. Apparently somebody, instead, gave the restaurant a one-star review that talked about shady looking characters eyeing up his kids.
For myself, I unashamedly aspire to universal realism, but what do others here think? Do you think it's a fair summary? Do you too aspire to universal realism or do you regard the mythology mindset as valuable and as something that should be preserved? If you have religious beliefs, which mindset do you think they belong to?
