Enlightenment 2.0 by Canadian philosopher Joseph Heath is an almost chauvinistically
ambitious book, aiming for nothing less than the restoration of reason into the
world of politics.
Published in 2014, this book has by
any measure taken on extra relevance given the events of 2016.
The election of Donald Trump, the
Brexit referendum and the increasing likelihood that anti-immigrant parties in
Europe will make further electoral gains in the future has moved me to make a
few remarks about some of Heath’s ideas.
Heath should be well-known to readers
as the co-author with Andrew Potter of The
Rebel Sell, a polemical attack on the sort of counter-cultural left criticism associated with Adbusters and Herbert Marcuse; and Filthy Lucre, a similarly polemical
jeremiad directed against both left and right assumptions about economics.
People familiar with both books who
are also broadly receptive to Heath’s style of combative intellectual gameplay,
will relish Enlightenment 2.0. For it
is a dazzlingly variegated product, dense with insights and provocations drawn
from numerous fields such as cognitive psychology, political economy and public
sociology. For some the end result might be anarchic: Heath traverses so many
fields in such a brazenly confident manner that the various parts threaten to
overwhelm the whole.
However large a sense of structural
incompleteness one might feel come the final page, it would be hard not to be
thrilled by Heath’s ambition.
At the core of Enlightenment 2.0 is the conflict, both individual and collective,
between intuition and reason. Heath spends a large portion of the book
scrutinizing the cognitive mechanisms that underlie each. For this purpose
Heath is reliant on a number of psychological and evolutionary theories that
proclaim our species’ reliance on intuitive thinking.
We evolved to think intuitively in
order to deal with elements of our immediate environment. A synonym for
intuition is instinct – the word attaching itself to notions of our animal
past. This is more or less the image Heath wants us to conjure. Intuition is
quick, easy and useful for the resolution of short-term practical problems, in
part because it is a part of our ancestry and evolutionary development.
Our rationality, on the other hand,
is not strictly speaking part of our evolutionary baggage: it is largely
artificial, like civilization itself. But it is integral to the development and
coherence of large-scale societies, and makes possible cooperation between non-genetically-related
persons. Institutions such as the state and the judicial system are hardly
conceivable without the special insight afforded by our reason, which necessarily
acts against our instinctual reflexes. Rational thinking is slow, linear,
sequential, and in a sense decisively un-natural.
My apologies if all this sounds
reductive and essentialist. These are the results, rather than the process, of
Heath’s thinking. But Heath is sternly unequivocal in making the case for
reason over intuition. Following our instincts is a poor substitute for
developing our reason when it comes to dealing with collective action problems, a concept Heath propagates as his equivalent for what the Marxist might call a
‘structural crisis’. In order to resolve collective actions problems – climate
change being the most dramatic – we need to call upon our rational capacities
to organise society-wide cooperation.
The political environment that
preoccupies Heath at the beginning of Enlightenment
2.0 is one where the evasion of policy-oriented discussion makes way for
emotional appeals to voters’ guts. This applies as much to Heath’s home of
Canada as it does south of the border, where the paranoid style of the
Republican Party has come to occupy the mainstream. Heath looks to comedians
such as Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert to best illustrate the toxicity of such
an environment via the forces of satire. This was 2014. The situation has inarguably
gotten more extreme. And satire has become ill-equipped to deal with a figure
such as Donald Trump who by now is beyond parody.
The Donald Trump campaign had a
laughable deficit of fleshed-out policies to offer. Its appeal was almost
entirely visceral, rendering impotent the endless exposures of Trump’s lies. His
electoral victory was a rousing vindication of intuition over reason. But it
would be unsatisfactory to declare Trump voters as simply irrational. The
effects of a relentlessly globalized economy – in particular the relocation of
low-skilled industrial jobs – are certainly real. No one ought to blame Americans for finding the
economic landscape of their country unappealing, or even downright corrupt.
Beyond this, however, there’s not
much connecting tissue between Trump’s rabid fan base and critical thinking. If
Trump’s base is effective at demonstrating anger, they are less successful in
explicating said anger in rationally construed language. Instead the language we get comes in the form
of intense feeling (resentment, fear, hostility), pseudo-explanations,
nostalgic projections, and worst of all simply making stuff up. And as the
recent CNN interview
of several Trump supporters by Alisyn Camerota makes clear, a heavy dose of
conspiratorial posturing is never far away when interrogating the Trump phenomenon.
Heath makes it clear throughout Enlightenment 2.0 that the determining
factors of one’s cognitive preferences for either intuition or rationality are
not found exclusively within the brain. If anything Heath grapples more with
sociological factors. Rational thinking is undermined or enhanced depending on
the social scaffolding of certain
environments. A seminar at a university puts environmental pressure on people
to listen, concentrate, memorize and understand; as such it enhances our
rational capacities.
Dinner parties, supermarkets, or
morning TV shows, on the other hand, are environments less hospitable to
rational thinking. Heath writes that ‘outside of the privileged environment of
the classroom, it is remarkable how seldom anyone is ever forced to sit and
listen to someone else explain something (without flipping the channel,
checking for status updates, or interrupting)’. The features of rationality
that Heath spends so much time explicating – ‘It is slow; it requires
attention; it is linguistically based, conscious, and fully explicit’ – are
absent from most of the social settings we find ourselves in.
And so part of Heath’s proposals for enhancing
the possibility of rational thinking is to tinker with the various environments
we operate within. It goes to the heart of his classically liberal outlook
to find out that he would prefer we structure our social settings so as to trick ourselves, rather than force ourselves, to think more clearly. This
is easier said than done, and in the short-term not likely done at all. As
Heath writes towards the end of Enlightenment
2.0: ‘It should go without saying that writing books about the decline of
reason is not the sort of thing that is likely to slow the decline of reason’. For a writer who spends a lot of time dispelling
the illusions of others, he is certainly up for facing his own.
*
Heath, J 2014, Enlightenment 2.0: Restoring Sanity to Our Politics, Our Economy and
Our Lives, HarperCollins, Toronto
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