Enlightenment 2.0

Enlightenment 2.0: Restoring Sanity to Our Politics, Our Economy, and Our Lives by Joseph Heath, 2014.

Review by Cosma Shalizi:

Enlightenment is Other People

This is a very interesting but also somewhat-dated book and highly-debatable book; I decided to review it in part to figure out what I think about it.

Heath is, as I've said, notable because he has a good claim to being the world's only rational-choice critical theorist, at once an acute student of the Frankfurt School, especially Habermas, while simultaneously devoted to game theory. Both these traditions lean very heavily on notions of "reason" and "rationality".

This book is Heath grappling with two sets of ideas: (1) according to the psychologists, people are not very rational at all, and (2) politics throughout the rich democracies, but especially in the US, seemed to be going crazy, and be increasingly detached from reason. (Remember Heath is writing c. 2013; we hadn't seen nothing yet. (MAGA)) At first sight, these have nothing to do with each other; if the psychologists are right, after all, we've always been stupid, which can hardly explain why some of us seemed to be getting more crazy.

Heath ingeniously ties these two ideas together, and connects them to his game-theoretic/Habmerasian concerns, by adopting a "dual process" or "dual systems" view of human cognition, explicitly (but not exclusively) following the great Daniel Kahneman. One system consists of our faculties for pattern recognition, primate social interaction, etc., etc. This is parallel, fast, intuitive, pre-linguistic, inaccessible to introspection, and run by fast and frugal heuristics which worked well for our evolutionary ancestors but were not tuned to the environment of post-industrial, media-saturated capitalist representative democracies

All of this is in contrast to the other system, which is reason or rationality. Reason is serial, slow, explicit, articulated in language, self-reflective, and capable of self-correction. It is also, and this is absolutely vital, culturally and socially mediated.

For Heath, we have in turn two ways of being rational. The obvious one is to explicitly rely on the second system.
Our capacity to do this --- to, as it were, white-knuckle our way to human freedom --- is very limited and easily over-taxed.

The other way to be rational is to arrange our environments so that our first system responds in ways our second system would approve of, were the latter given the time and resources to work things out. This is, in Heath's account, vastly the more common and important source of rationality. In many cases, inherited customs, traditions and institutions, which have (literally) evolved through a long process of selection, create situations where our intuitive or habitual reactions are, in fact, rational and adaptive. To this extent, as he says, conservatism is right.

Thus one way in which rationality is (for Heath) social: we build environments.

The other way in which rationality is social is that even when we are relying on explicitly, articulated, second-system reasoning, we are a lot better at criticizing others than ourselves, so argument and debate actually improve ideas

Rationality matters for Heath because, in addition to its intrinsic value, he sees it as being essential to solving large-scale collective action problems.
Small-scale collective action problems and social dilemmas can be solved by our first-system human tendencies to reciprocity and enforcing norms, even at cost to ourselves, but beyond the scale of a foraging band (tribe), we need some combination of thinking through "what if everyone acted this way?" and formal organizations (especially states), which needs reason.

And now we get to what was worrying Heath c. 2010. He was very concerned that our built environments, including our social institutions, were deteriorating, in ways that made rationality increasingly difficult. Among the specific issues he discusses, I will single out advertising and, relatedly, the news media.

He present the techniques of modern advertising as an attempt to use the first, intuitive system to short-circuit considerations from the second, rational system.

Turning to the media (MSM) environment, he leans very heavily on the idea that reason is necessarily linguistic. The increasing role of imagery and movies/video undermines reason, because it keeps prodding the visual system.

The rise of 24 hour news, which, as he says, is really nearly the same 15 minutes of news on looped over and over, is deleterious here, because the intuitive system takes repetition, confidence and frequency as cues to truth, in highly exploitable ways.

More generally, he is very concerned that (to quote a phrase he doesn't use) deceiving us has become an industrial process, that we are constantly surrounded by artifacts produced by corporations which carefully use rational procedures to activate our intuitive cognitions in ways which will pump money from us to them. Even if those acts have no overt political content, Heath worries that the effort required to resist them will undermine our capacity for rationality and self-control.
The increasing wide-spread recognition by sophisticated and rational political operatives that it is possible to simply evade rational criticism by means of innuendo and sufficiently shameless lying only makes a bad situation worse.

As a devotee of Herbert Simon (of blessed memory), naturally I agree that creating environments where our favored heuristics work well is a key to rationality. Moreover, as a follower of Dan Sperber (to say nothing of Karl Popper --- a lot of this in his "Towards a Rational Theory of Tradition", which Heath oddly doesn't mention), I am already persuaded that criticism and argumentation is crucial to improving ideas, and that the standards of discussion and other tools of thought are themselves culturally transmitted social products. And I am very worried about the quality of our built environment, institutions included, and what it is doing to our capacity to think effectively together about our common life. I entertain particularly grave suspicions about the effects of television and of social media.

But --- of course you could tell there was a but! --- I find myself with a lot of doubts about Heath's rendition of this theme. Some of these concern theory, and others the specific application to our present troubles.

Starting with more intellectual, longer-duration issues first, I am unconvinced that Heath's dual-system account is necessary, or even helpful. As to its being unnecessary, Mercier and Sperber, in their great Enigma of Reason (precis), give a not-obviously-absurd account of "reason" as an intuitive capacity, rooted in our evolutionary history as social, communicative animals.

if Heath were to be convinced that Mercier and Sperber were right about the psychology of rationality, most of what he has to say as a political philosopher and social critic would stand just fine, because it doesn't really need a dual-systems basis.

This brings me to Heath's reliance on the psychological literature. Paying attention to empirical findings about human thought and behavior is obviously the right approach for a project like his. But the early 2010s were a rather unfortunate time to do that, since this was just before the replication crisis.

• When discussing the limits of self-control, what I called "white-knuckling it" above, he repeatedly refers to Roy Baumeister's work on "ego depletion" --- famous, influential, widely cited, and a famous failure to replicate
• When discussing how our evolved appetites are manipulated by corporations, Heath repeatedly, and favorably, appeals to the work of Brian Wansink; these citations have (to put it kindly) not aged well.
• I also have my issues with Heath's approving noises in the direction of Thaler/Sunstein-style nudging, but that's another story

I am simply not at all convinced that if Heath were to go back and immerse himself in the cultural environment of the US (or Canada) c. 1955 that he'd actually find all that much more reason, in his sense, on display. We are, after all, talking about the period of McCarthyism, actual white supremacy being violently defended, moral panic over comic books, etc., etc.

The question is whether more of that electorate is detached from reason than before, and if so whether that fraction is more politically effective than before. My suspicion --- no more, I'm genuinely unsure about all of this --- is that the bulk of our fellow citizens are about as coherent and reality-based as they ever were, maybe more, but that modern communications makes us all better able to coordinate our irrationalities, to condense into substantial blobs of delusion, rather than pulling in fifty million different directions and canceling each other out.

I don't insist this is the right picture, but it suggests a very different diagnosis and set of prescriptions than Heath's view, and I think we genuinely don't know enough to judge between them.

I opened by saying I wasn't sure what to think of this book. Let me close by saying that writing this has clarified that, at least for me. Aiming to do no less than to re-vitalize the Enlightenment project is grandiosely ambitious. (But, again: Heath is very attentive to Habermas.) Unlike some popular writers who say they share that aim, Heath doesn't just preach to the choir and say "Enlighten harder!"

Rather, and correctly, he takes seriously not just many relevant things that we've learned about reason, experience, nature and society since that project began, but also the history of failures, even disasters, which have attended that project.