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Enlightenment 2.0, by Joseph Heath
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The co-author of the internationally bestselling The Rebel Sell brings us "slow politics": promoting slow thought, slow deliberation and slow debate.
Over the last twenty years, the political systems of the western world have become increasingly divided--not between right and left but between crazy and non-crazy. What’s more, the crazies seem to be gaining the upper hand. Rational thought cannot prevail in the current social and media environment, where elections are won by appealing to voters’ hearts rather than their minds. The rapid-fire pace of modern politics, the hypnotic repetition of daily news items and even the multitude of visual sources of information all make it difficult for the voice of reason to be heard.
In Enlightenment 2.0, bestselling author Joseph Heath outlines a program for a second Enlightenment. The answer, he argues, lies in a new “slow politics.” It takes as its point of departure recent psychological and philosophical research that identifies quite clearly the social and environmental preconditions for the exercise of rational thought. It is impossible to restore sanity merely by being sane and trying to speak in a reasonable tone of voice. The only way to restore sanity is by engaging in collective action against the social conditions that have crowded it out.
- Sales Rank: #703349 in eBooks
- Published on: 2014-04-15
- Released on: 2014-04-15
- Format: Kindle eBook
About the Author
JOSEPH HEATH is director of the Centre for Ethics at the University of Toronto, as well as professor in the department of philosophy and the School of Public Policy and Governance. He is the author of five books, including The Rebel Sell: Why the Culture Can’t Be Jammed (with Andrew Potter) and Filthy Lucre: Economics for People Who Hate Capitalism. He lives in Toronto.
Most helpful customer reviews
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
Strong on original analysis of our society drift towards irrationalism; weak on solutions to this problem
By Timothy J. Bartik
This book is a mixed bag. On the one hand, the book does an outstanding job of identifying and describing an important social problem: American society and politics are increasingly less conducive to rational dialogue. On the other hand, the book makes little progress in even suggesting how we might overcome this problem and develop better solutions to our many social problems through rational dialogue. The book also could have benefitted from some pruning. But the reader who engages with this book will be rewarded with some useful and original ideas, so the book is worth the time.
A key point in the book is that modern science, and in particular the sciences of psychology and paleontology, suggest that human beings are "naturally", via the forces of evolution and human history, inclined to rely on intuition, and inclined to be loyal to their own small tribes. Yet reason is also a product of human history and evolution, and, Heath argues, is rooted in our language abilities that have allowed human beings to cooperate and plan. Heath argues that although reason is relatively weak compared to intuition and tribalism, reason is needed more than ever in modern society, so that we can all get along and figure out how to cooperate for the overall human good. Reason, however, is quite dependent on whether social forces encourage rational dialogue and debate and social learning. A good team with good dialogue will almost always outthink an isolated individual. Various institutions have over time tried to encourage this rational learning -- the process of science is one such institution. But such institutions are fragile and easily destroyed. Heath argues that we need to think more about how to encourage such rational dialogue. But he doesn't come up with much in the way of practical or even theoretical proposals for doing so, which is a disappointment.
What is refreshing in this book is that unlike many other authors (e.g., Jonathan Haidt) who write about morality in the light of the findings of the science of human evolution, Heath does NOT argue that whatever happens to have been favored by past evolution must be the best guide to where our society needs to go. The human instincts for being loyal to a small tribe, and towards relying on one's gut instincts, served human beings well when the human species in fact lived in largely isolated tribes, in familiar environments. But in our modern inter-dependent and rapidly-changing world, we need to use our capacity for reason to learn how to get along with each other. And that capacity for reason depends upon dialogue with others, as individuals on their own are inclined to use reason more to rationalize their prejudices than to discover the truth.
Heath has done a good job of identifying the problem. What is needed is a good process of rational debate to find some practical solutions.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
Superb Work of Political Philosophy for a Popular Audience
By Jim Preston
The only thing I don't like about "Enlightenment 2.0" is the title. This would have been a cringe-worthy, outdated title in 2010. However, if you can look past that, this book was an amazingly entertaining and thoughtful discussion of a topic that should be of anyone interested in political discourse regardless of your personal beliefs.
The major contributions of this book include:
- Carefully surveying much of the recent literature by Haidt, Gladwell, Brooks and others (Josh Greeen's "Moral Tribes", however, doesn't rate a mention) on bias and moral cognition and how the argument to privilege the sub-rational parts of the brain are troublesome
- Kicking the hell out of David Brooks for columns and books that I think we can all agree are, to use Heath's terms, "vulgar romanticism."
- Thoughtfully and carefully tracing the rise of anti-rationalism on both the Left and the Right from the waning days of the Enlightenment to the present day
- Fascinating discussions on "kluges" throughout the book, ranging all the way from simple biological exaptations to the environment, all they way up to discussion of inflation and monetary policy of modern central banks. There is a fractal nature to Heath's argumentation, earned by years of training and reading, that puts him head and shoulders above other writers
- The central insight is that the Enlightenment practiced a hyper-individualistic concept of rationality but that this view is incomplete. Living in an age of neurophilosophy, behavioral economics, and mountains of psychological data, we now know that rationality exists in a "scaffolded" environment where ready-to-hand shortcuts of reasoning already linger in the environment. This is one the great insights of the book and the bases for Heath's concept of new, more scientifically-informed version of Enlightenment rationality
- This book is blissfully free of jargon. There's no need to puff up one's writing by salting in Greek and Latin phrases when plain language like "bulls***," "insane," and "plain old crazy" correctly identify current problems.
- I now know what the word "apophenia" means (seeing patterns in random or meaningless data) and now wonder where its been all my life
- There are many quite funny parts of the book, including references to "home made Nigerian helicopters," "the Onion," crazy cults, the caps on liquid laundry detergents, Jon Stewart and more. Some very fun parts in here, including the author owning up to his own biases
- Evenhanded. Like in Heath's other books, particularly Filthy Lucre, he is not afraid to scold both the left and the right. Thomas Jefferson, '60s era leftism, feminism, and modern democrats all get a good punch to the gut. Likewise, Edmund Burke, modern conservatism, Fox news, and the current sad state of the Republican party all get a face of cold water.
- As a result of all of this, Enlightenment 2.0 is not only more thoughtful than any other current book on the topic, is more thoroughly argued, researched, and stylishly written than any other single work of political philosophy in the last several years
The only thing that can be ill said of this book is that it proposes weak solutions to the problems identified. Others have picked up on this fault (the Marginal Revolution web site in particular) and Heath has begun to respond to his critics. And like his critics, I would like to see bolder thinking on these issues. After spending several hundred pages arguing for the need of input from "enlightened 2.0" experts exactly like himself, the reader is then sitting upright in her chair, napkin tied around her neck, knife and fork in hand, plate at the ready...and only a few green peas are served. Hopefully, the next book will offer more steak.
17 of 23 people found the following review helpful.
Biased, and doesn't deliver the promised "program for a second Enlightenment"
By Irwin Jungreis
I started this book with high expectations because I had very much liked one of Heath's earlier books, Economics Without Illusions, in which he provided clear, balanced, well-reasoned arguments against many economic fallacies of both the left and right. Economics Without Illusions had the most intelligent criticism I've ever encountered of some economic ideas of the right. (Its criticisms of arguments on the left were also intelligent, but were not particularly novel.) I was eager to read the "program for a second Enlightenment" promised by the Amazon book description coming from such a clear-thinking and intelligent author. Sadly, the book delivered neither the balance nor the program.
By the time I finished the introduction of Enlightenment 2.0 I found it hard to believe it was written by the same person who wrote Economics Without Illusions. All of the balance was gone.
The Amazon book description says the book is about how "the political systems of the western world have become increasingly divided ”not between right and left, but between crazy and non-crazy". That's rather misleading, because Heath declares that the crazy is exclusively on the right! There are certainly many examples of crazy on the right, and Heath is correct to call them out, but it is easy to find similar examples on the left. (Heath even mentions some of them in the later chapters, but does his best to minimize them.) What's more, Heath's bias is entirely gratuitous. It would have been just as easy to get across all of his ideas by criticizing particular irrational actions without trying to generalize them to the left and right, but Heath chose to do the opposite. There are many rational conservatives who would have been quite open to Heath's main message, but he seems to have tried his best to offend them. Unless you share Heath's progressive bias, you will find the book easier to get through if every time he says "progressive", you mentally substitute "advocate for reason" or whatever group you most associate with reason in politics.
Part I has a nice description of many cognitive biases that make our intuitions unreliable in the modern world. Most of it is a rehash of "Thinking Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman which is a very readable work by the Nobel-prize-winning psychologist who discovered many of these biases in the first place. What I found most interesting in Heath's retelling was how memes that exploit our cognitive biases will thrive in the meme ecosystem, and so the need for our rational facilities to override our intuitions will become stronger over time.
Whatever balance there was in Part I is gone by Part II. The book is almost a parody of itself in that Heath himself demonstrates the cognitive biases that he talked about in Part I, such as confirmation bias. Of course, it is easy to find examples of craziness in conservatives, as it is in any group, but a rational analysis would look for examples of sanity in conservatives to test the hypothesis that conservatives are crazy. Heath never does. Heath points out the idea by Donald Davidson that we have a bias towards finding other people to be unreasonable, and so we will get closer to the truth if we counteract this by privileging interpretations that make the other person sound reasonable. Yet in his criticism of conservatives Heath ignores obvious alternative interpretations that make them sound more reasonable.
Perhaps Heath's biggest complaint with conservatives is a lack of regard for truth. He spends several pages talking about Reagan's story of the "Chicago welfare queen". Heath reports, "The story wasn't remotely true, but no matter how often it was debunked by the media, Reagan would just keep telling it." Well, try this: spend two seconds doing an internet search for "welfare queen" and you'll learn that actually Reagan's story was the true story of Linda Taylor, and it is documented by newspaper articles at the time. Rather than accusing Heath of lying, I will assign the interpretation that makes him sound most reasonable: this was just confirmation bias -- he didn't bother to check if his accusation was true because it fit with his other beliefs about conservatives.
I persevered through this nonsense waiting for the "program for a second Enlightenment" promised by the Amazon book description. Sadly, it never arrives. In Part III, Heath explains why several proposals for how we can increase rationality will not work. He also suggests that any solution must include changes to our social environment that make it easier for people to be rational, but there's nothing even close to a "program" for a second Enlightenment. All Heath does is exhort us to try to find one.
All in all, this is a book for progressives who wants to feed their own confirmation bias, but anyone who actually wants to learn something would be better off reading "Thinking Fast and Slow".
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