The Internet of Us (8 page)

As I've already noted, the Internet didn't create this problem, but it is exaggerating it. Yet you might think that this isn't so bad. As philosopher Allan Hazlett has pointed out, if everyone agrees in a democracy, something's gone wrong.
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Democracies should be, in John Rawls' words, places where there are “a plurality of reasonable yet incompatible comprehensive doctrines.”
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But that's just the point. How do we figure out, as a society, whose views are “reasonable” and whose are not, if our standards for what counts as reasonable don't overlap? And how do we engage in
dialogue
with people with worldviews that are different from our own (as opposed to oppressing them, or manipulating them, or simply shouting at them) without an exchange of reasons? The answer is: we don't. And that tells us something: civil societies not only need a common currency to exchange money; they also need a common currency to exchange reasons.

So, the point is not that we should all agree. We all have different experience bases, after all, and that means we can use different evidence even if we agree on what counts as evidence. But if we don't agree on what counts as evidence, on our epistemic principles, then we aren't playing by the same rules anymore. And once that happens, game over.

The Rationalist's Delusion

Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that we have a hard time defending our “first principles” with reasons. It might be that the fragmentation of reason, while exaggerated by our digital culture, is actually the result of human psychology. If so, then perhaps being reasonable, defined as the willingness to give and ask for reasons that others can appreciate, is an untenable ideal. After all, you don't have to be Karl Rove to suspect that the evidence often fails to persuade and that what really changes opinion is good advertising, emotional associations and having the bigger stick (or super PAC).

Recently, some social scientists, most notably the psychologist
Jonathan Haidt, have suggested that this is not far from the truth.
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Haidt has done remarkable work exposing some of the psychological causes of our divisions in values. But he thinks this work shows that the philosopher's dream of reason isn't just naive, it is radically unfounded, the product of what he calls “the rationalist delusion.” As he puts it, “Anyone who values truth should stop worshipping reason. We all need to take a cold hard look at the evidence and see reasoning for what it is.”
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Haidt sees two points about reasoning to be particularly important: the first concerns the relative efficacy (or lack thereof) of reasoning; the second concerns the point of doing so publicly: of exchanging reasons. According to Haidt, value judgments are less a product of rational deliberation than they are a result of intuition and emotion. In neuroscientist Drew Westen's words, the political brain is the emotional brain.

If this is right, then we not only have something of an explanation for why knowledge fragmentation continues to persist (people just won't listen to one another's reasons) but also a lesson for what to do about it. Or at least what not to do: trying to come up with reasons to convince our cultural opponents isn't going to work. If peace is in the offing, it is going to have to come about some other way.

There is, without question, a lot of sense to the idea that reasons often—perhaps mostly—fail to persuade. As we've already seen from Kahneman's work, our reflective self, whose job it is to monitor our fast judgment-making processes, is often not on the ball. And even when it is, “reasoning” often seems to be post-hoc rationalization: we tend to accept that which confirms what we already believe (psychologists call this confirmation bias). And
the tendency goes beyond just politics. When people are told that they scored low on an IQ test, for example, they are more likely to read scientific articles criticizing such tests; when they score high, they are more likely to read articles that support the tests. They are more likely to favor the “evidence,” in other words, that make them feel good. This is what Haidt calls the “wag the dog” illusion: reason, he says, is the tail that we mistakenly believe wags the dog of value judgment.
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Much of this has to do with our brain's ability to trump reason with emotion. Consider some of Haidt's own well-known research on “moral dumbfounding.” Presented with a story about consensual, protected sex between an adult brother and sister—sex which is never repeated, and which is protected by birth control—most people reacted with feelings of disgust, judging that it is wrong. Yet they struggled to defend such feelings with arguments when questioned by researchers.
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Even so, they stuck to their guns. Haidt suggests that this means that whatever reasons they could come up with seem to be just along for the ride: their feelings were doing the work of judgment.

Data like this should give us pause, but we need to be careful not to exaggerate the lessons it has to teach us. The inability of people—in particular young college students like those in Haidt's study—to be immediately articulate about why they've made an intuitive judgment doesn't necessarily show that their judgment is the outcome of a nonrational process, or even that they lack reasons for their view. Intuitions, moral or otherwise, can be the result of sources that can be rationally evaluated and calibrated.
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Moreover, rational deliberation is not a switch to be thrown on or off. It is a process, and therefore many of its effects have to be
measured over time. Tellingly, the participants in Haidt's original harmless-taboo studies had little time to deliberate. But as other studies have suggested, when people are given more time to reflect, they
can
change their beliefs to fit the evidence, even when those beliefs might initially be emotionally uncomfortable.

Haidt has been careful to say that reasons do play some role in moral and political judgments. His point is that reasons are far less influential than intuition and emotion. The latter factors trump reasons: “reasons matter (except when intuitions object).”
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As I've said, it is hard to argue with this—even just based on the anecdotal evidence that daily life provides. But it doesn't show that reason doesn't have a role to play. Consider the changing attitudes toward homosexuality and same-sex marriage in the United States. What caused this change? Part of the story is simply that younger people, in general, are increasingly tolerant of same-sex marriage. Another part is increased contact and exposure to gays and lesbians through the media. But the battle over same-sex marriage has also been partly a legal battle, where the issue has concerned not just the definition of marriage but the alleged harm same-sex unions cause to others not in those unions. Tellingly, the evidence—reason—has shown those claims to be unjustified.
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And that fact seems to have had an impact on judicial proceedings about the matter—most famously in the 2009 Proposition 8 legal case, when the attorney arguing the case against same-sex marriage was reported to have conceded in court that he did not know what harm would result from letting same-sex partners marry.
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So perhaps we can explain massive moral and political change of this sort without having to invoke the causal influence of reasons, but it seems just as likely that appeals to evidence—evidence, in
fact, often uncovered by social scientists—have had an impact on how people view same-sex (or interracial) marriage via affecting institutions such as the law.

Moreover, as the psychologist Paul Bloom has pointed out, it seems likely that rational deliberation is also going to be involved in the creation of
new
moral concepts—such as human rights, or the idea that all people should be treated equally under the law.
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Changes in moral concepts are often changes that occur despite the resistance of the “intuitive” or “emotional” judgments people inherit from the culture around them. But such changes take time. So, to show that reasons cannot trump intuition in value judgments, we would need to show that they don't change our moral judgments
over time
.

This brings us around to Haidt's second main point about reasoning, mentioned above. He endorses what he calls a Glauconian view of reasoning about value. The reference here is to an old saw from Plato: What would you do with a ring of invisibility? Fight for truth, justice and the American way—or spy and steal? In Plato's
Republic,
the character Glaucon asks this question to illustrate the idea that it is merely the fear of being caught that makes us behave, not a desire for justice. Haidt takes from this a general lesson about the value of defending our views with reasons. Just as those who do the “right” thing are not really motivated by a desire for justice, those who defend their views with reasons are not “really” after the truth. As the cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber put it, the function of both reasoning and the exchange of reasons is persuasion and persuasion alone. If so, then what people are really after when looking for reasons—whether they acknowledge it or not—are
arguments supporting their already entrenched views, and/or a way to push people into agreeing with them.
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So even if appeals to evidence are sometimes effective in changing our values over time, that's because reasons themselves are aimed at manipulating others into agreeing with us, not because they might have also uncovered the facts. On this view, to think otherwise is to once again fall into the rationalist delusion.

Anyone who has spent time on the Internet will probably feel the pull of the Glauconian view of human rationality. Social media and the blogosphere are filled with “reasoning”—but much of it seems to be either blatant marketing or aimed only at supporting what people already believe. Maybe that is what the Internet is teaching us. Maybe we are all Glauconians, and always have been.

Democracy as a Space of Reasons

I began this chapter by asking whether the Internet is making us less reasonable. Being reasonable, I've said, amounts to defending your views with reasons that are in line with shared epistemic principles or standards. We've canvassed two deep challenges to reasonableness so defined. The first stems from an ancient philosophical paradox. It points out that when disagreements go all the way down to epistemic principles, reasonableness goes by the board. The second challenge comes from results in social psychology. It forces us to wonder whether reasons are really effective tools for persuasion at all.

Neither of these challenges is new. And so it would be wrong to say that the Internet itself is making us less reasonable. It
would be more accurate to say that we are making ourselves less reasonable with the help of the Internet. Or more precisely still, that the Internet is exaggerating these challenges, making them even more pressing.

In both cases, it is the very availability of so much information—our life in the library—that is part of the problem. That's a point Haidt emphasizes: “Whatever you want to believe about the causes of global warming or whether a fetus can feel pain, just Google your belief.”
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Our ability to access so much information just makes it easier than ever to follow our hardwired tendencies to make the facts fit what we already think.

There are reasons for hope, of course. We actually do use the Internet to hold one another to account—to solve the information coordination problem I talked about in the last chapter. Think of the ubiquitous smartphone check. How often have you been at a party, or in a bar, or in a lecture, and someone makes some point of fact; out come the phones and a race is on to see who can verify (or falsify) it first. We are holding one another accountable when we do this (and sometimes also being annoying). Wikipedia has become one of our most widely shared public standards of evidence. And that is often a very good thing—it cuts down on irresponsible assertions (even if it also cuts down on spontaneity). Moreover, as we'll see later in the book, there are obvious ways in which the Internet can be a force for social cohesion and democratic discussion.

We also shouldn't be too willing to accept the Glauconian view of the function of human rationality. That's partly because human rationality is too complex to have a single kind of function. In giving reasons, we certainly aim to get others to agree
with us (I'm doing that now, after all). And aiming at agreement is a good thing, as is searching out effective means of reaching it (indeed, this is one of the noble ideals of Haidt's book). But it is less clear that we can coherently represent ourselves as
only
aiming to get others to agree with us in judgment.

To see this, think about the difficulty in being skeptical about the role of rationality in our lives today. The judgment that reasons play a weak role in judgment is itself a judgment. And the Glauconian skeptic has defended it with reasons. So, if those reasons persuade me of his theory despite my intuitive feelings to the contrary, then reasons
can
play a trumping role in judgment—contra the theory.

Of course, one might reasonably say that the reasons to accept views like Haidt's are not value judgments. They are scientific claims. But even the most “scientific” of claims is
informed
by value judgments. Science itself presupposes certain values: truth, objectivity and what I call epistemic principles—principles that give us our standards of rationality. Moreover, outside of mathematics it is rare that the data is so conclusive that there is just one conclusion we can draw.
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Usually the data admits of more than one interpretation, more than one explanation. And that means that we must infer, or judge, what we think is the case. And where there is judgment, there are values in the background. Hence the point: arguing (with reasons) that reason never plays a role in value judgments is apt to be self-defeating.