Enlightenment 2.0

By Joseph Heath

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Apr 15, 2014
• ISBN: 9781443422543

Joseph Heath

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.

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Introduction

Head versus heart

The National Mall in Washington, D.C., is one of the world’s great boulevards. Officially designated a national park, its tree-lined expanse runs from the Lincoln Memorial in the west to the Capitol in the east, punctuated by the Washington Monument almost square in the middle. It provides a grand setting for America’s great national institutions, museums, and memorials, and it is where over 24 million tourists come every year to bask in the glory that is the United States of America.

It is also where a great many Americans come to complain about their government.

There have been thousands of rallies, great and small, over the years, but in October 2010, the National Mall was the scene of perhaps its most peculiar event to date. On the day before Halloween, close to a quarter million Americans gathered, not for civil liberty or equal rights, and not to oppose the war or support the troops. Instead, they rallied for sanity.

Led by Jon Stewart, host of the satirical news program The Daily Show, the rally was intended as a call for more reasoned discussion in American politics, outside the cacophony of partisan extremism that dominates America’s news media. And while Stewart insisted that the rally was not a partisan event, it was widely interpreted as a response to the Reclaiming Honor rally hosted two months earlier by then Fox News personality Glenn Beck. Intended or not, the Rally to Restore Sanity¹ quickly turned into a mass protest against the extreme craziness that had erupted on the American political scene after the election of Barack Obama.

It was the first time, perhaps since the French Revolution, that reason had become the object of large-scale political mobilization in the West. This says a lot about the changes that have occurred in American political culture in the past few decades.

The big tent of the American right has always sheltered its share of crazies, particularly gun nuts and religious conservatives, but in recent years they have been joined by the anti-tax Tea Party movement, the birthers (who deny that Obama was born in the United States), the truthers (who believe that the collapse of the World Trade Center towers was an inside job), and a dog’s breakfast of antiscience denialists who believe in neither evolution nor global warming and who are highly suspicious of much else besides. There came a point, however, when the sideshow began to take over center stage. Americans woke up to find that their political system was increasingly divided, not between right and left, but between crazy and non-crazy. And what’s more, the crazies seemed be gaining the upper hand.

Consider the case of Glenn Beck, who is a conspiracy theorist in the classic mold. Before he finally lost his TV show on Fox News, Beck used to draw elaborate diagrams on a chalkboard, sketching out the connections he saw between various people and trends, all part of a vast secular socialist conspiracy aimed at robbing Americans of their birthright. It was all so stereotypical—as though someone had put in a request to central casting for a nut to do political commentary. Higher-ups at the network may have seen it as pure entertainment, but millions of Americans took it quite seriously.

Popular awareness that something was going quite wrong in America probably came in 2005. That was the year the comedian Stephen Colbert coined the term truthiness to describe the growing abuse of appeals to emotions or gut feelings by politicians in lieu of arguments based on reason, evidence, or even fact. According to his inspired definition, a claim is truthy when it feels true, even though it may not, strictly speaking, be true. As Colbert said in an interview at the time, feeling had now triumphed over objective truth: It used to be, everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. But that’s not the case anymore. Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything.²

Since 2005, the syndrome that Colbert described has, if anything, become more virulent. The 2012 primaries for the Republican presidential nomination, for example, became almost otherworldly, the discussion and debate increasingly unhinged from reality. Rick Santorum, who was the only person able to mount a serious challenge against the eventual nominee, Mitt Romney, at one point made the following series of claims (against the specter of government rationing of health care):

In the Netherlands, people wear different bracelets if they are elderly. And the bracelet is: Do not euthanize me. Because they have voluntary euthanasia in the Netherlands, but half of the people who are euthanized—ten percent of all deaths in the Netherlands—half of those people are euthanized involuntarily at hospitals because they are older and sick. And so elderly people in the Netherlands don’t go to the hospital. They go to another country, because they are afraid, because for budget purposes, they will not come out of that hospital if they go in there with sickness.³

What is astonishing about this sequence of claims is that almost everything in it is false—and not just false, but fantastic, made-up, disconnected from reality. The only thing Santorum said that is true is that the Netherlands permits physician-assisted suicide. Needless to say, no one is subject to involuntary euthanasia (i.e., murder) in the heart of Europe.⁴ The statistics are all false. The detail about the bracelets is completely imaginary. And there is no evidence of elderly Dutch people traveling to other countries for fear of being euthanized at their local hospital. It was as though Santorum were living in a parallel universe, where the facts were what he wanted them to be (and happened to support his paranoid, apocalyptic, ultra-rigid brand of Christianity).

Furthermore, he seemed not to realize that the Netherlands was a real place, where people might hear what he said and hope to set the record straight. The Dutch were actually quite upset about the lies that were being told about their country in America. Yet when pressed by a Dutch reporter to explain Santorum’s comments, his official spokesperson—amazingly—refused to retract or apologize for Santorum’s claims. She defended him on the grounds that Rick says what’s in his heart.

Sometimes the jokes write themselves. In this case, it was as though the Santorum campaign got their talking points from Colbert. Their defense, in a nutshell, was that even though the candidate’s claims were not true, they were nevertheless truthy. Simply pointing this out was satisfactory, from their perspective; no apology or retraction was necessary.

The same year that Colbert coined the term truthiness, a short essay written by the philosopher Harry Frankfurt, entitled On Bullshit, became an international sensation. The essay was actually more than twenty years old and already widely known among academics. But when the press reissued it as a stand-alone volume, it clearly hit a nerve with the public, who propelled it onto the New York Times bestseller list for twenty-seven weeks. It was not so much that people enjoyed Frankfurt’s writing—indeed, it is not clear how many people actually cared to read through and follow the argument. What mattered more was that Frankfurt had given a name to something that everyone had already noticed but didn’t have a way of talking about. (As he put it in the opening lines, One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this.⁵)

Frankfurt’s important contribution was to have distinguished between lying and bullshitting. What characterizes the bullshitter is that, unlike the liar, who at least maintains the pretense of telling the truth, the bullshitter has simply opted out of the truth-telling game. There is no pretense with the bullshitter. Although producing ordinary declarative sentences that would normally be evaluated under the categories of truth and falsity, the bullshitter is not even trying to say something that sounds true. (In a subsequent contribution to the genre, Laura Penny picked out the phrase your call is important to us—repeated ad nauseam to callers on hold—as quintessential bullshit.⁶ It’s not just unbelievable, it’s inherently unbelievable. If your call was important, then you wouldn’t be on hold.)

In the same way that truthiness has become central to our political discourse, there has also been a significant rise in the amount of bullshit. Lying for political advantage, of course, is as old as the hills. What has changed is that politicians used to worry about getting caught. Lying also requires some effort—you have to come up with something that, if not exactly true, at least sounds true. But there came a point when politicians discovered that if you simply kept repeating the same thing over and over again, a lot of people would come to believe it regardless of whether it was true or not. And in a democracy, what the majority believes is much more important than what is actually the case. As a result, many politicians dropped even the pretense of trying to tell the truth.

There are many examples of this new attitude on display, but one of the most striking occurred in the fall of 2012, when the Conservative government in Canada decided to accuse the opposition New Democratic Party of supporting a carbon tax. Anyone who had been paying attention knew this to be not only false, but the opposite of true. The NDP probably should support a carbon tax, given its left-wing, environmental sympathies. And yet one of the more controversial aspects of its platform has been its vocal opposition to carbon taxes. During the 2008 federal election, when the Liberal Party of Canada actually ran on a carbon tax platform, the NDP upset an enormous number of environmentalists by opposing it. And in British Columbia, the only jurisdiction in Canada that has actually implemented a carbon tax to date, the NDP has consistently threatened to repeal it if elected. (The federal NDP’s official policy is in support of a cap-and-trade system, the same policy that the Conservatives supported and campaigned on during the previous two elections.⁷)

If the Conservative accusation had simply been put forward as an argument, then of course it would have been quickly dismissed. What the Conservatives decided to do instead was to have every member of Parliament on their side use the phrase carbon tax (or better yet, job-killing carbon tax) on almost every occasion that anyone rose to speak, regardless of the topic, and claim that the NDP supported it. This went on literally for weeks, to the point where one journalist described it as the death by talking point strategy.⁸ In a breach of parliamentary tradition, not to mention decorum, they also had their backbenchers recite the same talking points during their members’ statements—made during a fifteen-minute period before the beginning of Question Period, when members are entitled to rise to make a statements to the House of their choosing (traditionally used for tributes to deceased constituents or to announce events in their ridings).⁹

The Canadian print media, not being quite as supine as their American counterparts, immediately denounced the carbon tax claim as a lie and roundly condemned the tactic for its political cynicism. Yet this did not deter the Conservative government from following up with a nationwide radio and television advertising campaign repeating the same false claim about NDP support for carbon taxes.

The accusation was bullshit, in the technical sense of the term. Relentless bullshit, however, creates something of a dilemma for those being subjected to it. In a sense, all that the NDP could do was deny that it supported a carbon tax. But it’s very difficult to do this without yourself using the phrase carbon tax. So what the average person hears is simply carbon tax, NDP, carbon tax, NDP, carbon tax, NDP, carbon tax … And that’s precisely the point. Pretty soon low information voters were probably saying to themselves, The NDP, aren’t those the guys who support a carbon tax? That was, in any case, the Conservative ambition. It was a classic instance of what is now routinely called a post-truth political strategy.

Some people like to find balance whenever discussing politics, to see the left and the right as mirror images of one another. When it comes to attitudes toward truth, however, there are clear differences. Democratic Party politicians in the United States may manipulate, exaggerate, and lie, but they are not unhinged from reality. When they debate policy, they still make some attempt to discuss the actual issues. The debates between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton on the subject of health care during the Democratic primaries in 2008, for instance, provided a fairly reliable sense of what each candidate actually intended to do with that file. At no point did it degenerate into the sort of display that has become commonplace among Republicans, with each contender competing against the others to say how many government departments he would close down upon being elected—when no one could believe for an instant that any them would do any such thing.

The difference is that conservatives have become enamored of the idea that politics is ultimately not about plans and policies, it’s about gut feelings and values. Elections are decided by appealing to people’s hearts, not their heads. So, for example, when a Republican candidate says that he is going to close down the Department of Energy, he doesn’t really mean that he is going to close down the Department of Energy and fire all of its employees. After all, the U.S. Department of Energy is responsible for maintaining the nuclear reactors in U.S. military submarines, among other things. What it really means to say that you’ll close down the Department of Energy is just I feel very strongly that the federal government hates oil companies, and I want to change that. The objective is to communicate your feelings, not your thoughts.

This privileging of visceral, intuitive, gut feelings is central to the movement known as common sense conservatism, which has become a powerful force everywhere in the Western world, not just the United States. The central characteristic of common sense, according to Republican communication strategist Frank Luntz, is that it "doesn’t require any fancy theories; it is self-evidently correct."¹⁰ To say that it is self-evident is to say that it is known to be correct without argument and without explanation. Thus, making common sense the core of one’s political ideology amounts to a pure privileging of intuition over rational thought, of gut feeling over deliberation, and of heart over head. Indeed, one can see in Luntz’s description the explicit downgrading of rationality. Common sense is independent not just of theories, but of fancy theories—the kind proposed by effete East Coast intellectuals. The crucial thing about fancy theories is that you can feel free to ignore them, precisely because they are fancy. You don’t have to worry about the actual content of what the person is saying.

The phrase common sense itself has of course been test-marketed, and picked because it maximizes positive resonance. Who doesn’t like common sense? And yet it is also quite apt at describing the most important unifying idea in contemporary conservatism. If the plan that you’re proposing needs to be explained, then it’s not common sense. If it doesn’t sound right, then it’s not common sense. And if it requires some sort of data or study, then it most certainly isn’t common sense.

Part of the popularity of this brand of conservatism is that it generates a set of incredibly powerful electoral strategies. Appealing to the gut rather than the head plays well on television, not to mention on talk radio. Indeed, the major channel through which this American style of conservativism has spread is not its intellectual expression, but the hiring of Republican campaign strategists during the off season. (Tellingly, Conservative governments in both Canada and the United Kingdom have made significant use of Republican campaign strategists.) This is what explains the otherwise mysterious fact that conservatives—supposedly the guardians of old-fashioned values like honesty and forthrightness—have been the most aggressive at employing post-truth political strategies. It’s because these coincide with their political ideology.

According to the common sense conservative view, most of the problems in the world today are caused by intellectual elites, who chronically overestimate their ability to understand and control the world. It is these so-called experts who built the public housing projects that became magnets for crime, initiated the war on poverty that created an epidemic of welfare dependency, introduced the trade policies that led to the evisceration of U.S. manufacturing, negotiated the treaties that undermined U.S. military supremacy, introduced the environmental regulations that destroyed the competitiveness of U.S. industry, brought in the education reforms that left American children unable to read and write, did all the hand-wringing and second-guessing that led to the loss of the Vietnam War, and promoted all kinds of feminist ideas that undermined parental authority, producing several generations of rude and disrespectful children. If these overeducated elites with their fancy college degrees had just spent a bit more time listening to their heart, rather than their head, and stuck to good old-fashioned traditional values, then none of this would have happened.

Perhaps the highest-profile defender of this view is New York Times columnist David Brooks, whose recent book The Social Animal is essentially an extended defense of truthiness. Brooks draws on a vast repertoire of social science and psychological research to show that what we call rational thought is nothing but an elaborate self-deception, that the real forces driving our decisions are unconscious instincts, dopamine levels, and pheromone trails. We are, in Brooks’s view, nothing but the sum of our biases. Our best response, then, is simply to relax, go with the flow, and embrace what our gut is telling us. There is no truth, only truthiness, and so we should not aspire to anything greater. We certainly should not try to achieve anything too ambitious, like improving the human condition.

The difference between conservatives and liberals, in Brooks’s view, is not that liberals are more rational or more committed to thinking things through. It is simply that they are more self-deceived. They think they’re being rational, when in fact they’re being just as emotional and intuitive as everyone else. This self-deception would be harmless except that it tempts them to hubris. They overestimate their ability to anticipate, to control, and to change the world. This leads them to engage in expensive, futile schemes to improve the human condition, which usually leave everyone worse off than they were before. The modern welfare state, according to Brooks, is essentially a consequence of this sort of social engineering: We’ve reformed the education system again and again, yet more than a quarter of highschool students drop out, even though all rational incentives tell them not to. We’ve tried to close the gap between white and black achievement, but have failed. We’ve spent a generation enrolling more young people in college without understanding why so many don’t graduate. One could go on.¹¹ What Brooks thinks we need in order to avoid these pitfalls is a frank embrace of the deep wellsprings of human action, the intuitive, nonrational form of thinking that is the province of the unconscious.

The idea that conservatism is grounded in a deeper understanding of human nature, or at least one less tainted by self-deception, has been echoed by psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who claims that "Republicans understand moral psychology. Democrats dont."¹² In The Righteous Mind, Haidt argues that human morality is based on six innate social receptors,¹³ which he compares to taste buds. The central argument between liberals and conservatives, he claims, is that conservatives value all six of the basic moral intuitions, whereas liberalism is based on a lopsided emphasis on only three of them—and often only one or two. Liberals put a huge amount of emphasis on harm reduction and fairness while downplaying the concerns that animate many other moral codes, around the world and throughout history, such as purity, obedience, and loyalty. This is, he argues, a narrow and truncated conception of morality. (He compares it to a restaurant that serves only sweet food, or only salty food, with no attempt to provide any sort of variety.)

Seen from a broader perspective, there is, of course, a reason that liberals are not so keen to go with their instincts. The first half of the twentieth century was arguably the most catastrophic in the history of Western civilization, beginning with two almost unimaginably destructive wars and culminating in the development of a nuclear standoff that came rather close to destroying all of humanity. The lesson many people took away from all this is that there are certain instinctual forms of human behavior that may be harmless when deployed in small-scale societies but that become disastrous when applied at the level of modern, technologically advanced, large-scale nation states. Group loyalty begets nationalism; obedience to authority encourages totalitarianism. And purity? The suggestion that it should be restored to pride of place in our system of values seems particularly obtuse in the wake of the Holocaust.¹⁴ What recent history has taught us is that we need to repress certain instincts. This is true not only of obviously antisocial tendencies, such as the way that we are tempted to enjoy cruelty, but also of pro-social instincts that give us particularistic loyalties, such as concern for our family, friends, and ethnic group.

Haidt ignores this concern because, fundamentally, he doesn’t believe that there is any standpoint from which we can make the decision to repress our instincts. He agrees with Brooks that rational thought is essentially an illusion. He compares the relationship between reason and intuition—or conscious, explicit thought and the unconscious—to a rider mounted on an elephant: The mind is divided, like a rider on an elephant, and the rider’s job is to serve the elephant.¹⁵ In his earlier research, Haidt became well known for having argued that, in moral judgment, the emotional tail wags the rational dog. When people make moral judgments, they do so almost instantly, as an immediate emotional reaction. It is only afterward that they make up reasons to justify this reaction. The reasons, however, are not doing any work. They mainly serve as window dressing, and as a way of pressuring others to share our judgments. Reason is actually just rationalization.

Rather than serving as the foundation of Western civilization, in Haidt’s view the worship of reason is one of the most long-lived delusions in Western history. It is not just mistaken, but also politically dangerous: The rationalist delusion is not just a claim about human nature. It’s also a claim that the rational caste (philosophers or scientists) should have more power, and it usually comes along with a utopian program for raising more rational children.¹⁶ All of this needs to be rejected, according to Haidt, so that we can get back to our roots. (Lest anyone accuse him of being a conservative, he goes on to some rather ’60s-tinged talk about the power of ecstatic dancing, and its ability to put us in touch with deeper sources of the sacred.¹⁷)

Haidt presents these arguments as an apologetic for modern American conservatism, based on the discomfort he evidently feels with the narrow-mindedness and self-satisfaction of many American liberals. Brooks presents his arguments as a defense of conservatism, although he writes in the tone of someone who is somewhat appalled by the florid irrationalism of the American right but nevertheless feels obliged to put the best face on it he can. What they share is the conviction that a politics that appeals to the heart rather than the head is not just more successful on the campaign trail, it is also more authentic, more true to human nature. Liberalism is based on delusions of grandeur, on hubris. Modern psychology, by taking us down a notch, exposing the weakness of rationality, helps to free us from this delusion.

And yet there is an obvious disconnect between this psychological theory and the way that history has unfolded over the past two thousand years. The world that we live in today is both unnatural and highly unintuitive. The three major institutional features of our society—the market, representative democracy, and human rights—were all innovations that, at the time they were adopted, struck people as being completely crazy, absolutely contrary to human nature (which is why they were rejected throughout most of human history). It is only through a long, patient process of reasoning, debate, and experimentation that they were tried and shown to be successful. Our society is the product of the Enlightenment—of the arguments and theories that came to prevail during that period. (As Pierre Manent has observed, the political history of ancient Greece and Rome can be related without referring to ‘ideas’ or ‘doctrine.’ The same is not true of modern societies, where the basic governing philosophy was "conceived and chosen before being implemented. This is why, in our political systems there is something essentially deliberate and experimental, that implies a conscious and ‘constructed’ plan."¹⁸) We enjoy the life that we do because, over the long slow course of human history, certain arguments eventually came to prevail over human passions.

To propose the restoration of instinct to supremacy is to attempt to undo all of these great achievements. The question is, how to respond?

Adbusters magazine styles itself as the journal of the mental environment. For nearly twenty years, it stuck largely to publishing advertising parodies, promoting its annual Buy Nothing Day, and selling anti-consumerist running shoes. All that changed, however, in the summer of 2011, when the magazine produced an eye-catching poster calling for the occupation of Wall Street. The idea caught on, so that on September 17, 2011, the Occupy Wall Street movement was born. Protestors set up an encampment in Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan, and copycat occupations quickly sprang up across North America (many of which lasted all fall, and well into the winter).

In the media frenzy that followed, aging radicals across America dusted themselves off and stood up to declare the Occupy movement to be the second coming of the 1960s. Less starry-eyed observers could see that the movement would have incredible difficulty translating its enthusiasm into concrete political action. It’s one thing to rage against the privileges enjoyed by the top 1 percent, quite another to figure out how to do anything about it. Adbusters, to its credit, pushed the participants to agree on one demand that they could put forward, but members of the various movements that had sprung up under the Occupy banner balked.

Many commentators suggested that the Occupy Wall Street movement might become the left-wing equivalent of the right-wing Tea Party movement. This certainly would not have hurt. In the winter of 2010, when the Dodd-Frank bill—the United States government’s major legislative response to the 2008 financial crisis—was being debated in Congress, the airwaves were dominated by the Tea Party, while the financial services industry was spending $1.3 billion lobbying against the stricter provisions of the bill.¹⁹ The left, meanwhile, sat on its hands. There was simply no organized pressure group pushing legislators to enact stricter regulation. Democratic politicians, facing no countervailing pressure from the left, predictably caved to the interests of Wall Street on numerous points.

The Tea Party movement, sparked just two years earlier by an off-the-cuff rant by CNBC commentator Rick Santelli, had at the time been incredibly successful at steering the entire agenda of political debate in America to the right.²⁰ In the 2010 midterm elections, it managed to get thirty-one affiliated members elected to the House of Representatives. More importantly, by staging successful primary challenges against Republican incumbents, it was able to scare a solid majority of sitting Republican legislators into catering to their demands. This was an important factor in the inflexibility that Republicans exhibited during Barack Obama’s first term of office.

By contrast, the Occupy movement has seen no such success. Far from electing any legislators under the Occupy banner, it has not even succeeded in applying any sort of effective pressure on elected Democratic politicians. The movement has, of course, had many defenders, willing to offer the usual excuses—that the movement refused to be co-opted by participating in mainstream democratic politics, or that its participants were anarchists, refusing to have any truck with existing power structures. But this is obviously sour grapes. If the inability of the Occupy movement to achieve any political gains whatsoever for the left in America is not a stunning political failure, it is at the very least a huge missed opportunity. Democratic politicians would find it easier sticking to their guns if they could even claim to be under some pressure from the left, regardless of whether it were true.

Why this difference in outcome? Why is the right so much more effective than the left, particularly in America? How was it able to take the catastrophic failure of deregulated markets and turn it into a powerful social movement against government? It will be a central contention of this book that the problem is not just that the left missed its opportunity, or that it was inarticulate, or that its leaders were craven. Rather, there is a fundamental asymmetry between right and left that comes to the fore in times such as these. Progressive social change is inherently complicated, difficult to achieve, and requires compromise, trust, and collective action. It cannot, therefore, be achieved on the basis of heart alone—it also requires a huge amount of head.

Collective action also requires institution building. Undermining collective action is, by contrast, much easier to do. Since the primary function of government in modern societies to solve the most intractable collective action problems, anti-government activists have an inherently easier time of it than pro-government activists. The Tea Party had no trouble translating the rage and frustration of its members into concrete political action. Tax resistance, for example, can be framed in a number of highly intuitive, viscerally appealing ways (e.g., They’re taking your hard-earned money!). The case for paying taxes, on the other hand, is difficult to present in a way that gets anyone excited. This is not an accident. The logic of taxation—the reason why markets fail to provide certain goods, so that the state must do the job instead—is something you work out in your head, not something you feel in your heart.

There are many examples of this. Consider the phenomenon of road rage, a modern ailment that is no doubt an expression of the frustration that drivers feel being stuck in traffic for hours on end on hopelessly congested roadways. The solution to traffic congestion is well known: it involves a combination of mass transit and road tolls. And yet car drivers go ballistic whenever anyone suggests this, because it looks like taking money away from us and giving it to them (specifically, freeloaders). Explaining the logic behind it is somewhat complicated: the total number of cars on the road is not a fixed sum, and many people don’t have to drive; if you give them an incentive to take mass transit it will result in less congestion for those who do choose to drive. No one has ever found a way of explaining this in an intuitively compelling way. So right-wing politicians can collect votes from angry commuters by vowing to end the war on the car, then use this as a mandate to scale back public transit. The result is worse for everyone, including drivers, but trying to get that idea to stick has proven incredibly difficult.

Needless to say, trying to do something about the distribution of wealth and opportunity in America is also going to be extremely complicated. Occupying a park near Wall Street does nothing to diminish the power of the great investment banks. It is possible to change the way that banks operate and to punish them for their misbehavior, but this is all accomplished through regulation. And to demand action on that front, one must know what to demand. Figuring that out requires getting involved in a lot of boring, nitty-gritty details. Yet who among the occupiers had the patience to work out the ins and outs of capital reserve requirements or credit default swaps, or the difference between an exchange and a clearinghouse? Even something as simple as redistributing wealth from the rich to the poor quickly gets complicated, involving boring debates about the tax code (the treatment of capital gains, the alternative minimum tax, etc.).

The problem with the Occupy movement was not that it lacked good slogans. The difference between the Tea Party and the Occupy movement is that the Tea Party’s slogans were also its policies, and so the Tea Party had an easier time motivating its followers to get involved in the political process in order to make very specific demands of their representatives. The problem with Occupy is it they never got beyond slogans—and not for want of trying. It’s because the type of changes its participants wanted were intrinsically more complicated, more controversial, and could not so easily be derived from its slogans.

All of this lends support to the idea that progressive social change is going to require more than just a new set of policies; it will also require a change in the mental environment, so that a more reasoned discussion of policy questions has a chance of taking place. And yet that change, should it occur, is unlikely to come about through the type of interventions that Adbusters undertakes. Like the Occupy movement, Adbusters exhibits a fight fire with fire impulse, wanting to confront its opponents on its own terms. It figures that if advertisers use clever tricks to persuade you to buy things, it will use the same clever tricks to persuade you not to buy things. Unfortunately, there is only so far you can go with that. Hitting the streets to resist global capitalism lends itself to graphical treatment; bolstering oversight of the securities industry does not.

If the mental environment is dominated by propaganda, it is not obvious that producing counterpropaganda will improve things in any significant way, just as when someone is yelling, yelling back at him may not be a useful way to respond—it may just increase the noise level. To bring about real change in the mental environment, a more fundamental transformation may be required. We may need to change things so that the voice of reason can prevail, so that a more dispassionate, informed, civilized debate can take place. The only problem is, we seem to have no idea how to do this.

One of the most striking things that could be observed at the Rally to Restore Sanity was a desire on the part of many to change not the content, but rather the tone of political debate in America. Many of the signs, for example, criticized the practice of comparing political opponents to Hitler (Obama is not Hitler, Glenn Beck is not Hitler, Hitler is Hitler). Others called for less anger (Use your inside voice, I’m with reasonable) or to dial down the rhetoric (Honest, I don’t mind paying my taxes, or France seems nice enough). Some people even complained that the protest seemed to have become a rally to restore politeness rather than a rally to restore sanity.²¹

And yet there is a connection between politeness and sanity. One of the things that has been noted about those on the American right is that they always seem to be very angry. Furthermore, anger sets an emotional tone that seems to work for certain kinds of political views but not for others.²² This is particularly obvious on talk radio, where the more effective hosts spend a significant portion of their time trying to get their listeners worked up. This sort of anger is clearly not politically neutral. Anger makes people more receptive to some viewpoints than to others. Seen through the lens of common sense conservatism, it is easy to see why this is. Anger works for this particular brand of conservatism because angry people aren’t thinking with their heads, they’re going with their gut. This makes them more likely to trust common sense solutions—ideas that are familiar and intuitive—and to mistrust the fancy talk of liberal intellectuals (or any argument with more than two steps to it).

What the polite protesters understood is that people must be in the right frame of mind in order to think rationally. When people are angry, you need to get them to calm down before you can talk to them. And yet one might wonder what it is about rationality that makes it incompatible with anger. Why do strong emotions prevent us from thinking straight? These are all questions that it would be nice to have some answer to if we wanted to develop a strategy for restoring sanity in our culture. Unfortunately, there is no off-the-shelf concept of reason or sanity that we can pull down and put to use to answer these questions.

Indeed, it is a bit rich for the progressive left to all of a sudden want everyone to calm down and start thinking rationally. From the ’60s counterculture through ’70s feminism and ’80s postmodernism, the left seemed united in the conviction that rationality and truth were part of a plot to impose a hegemony of white, heterosexual male thought on anyone who dared to be different. Over the course of the twentieth century, the left was not a particularly faithful friend of either science or reason. It’s difficult to turn around and rally for sanity after films like One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which convinced an entire generation of American liberals that the whole concept of sanity was nothing but a plot perpetrated by the system, designed to control those who challenged mainstream beliefs. (In a more highbrow vein, Michel Foucault became the darling of the postmodern intellectual left by claiming that reason was able to assert its supremacy only through the invention of the asylum, where all those who refused to bow down before its dictates could be locked away out of sight.²³)

Indeed, the current mood within the liberal academy remains one of intense antirationalism, motivated not only by political ideology, but also by the last several decades of research in psychology, which have shown that we are all, in general, much less rational that we take ourselves to be. Literally dozens of major books have been published in the past decade, echoing the same theme: that we are fundamentally not rational animals.²⁴

Part of the motivation for this wholesale assault on reason has been that economists, throughout the twentieth century, maintained a dogmatic adherence to a peculiarly narrow concept of rationality, one that denied any status to moral principles or rules.²⁵ Because their most important mathematical models depended on this conception of reason, they were extremely reluctant to acknowledge any evidence that contradicted it. So they often went to great lengths to deny the fact of human irrationality. (This tendency reached its most absurd heights in the work of Chicago economists Gary Becker and Kevin Murphy, who argued that addiction was part of a perfectly rational, consistent consumption plan.²⁶) Many noneconomists found this incredibly frustrating, and so went a bit overboard in their efforts to show how implausible the economic conception of rationality was. (Many also found the model to be morally repulsive, which made the debates a lot more heated than they otherwise would have been.)

It is important, however, to recognize that the economists’ conception of rationality was never widely accepted in the social sciences. Furthermore, because these debates generated a certain amount of overstatement, many people were left with the impression that reason is not a valid psychological construct. It is often suggested that science has somehow proven that there is no such thing as reason, or if there is, that it plays little or no role in guiding our judgments or behavior. And this in turn has been taken as vindication of the current state of politics, with its flagrant irrationalism. Our degraded public discourse and demagogic politics are portrayed as simply an expression of the human condition, not the result of choices we have made. Those who complain are simply victims of rationalist self-deception.²⁷

Science has, in fact, proven no such