Psychologist Jonathan Haidt has a book out called, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. He has something to say about sobriety, or what we might call, “sober second thought.” Do you consider reason sacred? I do. There are a few problems with that. Reason can be a trap that distances us from the truth. Here is an exchange on the Bill Moyers show. I encourage you to watch the full hour sometime. The link is below.
BILL MOYERS: This one took me aback, because it flies right in the face of my predisposition. “Anyone who values truth should stop worshiping reason.”
JONATHAN HAIDT: The idea of sacredness, the idea of sacralizing something. What I see as an academic, and as a philosophy major is there are a lot of people in the academic world that think, “No sacred cows.” We shouldn't sacralize anything.
But they sacralize reason itself, as though reason is this noble attribute, reason is our highest nature. And if we could just reason, we will solve our problems. All right, that sounds good on paper. But given all the stuff I just told you about what psychologists have discovered about reason, reasoning is not good at finding the truth. Conscious verbal reasoning is really good at confirming.
I say in the book, follow the sacredness. Wherever people sacralize something, there you will find ignorance, blindness to the truth, and resistance to evidence.
BILL MOYERS: So what does, what did the Hebrew prophet mean when he said, "Come now, and let us reason together." Are you saying we can't get at the truth that way?
JONATHAN HAIDT: No. That actually is very wise. What I'm saying here is that individual reasoning is post-hoc, and justificatory. Individual reasoning is not reliable because of the confirmation bias. The only cure for the confirmation bias is other people.
So, if you bring people together who disagree, and they have a sense of friendship, family, having something in common, having an institution to preserve, they can challenge each other's reason. And this is the way the scientific world is supposed to work.
And this is the way it does work in almost every part of it. You know, I've got my theory, and I'm really good at justifying it. But fortunately there's peer review, and there's lots of people are really good at undercutting it. And saying, "Well, what about this phenomenon? You didn't account for that."
And we worked together even if we don't want to, we end up being forced to work together, challenging each other's confirmation biases, and truth emerges.
We’ve heard the expression that an idea is only a bad idea if it’s the only one we have. I have someone in recovery that I bounce ideas off of, that I call a sponsor. He has a turgid little saying. When I am sharing one of my latest, greatest ideas, sometimes after letting me get it out, he’ll sometimes ask, “So what, now you want me to co-sign that bullshit?”
If I make my ideas sacred, I tend to demonize others who have opposing ideas. If I demonize opposing views how can I compromise—I would be betraying my principle. When I treat my view as the truth as a sacred reality, how easy it is to see detractors as delusional while I remain, by my judgment, clear headed. In recovery, in fellowship and in the service of others, there are no absolute truths. If I can tone it down and say that I have one view, they have another, compromise isn’t so difficult. Any society works best when people with converging ideologies work together to sort problems out.
See the whole interview HERE