The Assault on Reason

Key Takeaways

Under Consideration — to be added.

Interconnections

Under Consideration — to be added.

Highlights

• “Why do reason, logic, and truth seem to play a sharply diminished role in the way America now makes important decisions?”
• “Reason—cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason—must furnish all materials for our future support and defence. Let those materials be moulded into general intelligence, sound morality, and in particular, a reverence for the Constitution and laws.”
• Our Founders’ faith in the viability of representative democracy rested on their trust in the wisdom of a well-informed citizenry, their
• ingenious design for checks and balances, and their belief that the rule of reason is the natural sovereign of a free people. As Thomas Paine put it, “For as in absolute governments the king is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king and there ought to be no other.”
• Though pleased, of course, for my own campaign, I had a sense of foreboding for what this revealed about our democracy. Clearly, at least to some degree, the “consent of the governed” was becoming a commodity to be purchased by the highest bidder.
• The “marketplace of ideas” so beloved and so carefully protected by our Founders was a space in which “truths,” in John Stuart Mill’s words, could be discovered and refined through “the fullest and freest comparison of opposite opinions.” The print-based public sphere that had emerged from the books, pamphlets, and essays of the Enlightenment has, in the blinking eyes of a single generation, come to seem as remote as the horse and buggy.
• Individuals receive, but they cannot send. They absorb, but they cannot share. They hear, but they do not speak. They see constant motion, but they do not move themselves. The “well-informed citizenry” is in danger of becoming the “well-amused audience.”
• Marshall McLuhan’s description of television as a “cool” medium—as opposed to the “hot” medium of print—was
• “Any who act as if freedom’s defenses are to be found in suppression and suspicion and fear confess a doctrine that is alien to America.” Edward R. Murrow, whose courageous journalism was assaulted by Senator Joseph McCarthy, declared, “We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason.”
• “Error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.”
• In a democracy, the common (if usually unstated) assumption is that citizens operate as rational human beings, reasoning their way through the problems presented to them as if every question could be analyzed rationally and debated fairly until there is a well-reasoned collective conclusion. But the new research demonstrates that, of course, this is not the way it works at all.
• Moreover, emotions have much more power to affect reason than reason does to affect emotions—particularly the emotion of fear.
• When recalled, television-created memories have the same control over the emotional system as do real memories.
• Television’s quasi-hypnotic effect is one reason that the political economy supported by the television industry is as different from the vibrant politics of America’s first century as those politics were different from the feudalism that thrived on the ignorance of the masses of people in the Dark Ages.
• Even so, when such strong feelings are manipulated, the possibility for abuse becomes considerable.
• “Reason is our soul’s left hand, Faith her right.”
• “The United States is not a Christian nation any more than it is a Jewish or Mohammedan Nation.”
• But this intricate clockwork mechanism of American government has always depended on a “ghost in the machine.” The ghost animating the Constitution’s machinery is not holy; it is us, all of us, the proverbial “well-informed citizenry.” We may be endowed with individual rights by our Creator, but we act to protect those rights and govern our nation with the instruments of reason.
• The truth is, reading and writing simply don’t play as important a role in how we interact with the world as they used to.
• It may well be that the disuse of democracy’s calisthenics—the sharp decline in reading and writing—and the bombardment of every new fear with television commercials and simplistic nostrums disguised as solutions for the indicated fear has given American democracy an immune system disorder that prevents the citizenry from responding precisely, appropriately, and effectively to serious threats to the health of our democracy. So all of a sudden we overreact to illusory threats and underreact to real threats.
  • Maybe. But when you read the reactions of people in the Hamilton and Adams biography, I don’t necessarily are well-balanced, rational, informed decision making.
• There are many people in both political parties who worry that there is something deeply troubling about President Bush’s relationship to reason, his disdain for facts, and his lack of curiosity about any new information that might produce a deeper understanding of the problems and policies that he is supposed to wrestle with on behalf of the country.
• The very idea of self-government depends on open and honest debate as the preferred method for pursuing the truth—and a shared respect for the rule of reason as the best way to establish the truth.
• “We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.”
  • What is important here is to develop the ability to accept when you’re wrong.
• This self-reinforcing cycle of mutual back-scratching has pushed government policy further and further away from the public interest.
• If the forum is not fully open, then those who control access become gatekeepers. If they charge money in return for access, then those with more money have a greater ability to participate. Good ideas in the minds of men and women who cannot afford the price of admission to the public forum are then no longer available for consideration. When their opinions are blocked, the meritocracy of ideas that has always been the beating heart of democratic theory begins to suffer damage. The conversation of democracy then comes untethered from the rule of reason and can be manipulated.
• As long as individual citizens are not able to use logic and reason as the instruments with which they can dissect and meticulously examine ideas, opinions, policies, and laws, corrupt forces will shape those policies and laws instead.
• American Democracy: The Movie. It looks and sounds almost real, but its true purpose is the presentation of a semblance of participatory democracy in order to produce a counterfeit version of the consent of the governed. With no ability to test the propositions presented or explore the facets of policies not revealed, the public is often persuaded to endorse and applaud policies that are actually harmful to its interests.
• Democracy begins with the premise that all are created equal. Capitalism begins with the premise that competition will inevitably produce inequality, depending on differences in talent, industriousness, and fortune.
• “Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics, is the first task of the statesmanship of the day.”
• Without the introduction of radio, it is doubtful that these totalitarian regimes would have commanded the obedience of the people in the manner they did.
• The combination of psychologically driven public relations and electronic mass media broadcasting led to modern propaganda. Reason was displaced not only by the substitution of broadcasting for print, but also by the science of PR as the principal language by which communication occurs in the public forum—for both commercial and political purposes.
  • Psychological manipulation has been a part of it all along.
• “We must shift America from a needs to desires culture,” Mazur said. “People must be trained to desire, to want new things, even before the old have been entirely consumed. We must shape a new mentality. Man’s desires
  • Well that sucks.
• “Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it’s just the opposite.”)
• Our Founders could never have imagined that the marketplace of ideas would change so profoundly that the “consent of the governed”—the very source of legitimate political power in a democracy—could become a commodity.
• Participatory democracy, because of its openness and accountability, helps to minimize mistakes in national policy decisions.
• And in every case, when the evidence was questioned, there was a determined disinterest in learning the truth.
• “The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.”