The Republican Brain (5 page)

For if we apply Condorcet's favorite tools—science and reason—to how human beings process information, we quickly perceive why his vision has a fatal flaw. That will be our task in the coming pages, where we'll learn that, contrary to Condorcet's account, scientific and fact-based arguments often don't work to persuade us; education often doesn't protect us from lies and misinformation; more information and more knowledge sometimes just give us more opportunities to twist and distort—and worst of all, the two groups that we'll broadly call “liberals” and “conservatives” have an array of divergent traits that sometimes make them unable to perceive or agree upon the same reality. (In this schematic, Condorcet was an anti-authoritarian and change-embracing “liberal,” through and through.)

All of which leaves scientists, and liberals who want to operate in the Condorcet mode, in quite an. . . . awkward situation. It turns out that there are facts about why we deny facts. It turns out there's a science of why we deny science.

But the sadness of reading Condorcet, the tragedy, does not merely arise from the realization that we cannot defeat misinformation or achieve public enlightenment through rational argument. It's more situational. We know in reading this text that Condorcet—this brilliant mind, this champion of reason in politics and in everyday life, who bravely risked his life by publishing attacks on the murderous Jacobins, and trying to keep the ideals of the French Revolution intact despite the mounting bloodshed—is about to die.

Picture Condorcet in hiding, writing steadily, smuggling out notes to his beloved wife and daughter, to whom he will soon have to bid eternal farewell. Could you have clung to such an impassioned view of the future of humanity—against all odds, when there was absolutely nothing to feel optimistic about? Could you have maintained the dream even as the nightmare inched ever closer?

Here is the final paragraph of the
Sketch for a Historical Picture of the
Progress of the Human Mind
, showing how Condorcet's dream of reason and Enlightenment must have kept him going through it all:

How consoling for the philosopher who laments the errors, the crimes, the injustices which still pollute the earth and of which he is often the victim is this view of the human race, emancipated from its shackles, released from the empire of fate and from that of the enemies of its progress, advancing with a firm and sure step along the path of truth, virtue, and happiness! It is the contemplation of this prospect that rewards him for all his efforts to assist the progress of reason and the defense of liberty. He dares to regard these strivings as part of the eternal chain of human destiny; and in this persuasion he is filled with the true delight of virtue and the pleasure of having done some lasting good which fate can never destroy by a sinister stroke of revenge, by calling back the reign of slavery and prejudice. Such contemplation is for him an asylum, in which the memory of his persecutors cannot pursue him; there he lives in thought with man restored to his natural rights and dignity, forgets man tormented and corrupted by greed, fear or envy; there he lives with his peers in an Elysium created by reason and graced by the purest pleasures known to the love of mankind.

On March 25, 1794, Condorcet left his place of hiding, hoping to protect his own protector—one Madame Vernet—who ran the risk of being guillotined herself if he was discovered under her roof. Traveling in disguise, he made it out of Paris—but then came the betrayal. Condorcet's “friends” at his next planned refuge turned him away, left him in the cold.

After two days of wandering, the authorities arrested Condorcet on March 27, 1794. He was placed in a prison at Bourg-la-Reine, which had been temporarily renamed Bourg-Égalité in honor of the Revolution.

The next day—some speculate from suicide, others say from simple exhaustion—his body was found on the floor of his cell.

Notes

20
the Marquis de Condorcet
My account of Condorcet's life and thought relies on a variety of works. These include: David C. Williams,
Condorcet and Modernity
, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004; Iain McLean and Fiona Hewitt,
Condorcet: Foundations of Social Choice and Political Theory
, Edward Elgar Publications, 2004; and Charles C. Gillispie,
Science and Polity in France: The End of the Old Regime
, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004.

21
“great fresco on a prison wall”
James George Frazer, “Condorcet on the Progress of the Human Mind,” Zarhoff Lecture for 1933, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933.

22
“truth alone will obtain a lasting victory”
I am quoting from the following version of the text: Condorcet,
Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind
, Library of Ideas, translated by June Barraclough and edited by Stuart Hampshire. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1955.

Chapter One

Denying Minds

It is impossible—for a liberal, anyway—not to admire the Marquis de Condorcet. The passion and clarity with which he articulated a progressive vision of science-based Enlightenment is more inspiring than several football stadiums of people shouting the word “reason” simultaneously.

But the great scientific liberal was wrong about one of the things that matters most. He was incorrect in thinking that the broader dissemination of reasoned arguments would necessarily lead to greater acceptance of them. And he was equally wrong to think that the refutation of false claims would lead human beings to discard them.

Why? To show as much, let's examine another story, this time a mind-bending experiment from mid-twentieth-century psychology—one that has been greatly built upon by subsequent research.

“A man with a conviction is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point.”

So wrote the celebrated Stanford University psychologist Leon Festinger, in a passage that might have been referring to the denial of global warming. But the year was too early for that—this was in the 1950s—and Festinger was instead describing his most famous piece of research.

Festinger and several of his colleagues had infiltrated the Seekers, a small Chicago-area group whose members thought they were communicating with alien intelligences, including one “Sananda,” whom they believed to be the astral incarnation of Jesus Christ. The group was led by a woman the researchers dubbed “Marian Keech” (her real name was Dorothy Martin), who transcribed the interstellar messages through automatic writing. That's how Mrs. Keech knew the world was about to end.

Through her pen, the aliens had given the precise date of an earth-rending cataclysm: December 21, 1954. Some of Mrs. Keech's followers had, accordingly, quit their jobs and sold their property. They literally expected to be rescued by flying saucers when the continent split asunder and a new sea submerged much of the current United States. They even went so far as to rip zippers out of trousers and remove brassieres, because they believed that metal would pose a danger on the spacecraft.

Festinger and his team were with the group when the prophecy failed. First, the “boys upstairs” (as the aliens were sometimes called) failed to show up and rescue the Seekers. Then December 21 arrived without incident. It was the moment Festinger had been waiting for: How would people so emotionally invested in a belief system react now that it had been soundly refuted?

At first, the group struggled for an explanation. But then rationalization set in. Conveniently, a new message arrived via Mrs. Keech's pen, announcing that they'd all been spared at the last minute. As Festinger summarized the new pronouncement from the stars: “The little group, sitting all night long, had spread so much light that God had saved the world from destruction.” Their willingness to believe in the prophecy had saved everyone on Earth from the prophecy!

From that day forward, Mrs. Keech and her followers, previously shy of the press and indifferent toward evangelizing, began to proselytize about their beliefs. “Their sense of urgency was enormous,” wrote Festinger. The devastation of all they had believed made them more sure of their beliefs than ever.

In the annals of delusion and denial, you don't get much more extreme than Mrs. Keech and her followers. They lost their jobs, the press mocked them, and there were efforts to keep them away from impressionable young minds. Mrs. Keech's small group of UFO obsessives would lie at one end of the spectrum of human self-delusion—and at the other would stand an utterly dispassionate scientist, who carefully updates her conclusions based on each new piece of evidence.

The fact, though, is that all of us are susceptible to such follies of “reasoning,” even if we're rarely so extreme.

To see as much, let's ask the question: What was going through the minds of Mrs. Keech and her followers when they reinterpreted a clear and direct refutation of their belief system into a
confirmation
of it? Festinger came up with a theory called “cognitive dissonance” to explain this occurrence. The idea is that when the mind holds thoughts or ideas that are in conflict, or when it is assaulted by facts that contradict core beliefs, this creates an unpleasant sensation or discomfort—and so one moves to resolve the dissonance by bringing ideas into compatibility again. The goal isn't accuracy per se; it's to achieve consistency between one's beliefs—and prior beliefs and commitments, especially strong emotional ones, take precedence. Thus, the disconfirming information was rendered consistent with the Seekers' “theory” by turning it into a confirmation.

You might think of Festinger's work on the Seekers as a kind of midpoint between the depictions contained in psychologically insightful 19th-century novels like Charles Dickens'
Great Expectations
—whose main character, Pip, is a painful study in self-delusion—and what we're now learning from modern neuroscience. Since Festinger's day, an array of new discoveries have further demonstrated how our pre-existing beliefs, far more than any new facts, can skew our thoughts, and even color what we consider our most dispassionate and logical conclusions.

The result of these developments is that cognitive dissonance theory has been somewhat updated, although certainly not discarded. One source of confusion is that in light of modern neuroscience, the word “cognitive”—which in common parlance would seem to suggest conscious thought—can be misleading, as we now know that much of this is occurring in an automatic, subconscious way. Cognitive dissonance theory still successfully explains many psychological observations and results, with a classic example being how smokers rationalize the knowledge that they're signing their death warrant (“but it keeps me thin; I'll quit later when my looks don't matter so much”). But its core findings are increasingly being subsumed under a theory called “motivated reasoning.”

This theory builds on one of the key insights of modern neuroscience: Thinking and reasoning are actually suffused with emotion (or what researchers often call “affect”). And not just that: Many of our reactions to stimuli and information are neither reflective nor dispassionate, but rather emotional and automatic, and set in motion prior to (and often in the absence of) conscious thought.

Neuroscientists now know that the vast majority of the brain's actions occur subconsciously and automatically. We are only aware of a very small fraction of what the brain is up to—some estimates suggest about 2 percent. In other words, not only do we feel before we think—but most of the time, we don't even reach the second step. And even when we get there, our emotions are often guiding our reasoning.

I'll sketch out why the brain operates in this way in a moment. For now, just consider the consequences: Our prior emotional commitments—operating in a way we're not even aware of—often cause us to misread all kinds of evidence, or selectively interpret it to favor what we already believe. This kind of response has been found repeatedly in psychology studies. People read and respond
even
to scientific or technical evidence so as to justify their pre-existing beliefs.

In a classic 1979 experiment, for instance, pro- and anti-death penalty advocates were exposed to descriptions of two fake scientific studies, one supporting and one undermining the notion that capital punishment deters violent crime and, in particular, murder. They were also shown detailed methodological discussions and critiques of the fake studies—and, cleverly, the researchers had ensured that each study design sometimes produced a pro-deterrent, and sometimes an anti-deterrent, conclusion. Thus, in a scientific sense, no study was “stronger” than another—they were all equally conjured out of thin air.

Yet in each case, and regardless of its design, advocates more heavily criticized studies whose conclusions disagreed with their own, while describing studies that were more ideologically congenial as more “convincing.”

Since then, similar results have been found for how people respond to “evidence” and studies about affirmative action and gun control, the accuracy of gay stereotypes, and much more. Motivated reasoning emerges again and again. Even when study subjects are explicitly instructed to be unbiased and evenhanded about the evidence, they often fail. They see what they want to see, guided by where they're coming from.

Why do people behave like this, and respond in this way in controlled psychology studies? What's so powerful about the theory of motivated reasoning is that we can now sketch out, to a significant extent, how the process occurs in the human brain—and why we have brains that go through such a process to begin with.

Evolution built the human brain—but not all at once. The brain has been described as a “confederation of systems” with different evolutionary ages and purposes. Many of these systems, and especially the older ones, are closely related to those that we find in other animals. Others are more unique to us—they evolved alongside the rapid increase in the size of our brains that allowed us to become
homo sapiens
, somewhere in Africa well over 150,000 years ago.

The systems of the human brain work very well together. Evolution wouldn't have built an information processing machine that tended to get you killed. But there are also some oddities that arise because evolution could only build onto what it already had, jury-rigging and tweaking rather than designing something new from the ground up.

As a result of this tinkering, we essentially find ourselves with an evolutionarily older brain lying beneath and enveloped by a newer brain, both bound together and acting in coordination. The older parts—the subcortex, the limbic regions—tend to be involved in emotional or automatic responses. These are stark and binary reactions—not discerning or discriminating. And they occur extremely rapidly, much more so than our conscious thoughts. Positive or negative feelings about people, things, and ideas arise in a matter of milliseconds, fast enough to detect with an EEG device but long before we're aware of it.

The newer parts of the brain, such as the prefrontal cortex, empower abstract reasoning, language, and more conscious and goal-directed behavior. In general, these operations are slower and only able to focus on a few things or ideas at once. Their bandwidth is limited.

Thus, while the newer parts of the brain may be responsible for our species' greatest innovations and insights, it isn't like they always get to run the show. “There are certain important circumstances where natural selection basically didn't trust us to make the right choice,” explains Aaron Sell, an evolutionary psychologist at Griffith University in Australia. “We have a highly experimental frontal lobe that plays around with ideas, but there are circumstances, like danger, where we're not allowed to do that.” Instead, the rapid-fire emotions take control and run an automatic response program—e.g., fight or flight.