Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

by Steven Pinker

Kahan notes that people’s tendency to treat their beliefs as oaths of allegiance rather than disinterested appraisals is, in one sense, rational. With the exception of a tiny number of movers, shakers, and deciders, a person’s opinions on climate change or evolution are astronomically unlikely to make a difference to the world at large. But they make an enormous difference to the respect the person commands in his or her social circle. To express the wrong opinion on a politicized issue can make one an oddball at best—someone who “doesn’t get it”—and a traitor at worst. The pressure to conform becomes all the greater as people live and work with others who are like them and as academic, business, or religious cliques brand themselves with left-wing or right-wing causes. For pundits and politicians with a reputation for championing their faction, coming out on the wrong side of an issue would be career suicide. Given these payoffs, endorsing a belief that hasn’t passed muster with science and fact-checking isn’t so irrational after all—at least, not by the criterion of the immediate effects on the believer. The effects on the society and planet are another matter. The atmosphere doesn’t care what people think about it, and if it in fact warms by 4° Celsius, billions of people will suffer, no matter how many of them had been esteemed in their peer groups for holding the locally fashionable opinion on climate change along the way. Kahan concludes that we are all actors in a T...