Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters

by Steven Pinker

When a pilot is suspended thousands of feet in the air with nothing but empty space between him and the earth, and the horizon is obscured by clouds, haze, or mountains, his visual sense gets out of sync with reality. As he flies by the seat of his pants, which cannot distinguish acceleration from gravity, every correction makes things worse, and can send the plane into a “graveyard spiral” within minutes—the fate of an inexperienced and overconfident John F. Kennedy Jr. in 1999. As excellent as our visual systems are, rational pilots know when to discount them and turn their perception over to instruments.63 And as excellent as our cognitive systems are, in the modern world we must know when to discount them and turn our reasoning over to instruments—the tools of logic, probability, and critical thinking that extend our powers of reason beyond what nature gave us. Because in the twenty-first century, when we think by the seat of our pants, every correction can make things worse, and can send our democracy into a graveyard spiral.