Enlightenment 2.0 Quotes

“The environments that are the most hostile from the standpoint of rationality are those that are the most commercial.”
― Joseph Heath, Enlightenment 2.0

“it is unfair to characterize the work of postmodernists as “bad writing,” despite the fact that a lot of it is actually bad writing.”
― Joseph Heath, Enlightenment 2.0

“It’s all well and good to have a mountain of psychological research detailing the different ways in which we routinely fail to think and act rationally. But the obvious practical implication is not that it’s okay to be irrational: it’s that we need to work a lot harder at becoming rational, and that where we fail, we need to develop systems and strategies that insulate us from the consequences of these failings. It is important to remember that rationality is not some alien set of rules imposed on us from on high; it is, rather, the basis of human freedom and autonomy.”
― Joseph Heath, Enlightenment 2.0

“if you put individuals together in the right way, such that some individuals can use their reasoning powers to disconfirm the claims of others, and all individuals feel some common bond or shared fate that allows them to interact civilly, you can create a group that ends up producing good reasoning as an emergent property of the social system.”18”
― Joseph Heath, Enlightenment 2.0

“There may be important things right in front of you that you aren’t noticing due to the illusion of attention. Now that you know about this illusion, you’ll be less apt to assume you’re seeing everything there is to see. You may think you remember some things much better than you really do, because of the illusion of memory. Now that you understand this illusion, you’ll trust your own memory, and that of others, a bit less, and you’ll try to corroborate your memory in important situations. You’ll recognize that the confidence people express often reflects their personalities rather than their knowledge, memory, or ability. You’ll be wary of thinking you know more about a topic than you really do, and you will test your own understanding before mistaking familiarity for knowledge.11 What”
― Joseph Heath, Enlightenment 2.0

“Everyone always has a reason to reject a compromise, because everyone thinks that their own view is correct, their own cause is just, or their own values are more important. That gives everyone a reason not to compromise. The only way to see one’s way toward accepting a compromise is to recognize that because everyone thinks that their own view is correct, no one is likely to back down, and so everyone is better off settling for somewhat less than what they think an ideal arrangement would be.”
― Joseph Heath, Enlightenment 2.0

“our ability to enter into cooperative relations with one another is based upon the rational insight that we can all be better off if we follow some mutually agreed-upon rules.22”
― Joseph Heath, Enlightenment 2.0

“As individuals, we have enormous difficulty thinking the negative. We see patterns all around us, and each new day brings new evidence that confirms our belief in them. Thinking through the hypothetical “What if I am wrong?” is not something that comes naturally. Having other people around whose sole interest lies in doing just that not only serves as an external corrective, it also pushes us to think in a way that our thoughts do not naturally go.”
― Joseph Heath, Enlightenment 2.0

“that, when it comes to humanity, “the perfection of our nature and capability of happiness, must be estimated by the degree of reason, virtue, and knowledge, that distinguish the individual, and direct the laws which bind society.”
― Joseph Heath, Enlightenment 2.0

“The search for a new type of rationality became just another form of antirationalism.”
― Joseph Heath, Enlightenment 2.0

“if we adopted a different orientation toward the world, one that focused on liberation and freedom rather than manipulation and control, it would literally give rise to a new type of science, new bodies of knowledge, governed by entirely different principles and practices: “The liberated consciousness would promote the development of a science and technology free to discover and realize the possibilities of things and men in the production and gratification of life, playing with the potentialities of form and matter for the attainment of this goal. Technique would then tend to become art, and art would tend to form reality: the opposition between imagination and reason, higher and lower faculties, poetic and scientific thought, would be invalidated.”
― Joseph Heath, Enlightenment 2.0

“The scientific method is famous for requiring objectivity and emotional detachment on the part of the investigator. Scientific experimentation also involves extensive manipulation of conditions. When dealing with nature, this is fine, but with people it becomes problematic. “Being objective” can easily be taken to mean “treating people as objects,” emotional detachment can translate into indifference to human suffering, and manipulation can take the form of dominance and control.”
― Joseph Heath, Enlightenment 2.0

“Our environment has changed so that the correlations we relied upon in the environment of evolutionary adaptation no longer obtain. This makes it so that our hardwired problem-solving routines, rather than producing answers that are approximately correct, will increasingly provide answers that are exactly wrong. Furthermore, a number of our social institutions encourage this tendency. Doing something to counteract this trend is a political problem of the first degree. Unfortunately, many of our political institutions, far from providing anything like a solution, have become a significant part of the problem.”
― Joseph Heath, Enlightenment 2.0

“More and more frequently, we will find ourselves in the position of the lower animals—with a mental apparatus that is unequipped to deal thoroughly with the intricacy and richness of the outside environment.” The irony is that, “unlike the animals, whose cognitive powers have always been relatively deficient, we have created our own deficiency by constructing a radically more complex world.”
― Joseph Heath, Enlightenment 2.0

“If you had to give a child just one piece of advice upon entering a shopping mall, a good suggestion might be “Remember that everything—and by that I mean everything—is a trick to take your money.”
― Joseph Heath, Enlightenment 2.0

“Our era, which began and has developed under the banner of the Enlightenment, first invented liberal democracy, then took it as its political ideal. But we have become enslaved by speed, and have all succumbed to the same insidious virus: Fast Life, which disrupts our habits, impairs our concentration and forces us to consume information in ever-smaller packets. To be worthy of the name, we Homo sapiens should rid ourselves of speed before it reduces us to a species in danger of extinction. A firm defense of quiet, rational deliberation is the only way to oppose the universal folly of Fast Life. Our defense of reason must rest on three pillars. First, we must better understand the conditions that make it possible. Second, we must deliberate about how to improve those conditions. And finally, we must engage in collective action aimed at bringing about those improvements. Only in this way can we banish the degrading effects of Fast Life. In its frenzied competition for attention, Fast Politics has changed our way of making decisions, making us prey to demagogues. This threatens our democracy and our way of life. Slow Politics is now the only truly progressive answer. Politics should be about cultivating intelligence rather than demeaning it, building on experience rather than going with our gut feelings. What better way to set about this than an international exchange of experiences, knowledge, projects? Slow Politics promises a better future. Slow Politics cannot succeed as an individual endeavor. It is an idea that needs many committed supporters who can help turn this into an international movement.”
― Joseph Heath, Enlightenment 2.0