What You'll Learn:
Harvard psychologist and public intellectual Steven Pinker offers us his case for rationality and attempts to answer the question we often ask: “What’s the matter with people?” Pinker argues that, at some level, reason is inescapable—but that has hardly stopped people from trying to flee it. As long as people reject reason’s society-promoting tools (logic, philosophy, mathematics, statistics, and so on), we miss out on the ability to think and solve problems clearly, and we invite needless pain and chaos into our world.
Key Insights:
- We humans are capable of brilliant, incisive thought and also are vulnerable to the oldest tricks in the book.
- Reason is so fundamental to life that you can’t make a case against reason without relying on it.
- When we cannot negotiate and resolve problems with the tools reason provides, society becomes divided and bellicose.
- It is much easier to ground morality in reason than to ground it in God.
- The stock answers to the question, “What is wrong with people?” only scratch the surface.
- Suffering and confusion flourish when mythology oversteps its bounds and masquerades as realism.
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