A C Grayling Makes a Case for Humanism

by Gary Berg-Cross

 Philosopher extraordinaire A.C. Grayling, first Master of London’s New College of the Humanities, is on tour discussing ideas from his most recent book -The  God Argument; the Case Against Religion and For Humanism. He was recently in DC as part of a CFI event and Chris Mooney's Point of Inquiry conversation.

Grayling is very much the thoughtful man and this new book attempts a calm approach that “thoroughly and calmly to examine all the arguments offered in support of religious beliefs.” Although he borrows life examples from other New Atheists, Grayling is very much less combative in tone. But still confronting arguments (e.g.  ontological, cosmological-design arguments, Pascal's wager etc,) for the necessary existence of God and the value of religion as an institution.

 From these it is a short transition to the 2nd part of the book which is the argument for ethical Humanism as a way of living a good life given the belief that there are no supernatural beings. Without religious doctrine this ethics must therefore be drawn from human experience, a history of which he draws from classic Greco-Roman thinkers such as Democritus, Epicurus and Lucretius.  These are well represented in his previous work The Good Book.

You can see a bit of Grayling's tone and generosity of spirit in a brief video introduction to this book at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYx_rayG4ec

 For a very good summary of Grayling lecturing at length on the book see:

http://bwog.com/2013/04/07/lecturehop-a-c-grayling/

Images

 

Grayling: http://www.dignityindying.org.uk/about-us/patrons.html

God Argument: http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2013/03/reviewed-the-god-argument-by-a-c-grayling.html

Discussing Science Left and Right

Chris Mooney recently spoke to WASH MDC on his book  The Republican Brain.

 

There is a something on a competing book called, "Science Left Behind: Feel-Good Fallacies and the Rise of the Anti-Scientific Left“ that is being promoted by more conservative circles.  One  recommendation comes from Michael Medved, nationally syndicated talk radio host, author of The 10 Big Lies about America...He's not my favorite source of ideas and  while Medved finds it " Entertaining, enlightening, and important" (along with the American Enterprise Instituted)  I believe  other review such as Publisher's weekly that summarize it as follows:

 

While frequently illuminating, Berezow and Campbell employ sweeping generalizations (e.g., "[I]n truth, Europe is a nice place. European countries have good food.") that often undermine convincing arguments. And their list of 12 issues that would require a blend of science and politics is underwhelming—among them: "Managing resources efficiently" and "Addressing global poverty." (Sept.)

 

Of course the people who really like to use the book are anti-evolutionists such as the http://www.evolutionnews.org/2012/10/science_left_b065791.html site which hawks the book in arn article:

 

"Science Left Behind Can Teach Us about Political Tactics of Intelligent Design Critics"

 

You might also add climate change critics using the book to blur issues too.  Below is a longer review by Ken Silber of the book and comparing it to Mooney's book that was discussed at the December meeting.

 

 

Review: Science Left Behind

I opened with some eagerness my review copy of Science Left Behind: Feel-Good Fallacies and the Rise of the Anti-Scientific Left, by Alex B. Berezow and Hank Campbell. Having spent much time in recent years criticizing conservatives for denial and ignorance of scientific facts, and being a center-right type myself, I am interested in similar failings on the left. But this is a badly disappointing book.

Some time ago, at David Frum’s blog, I criticized Chris Mooney’s The Republican Brain for (in my view) overstating its case that science is revealing a broad tendency among conservatives to deny or distort facts. Let me say now that Mooney’s book is a model of fair-mindedness compared to Science Left Behind.

Berezow and Campbell open by setting up their target: "progressives." They quickly unleash a bombardment of stereotypes:

Who  are the people we’re calling progressives? Generally, they’re the kind of people who think that overpriced granola from Whole Foods is healthier and tastier. They’re the people who buy “Terra Pass” bumper stickers to offset their cars’ carbon emissions. And they’re the sort of people whose beliefs allow them to feel morally superior to everybody else who disagrees—even if scientists are among those doing the disagreeing.

The authors distinguish between “progressives” and “liberals” on the grounds that the former evince a social authoritarianism not shared by the latter. I find this rather notional, given the virtual interchangeability with which the terms are widely used. Supposedly, though, whereas liberals favor economic interventionism but “value social liberty,” progressives

seek dominion over issues such as the environment, food production, and education. They endorse bans on plastic grocery bags, McDonald’s Happy Meal toys, and home schooling. They hold opinions that are not based on physical reality about how energy and development should work. And, most significant, they claim that all of their beliefs are based on science—even when they aren’t.

So it seems that progressives are antithetical to science as a matter of definition. Oddly, this comes just a few pages after the authors assure us that “the purpose of this book is not to demonize all progressives. We just want to demonize the loony ones.” And: “Though some progressives are pro-science, many within their ranks are not.”

Then there’s a look back to what progressive once meant, but the authors are no better on their history. Consider this:

For a time, progressivism made for good politics. [Theodore] Roosevelt was joined under the banner of “progressives” by Democrats including Woodrow Wilson and William Jennings Bryant [sic]. All of these men aimed to mobilize rationalism and science to promote “progress,” just as their philosophy’s name suggested.

Bryan is better described as a populist than a progressive, and the notion that he “aimed to mobilize rationalism and science” would’ve been news to H.L. Mencken during the Scopes Monkey Trial.

This just scratches the surface of what’s wrong with this book. The authors present various examples of  leftists being out of step with science. Some of these are issues that cut across ideological boundaries (anti-vaccine hysteria, for instance). Some are issues where the left-wing anti-science types have had little success in getting the policies they want or even getting support from Democratic politicians (genetically modified foods). Some are just marginal and obscure issues to begin with (the use of compostable utensils in the Capitol Hill cafeteria).

Berezow and Campbell are right that there are anti-science attitudes on the left. They are wrong to see these as of similar current significance to anti-science views on the right.  They fail to show any issue that is a progressive counterpart to the conservative stance of recent years on climate change—that is to say, an important issue where one side, including its elite, is not only grossly out of step with the scientific community but has succeeded in getting its anti-science views reflected in public policy.

After filling the book with tendentious and trivial point-scoring, the authors close with a chapter on the science-related issues that "really matter." This is filled with banality such as “it is imperative that Americans have a serious debate about the country’s future in space.” Thanks for the tip.

 Posted by Kenneth Silber on his Blog. Re-posted here by Gary Berg-Cross.

Why do such things happen?

By Gary Berg-Cross

An NBC headline reads, “Massacre leaves America shocked and grieving ... again.”

Further below House Speaker John Boehner is quoted appealing to Americans to come together to seek solace.  How?   

“In religion….The horror of this day seems so unbearable, but we will lock arms and unite as citizens, for that is how Americans rise above unspeakable evil. Let us all come together in God's grace to pray for the families of the victims, that they may find some comfort and peace amid such suffering,” 

Psychological studies ( see Chris Mooney's reporting On The Republican Brain and Understanding Confirmatory Bias and Dead End Arguments) of Conservative Republicans,  like  Boehner, tells us that they tend to ignore evidence contrary to their initial position, and they tend to reinforce their previous commitments.  And they value group unity. .As a result.they are quick to close on an issue without studying all sides of it  So Boehner was probably more comfortable talking about some vague notion of evil and the comfort of prayer that fit his group thinking than of taking on the very American, National Rifle Association to give us more security from guns.

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell had similar words of some narrow idea of unity with a look towards more peaceful days:

“I invite everyone to lift their hearts in prayer for the victims and their families and to unite around the hope that there will soon come a day when parents no longer fear this kind of violence in our nation again,”

And such appeals to come together in ritual are understandable, although some of us would rather it not be around an assumed religious ideas of prayer and evil.Critical thinking using science based evidence is probably a better way to go in the long run.

Religion isn’t unique in providing comfort, which is easier if we accept the irrational in our thinking and in the world, but it is convenient security blanket and indeed there is some thinking that this is one of the main reasons for Religion:

According to the security blanket concept of religion, supernatural belief systems provide peace of mind and help believers to cope with the more stressful events in their lives. This is a valuable service because chronic stress increases blood pressure leading to heart disease, clinical depression, and contributing to a number of other health problems ranging from obesity to cancers.

OK, so maybe it  provides an easy comfort for people. It has a simple explanation for everything even for people who ask, “Why do such things happen?” It’s part of God’s plan…don’t ask more, it’s beyond us. Broad appeals to prayer and religion provide comfort rather than answers to such things. And we prefer real attempts at understanding rather than religion driven thinking. According to the Huffington Post, Republican Mike Huckabee said the crime should be no surprise because we have "systematically removed God" from public schools.
In his own words, delivered on Fox News:

"We ask why there is violence in our schools, but we have systematically removed God from our schools. Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage?"

Yuk and hogwash! Systematically eliminating open inquiry and humanist values, lack of support for counseling, addressing the causes of poverty, stress and mental illnsess and  the like are all things discuss as an alternative criticism.

Some of us want more than that type of blaming or that God is punishing us or, "God has a plan,"  That’s a more difficult take on reality which quickly leads into more divisive topics of policy, politics and interest groups. And we need more understanding to yield us answers that will work. We might prefer the role of secular counselors and Psychologists to handle grief and real problem solvers with political skills and wisdom to deal with the issues.

Image Credits

Brad on religion: http://cafewitteveen.wordpress.com/tag/pope/

Leading the children to safety: http://perezhilton.com/tag/sandy_hook_elementary

Evolutionary Psychology of religion:http://www.fairobserver.com/article/evolutionary-psychology-religion-part-1

Determined, Partially Determined: Understanding Networks of Influence in the Nature vs Nature argument

s

By Gary Berg-Cross

One of the discussion topics after Chis Mooney’s presentation on The Republican Brain  concerned determinism.  One questioner framed a question about genetics “partially determining” ones personality, ideological stance etc. This was a gestured to by Simone Amselli in her blog on Mooney’ presentations:

“Mooney’s theory is somewhat deterministic: ‘our political inclination is dictated by the configuration of our brain’. This seems to be the conclusion Mooney is aiming at.

However determinism is a huge subject… and a lot can be said about it. Even the cultural context can be deterministic.”

Both Chris and I were more than a little uncomfortable with a verbal concept like “partially determined.”  This seems counter to the very idea of determinism which argues that for any happening there are conditions such that, given those conditions (say a set of genes), nothing else could happen. 

What people who propose “partially determinism might mean is that events are affected by a factor or as Chris said “influenced.”  Genetics and environment are huge factors involved in driving human behavior.  They certainly interact and they have many components that interact over time. An interactionist model, contrasted to pure genetic or environmental ones is shown in the 3 part graphic below.

 

As developmentalist  Jerome Kagan put it to broaden the nature vs nature issue:

Genes and family may determine the foundation of the house, but time and place determine its form.

That’s a much better model for what is going on than determinism by either single factor approach.

So part of what the research that Chris reports on is saying is that from things like twin studies we understand the 2 sides and their interactions better.

“Nature, we are starting to realize, is every bit as important as nurture. Genetic influences, brain chemistry, and neurological de velopment contribute strongly to who we are as children and what we become as adults. For example, tendencies to excessive worrying or timidity, leadership qualities, risk taking, obedience to authority, all appear to have a constitutional aspect.” Stanley Turecki

This general idea of interaction is an important way of understanding complex phenomena (like obesity).  Take climate change.  In a November 01, 2012 article in Business Week  Paul M. Barrett declared after Hurricane Sandy - It's Global Warming, Stupid.  The article  quotes Jonathan Foley, director of the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota explaining how to understand the influence of climate change on a storm like Sandy:

“Would this kind of storm happen without climate change? Yes. Fueled by many factors. Is storm stronger because of climate change? Yes.”

Eric Pooley, senior VP of the Environmental Defense Fund (and former deputy editor of Bloomberg Businessweek), explained it using a baseball analogy that we all might understand:

“We can’t say that steroids caused any one home run by Barry Bonds, but steroids sure helped him hit more and hit them farther. Now we have weather on steroids.”

And we can go way beyond that frame to understand some of the factors that influence something like a storm. Mark Fischetti of Scientific American summarized the broadening consensus about the mechanistic factors:

“Climate change amps up other basic factors that contribute to big storms. For example, the oceans have warmed, providing more energy for storms. And the Earth’s atmosphere has warmed, so it retains more moisture, which is drawn into storms and is then dumped on us.

Do sure climate scientists agreed that it's difficult to link a single weather event to global warming but many agree that the damage caused by Sandy was worse because of rising sea levels.

Climate change itself is multi-determined and involves factors combine to produce climate change and global warming, greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, methane, chlorofluorocarbons and nitrous oxide. And the model isn’t as simple as a one directional factor influence. It is more like a network of factors with some factors feeding back to affect other factors. So while climate is always changing, understanding recent changes starts with human generated increases of greenhouse gases.  These hold in heat which in turn warms the atmosphere and oceans.  But there is feedback, since as temperatures warm, the area of the Earth covered by light reflecting ice shrinks.  With less ice in polar regions, more of the sun's energy is absorbed by Earth, further warming the climate, which leads to still more ice melt.
It’s a network of influence.  And so is the gene-environment situation.  We shouldn’t think of it as 2 modular, isolated items. When we step closer we see a biological-development network. And there are structures and mechanism at work. Cells for example. In bio-organisms, most cellular components exert a  functional influnce through interactions with other cellular components. And in complex organisms we have complex organs. We humans have a complex brain. We know a bit about the neural interconnections there, but there are also interconnections at brain component such as the amygdale and neo-cortex.

All of this is not well covered by simple terms like “determined.”  We need to slowly develop a vocabulary to understand these better and not force arguments into Procrustean beds that lop off part of real understanding to fit binary views of reality. Opposing ideas are easy parts of a debate, and can start understanding but often evolve into larger understanding.
All part of open inquiry and a life of learning.

The burgeoning field of computer science has shifted our view of the physical world from that of a collection of interacting material particles to one of a seething network of information. In this way of looking at nature, the laws of physics are a form of software, or algorithm, while the material world—the hardware—plays the role of a gigantic computer.  — P.C.W. Davies

'Laying Down the Laws', New Scientist. In Clifford A. Pickover, Archimedes to Hawking: Laws of Science and the Great Minds Behind Them (2008)

Images

Gene-environment interaction: http://www.mun.ca/biology/scarr/2250_Genetic_Environmental_interaction.html
Twins: http://bestphotosaroundtheworld.blogspot.com/2011/08/nature-vs-nurture-are-we-shaped-by-one.html
Tangle of nature vs nurture: http://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/student-voices/the_tangle_of_the_naturenurture

Some thoughts on Chris Mooney's Republican Brain

by Simone Amselli (posted with her permission by Gary Berg-Cross

The following were some thoughts Simone had about Chris Mooney's presentation at WASH MDC on The Republican Brain. Simone is a teacher of French & Spanish.
others who attended or have read the book will be interested in these and in commenting.:

1-First, Mooney based his studies on only two elements of the political spectrum: the Liberals and the Conservatives. This is what I call a “black and white” outlook on the subject. There are so many nuances of grey that can be addressed.

2- The topic is presented as scientific (which would mean that the theory could be applied universally), but it contemplates only the American perspective.

3-My opinion is that in what determines our personality, the cultural element is much more important than our genetic disposition. Mooney said rightly, that the choices we make in politics can be compared to those we make in religion. However, most of the time people don’t “choose” their religion; they were raised in it. This can apply to politics. I see my students just repeating the political arguments their parents are using; this was quite obvious at the time of the last election. I wonder if a study has been made, or could me made to see if the children of the so called “liberal parents” feel more free not to stand by their parents ‘political affiliation than the Conservative’s. Of course, in that topic, like in many others that pertain to human sciences, there are a lot of gray areas.

4- Regarding the definitions Mooney give of each group: the Liberals being more open-minded, and the Conservatives liking structures, they can be applied to the individual members of each party: There are among the “Liberals” people who like structure (and are not "messy") and are used for their sense of duty and organization. There are among the “Conservative” people who like to discover, learn new things. All parties need people who reach out, and others that are duty oriented. All spectrums of personalities can find their niche in any party.


5-and last: I agree with the comment of the gentleman who said that Mooney’s theory is somewhat deterministic: "our political inclination is dictated by the configuration of our brain". This seems to be the conclusion Mooney is aiming at. However determinism is a huge subject… and a lot can be said about it. Even the cultural context can be deterministic.

Philosopher Johan Braeckman on European Islamic creationism

by Gary Berg-Cross

You can see a Chris Mooney Point of Inquiry podcast with Johan Braeckman, a philosopher at the University of Ghent, on a topic troubling European defenders of science and reason. It's about the spread of Islamic creationism in European countries.

You can listen to the show here.

Myth Supplants Reality & Fantasy Displaces Common Sense

By Gary Berg-Cross

Allan Sloan wrote recently about the 5 Myths of the Great Financial Meltdown. His list covered:

1: The government should have done nothing

2: The government bailed out shareholders

3: The Volcker Rule will save us

4: Taxpayers are off the hook for future failures. And

5: It's the government's fault.

The details in the article are worth reading, but I was particularly struck a compelling framing line that I could identify with in his analysis:

I find myself getting increasingly angry and frustrated watching myth supplant reality about what happened, and seeing fantasy displace common sense when it comes to fixing the problems that got us in this mess .

Some manifestations are because of ideological and political stances. We see fantasy and unsound thinking in the climate change debate and warming as conspiracy of scientists, who are the most reality grounded of us. We will hear more myth, like “death panels” in likely discussion the Affordable Health Care act. As Chris Mooney notes it seems at times the political right lives in a different reality that pushed serious, critical thinking to the back of the bus. You can see this for yourself by going to the Main page of Conservapedia. When I was writing this blog the following were the very mythic, anti-freethinking news stories featured:

Liberals have destroyed the perceived value of a college degree with their worst college majors: "Undervalued and overpriced, the beleaguered bachelor's degree is losing its edge as the hallmark of an educated, readily employable American." [9]

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The myth of neutrality.[10] Which side are you on?

Remind Wikipedia that their neutral point of view policy (NPOV) is a farce and they might as well confess they are liberals! See: Bias in Wikipedia

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Pastor Carl Gallups declares his anti-atheism and anti-evolution book is doing well around the world.VIDEO

Is there more bad news on its way for global atheism and global evolutionism? You know where to go to find the latest news detailing the decline of atheism and evolutionism![11][12][13] It is such a glorious time to be a Christian creationist.[14][15]

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Also, food related stocks with large international footprints are largely doing well in the Great Recession.[18][19] No matter how incompetent Barack Obama and secular European leaders are, people still need to eat!

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Much to the dismay of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Michelle Obama and "The Lord of the Fries" (Barack Obama), there are fast food restaurants serving big sugary drinks whose stocks are doing well in the Great Recession.[20]

Obese atheists and obese evolutionists of the world, stop driving up the price of fast food stocks! Also, a leading creationist organization declares, "Blaming gluttony on evolution seems very self-serving."[21] You thought you could blame your obesity and gluttony on "evolution". Think again! Start hitting the gym for 60 minutes a day evolutionist slackers![22][23][24] And give your body one day of rest a week.[25][26]

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Want to read part of the Conservapedia entry on Climate Change? Here is a snippet:

Ideologues insist that the world's top scientists have reached a "consensus" that most of the warming which land-based weather stations have recorded in the last century is due to human activity. The basis for this claim is a set of reports published by the IPCC, an agency of the United Nations. The assumption is that the government-appointed representatives who run the IPCC would be completely objective and neutral, and would place finding and revealing the truth ahead of any nationalistic interests.

A lot of money is spent publicizing each side's position in the debate:

"Newsweek purports to take readers inside the world of “Global-Warming Deniers: A Well-Funded Machine” without mentioning that the global-warming alarmists are even better funded, in some cases with government support

Myths replacing reality is a perennial worrisome topic to Freethinkers and the above is a large dose. Some of the WASH speaker’s have addressed the myth-reality battle directly. Rob Boston’s Talk on “The Christian Nation Myth” covered many aspects of this arguing that we have to

strongly oppose the Christian establishment myth and its associated principles, which exclude many people who now it can claim, are not true Americans. We are still struggling with our pluralism and the claim that non-believers that don't have America’s best interest at heart.

Another historical myth family has bothered my is the oversimplified stories about Western and American Exceptionalism such as Niall Ferguson’s book Civilization: The West and the Rest or the Reagan-like belief that “God has granted America a special role in human history.”.

Such Myths are potent in part because they cobble together reassuring ideas that we want to believe in. We just need enough support to get above a very low threshold of our version of “proof” that serves a confirmatory bias.

WallBuilders is an organization, for example, that shows a healthy dose of confirmatory bias towards the proposition of:

"presenting America's forgotten history and heroes, with an emphasis on the moral, religious, and constitutional foundation on which America was built – a foundation which, in recent years, has been seriously attacked and undermined. In accord with what was so accurately stated by George Washington, we believe that "the propitious [favorable] smiles of heaven can never be expected on a nation which disregards the eternal rules of order and right which heaven itself has ordained."

Myths persist in part because considering the alternative, skeptical view is threatening. Then again, critical thinking, as opposed to the intuitive, feel-good version is hard work. Real historic understanding takes time and energy for evidentiary analysis and most of us routinely rely on short cuts that seem like common sense but are often don’t stand up to rational analysis..

Rational analysis for the masses, alas, remains an unfulfilled Enlightenment goal..

Condorcet and Dreams of Reason

By Gary Berg-Cross
 

I’m a big fan of the Enlightenment, its products (Encyclopedia), values (the notion of progress), traditions and influence. I agree with Jürgen Habermas that its ideas along with democratic ideas has the potential for transforming the world and arriving at a more humane, just, and egalitarian society through the realization of the human potential for reason. I agree with Kant, that the Enlightenment marked:

"Mankind's final coming of age, the emancipation of the human consciousness from an immature state of ignorance and error."

But I also agree with Habermas (and others like E.O. Wilson in Consilience ) that the Enlightenment is an "unfinished project." It was a start on emancipated thinking but has not been able to universalize this or remove large islands of ignorance, intolerance and error. It’s successes and shortcomings are something we can learn from. Like Habermas I think that one of its passionate, strategic thrusts, the idea that certainty in moral, social and politics issues will emerge from the application of the scientific method to society, should be corrected and complemented by modern understanding, but not discarded. 

What type of corrections? Well considerations of rationality for one and how it is applied successfully to reform society, understand morals and politics. With the idea of progress comes the idea that morals and politics will become more the products of rationality and greater factual knowledge generated by Science. That’s not exactly what happened in the 19^th and 20^th century. 

One inspirational starting point and humbling lesson comes from that the great French mathematician, philosopher Revolutionist, and Enlightenment figure Condorcet (1743-1794- full name Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat Condorcet). In NNDB, an intelligence aggregator that tracks the activities of people they have determined to be noteworthy, H B Acton described Condorcet as:

Wholly a man of the Enlightenment, an advocate of economic freedom, religious toleration, legal and educational reform, and the abolition of slavery, Condorcet sought to extend the empire of reason to social affairs. Rather than elucidate human behaviour, as had been done thus far, by recourse to either the moral or physical sciences, he sought to explain it by a merger of the two sciences that eventually became transmuted into the discipline of sociology.

He was indeed one of the pioneers in the invention of an analytic, Social Science. He provided the Enlightenment movement some social theory and these remain an important contribution, but his approach did not provide a simple path to Enlightenment goals. Among other things Condorcet struggled to find logical-scientific ways to understand individual and group choice.  One issue was how best (most rationally) conduct voting to advance Democracy. The idea was to apply mathematical principles to social/group decision making and human choice? (Condorcet was a mathematician and well versed in probability which he was eager to apply to social issues. )
So he expected that rational/mathematical analysis could (and would) establish an authoritative system of ethics, aesthetics, and knowledge -something we are still debating and working on. Early on Condorcet argued that through voting, people were more likely to make correct group decisions. But when he modeled voting analytically to check this out he found mathematical paradoxes in it, as did Noble prize winner Ken Arrow many decades later. (In 1972 American economist Kenneth Arrow, together with Sir John Hicks, was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics for work in this area - “pioneering contributions to general equilibrium theory and welfare theory.”) As explained in Wikipedia the voting paradox (also known as Condorcet's paradox) is a situation noted by the Condorcet, in which collective preferences can be cyclic (i.e. not transitive meaning that if A beats B and B beats C then A also beats C - but this isn't what happens in a cycle). Cycles are paradoxical, because they mean that majority wishes can be in conflict with each other. When this occurs, it is because the conflicting majorities are each made up of different groups of individuals. Thus the usual collective democratic decision-making principles don’t generate correct, consistent and stable results. 
Discouraging as was Condorcet personal  participation in the French Revolution.  Part of that story based on brief biographies is culled below:

When the French Revolution broke out Condorcet championed the liberal cause. He was elected as the Paris representative in the Legislative Assembly and he became the secretary of the Assembly. He drew up plans for a state education system which were adopted. By 1792 Condorcet had become one of the leaders of the Republican cause. He joined the moderate Girondists and argued strongly that the King's life should be spared.
When the Girondists fell from favour and the Jacobins, a more radical political group led by Robespierre, took over, Condorcet argued strongly against the new, hurriedly written, constitution which was drawn up to replace the one which he himself had been chiefly responsible for drawing up. This showed a lack of sense and he paid for it when a warrant was issued for his arrest.
Condorcet went into hiding and wrote his very interesting, seminal philosophical work Esquisse d'un tableau historique des progrès de l'esprit humain (1795). Sketch of a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind . Sketch pretty much descibes all he had time for. It was a sketch outlining what was supposed to be a much larger,full picture work. In March 1794 he thought that the house in which he was hiding in Paris was being watched by his enemies and he no longer felt safe. So he fled from Paris but after 3 days he was arrested and imprisoned. Two days later he was tragicaly found dead in his prison cell of unknown causes. Was he murdered or did he take his own life? His death robbed of much including his plan Historical Picture, which was to be the grand defense of his philosophical system.

As J Herival notes of Condorcet:

... Condorcet was no politician. His uncompromising directness of manner and inability to suffer illogical windbags in silence made him many enemies and few friends. His weak voice, lack of oratorical powers, and tendency to bore the Convention by the excessive height of his arguments was one of the tragedies of the Revolution.

 

Condorcet left us with a martyr to the dream that mankind might directly be freed from error with a simple progressive idea that improves on past belief.  The dream is if only we had processes to get factual information and cogent arguments widely disseminated. Sounds good, but it didn’t work in the emotions of a revolution and now we now understand the problem a bit better. I don't blame a devil , nor do I deem the dreams of reason.  But emotions can override reason, and it happens with some people more than others. Progress can be blocked and the dream of reason deferred. Furthermore, there are probably evolutionary reasons that establish this variability of emotion/reason balance. People who are not as open to the facts are not necessarily stupid or stubborn. Some may be, but others are wired (and acculturated further) to process and react to information differently. As the cognitive linguist George Lakoff put it:

So to attack (that) “belief” through logical or reasoned argument, and thereby expect it to vanish and cease to exist in a brain, is really a rather naive idea. Certainly, it is not the wisest or most effective way of trying to “change brains,”

And changing brains is something needed to advance the Enlightenment vision. One modern interpretation of our dilemma is that rationality and the advancement of knowledge are great values, but they need strategic allies in the Enlightenment effort against institutionalized ignorance that prevent progress.  

For more  on this see my blogs on Confirmatory Bias and for more on Condorcet see Mooney’s "The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science -- and Reality."

Understanding Confirmatory Bias and Dead End Arguments

By Gary Berg-Cross

In her popular blog “General Myers and His Endless War on Error”, Sarah Hippolitus took on PZ Myers essay, Sunday Sacrilege: Sacking the City of God, for its deliberate and provocative vitriol. The argument is simple, telling people they are wrong in this way just doesn’t work and is perhaps counterproductive. Sarah cited Chris Mooney's essay, The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science, in which Mooney explains why berating people, such as religious conservatives who are emotionally committed to an idea, can make them defensively cling harder to their beliefs and biases. An in-your-face criticism raises emotions and people respond defensively overwhelming any chance at reason. Over the last 50 years of social and cognitive research we have learned a considerable amount of the general type of phenomena of how people frame and defend biases (bracketology being one area where “experts” are visibly wrong) and unsupported beliefs and how we rationalization our beliefs rather than use reason to arrive at opinions. I’ve written on this topic earlier in such blogs as “Rationalizing Irrational Choices: That $45 entree and presidential choices” and Boxing Ourselves In with Category Errors. We have come to a sad, but scientific understanding from a coordinated system of studies that we humans are imperfect reasoners. The fact is that the emphasis on rationality encouraged by Enlightenment thinkers is a noble effort, but difficult, and does not come easily in many circumstances. The modern parlance covering this is to talk about gut feeling that overwhelm and, in effect, reverse engineer our opinions. More recently the studies have focused on group differences in cognitive styles and the role of emotions, like fear, in these differences.

The scientific study of general phenomena of changing the minds of people with convictions, especially faith-based ones,  goes back a long way, but progress was made starting in the 50s. Stanford University social psychologist Leon Festinger summarized it succinctly based on a study of a UFO cult that was convinced the world would end on December 20^th 1954 (see“When Prophecy Fails”):

"A man with 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."

And it wasn’t just odd folks that show biases responses. Experimental studies of experts, such as Physicians, show they are often biased in clinical judgments. Their expertise could be improved upon by simple statistical rules, a discovery that prompted some hope for things like artificial, expert systems to aid human judgment.But this human tendency gets enhanced when it interacts with factors like ideology,  frightening circumstances and cultural framing.

The more recent studies on differences of reasoning style, which I touched on in Epistemological Styles. There I contrasted scientific with theist styles. Scientific styles are cognitively taxing and require considerable cultural support for chained combinations of postulates that get tested by experiment. These may confirm a belief but also disconfirm it. It’s all part of a humbling style that values exploration of ideas with controlled observation and measurement, analogical models and statistical analysis of regularities of populations.Such methods have been applied to self-study processes by which small groups have moved the country  away from intellectual  processes to more of a conservative agenda in this  country (see for example Hacker and Pierson's work Off Center). Such conservative, social-political engineering reflect reaching people who prefer far simpler style . It is to be an idea advocate and largely focus on evidence to justify existing belief and gut feelings.Taken as a whole this tends to appeal to conservative minds more than liberal ones.

Chris Mooney, author of The Republican War on Science, discusses such things in his recent book The Republican Brain The Science of Why They Deny Science--and Reality. His finding is simply states: conservatives and liberals don’t just have different ideologies; they have different psychologies (aka epistemological styles) that help explain their fact and expert denying positions on such things as climate change and evolution. It’s not just that they don’t know facts it is that they have a tendency towards a confirmatory bias that reflects a preference to focus on evidence that supports existing belief. Another part of who conservatives are is their preference for ideas that bind groups together rather than “truth” in an objective sense. And one of the big factors driving conservative beliefs is their tendency to emotional, fight or flight responses. Eye tracking studies, for example, show that people who score high on conservative positions tend to track “threat” objects in an environment (a knife or gun – maybe a stranger). There’s survival value in such a tendency so one may imagine how such a tendency was selected in populations and later frozen into cultural values. Conservatives tend to be ready to be afraid and this can turn off the reasoning side of the brain.
You can see a good discussion of all of this on the recent Up With Chris Hayes, where Mooney and Jonathan Haidt, UVA moral psychologist & author of The Righteous Mind, discussed group differences. They agreed that liberals tend to be more open to new experiences, new data and convincing finds. As a consequence they tend to be more sympathetic to scientific process, and take their scientific findings more seriously. This is a tendency/predisposition and not a hard and fast thing in all circumstances.  The socially generated tendency of Conservatives, meanwhile, is that they just do it differently. Haidt explained:

“I want to fully agree with Chris that the psychology does predispose liberals more to be receptive to science; my own research has found that conservatives are better at group-binding, at loyalty, and so if you put them in a group-versus-group conflict, yes, the right is more prone, psychologically, to band around and sort of, circle the wagons.”

This is consistent with Sarah’s earlier argument about the reaction of believers to strong, mocking arguments. In conversations with conservative thinkers (as opposed to  liberal styles) we should be aware that they may not have the same regard for the Enlightenment’s style of rational argument. We are either fooling ourselves or just being a bit too rigid in our style. But we need not be quiet or withdrawn certainly in our own communuty, and we can use the new understandings that come from cognitive and social science to guide us. The value of framing (see my Framing Arguments: You say Flaming Atheists and I Say Non-Confrontational Humanist) 
is one tool we can use. Another is to recognize that individual reasoning is biased. We are often battling a strong confirmatory bias that repels facts and strict logic. What we need instead is get into a dialog to challenge our biases as well as others. Socrates was on to this a long time ago and its time to update that technique drawing lessons from the relevant science. Overcoming a reflexive conservative denial of the science of denial would be a big step. We need to get the word out on that.