Irrationality, a personal study

by Massimo Pigliucci

My Facebook account is reserved for close friends and family (if you want to follow my writings, there’s Twitter). One of my very close relatives is a fellow of about my age, self-professed politically progressive, and with whom there is a lot of reciprocal respect and love. The ideal conditions to conduct the occasional rational discourse on politics or social issues, right? Wrong.

Below is a not too fictional dialogue (meaning that the gist is there, accounting for translation from Italian and some editing) with my relative. The topic is gay rights, and specifically a new directive to be implemented at the Mamiani High School in Rome. The administrators there have decided that forms to justify students’ absences from school will say “Parent 1” and “Parent 2” instead of “Father” and “Mother.” Apparently, the move has been extremely controversial, immediately branded as an attack on the traditional family, blah blah blah.

I asked my relative (R, below; I’m M) what he thought of the issue. Here is what I learned:

R: It’s nonsense.

M: Well, actually it is aimed at making non-traditional families feel included.

R: It’s a politically correct way to go around the law. [In Italy gay couples still cannot legally adopt children, though one member of the couple can, thereby creating a de facto pair of adoptive parents.]

M: But it doesn’t violate or undermine any law, it’s a simple administrative decision to help kids and their families.

R: But the law doesn’t recognize gay parents.

M: But it should, right?

R: The natural state is that of a mother and a father.

M: Just because something is natural it doesn’t follow that it is right. Poisonous mushrooms are natural too, for instance… And incidentally, the family based on a heterosexual married couple is not natural at all, it is a recent cultural invention. Perhaps we should have tribes of 40-50 relatives raise kids instead? That was the natural state of things back in the Pleistocene.

R: You always approach things rationally. But there are also such things as emotions.

M: True, but we are talking about people’s rights. Usually when one invokes emotions it is because one is running out of arguments. And emotions often hide simple prejudice, sometimes unbeknownst to the prejudiced person himself.

R: Bottom line is, I don’t need your permission to object to something.

M: No you don’t. But by posting the article on Facebook and commenting on it you invited my comments, no?

R: Still, I’m not homophobic, I don’t hate gays. But I have serious doubts about letting them raise children.

M: Ok… Are these doubts based on factual evidence showing that children of gay couples develop psychological problems, or you just don’t like the idea?

R: Regardless of what you say, I have a right to my opinions.

M: You do. And I have a right to criticize them. But emotional responses aren’t opinions.

R: You know, sometimes you take on the professor role, and that’s irritating.

M: I am a professor, it’s not a role. It sounds to me like you think anyone asking you for reasons is just an annoying egg-headed intellectual.

R: But the problem is that you keep splitting hairs, you are missing the big picture.

M: I prefer to think that I am getting clear about what you think and why. At any rate, what picture am I missing?

R: Well, for instance, gay couples cannot have children naturally, so they can’t be parents.

M: There you go again with the “natural” thing. What about heterosexual couples who are infertile and adopt? Are they not parents, then?

R: It sounds to me like you engage in discussions to convince people, not to exchange ideas.

M: It sounds to me like you don’t want an exchange of ideas, just a chance to vent your emotional response to a decision you dislike.

I find the above exchange deeply saddening and depressing. Here I am, devoting my life to engaging people in reasonable discourse, and I can’t even get a simple and relatively uncontroversial point across with someone who broadly agrees with my worldview (e.g., R is an atheist, and politically leaning left, as I said), and who cares deeply for me.

Still, there are some interesting lessons to be learned here. To begin with, R’s responses are an unwitting catalogue of everything I expect from the Tea Party these days, and R doesn’t even know what the Tea Party is! This ought to count as an example of parallel cultural evolution, which probably reflects a number of deep seated cognitive biases that R shares with a surprising number of people — again, including politically progressive ones such as himself.

In fact, a closer look reveals what amounts to a collection of textbook examples of logical fallacies and generalized bad reasoning. Notice, for instance, how R repeatedly commits the naturalistic fallacy, arguing that if X is natural therefore X must be good. Even though I quickly pointed out that X (in this instance) was not at all “natural,” and that at any rate there are plenty of easy counter-examples that undermine that particular move.

R also repeatedly invoked what seems to amount to an epistemic role for emotions, something that has been studied recently in some detail by social psychologists like Jonathan Haidt (and I mention him despite my own reservations about some of Haidt’s claims).

Notice also the anti-intellectualism that emerges during the exchange. Since R knows that I am a philosophy professor, he thinks that I’m lecturing him instead of dialoging with him — and he resents it.

R lashes out by saying that he has a right to his opinions, which he certainly does. But he doesn’t seem to be aware that that right is mirrored by my right to criticize such opinions. That part of the exchange reminded me of several people I encountered while I was living in Tennessee, who actually thought they had a constitutional right not to be offended. (On the contrary, the US Constitution gives people the right to offend — it’s called freedom of speech.)

There is also a bit of paranoia in R’s reactions (“I don’t need your permission to think what I think”), which I know reflects his general distrust of authority (perceived or real).

R at times sounded a bit disingenuous, for instance when he accused me of wanting to convince people instead of engaging in an open and honest exchange of ideas. Setting aside that the two goals are definitely not mutually exclusive, why did R post the article (and commented negatively) to begin with? Isn’t the point of sharing something on Facebook to make a statement about a particular topic, both seeking support from like minded people and providing food for thought to those who disagree? I find the “you just want to be right” objection from people who vehemently argue with you to be very strange. As if they were arguing for the sheer pleasure of being challenged intellectually, with no intention whatsoever to persuade you of their own point of view.

Perhaps the most disturbing thing to me, however, is to see an intelligent person like R being completely unaware of the basics of reasoned discourse. He thinks I’m “splitting hairs” when I point out flagrant contradictions or incoherencies in his positions. More broadly, there seems to be a Tea party-like attitude of complete disregard for both reason (“Emotions count too, you know?”) and factual evidence. Whenever I commented on a non sequitur or about him getting basic facts wrong he simply ignored the corrections and moved to another target.

I will eventually recover from this exchange and redouble my efforts to engage people in rational discourse. This post is meant to be cathartic in that sense. I still think a good dose of rationality can only benefit humanity. It’s not that emotions aren’t important, of course they are. But they’ve had the run of things for quite a long time now. Nobody wants to simply substitute them with “cold” reason, Spock-like (or Plato-like, if you will). We just want to begin to address the huge imbalance between emotion and reason in public discourse, an imbalance that still makes it possible for people of good will to say with a straight face and in all sincerity that they don’t hate gays, they just think gays shouldn’t have the same rights that they themselves enjoy without question, or thought.