Science and the Allure of Pessimism

When I first began snooping around in the world of ideas, I became smitten by pessimism. This is common among adolescents with intellectual pretensions. Atheism, determinism, behaviorism, moral nihilism...the more stark and depressing the doctrine, the more I liked it. Any theory that allowed humanity any shred of dignity was suspect; my specific suspicion was that people only believed those things because they didn't have the intellectual courage to face the cold, awful truth. Me, I had the courage. In fact, it soon became clear that I was not only willing to embrace such doctrines, but eager to do so. This, I think, is a common, if sophomoric, intellectual quirk. Many of us get over it; many of us don't. In my own case, many of the more pessimistic views survived a more sober and objective assessment...but many did not.

Unfortunately, I'm often given occasion to reflect on the allure of pessimistic views, in part because cognitive science--or at least what percolates down to folks like me--currently seems to be engaged in a race to the bottom in this respect. Consider the tedious suggestion by Mercier and Sperber that the primary function of reason(ing) is argumentation and persuasion, rather than finding the truth. (This discussion is what prompts this post.) This is an unlikely suggestion, and I'll eat your hat if it turns out to be true. It'll pass. At worst, it'll take up a place next to detritus like the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis--too fascinatingly depressing for some to let go. (If it doesn't, fine--it actually has almost no implications for our view of ourselves and of rationality. It in no way, for example, means that our current efforts to discover the truth are illusory or futile.)

It's not the specific suggestion that interests me, but, rather, the generic allure of the pessimistic. We read, over and over, breathless posts about deflating human pretensions--as if we had any left at this point--and facing the cold, hard facts about ourselves, our lives and the universe. Of course, these alleged facts often have little to speak for them other than their coldness--they haven't been proven, or even terribly well-supported, and certainly haven't epistemically outrun their competitors...but still, the suggestion seems to be: if you don't believe this, you are soft-hearted and soft-headed.

It's very unlikely that persuasion and argumentation could become important for a species that could not reason in order to discover the truth. Reasoning and persuasion probably grew up along side each other, and my guess is that their histories are entangled. But be that as it may, at some point we're collectively going to have to get over our sophomoric fascination with the pessimistic. The puerile game of recreational debunking--especially when it infects science (and, let's face it, semi-science), is a destructive force. We should be willing to bravely face unpleasant truths if necessary, but gleefully favoring the pessimistic is no more rational than is timidly turning away from it.