The Republican Brain by is Mooney Read Free Book Online

wandering, the authorities arrested Condorcet on March 27, 1794. He was placed in a prison at Bourg-la-Reine, which had been temporarily renamed Bourg-Égalité in honor of the Revolution.
    The next day—some speculate from suicide, others say from simple exhaustion—his body was found on the floor of his cell.
    Notes
    20 the Marquis de Condorcet My account of Condorcet’s life and thought relies on a variety of works. These include: David C. Williams, Condorcet and Modernity , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004; Iain McLean and Fiona Hewitt, Condorcet: Foundations of Social Choice and Political Theory , Edward Elgar Publications, 2004; and Charles C. Gillispie, Science and Polity in France: The End of the Old Regime , Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004.
    21 “great fresco on a prison wall” James George Frazer, “Condorcet on the Progress of the Human Mind,” Zarhoff Lecture for 1933, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933.
    22 “truth alone will obtain a lasting victory” I am quoting from the following version of the text: Condorcet, Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind , Library of Ideas, translated by June Barraclough and edited by Stuart Hampshire. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1955.

Chapter One
    Denying Minds
    It is impossible—for a liberal, anyway—not to admire the Marquis de Condorcet. The passion and clarity with which he articulated a progressive vision of science-based Enlightenment is more inspiring than several football stadiums of people shouting the word “reason” simultaneously.
    But the great scientific liberal was wrong about one of the things that matters most. He was incorrect in thinking that the broader dissemination of reasoned arguments would necessarily lead to greater acceptance of them. And he was equally wrong to think that the refutation of false claims would lead human beings to discard them.
    Why? To show as much, let’s examine another story, this time a mind-bending experiment from mid-twentieth-century psychology—one that has been greatly built upon by subsequent research.

    â€œA man with a 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.”
    So wrote the celebrated Stanford University psychologist Leon Festinger, in a passage that might have been referring to the denial of global warming. But the year was too early for that—this was in the 1950s—and Festinger was instead describing his most famous piece of research.
    Festinger and several of his colleagues had infiltrated the Seekers, a small Chicago-area group whose members thought they were communicating with alien intelligences, including one “Sananda,” whom they believed to be the astral incarnation of Jesus Christ. The group was led by a woman the researchers dubbed “Marian Keech” (her real name was Dorothy Martin), who transcribed the interstellar messages through automatic writing. That’s how Mrs. Keech knew the world was about to end.
    Through her pen, the aliens had given the precise date of an earth-rending cataclysm: December 21, 1954. Some of Mrs. Keech’s followers had, accordingly, quit their jobs and sold their property. They literally expected to be rescued by flying saucers when the continent split asunder and a new sea submerged much of the current United States. They even went so far as to rip zippers out of trousers and remove brassieres, because they believed that metal would pose a danger on the spacecraft.
    Festinger and his team were with the group when the prophecy failed. First, the “boys upstairs” (as the aliens were sometimes called) failed to show up and rescue the Seekers. Then December 21 arrived without incident. It was the moment Festinger had been waiting for: How would people so emotionally invested in a belief