Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Table of Contents
- Preface
- 1 Connecting Modernities: A Global Update
- Part I Modernity as We Know It: Narratives of Modernity across the Disciplines
- Part II Modernity under Fire: Critiques, Challenges, and Revisions
- Part III In the Shadow of the Pandemic
- Part IV Imagining New Global Frameworks: Democracy and Modernity-to-Come
- Index
14 - The Cognitive Immune System: The Mind’s Ability to Dispel Pathological Beliefs
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 April 2022
- Frontmatter
- Table of Contents
- Preface
- 1 Connecting Modernities: A Global Update
- Part I Modernity as We Know It: Narratives of Modernity across the Disciplines
- Part II Modernity under Fire: Critiques, Challenges, and Revisions
- Part III In the Shadow of the Pandemic
- Part IV Imagining New Global Frameworks: Democracy and Modernity-to-Come
- Index
Summary
Abstract
How do we know when a belief or behavior qualifies as pathological? Are institutions vulnerable to pathological beliefs and behaviors? Nicolas de Condorcet sought answers to these questions using Enlightenment reason. This chapter argues that Condorcet's modern liberal approach to diagnosing and treating pathological beliefs and behaviors (1) didn't go far enough, and (2) contained significant blind spots that we are only now coming to appreciate through scientific discoveries. Currently the United States and much of the world is crippled by two pandemics: the coronavirus (a physical virus) and the right-wing cult (a cognitive virus). This chapter introduces the theory of the cognitive immune system and discusses the affordances and limits of the metaphor to medical epidemiology.
Keywords: Enlightenment; epidemiology; cults; COVID-19; delusion; extremism.
In 2020, the US Department of Defense elicited research that “would look at audience vulnerability to suasory discourses, as delivered by a variety of authentic and inauthentic actors and at methods to improve audience resilience to malign and deceptive information attacks” (DoD 2020, 48). This chapter argues that malign and deceptive information fosters pathological belief systems. Why are pathological beliefs still a modern problem after centuries of the Enlightenment project?
Enlightenment thinkers, such as French Revolutionary leader Nicolas de Condorcet, predicted that progress would lead to reason's triumph, benefitting all humanity. Condorcet claimed that human beings would perfect their reasoning abilities and abandon their prejudices (Condorcet 1795). But the Enlightenment project fell short for two reasons: (1) it contained significant blind spots; and (2) It didn't go far enough.
Condorcet's most significant blind spot was his belief that human progress was a natural law. He wrote, “that no bounds have been fixed to the improvement of the human faculties; that the perfectibility of man is absolutely indefinite; that the progress of this perfectibility, henceforth above the controul of every power that would impede it, has no other limit than the duration of the globe upon which nature has placed us.” He added that human progress was not only inevitable, but also irreversible; “The course of this progress may doubtless be more or less rapid, but it can never be retrograde” (11–12).
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- Global Modernity from Coloniality to PandemicA Cross-Disciplinary Perspective, pp. 321 - 348Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2022