Down to the wire : confronting climate collapse / David - Index of

millennial hope S 167
fairness. We have emotions for good evolutionary reasons, and, as
Pascal noted, our hearts guide our rationality, not the other way
around. Pascal’s point is confi rmed by work in neuroscience showing
that the emotions infl uence cognition more than cognition
infl uences emotion (LeDoux, 1996). This may help explain why
we are so susceptible to the infl uence of fear, once a highly adaptive
mechanism but one that now threatens the human future.
We know that we succumb to a variety of cognitive traps
that undermine our reasoning and the prospect of rational judgments
of risk (Ferguson, 2008, pp. 345–346). We are prone to
accept information that is close at hand regardless of its relevance.
We are inclined to place undue confi dence in quantitative risk
assessments regardless of validity. We tend to confuse risks associated
with known events with the uncertainties of unknown and
unknowable probabilities, what risk analyst Nassim Taleb (2008)
calls “Black Swans.”
Finally, we know that erroneous thinking can sometimes cause
us to act in ways that create self-fulfi lling prophecies leading to
a “reign of error” (Merton, 1968, p. 477). It matters greatly how
and how accurately we defi ne ourselves and situations, because
we tend to perceive what we assume to be true and act accordingly.
Neoclassical economists, for example, defi ne humans as selfmaximizing
creatures dedicated solely to their own advancement.
But this at once purports to be both a description of how humans
actually behave and a prescription for how they should behave.
Hidden beneath the theory is confusion and confl ation of selfinterest,
which is unavoidable, with selfi shness, which is not. This
is a basic category mistake that works considerable mischief by
justifying individualism at the cost of community.
I think we know as well that the study of mind as practiced
from the 18th century to the present has its own limitations and
pathologies. Early on it was corseted with assumptions that people
are merely machines, that minds and bodies are separate things,
and that what can’t be counted doesn’t count. Modern science,