Let’s back up a bit . . .

You are absolutely right that “rationality” can be put to ideological uses, defending the domination of one class, race, nationality, or sex/gender over another. Postmodernists like Foucault made that clear, but they do not own the idea of disguising a power-grab as pure rational insight into the way the world is and must be. Marx was there long before Foucault and company. But Marx’s whole point was that utter irrationality was being disguised as the soul of sense. Power corrupts, power distorts – but power can be challenged and defeated by showing its self-defeating character. Who could be more irrational than homo economicus, “economic human nature” of classical economic theory, where the only value is exchange value who believes in prices but not value? Marx’s work, especially his earlier writings, defended a construal of rationality by casting doubt on the received view of it through what can be called “immanent critique”, by showing it fails by its own standards of success.

The problem is with an incoherent and false idea of what “rationality” is. That’s the problem with Pinker. For Pinker rationality is defined by neuroscience and cognitive linguistics. The former discipline is in its infancy and the latter bedeviled by all sorts of questionable presuppositions, e.g., the “language of thought” hypothesis and the computational model of mind. These presuppositions are part and parcel of a philosophical paradigm – call it “reductive naturalism” or “reductive physicalism” – that, like all philosophical worldviews, is not a “done-deal.” I don’t want to rehearse a critique of reductionism here: others have done it better, and a long time ago. But it’s interesting that Pinker’s idea of rational “human nature” fits the model of the very kind of ideological smoke-screening criticized by Marx (and Keynes, and Karl Polanyi, and John Dewey, and a host of others). It’s no surprise that Pinker’s feel-good view of the contemporary world rests on taking a contingent historical stage of certain humans – the white, wealthy, cis-and-hetero male ones – as a timeless, inescapable human essence. This is wrong. But it’s wrong because it’s self-serving ideology. It makes his privileged audience feel good and make him rich. That’s not only vile, but it’s also stupid. Irrational, even.

What Alasdair MacIntyre once called “the Enlightenment Project” was flawed by its devotion to rationality as centered on universal, foundational truths that are available to anyone who dares to think for themselves (Kant). It presumes that we come to true rationality by ascending to a standpoint beyond presuppositions, and thus to make an end-run around traditions of thought and conduct. There is no such standpoint. That does not mean that “rationality” is without resources. (MacIntyre’s entire body of work – with which I have some serious disagreements – is devoted to showing what those resources are.)

Richard Rorty, a very different kind of philosopher than MacIntyre, has also argued that the flaws of the Enlightenment can be superseded by viewing rationality as a kind of self-responsibility for one’s assertions, as well as one’s actions. It emerges from our practices of holding ourselves and others responsible for what we affirm or deny or doubt. We do this in all sorts of social practices – at work, at home, in the public realm – and without this rational give-and-take it is doubtful that these practices could even get off the ground. And if “rationality” is something that emerges from social practices, so is self-critical reason. (No resting on one’s reductionist laurels, as Pinker has done pretty much for his entire career.) Rationality is not something handed down to us as if from some Platonic heaven. It demands the cultivation of virtues not just of intellect but character: truthfulness, a willingness to put one’s own ideas in question, an assumption that one’s interlocutors are arguing in good faith until the contrary is demonstrated.

It is not easy to be rational, and whatever “being rational” consists in is something that itself open to question and critique. There are many inadequate and self-serving understandings of what it means to be rational, such as Pinker’s. But rationality is not itself a “bad idea.”