Humanist Reason

Societies shape ways of thinking and feeling, which in turn shape how societies function—whether through damage and violence or through habits of collaboration and tolerance. But there is no reliable theory which can tell us which shifts in the present may presage the future.2 We may have to try to feel and sense them rather than deducing them.

All of these underlying ideas can be thought of as a kind of folk sociology or political science. They are everyday explanations of how the world works that sit alongside the folk economics that makes people think, for example, that there is a fixed stock of jobs at any one point or that a nation’s finances should be run in the same way as those of

when computer scientists rely on their own limited intuitions to design systems, rather than engage theories that show how identities are “enacted, contextual, imaginative, and infrastructural,” they are likely to perpetuate patterns of discrimination and disenfranchisement.