Name-Calling

Are you rational? Am I? Is anyone? Have you made judgments about who or what in our society represents rationality or its opposite?

These are important questions because of the high value we place on rationality in modern society. Indeed, if we can label something as “irrational,” we end the discussion: If you’re irrational, or what you believe is irrational, I can safely disregard anything you say; I don’t have to make any further argument.

This attitude reflects what I’ve referred to as “hyper-rationalism,” by which I mean the belief that the only way to understand anything in an accurate way is by means of rationality, whatever that is. It’s an attitude that has been with us for a fairly long time now, arising in the late 17th century and really gaining the upper hand in the 18th – the so-called “Enlightenment” or “Age of Reason.”

Those names reflect the widespread self-understanding of the noted thinkers of those times, their belief that they had advanced immeasurably from their predecessors of only a few years before: the religious “enthusiasts” and “fanatics” who had made the Reformation such a vicious, bloody mess. (The novel Q by “Luther Blissett” conveys a vivid impression of the violent craziness of the period, despite having been written by a committee.)

But in more recent times, we’ve seen how the application of an insistent rationalism can produce results that are equally or even more catastrophic; for example, in the Soviet Union, or in the whoring of science in general to political (think atom bomb) or economic (think psychological pharmaceuticals) purposes and interests.

We continue, however, to regard rationality as the supreme standard for judging ideas, worldviews, lifestyles; everything, in fact. I’m not convinced we really believe in it at this point, but we’ve found it useful for a long time as a justification for imperialism, both domestic and foreign, so it’s a bit hard to let it go.

What I mean by that is the claim that northern Europeans and their descendants in North America are the most rational people on Earth (which is justified ipso facto by the fact that we’ve succeeded in gaining control over almost everyone else), while all those other, darker-skinned or intellectually pre-modern (i.e., religious) people are “emotional” or “politically volatile” or just plain “backward,” so it’s incumbent upon us to guide them toward a better understanding of reality, a better approach to politics, and of course to a more efficient and remunerative exploitation of the natural resources buried under their feet.

This is precisely the attitude that led to the United States’ policies of “gunboat diplomacy” and support for “banana republics” (Latin American nations that were bribed and/or threatened into becoming nothing more than plantations for gringo landlords). We told ourselves that “those people” were incapable of creating stable societies and governments for themselves, so they needed our help; but our “help” consisted of making sure they never created stable societies or governments for themselves, because then they might be able to enforce demands for realistically adequate compensation for the labor and resources we were exploiting.

The same sort of thing has gone on in other parts of the world, of course; for example, the Middle East, where American and British oil companies (including one called British Petroleum) were interfering (and browbeating their own governments into interfering) with the political process in such countries as Iran and Iraq. The average American may not recognize the name Mossadegh any more than Allende, but the people of Iran and Chile haven’t forgotten.

So now we hear Americans asking, “Why do they hate us?” And the answer we get from the mainstream media and the corporate-owned talking heads who pose as experts, is simply, “Because they are irrational, backward people.” When in fact a rational examination of the past behavior of the United States and the United Kingdom is certainly likely to provoke distrust at the very least.

I’m quite fed up, frankly, with the tossing around of “rational” and “irrational” as labels, without deeper examination of such claims. Beyond international politics, the “clash of civilizations,” it’s also a factor in the so-called “culture wars” within the U.S.: “New Atheists” such as Dawkins and Hitchens happily hurl the “irrational” label at all religious believers willy-nilly, in the same way political and economic hegemonists use it to label the countries they want to dominate.

There are two angles of attack against this (mis)use of the idea of rationality. One is of course to argue the specifics, i.e., that the particular idea(s) or people labeled as rational or irrational are inaccurately so labeled. The other is to argue that rationality/irrationality as a concept is wrong, or at least so seriously misunderstood as to be useless. If the latter view is correct, it presumably makes it likelier that the former criticism will also be true.

It probably will come as no surprise that I believe the latter view is indeed correct. I’m convinced that almost no one who upholds rationality as the sine qua non of belief, thought, behavior, has any clear idea of what rationality really is. So what is it?

Where There's a Will There's an Excuse

Looking back at the stuff I’ve written since I reactivated this blog a few weeks ago, it struck me that a casual reader might get the impression that my thought processes are pretty chaotic. I could claim that I’ve deliberately been picking random topics as a way to enable “emergent order” to work its magic on my muddled thoughts in the same way it’s supposed to account for the existence of order in physical processes that are alleged to be random in their underlying dynamics. But just as I believe that the order in our cosmos is there from the beginning, I also want to claim that there has been method in my madness all along.


One of the nagging questions about human beings, one that gets asked over and over again under all kinds of circumstances, is this: How could anyone do that? We hear about some awful, horrible thing that has happened, something that seems to violate every rule as we understand the rules, and we wonder how or why another human being could behave in such a grossly and grotesquely wrong way: committing serial murders, genocide, child-rape, conning old people out of their life savings, condemning miners to unmarked graves in unsafe coal pits, feeding children toxic chemicals with their formula, aiding and abetting dictators just to get at the minerals buried under their subjects’ homes, etc. etc. etc.

Frankly, I don’t think the answer is as difficult or mystifying as people seem to believe. Let’s start here: Socrates said (according to Plato) that no one does evil willingly. And Aristotle said, famously, “All beings by nature desire the good.” People do what they do because they believe, rightly or wrongly, that what they’re doing is good – if not for the world at large, at least for themselves.

And people are able to convince themselves that very bad things are actually very good things. Even a psycho- or sociopath may have some inkling that society in general disapproves of the bad, terrible, awful things he or she wants to do, but there’s always a way to claim that “I am right, you (all) are wrong.”

Because we all live in a constructed reality, each of us in his or her own constructed reality: an intellectual or psychological bubble built with the materials at hand, personal, social, political, intellectual, what have you.

As I pointed out here, it’s impossible for a human being to have a complete picture of the universe as it really exists at any moment. As a result, we're forced to go through life with an understanding of the universe and our place in it that is, and will always remain, largely hypothetical. The nature of reality forces us to fill in a lot of blanks with our best guesses, which often are supplied to us by those around us.

That gives us wide latitude to indulge whatever predispositions we bring to the table, whether from personal or social conditioning or out of the fundaments of our souls. In essence, we learn to construct arguments in support of whatever it is we want to believe, whatever we want to do.

We can make anything fit, if we just put our minds to the task: skimping on safety equipment in mines and on oil platforms so as to keep our costs low and our profits high, for instance; selling drugs (“prescription medications”) that ravage people’s bodies or minds, because we can whip out a “clinical study” that shows that 51 percent of the test subjects felt slightly better after swallowing our pill, and only 10 percent had “adverse reactions;” forcing the migration of indigenous people or just chewing through the ground beneath their feet because they didn’t understand the value of what was down there and weren’t exploiting it like we can; or “she said no but I could see she really meant yes.”

There does remain some fairly widespread agreement, even in our fragmented world, about what’s right and what’s wrong. Unfortunately, it seems more and more as though the people who share that agreement are the least able to do anything about it. The social, political and economic predators not only have clawed their way to the top, they’ve embedded their self-justifications at the heart of our society, to the point where demanding that a (foreign) corporation compensate people for the catastrophic damage it has caused through its utterly unconscionable activities can be characterized by a “people’s representative” as a form of extortion.

This is exactly what I mean about living in a “bubble”: Anyone who could see British Petroleum as the victim in the current catastrophe is living in his imagination, not reality. Man may be, as Aristotle said, a rational animal, but he’s very talented at putting his rationality to work in the service of what pleases him most, no matter how destructive or downright disgusting that may be.

Reasonably Irrational

I’ve been trying for some time to heap scorn on one of the central tenets of orthodox economics, namely the concept of the “rational investor.” Anyone who follows the markets can see quite clearly that investors behave irrationally at times, or have we forgotten the dot-com bubble? But the theory remains firmly in place, not because economists are stupid or because they’re deliberately trying to mislead people, but because the whole structure of mainstream economic theory would collapse without it.

Put simply, economists believe that economies and markets function efficiently because people naturally choose the courses of action that are most likely to give them the greatest benefit. In this obviously naive belief, economists are clinging to the ideas of those theorists of the so-called Age of Reason, such as John Locke and Adam Smith, who laid the foundations of our modern political and economic systems. For Locke and Smith and their like-minded contemporaries, “reason” alone is sufficient to guide all human life and unlock all the mysteries of existence, while “unreason” is all bad and a great impediment to our progress as individuals and as a society.

In particular, the thinkers of the 18th-century “Enlightenment” – many of them Deists, including a number of the founding fathers of the United States – identified “unreason” with traditional and “emotional” forms of religion. After all, they were keenly aware of the violent upheavals of the 15th and 16th centuries, when partisans on both sides of the Reformation engaged in repeated and vicious wars to promote or defend their theological positions.

These cutting-edge 18th-century opinions still hold sway with a large number of contemporary thinkers. Richard Dawkins, for example, in “The God Delusion,” voices the opinion that religious belief persists in our time mainly because of bad parenting (i.e., parents teaching their children religion), and if only we could rid ourselves of this irrational belief in the supernatural, the world would quickly enjoy unprecedented peace and harmony.

The main problem with this whole line of thought is that it takes into account only a small part of the human psyche while denying and devaluing the rest.

This was already the response of the Romantic movement, which followed close on the heels of the Enlightenment and celebrated the emotions and fantasies that had been swept out of the tidy Neoclassical worldview of Locke and Smith. The Romantics restored “irrationality” to a place of value and usefulness, perhaps even giving it too high an estimation; these swings of the pendulum do tend to carry to extremes.

It’s a bit ironic that the rationalists of the Age of Reason looked to ancient philosophy for support for their arguments, because the ancients actually had a much more balanced view of human psychology. In particular, Plato and his followers clearly delineated the psyche into an irrational and a rational part, and though they did argue that the rational soul should rule the individual psyche, they contended that the psyche as a whole should aim to serve a higher, super-rational level of being. (To be technical, this “higher level” is called nous in Greek and is translated generally as “spirit” or “intellect,” depending on the inclinations of the translator; neither term really works very well, in my opinion.)

There are many, I’m sure, who will find it absurd to accord any value to irrationality. But consider: Are our sense-perceptions rational? Of course not; they simply report the facts of our environment to our emotions and our thinking. What about instincts? No, but they're pretty useful in keeping us from starving to death and so on.

What about emotions? Well, as Carl Jung pointed out, there is in fact a kind of emotional logic, which is why he defined "feeling" as a "rational function": We can rate and rank and judge things according to how they make us feel, good or bad, better or worse. And that kind of evaluation seems pretty important to our well-being. But in our modern worldview, dominated by the belief that “rationality” consists entirely of verbal or numerical logic, it doesn’t make the cut.

And let’s not forget the importance of irrationality in creativity, in making breakthroughs. Logical analysis just breaks things down or connects one existing thing to another; it doesn’t produce anything new.

However, ignoring or denying the existence or importance of these things doesn’t make them go away; instead, it simply sweeps them under the mental rug, into the unconscious – something else a lot of contemporary thinkers like to pretend is nonexistent. And from their lurking-place in our mental shadow, they can feed on our basic appetites and drives, and grow large and powerful enough to dominate us now and then, causing all sorts of embarrassing problems and bloody conflicts.

In addition, there’s a tendency toward the thoroughly unproven and frankly rather smug belief that “we” – that is, the intellectual inheritors of the Western (specifically, the Northwestern European) worldview – are the only really rational people, while “they” – all those mostly darker people in the rest of the world – are irrational (“medieval,” “emotionally volatile,” “politically immature,” etc. etc.) and therefore in need of our benevolent (of course) guidance (or the firm hand of a dictator chosen by us).

It scarcely needs to be said, but I’ll state that I don’t think “we” are as rational as some of us like to believe, nor are “they” as irrational. And in any case, I think we need to practice irrationality to some extent. You might say that the problem isn’t that we’re irrational, it’s that we just aren’t very good at it.