Goya: "The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters"
I’ve been writing lately about the evolution of human breasts (and still have at least two to go), but will now interrupt these edifying proceedings for a brief meditation on reason and rationality. I teach a course titled “Ideas of Human Nature,” in which we range from the Baghavad Gita to sociobiology, the organizing theme being a search for various “great ideas” about what constitutes being human.
Just the other day, we were exploring the notion that human beings are distinguished by their use, reliance upon, and degree of elaboration of rationality, whereupon after reading and discussing more than a bit of Plato and Aristotle, the question arose: What has happened to rationality? Not that it is necessarily in shorter supply than in the past, but rationality seems to be valued significantly less. I wouldn’t go so far as to claim that the Greeks invented reason, but they sure got excited about it! There seems little doubt that there was a time when reason was seen as the sine qua non of humanity, something to celebrate, elaborate and encourage. And now we have a President being criticized because he is too rational! (Does anyone really want a return to George W. Bush’s abominable, abdominal “gut-level” decision-making? Or the advent of a Palin-esque ignorance, Bachmann-like indifference to facts, or Perry’s faith-based certainties?) Yet sure enough, when I polled my class of 24 very bright undergraduate students, only four felt that reason was “superior” to emotion.
Now, assuming that this admittedly small sample is representative of modern America (a large and perhaps irrational assumption!), why might this be the case? We seem to be a long way from Greek rationality and Enlightenment insights; what caused us to travel so far?
One possibility: Reason is perceived as geeky and—almost by definition—unsexy, and my students (intelligent as they are) are also hormonally addled and accordingly prone to posture in ways that they consider will be interpersonally attractive. But this leaves unanswered the question why they find rationality less attractive than irrationality … if, indeed, they really do.
A second one: Reason is closely tied to technology, and even as many people are inclined to take certain accomplishments for granted (e.g., public health, enhanced leisure, and so forth), they are also especially aware of the degree to which we are collectively threatened by the products of reason: nuclear weapons, anthropogenic climate change, overpopulation. (The Manhattan Project, after all, was a triumph of rationality.)
A third: We have created computers that can “reason” more quickly and efficiently than we can, at least as measured by, for example, ability to perform complex calculations, play chess, etc. Not only that, but the evidence is now unequivocal that other animals—including but not limited to dogs, monkeys, apes, elephants, dolphins and parrots—are capable of elaborate cognitive acrobatics, sometimes even rivaling that which Homo sapiens can achieve. As a result, maybe rationality has been devalued simply because it is no longer considered a unique human specialty.
Fourth: Perhaps it’s a faux populism, as with politicians hoping to prove that they’re “just plain folks,” and who accordingly feel a need to downplay their intellectual accomplishments. (Yes, there are a few politicians who genuinely have such accomplishments.)
Fifth: Could it be that people yearn to define themselves by not being predictable, rational, “utility maximizing” creatures? Maybe they revel instead in being irrational, unpredictable, stubbornly individualistic agents possessing free will and inclined to do truly stupid, irrational things just to prove that they can. (For our next class meeting, in fact, we’ll read selections from Dostoyevsky’s Notes From Underground along with some poems by Stephen Crane.)
