28 December 2000, 807 words
I am a very rational person. This does not mean that I am free of the violent and cruel impulses, the dark fears and insecurities, or the extreme desires that define irrationality. My nature is the same as any other human being's. But, for the most part, I control such tendencies. That is what being rational is about.
This is why rationality is primarily a moral concept, rather than an intellectual one. Most pastors, pundits and imams would be quite unable to grasp this point, since all such persons make their living by promoting irrationality.
The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines "rational" as "endowed with reason, reasoning; sensible, sane, moderate, not foolish or absurd or extreme; of or based on reasoning or reason, rejecting what is unreasonable or cannot be tested by reason in religion or custom".
This definition correctly implies that the traditional separation between emotion and reason is a false dichotomy. This is shown by studies of people who have suffered damage to the limbic centres of the brain, which control our emotions. Such persons lose the ability to make rational choices, whether in respect to choosing a mate, making stock investments, or creating a scientific theory.
This implies that the rational mind works, not by cold logic, but by actually pitting emotions against one another. Civilized persons are those whose passion for truth, fairness, tolerance and reason triumphs over the darker passions listed in the first paragraph. Ironically, this is one reason that rationality and religion are opposed. In the right context, religion justifies slavery, genocide, war, oppression, murder, even child abuse. Historically and contemporaneously, most tyrannies have had religion on their side.
All religions depend on mindless emotion, the suppression of analytical thought, and the creation of a mindset that embraces belief without proof. Rationality requires logic, the reining in of our worst passions, and belief predicated on evidence. Religion therefore appeals to what is primitive in us; rationality appeals to what is evolved. Hence the reason there are so many more religious people than there are rational ones.
The conflict between religion and rationality is therefore a moral, rather than an intellectual, one. In fact, the person who chooses to be a rationalist cannot ultimately defend their position on logical grounds. This is because there is no way to prove logically that reason is a more valid concept than unreason.
To be sure, we conduct our everyday lives on the assumption that we live in a reasonable universe: that cause precedes effect, and that there are patterns to the world we can rely on. But Hume showed that the first principle is an unprovable assumption: it may be that thunder follows lightning by repeated coincidence.
As for the second principle, which is that of induction, Bertrand Russell once remarked that induction for a chicken means that the farmer comes and feeds it every morning - but one morning the farmer comes and wrings its neck.
Rationality can therefore be defended only on empirical and moral grounds: that reason is demonstrably a better method for interpreting reality, and that reasonable behaviour better ensures social survival. But these grounds are hardly absolute: reason does not necessarily determine subjective social realities (although there is usually an evolutionary genetic logic informing such realities); and many people achieve success by being ignorant and illogical (e.g. every spokesperson for the UNC).
Even so, all modern societies depend on rational systems in order to function. The problem is, human nature has not changed from our tribal days: most of us still act according to instinctive drives. For this reason, modern societies have created institutions aimed at regulating the worst excesses of our prehistoric natures.
What endangers a society is when our primitive perspectives infect modern institutions. Such a disease was demonstrated some weeks ago when a jury found it reasonable that a man should help beat another man to death for jumping his place in a gas station line. In our irrational culture, it is hardly surprising that a Trinidadian jury should consider such a reaction rational.
Since we cannot change human nature, the question is how do we change the culture? One way is to promote rational values, thus creating - eventually - a climate wherein irrational behaviour is considered unacceptable. In such a campaign, those who reflect and shape cultural opinion become important: calypsonians, writers, artists, journalists, academics.
Problem is, though, nearly everybody in those professions, just like out priests and politicians, are also champions of irrationality: exhorting intuition over analysis, tribalism over politics, superstition over science. Even in my own profession as newspaper columnist, only two writers promote the philosophy of rationality (though quite a few promote liberal, humane values).
As long as the proportion of rationalists in our society remains so minuscule, however, we will continue to exist on the knife-edge between savagery and civilization.
Copyright ©2000 Kevin Baldeosingh