The Dictatorship of Reason
In objecting to Saul’s description of the current Western technocracy as a “dictatorship of reason,” a couple of us made the point last night that reason has really never been given a chance, that reason has always been pushed aside by irrational forces -- apocalyptic Christianity, racism and other skewed ideologies. That the rational method was revived in the late Middle Ages to support and legitimize those very same “irrational” institutions could be dismissed as a simple disagreement over definitions. But at the same time, I think we all agree that the process of defining terms is much more than an intellectual exercise, or a nuanced strategy for scholastic debate. At the heart of the matter, I think, is the important difference between prescriptive and descriptive dictionaries. Prescriptive dictionaries use definitions to produce the desired result, like when scholars in the Middle Ages carefully parsed Biblical passages to remove contradictions in scripture, or when modern-day pundits spin political speeches. Descriptive dictionaries use definitions like scientists use hypotheses, as a tool for discovery. Such definitions are slippery, reflecting actual usage and revealing not how people ought to think but how people actually do think.
Allowing a word like “reason” to be fluid, by assigning it tentative definitions, we’re led to conclusions that either reveal some hidden dimension in the behavior of those who use the word, or, we’re forced to acknowledge that the definition doesn’t reflect actual usage. If we’re stubborn, prescriptive grammarians, our linguistic arguments become mere housekeeping exercises, the policing of appearances without addressing the reality, the corrupt interior, the core motivation for whatever we perceive as unethical.
Taking reason out of the hands of the mythmakers challenges our core beliefs. It forces us to acknowledge the contradictions of western civilization not as a confusion of terms but as something much deeper, arising, perhaps, out of our assumptions about what rational methodology ought to achieve. What Saul discovers after having set aside the mythologies of the rational western ideal, is that reason is fundamentally amoral. We find it hard to admit that Hitler’s final solution was a perfectly rational act, and somewhat easier to see how McNamara’s strategy for developing a global market for the U.S. weapons industry was also arrived at by a perfectly rational process. We might argue that in both cases some essential facts were missing from their arguments. But in the end our most compelling arguments could be dismissed as sentimental, naive, and unrealistic: the sanctity of human life; the desire for world peace.
Whether or not we like this definition of reason, this is what the word has come to mean. Reason is an administrative method for managing problems. It is a system of questions for producing answers. As modern-day political punditry demonstrates, it can be used to justify almost anything -- and perhaps even the qualifier “almost” is just wishful thinking, as the rational murdering of six million Jews demonstrates. We all sense that to rationalize something isn’t the same thing as justifying it, but because the former involves reason and the latter involves sentiment, the former carries more weight.
What Saul also discovers in clearing away the mythology surrounding reason are the qualities it’s displaced: Common Sense, Ethics; Imagination; Intuition, and Memory -- all the qualities that Western civilization demoted to mere sentiment. Because we grew to think of these other qualities as the irrational devices of arbitrary power, the rational method was elevated to serve a purpose to which it is gravely ill-suited to address in isolation: the search for truth.
Allowing a word like “reason” to be fluid, by assigning it tentative definitions, we’re led to conclusions that either reveal some hidden dimension in the behavior of those who use the word, or, we’re forced to acknowledge that the definition doesn’t reflect actual usage. If we’re stubborn, prescriptive grammarians, our linguistic arguments become mere housekeeping exercises, the policing of appearances without addressing the reality, the corrupt interior, the core motivation for whatever we perceive as unethical.
Taking reason out of the hands of the mythmakers challenges our core beliefs. It forces us to acknowledge the contradictions of western civilization not as a confusion of terms but as something much deeper, arising, perhaps, out of our assumptions about what rational methodology ought to achieve. What Saul discovers after having set aside the mythologies of the rational western ideal, is that reason is fundamentally amoral. We find it hard to admit that Hitler’s final solution was a perfectly rational act, and somewhat easier to see how McNamara’s strategy for developing a global market for the U.S. weapons industry was also arrived at by a perfectly rational process. We might argue that in both cases some essential facts were missing from their arguments. But in the end our most compelling arguments could be dismissed as sentimental, naive, and unrealistic: the sanctity of human life; the desire for world peace.
Whether or not we like this definition of reason, this is what the word has come to mean. Reason is an administrative method for managing problems. It is a system of questions for producing answers. As modern-day political punditry demonstrates, it can be used to justify almost anything -- and perhaps even the qualifier “almost” is just wishful thinking, as the rational murdering of six million Jews demonstrates. We all sense that to rationalize something isn’t the same thing as justifying it, but because the former involves reason and the latter involves sentiment, the former carries more weight.
What Saul also discovers in clearing away the mythology surrounding reason are the qualities it’s displaced: Common Sense, Ethics; Imagination; Intuition, and Memory -- all the qualities that Western civilization demoted to mere sentiment. Because we grew to think of these other qualities as the irrational devices of arbitrary power, the rational method was elevated to serve a purpose to which it is gravely ill-suited to address in isolation: the search for truth.
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