A theme of some recent posts here has been the limitations of reason. Reason is a machine: if properly maintained and frequently inspected, it does what it does well enough, but like any machine it can only do some things and not others. Moreover, it is in the nature of this machine not to deal very well with what lies outside its competencies. By default, the machine tends to assume that if it cannot digest such things comfortably they simply do not exist; and if it can somehow accept them as input, but cannot sort them reliably into True or False, they are either ejected as garbage, or, more dangerously, they are marked False anyway and sent along to the output tray as if nothing had gone wrong.
The cardinal rule for the proper use of machines is to know what they do well and what they do poorly, and to use them only for things they do well. Readers of a “certain age” will remember that a popular sage once gave us the same advice:
Professor J.M. Smith has picked up this theme — that we must confine our reliance on reason to those areas where it will provide help and not harm — in a recent essay. An excerpt:
When I say that Reason is ruthless, I mean that it respects nothing but itself, and that when it is let off its chain, it will therefore chew to pieces anything with which it disagrees. To see what this means, you have only to look at any specimen of modern architecture. Reason chewed away any ornament that did not answer the demands of Reason, and the naked box that remained was utterly inhuman.
The post is brief, and sharp. Read it here.
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One of the best examples of its limitations is arguing the slippery slope fallacy to say that allowing X won’t lead to allowing Y. Often used to argue decriminalizing sodomy would not lead to gay marriage. Yet here we are. Human nature, and therefore politics, is not ruled by pure reason.
Well I’ll be! Old “Mr. Natural” as I live and breathe! I haven’t seen or thought of that old cartoon buzzard in a generation.
In my mind a valuable illustration of the limits of reason lies in patriotism. Since this is a phenomenon not merely of the head but the heart, it can be difflicult perhaps especially for very cerebral individuals – liberals generally, but some conservatives as well, as Professor Smith suggests – to subsribe to, even if they’re well-meaning. This I suspect augers poorly for the future, for without this faith in one’s patrie, one’s fatherland, an individual is vulnerable to all the considerable justifications for not being patriotic.
Consider an educated Slovak in the EU, whose prospects for a higher income or a better quality of life beckons him west, or an American who wants to uproot her family to reside elsewhere because of the country’s encroaching decadence (without renouncing their American citizenship, of course!). How can patriotic piety endure, when its increasingly seen as a mindless shiboleth utterly detatched from rationality and self-interest, something to be ejected as “garbage” or declared “False”? Alas, if patriotism cannot perserve, then it’s hard to see how the nation-state can as well – “it will be chewed into pieces” over time. Nobody is a Frenchman or a German or an Australian merely out of utility.
How is reason being defined here? If reason is just something like logic, or maybe logic plus the scientific method, then it’s unclear why the Left would count as a particularly reasonable or rational entity. Take Professor Smith’s (true) observation that the overt Left is obsessed with Equality and the covert Left is obsessed with Freedom. There’s nothing in logic or the scientific method that compels anyone to believe that Equality is a worthy ideal. The belief in Equality–however that might be understood–is a value judgment, an expression of some kind of emotional preference or quasi-religious faith. And the same is true for the “principle” of Freedom or anything else of that kind.
The more general point is that if reason is defined in purely formal terms, as some abstract system of norms for deriving true or probable conclusions from a body of data, there is nothing more rational about conclusions based on Leftist values than other incompatible conclusions based on non-Leftist values.
On the other hand, if reason is understood more broadly, so that it includes a capacity for intuitive value judgments that correspond to reality–real values–then it’s possible that Leftist thought is more reasonable or rational than the alternatives. But it would also be possible that non-Leftist thought is more rational in this sense. (Maybe because some non-Leftist thought processes begin from correct intuitions of value whereas Leftist thought processes begin from deranged intuitions of value.)
Finally, there is the fact that the Left regularly violates its own canons of rationality. Science rules! Except when science provides overwhelming evidence racial differences in crime rates or average intelligence, etc. Then science must be silenced and denied. When the topic is the practices of alien cultures in the Third World, moral judgments are culturally relative and we must not “impose” our judgments on the Other. But when the topic is the practices of our own great-grand-parents in what was clearly a very different culture, suddenly we must “impose” and condemn our ancestors for their “sexism” and “racism” and general “intolerance”. And so on. This is not how people especially concerned with Reason would think.
Jacques,
Well, yes, but of course every chain of logical reasoning has to start with an axiom of some sort; the Left has a familiar assortment of them, e.g. “equality is the greatest good”.
My own critique of the Left has been that by making sacred and unassailable their own earthly assumptions, they are in fact practicing a religion, while refusing to call it that — but it’s clear from the way they deal with heresies (and heretics) that this is in fact what they are doing. At least the Right is willing to practice religion as religion, and to distinguish between the sacred and the merely practical and political.
I don’t want to speak for Mr. Smith, but on my reading of his essay he is saying that for the Left, the overt secularization of everything means that what they imagine to be Reason is all they have — even as they promote the mundane to the sacred. (“If your only tool is a hammer, then everything becomes a nail.”) I think that this is in fact the poisonous legacy of the Enlightenment itself: a corrosive skepsis that drags every postulate of traditional culture into the dock, demanding that it explain itself in simple and rational terms — in effect, demanding that civilization’s necessary axioms defend themselves as theorems. The Left does this constantly, without regard to the rubble it leaves behind (or perhaps, it would be more accurate to say, regarding it with pride in a job well done). That it spares its own axioms from this, we can chalk up to human nature — and even so, I think it only spares them for a time; revolutions typically turn inward and devour themselves.
Hi Malcolm,
I might agree that the Left believe that Reason is “all they have”–more precisely, they believe that “what they imagine to be Reason” is all they have. For example, the typical Leftist believes for no particular reason that “science” makes it impossible for a rational person to be a Christian, that “science” or “reason” prove that men can become women by wearing dresses, that evolution had no effect on the brains of different racial groups, etc. But that’s not about actual Reason or Science.
It seems to me that the current Left is almost completely irrational, not even trying anymore to maintain basic standards of logical thought. There isn’t even any pretense of free discussion or internal consistency. Nothing seems to matter intellectually for them except the ever changing hatreds and slogans of the mass media and academia.
Professor Smith seemed to be saying that the Left actually is more rational than the non-Left. The idea seemed to be that traditionalists are comfortable with beliefs and practices that are non-rational or even irrational, whereas Leftists are rigorously logical. But maybe I misunderstood?
For example: Professor Smith says that the true man of the Right “loses no sleep over contradictions in his theory or inconsistencies in application”. The suggestion here seems to be that Leftists DO lose sleep over this. But that seems plainly false.
Leftists infer racism from the mere fact that blacks are arrested and convicted more often than others; they know that men are convicted and arrested more often than women but refuse the obvious parallel inference in this case.
Leftists insist on a bogus “scientific consensus” in the case of “climate change” but dismiss mountains of vastly superior scientific evidence in the case of race differences and sex differences.
And then there is the question of basic assumptions and value judgments. Leftists have no idea what precisely is meant by “equality” and cannot explain how this abstraction would require gay marriage or mass immigration. They just know somehow that it does, and refuse to consider which inferences and empirical facts would actually get them to these bizarre conclusions.
I’ll speak for myself. I rejected the Leftism that was beaten into my head as a child and teenager _because_ I was concerned with logic and evidence. It was because I came to realize that this mass of attitudes was totally incoherent and had no basis in anything real–as far as I could tell.
I wish the Left were even somewhat concerned with Reason; if they were we might have some chance of limiting their worst ideas and impulses.
These people are so hostile to actual critical thinking and reflection that their knee-jerk reaction to any serious disagreement is to assemble a mob screaming and hitting people in order to prevent debates and discussions. They want to ban talks without even knowing the topic; it’s enough to know that a mob of woke people on the internet called the speaker a “homophobe” or whatever. They want to ban their own idols from just a few years back, and when asked for reasons they usually just assert and call people names.
There’s an interesting connection here with your latest post. Wouldn’t it be strange if the faction that represents entropy and decay and death at the level of ontology were somehow associated with logic and order and structure at the level of epistemology? We should expect that the Left is anti-rational given that, as you say, it is really the human cultural expression of entropy.
And I hate to see people on our side paying them this compliment. No! We are the ones who respect Reason, discussion, logic and evidence and science. And that’s because we stand for order, structure, purpose, beauty, life.
Jacques!
An estimable philippic there, my friend, worthy of Dr. Johnson himself. Indeed I must yield, for the most part at least, to its force.
So what shall I say in response? A couple of things, anyway:
I think I can fill in that part for you, and it is precisely conformant to Leftism-as-entropy: it is just another salvo in the entropic campaign against all distinctions. If things are different, then they can be different not only in superficial features but in qualities, and those differences are what lead to organic order and natural hierarchies — to discrimination, and to patriarchy, and to different roles and places in the social and cultural order. All of these things are anathema — actual evil — to the leveling mind of the man of the Left. (See this old post of mine on the death of eros.) So if all people are to be made “equal” in the radical (of course!) sense of there being no basis for discrimination between them, then all of their orderly and useful particularities must be stripped away, leaving behind just a generic, interchangeable token of a human. (Using a metaphor from object-oriented programming, I’ve occasionally said that to the Left, all humans are to be accessed only through “base-class pointers”.) Once all people are reduced to this, then obviously gay marriage and mass immigration can no longer be a problem.
And though I grant your piercing criticism of any claim the Left may have to being on the side of Reason, I will say again that I think that the point of Professor Smith’s post was that the Right knows much better than the Left what the limitations of reason actually are, and the risks of imagining that reason alone can serve as the basis for a complete model of the world.
Malcolm @ Thanks for the approving link. I stop by your blog on Fridays, and so am checking in late.
Jacques @ What I mean by reason is not so much logic as argumentation, or maybe argumentativeness. Leftists love to make arguments, and this is why they write fifty books for every one book written on the right. I don’t think they are good books, but they all make a great show of reason. They are ponderous and pretentious and absolutely packed with citations. Leftists also expect other people to “justify” their behavior with arguments, and then to engage with the Leftist’s “critique” of those arguments. Or at least they do this until they gain power and can order you to shut up and do as you are told, but that is another matter.
Now we all know that the left has plenty of sloppy myths and stupid idols, but they never admit to this. The genuine right denies that its myths are sloppy, and that its idols are stupid, but it is generally far more honest about its reliance on extra-rational considerations like honor, loyalty, love, tradition, etc. I’m talking about the genuine right, not the economistic right of “hard-headed businessmen.”
Professor Smith,
Thank you also for your link to my place the other day.
I hope you think I’ve read you correctly in this post and thread.
Hi Malcolm,
I agree that the Right better understands the limits of reason. In fact the Left doesn’t really understand this at all. Ironically, this is probably because the Right is more concerned with reason (as opposed to rhetoric and sophistry). Sustained serious honest rational reflection naturally leads to an appreciation of the non-rational. Or maybe that’s where it begins! Just being rational, in the true and deep sense, depends on reverence. It’s an essentially religious attitude. You have to believe that Truth exists, that the human mind is adequate to Truth, that Truth is better than falsity, that it matters what is good, etc. These are basically matters of faith.
Someone who takes this attitude–a true philosopher–is trusting in something Higher. There’s no way to “verify” any of this scientifically or logically or by any other strictly rational means. And someone who fails to trust in this, someone who has no sense of reverence and humility in relation to the ultimate or transcendent, will never care deeply about truth and logic and evidence. These will just be seen as tools to get whatever we happen to want–which is of course how the typical Leftist regards reason. And this is probably why the Left happily reject the demands of good reasoning whenever those are inconvenient. Of course that’s also just a common human tendency. But on the Right there’s a vision of reality that works against that tendency.