Rationalism Has Been a Disastrous Guide for Civilization
LACMA, Los Angeles. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair
The triumph of the concept of rationalism, which lay at the center of the processes that formed our Western civilization from the 16th century on, was not as swift or easy as it would seem to the modern mind, because it had to disprove all the other ways of explaining the world that had gone on for centuries. The task of rationalists was to show that a logical, straight-line, objective, and non-emotive comprehension, a decidedly anomalous and unaccustomed way of looking at the world, could provide a picture of nature in its smallest detail that quite did away with any need to suppose a God, or gods, or miracles or magic or mysticism or metaphysics. Cast the old religions out; science would be the new faith.
And so it has been for five hundred years we have let science and its parent, rationalism, guide our lives. Indeed Steven Pinker, a Harvard psychologist, wrote a best-selling book pushing it in 2021 and there are organizations worldwide promoting its tenets, including a Realist Society of Australia that “exists to promote the role of reason and evidence in approaching and finding solutions to the wide range of problems that confront us in public.”
But it is exactly in that way of thinking—that rationality is the way to solving public problems—that has led to the disasters of the modern world, and indeed is now contributing to Western society’s collapse. What we have learned after extolling rational thought for 500 years is that people are only partially rational and in fact respond and act from a variety of other impulses. Studies in neuroscience show that a human brain operates more at unconscious or emotional levels than at a rational one. The great 20th-century attempt to apply science, including social science, to solve human problems, especially at the governmental level, had been a hubristic folly, indeed creating more disorder and dislocation than resolving problems. The notion that society would always advance by applying rational ideas to everything, the horse that progressives since John Dewey have been riding blindly ahead, has proved to be folly, a delusional dream.
Take, as on example to begin with, liberal city planning. It has argued, and put into many governmental schemes at all levels, that the rational solution to segregation and poverty was to have people move their homes so that housing would be integrated and have jobs guaranteed so that everyone would work. And so for at least the better part of a century governments have made rules, given grants, passed laws, created bureaucracies, and built and unbuilt buildings and neighborhoods intended to achieve these ends. The result has been a complete failure. People don’t necessarily want to move from their homes or welcome new neighbors or take on a new job just because it would be rational to do so. There are many other considerations, emotional, delusional, or irrational, for their actions, and these usually outweigh the thought-out designs of the planners.
Or take, at a much larger and more important scale, the whole rigamarole that goes under the rubric of “climate change.” As we have seen, for at least 30 years now scientists have been warning that what is in fact global overheating of our atmosphere will bring serious and sweeping, perhaps catastrophic, changes to the earth and its species, threatening the continued existence of humankind as we know it. They have pointed to the cause, now generally agreed upon, as an excess production of “greenhouse gasses” that block the solar heat on earth from radiating back into space, driving up temperatures that effect agriculture, weather systems, ocean temperatures and heights, animal species, and the general functioning of earth systems stable for the last thousands of years. And they have pointed to the necessary solutions to these problems: limiting and then ending the production and use of fossil fuels that cause these gasses.
Completely rational. Cut and dried. Irrefutable. And, it turns out, useless. Because it is about something that, for the most part, will not effect us in major ways until a few decades on (we are led to hope), because there’s no apparent single act that an individual can do to alter it significantly, and because to give up carbon fuels would undermine the way of life of everyone who has always depended on them as the necessary substructure of the world’s economy—and as the source of all the comforts of modernity. That would seem to make the rational thing to do is going on as we in the West have always done, including economic growth, while encouraging the use of renewable fuels and electric cars and the like on the side.
Which is why the West is unable to avert the coming massive tragedy. Tragedy, as Shakespeare has shown us, is the ultimate downfall of a character who knows that what he is doing will lead to bad ends but is powerless to stop doing it. Western civilization now knows that it is headed toward ecocide but is powerless to stop it. So much for rationalism.
Science has obviously been the triumphant offspring of rationalism, and it has totally changed the world in the last five centuries. It has brought forth new understandings in every scientific branch and produced results that have advanced practices in fields from medicine to atomic weaponry, oil production to computerization, architecture to zoology, improving health throughout the world and doubling life expectancy for most societies, as well as creating bombs capable of destroying much of life on earth. And it has empowered an idea inherent in rationalism: progress.
Progress is the notion that things will always be better, and that comes about with widened scientific ideas and technologies as products of those ideas, and with some such machinery as the rational state to foster those technologies and deliver them to people. It has so far in many ways proven itself, and it is now just assumed that whatever change comes about is always progress. It is the triumph of technophilia, knowing that whatever machines we create are for our increasing control of the natural world and thus for our betterment; and that there can be no danger in expanding the impact of machines on society at their own momentum even if humans may not be able to guide or control them completely.
Thus we now have machines called computers, ever-smarter each passing year, linked to a worldwide internet, and ever-smarter smart phones which have spawned global networks and “social” media penetrating societies everywhere, and now that has brought us machines that offer artificial intelligence that rivals and will soon surpass human intelligence. And when that happens, no one knows the consequences. But the logic of progress argues that it has been good to have machines running things in the past, so why not in the future?
The fact that it is our technologies that have permitted the worldwide destruction of so much of our ecosphere, and atmosphere, and hydrosphere, and so many of our fellow species, does not enter into our calculations about progress or technological dependence. Thus, as we have seen, we are on the brink of ecocide.
Completely irrational, you might say. Well, yes, but this is what rationalism has brought us to.
Kirkpatrick Sale is the author of seventeen books. A 50th anniversary reprint of his classic SDS has been published this fall (Autonomedia).
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