On the abuse & decline of reason (thread)
It’s not that our reason is defective; but that fetishizing it can make it so.
As a society, we are too much in the thrall of logic.
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“Solving problems using only rationality is like playing golf with only one club.” — @rorysutherland
The Romanian philosopher Mircea Eliade warned us about this pseudo-intellectual wave...
He called its propagandists “reductionists” rather than “rationalists”
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Consider modernity’s most famous liberal manifesto, John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government.
It assumes that there is only one universal principle at the base of legitimate political order: individual freedom.
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Published in 1689, it opens up with the assertion that all human individuals are born in “perfect freedom” and “perfect equality”, and goes on to describe them as pursuing life, liberty, and property in a “world of transactions based on consent.”
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Now, note that every theory/model involves a reduction or simplification of some sort.
Think of maps. Even the best maps are imperfect.
The problem arises when a theory/model allows CRUCIAL elements to slip away unnoticed; that’s when it becomes reductionist.
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Locke’s work offers a reductionist view on human political life because “it has abstracted away every bond that ties human beings to one another other than consent.”
The philosopher Yarom Hazony (@yhazony) explains this in more detail in his book The Virtue of Nationalism.
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But, despite initial attempts to draw attention to the dangerous flaws of such thinking, this reductionist model has ceased to be recognized as a problem.
We’re inundated by follow-up works.
Two famous examples:
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This model thus became the default thinking among economists, policy-makers, urban planners, architects, politicians, academics, and scientists.
And it seems that no one can stop them.
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Consider modernism in architecture: an aesthetic taste masquerading as a scientific philosophy.
Such architects claim to care about the most “functional” and high-tech way of doing things.
The problem is...
No one likes these buildings & they are not sustainable.
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Organically-evolved towns tend to be densely-packed mixtures of curved streets, squares, tiny shops, and short blocks.
Human-scaled. Largely car-free. Fractal architecture. Built with local materials.
#GoodUrbanism
H/T @wrathofgnon
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But modern scientific rationalists came up with a better idea:
An evenly-spaced rectangular grid of identical giant Brutalist apartment buildings separated by wide boulevards, with everything separated into carefully-zoned districts.
(See Plan Voisin by Le Corbusier)
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Yet for some reason, whenever these new “rational” cities were built, people hated them and did everything they could to move out into more organic towns.
#BeautyMatters
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In 18th century Prussia, enlightenment rationalists noticed that peasants were just cutting down whatever trees happened to grow in the forests.
They came up with a better idea...
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Clear all the forests and replace them by planting identical copies of Norway spruce (the highest-lumber-yield-per-unit-time tree) in an evenly-spaced rectangular grid.
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This went poorly.
The impoverished ecosystem couldn’t support the animals & medicinal herbs that sustained the surrounding peasant villages.
The endless rows of identical trees were a perfect breeding ground for plant diseases & forest fires.
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Another example.
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@wrathofgnon also wrote a splendid thread about a similar topic.
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This reductionist way of thinking (stripped down of second-order effects, imagination, and epistemic humility) become the standard mental model for most bureaucrats, academics, consultants, economists, lawyers, and “experts” of all sorts.
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What they still fail to get is that most political, legal, and economic problems are non-logical problems.
Relying (way too much) on logic to tackle complex systems is a naïve and dangerous mentality that unfortunately permeates our world.
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One of my favorite examples of such “sexy” thinking is the way Richard Dawkins and Yuval Noah Harari try to explain religion and all religious experiences...
Religion is, they say, simply a bunch of “fictions” and “stories.”
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I will end this thread with the best (and funniest) commentary on the most reductionist thesis of our times: The Selfish Gene.
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