My veneration of human reason might be mocked as itself contrary to reason. With so much unreason afflicting the world. Yet what I revere is the idea of reason, for its own sake, for the crystalline beauty of it. But, yes too, for its salience in human affairs.
Some would retort we’re more creatures of emotion than reason. However, the two are not opposed, but a unified force, emotions being the impetus for deploying rationality. Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio discovered that brain injuries impairing emotion render people woefully indecisive.
Even love is not just emotion. For all its power, love is not reasonless, every love has reasons propelling it, even if deep in our unconscious. It is a choice we make.
And through reason we have built a cathedral of knowledge and understanding as the foundation for lives worth living. In stunning contrast with all the rest of the natural world from which we sprang. When I see even its humblest little aspects — this pen I’m scribbling my draft with, this sheet of paper — I’m awestruck that we animals have made such things. To picture a cat, a raccoon, even a chimp, doing anything of the kind points up its monumentality. And then I lift my eyes to skyscrapers, airplanes, computers . . . .
Almost gods we’ve made ourselves. Almost. But even the mythical gods of yore were imperfect beings, and so too are we. Yet we “don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.” The imperfections do not vitiate all the good in the human story, up from squalid caves to gleaming cities. And in the kind of society we’ve built in America and elsewhere — that didn’t just happen somehow by itself, but through use of reason, to create the basis for meaningful, rewarding lives.
True, our material gains had a cost in despoiling the planet. But should we not have incurred that cost — remained in caves? Our advancement was not reasonless, and reason can guide us in reckoning with its consequences.
All of this — reason’s stupendous power and impacts — makes likewise stunning our lapses from it — betrayals of it. Religion plays a big role, opening the door to so much else. Like supporting Trump, a nasty lying reprobate, turning upside down one’s supposed moral ethos. But reason and religion just don’t mix. That’s the problem.
Regarding Trump, how often we hear, “This is not who we are.” But clearly now it is. He won not in spite of all the ugliness he represented, but because of it.
With unreason’s worst horrors erupting all over — Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan, Myanmar, etc. — the Holocaust itself not far from memory — electing this man might seem a small thing. But I don’t think so. Because of what it darkly signifies about that aspect of the human character that could vote for him. Even in what we thought was such an advanced society as America’s; and in what it portends for our future. This will not go away tomorrow. It tears my heart out.
Or should I laugh sardonically at myself? Is the problem, after all, with me — silly ideas of human reason and progress? Yet still — the skyscrapers, airplanes, computers. To see people capable of all that, and of building such a blessed society as America, so heedlessly embracing sheer civic nihilism.
How can I square this circle, make sense of it all? I wish there really were a god to do so.
