Thinking About: Irrationality

Despite the fact that we are fully capable of being rational I think that humanity in general is deeply irrational – even if we put religion to one side for a moment. We are constant pray to our emotions, we love and we hate without a rational thought entering our heads. We follow political parties or football teams for no better reason than our parents follow them and take any criticism of them as personal insults. We kill and we die for beliefs that other cultures and other times find completely incomprehensible. Looking back into our blood soaked history we see armies slaughtering each other over religious arguments that few soldiers could even begin to articulate. At other times armies clash and cities burn over subsequently discredited ideologies passionately believed in and passionately defended by young men and women taught both to accept ideas and not to question them.

Reason itself has been vilified as a root problem of human existence. Martin Luther, the father of Protestantism famously said “Faith must trample under foot all reason, sense, and understanding”. He was not, and is not, alone in this viewpoint. Far too many people reject reason because it has the power to undermine their faith. This, in my opinion, is simply irrationality piled on irrationality. Luther, and those like him, view reason as the enemy and want it stopped being taught to our children. “I am afraid that the schools will prove the very gates of hell, unless they diligently labour in explaining the Holy Scriptures and engraving them in the heart of the youth” he said. It’s ironic of course that his prescription for avoiding Hell would probably ensure its dominion on the Earth as religious faction fought religious faction over interpretations of the words of each sects founding fathers. Of course you don’t have to delve into the historical record to find evidence of widespread irrationality. We have enough of that around us today – the so-called Global Warming ‘sceptics’, those who refuse to accept the fact of evolution or the fact that the Earth is more than six thousand years old and those who work tirelessly to prevent Gay marriage (as if homosexuality isn’t as natural as heterosexuality).

Of course I’m not going to hold myself up as a shining example of rationality. I’m a human being and, by my definition at least, that makes me irrational – which I am. I have irrational fears as well as highly rational ones. I sometimes let my emotions get the better of me and let them cloud my judgement – sometimes seriously so. Indeed the idea of being a fully rational human is a contradiction. Any creature who was fully rational is most definitely not a human being and would probably be close enough to sociopathic (or at least psychotic) as to be very dangerous indeed. So I am not advocating a fully rational world, nor am I aiming to be fully rational myself. What I do attempt to be and what I would like the world to be is simply more rational than I/we are at the moment. I am convinced that many (if not all) of the worlds problems could be solved by the application of deep rational thought. If we put aside, even for a short time, our more irrational nature and saw issues as they really are (in other words mostly of our own making) we would see our way to building better worlds without the usual foundation of numberless dead bodies. I’m not holding my breath though that this is going to happen any time soon. Such optimism would, in my rational opinion, be deeply irrational.