Thinking About: Rationality

I was reading a BBC Magazine article a few days ago where a famous contrarian philosopher stated that not only are humans a deeply irrational species but that the idea of us being another other than irrational is deeply irrational in itself. Whilst I agree with his proposition – that humans are, pretty much by definition, irrational I do not agree with his conclusion.

It is hard to argue with the demonstrable fact that humans do things, say things and propose things that are irrational. We only have to pick up a newspaper, watch the news or observe people around us to understand that. But let’s think about that brute fact a bit more before we write ourselves off. Are, for instance, all people equally irrational? Are they simply irrational in different ways or are there actually individual differences in levels of rationality (how you would accurately measure something like that is beyond me). Now it’s pretty obviously that there are a small number of people who are very, very irrational. We normally label these people bat-shit crazy. One the other end of the scale are a very small number of people who are seemingly very, very rational. We normally also label these people bat-shit crazy, just in a different way. The word Sociopath comes to mind here. But beyond these two extremes live the rest of us distributed along a graph from barely rational (but not crazy) to barely irrational (but not crazy). The majority of people will fit somewhere in the middle with a good mixture of both rational and irrational elements. I like to think of myself, of course, on the more rational side of the graph but readily recognise that I’ve done plenty of irrational things in my time and will probably do plenty more given the opportunity. I do, however, try to be as rational as I can be. I’ll let others judge how successful I am in that regard!

I’m confident that you’ll agree that some people are, generally speaking, more rational than others. I also think that even the most irrational amongst us (outside of the crazy groups) can have rational episodes lasting minutes, hours or even days at a time. Of course those at the other end of the spectrum can have irrational episodes too. In fact it’s arguable that a completely rational (but not crazy) creature would struggle to be labelled human. At least that’s my impression. Irrationality does, at least in some sense, helps define our humanity in often interesting ways. But if we, as a species, are inherently irrational, does that mean we are designed that way by our very DNA? Is that why, not matter how we try to train our minds to be more rational we still act irrationally from time to time. Is it because our genes tell us to act irrationally? Until very recently that would have been the end of the argument. Genes trump minds QED. That was then, this is now.

We’ve been interfering with Natural Selection long before recorded history through selective breeding of plant and animal species. It was always a rather hit and miss process until the actual mechanism of inheritance was discovered, increasingly understood and now, rather crudely so far, manipulated to a much higher degree than our ancestors could have imagined. Today in the early 21st Century we are not too far away from manipulating our own species genome with confidence. With that being the case then isn’t it in our grasp (sooner rather than later) to discover the combination of genes that, apparently, build in irrationality and modify or even eliminate them? Could we get to a point where we could design babies that are appreciably, significantly, more rational than their parents and can pass on this extra rationality to their offspring. Over the generations it’s entirely possible that the general level of rationality in our species would slowly increase. As our power in the genetics lab increases with our understanding we could fine-tune human rationality to its optimum level, not too much but enough to get over our more irrational impulses. Would that make it a better world? I have no idea. Views of better or worse are often deeply subjective (or irrational). From our own perspective a much more rational world might seem like a soulless nightmare. From the perspective of its future inhabitants it might seem like perfection.