The things I believed most then, the
things I believe most now, are the things called fairy tales. They
seem to me to be the entirely reasonable things. They are not
fantasies: compared with them other things are fantastic. Compared
with them religion and rationalism are both abnormal, though religion
is abnormally right and rationalism abnormally wrong.
...
We are all under the same mental
calamity; we have all forgotten our names. We have all forgotten what
we really are. All that we call common sense and rationality and
practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels
of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit
and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful instant we remember
that we forget.
--From Orthodoxy, by G.K. Chesterton
It has occurred to me that we've
collectively lost our reason and decided to replace it with
rationality.
I'll start with a story. It's true, as
far as stories go, which is to say all the truth we can know.
A client with which I work, diagnosed
by doctors who diagnose such things as Schizophrenic, hasn't taken a
shower in her home for a very, very long time, because the toilet
drains into her faucets.
She presented me with this tale, and I,
finding the whole thing a bit perplexing, asked for more explantion.
She told me, “The water comes out like sewage, and I can hear the
toilet drain into the shower, and no one has fixed it yet. No one
believes me.”
I didn't believe her either. I knew her
to be one of the more rational, highly-functioning clients; also, she
had impeccable hygeine. So it was with great interest I went to her
apartment to prove her wrong. She showed me, however, all the
evidence of her understanding, and I witnessed all the effects which
led her to her conclusion. All faucets in her apartment poured out
dark, almost black water, and her shower the blackest of all. In
addition, when she flushed the toilet, I could hear with her the rush
of water in the wall just behind her shower simultaneous to the noise
of the flush.
She was right. She had used the power
of reason to come to a rational conclusion based upon all available
evidence, constant observation. She'd taken showers in other
apartments and saw how therein the water ran clear and fresh.
Something was different in her apartment, and nothing could persuade
her rigorous logic.
But she was wrong, you see. I am a
believer in modern plumbing and the good-will and competency of most
people who install plumbing. Also, I was horrified by the idea, and
wanted to make every effort to prove to her that she was wrong, to
prove to myself she was wrong. So I ran the water longer, and it
came out clear, and then I drank some in front of her and did not
become ill. This is an irrational thing to do, to risk one's health
to prove a suspicion (that is, that she just didn't run her water
often enough and foul-smelling sediment had built up within her
pipes). And she was convinced.
What strikes me most about her logic is
its pristine quality. There was nothing wrong with the conclusions
of her observations nor her method; rather, she was missing something
else, an irrational hope that mayhaps she was wrong and a reasonable
suspicion that I could prove her otherwise. In addition, I'd some
previous knowledge regarding the matter—I'd seen what occurs in
stagnant, unused pipes, my own observation applied with wild (dare I
say reckless) reason towards a problem for which rationality had
failed.
I realise I'm using Reason and
Rationality in a different mode than most are familiar with, and that
so most they are synonyms. This, I think, is a dangerous spell woven
by the Rationalists, to claim for materialism one of the most useful
tools of the mind. That is, not only are Rationalists asserting that
the system of knowledge derived from observation based upon
fundamental(ist) principles (exclusively) correct, but also that it
is the natural conclusion of anyone who fully uses their reason.
The obvious conclusion, then, if one
embraces the Rational way of thinking, is that everyone who believes
in Fairies, or Gods, or Spirit, is not just being Irrational, they
are being unreasonable.
Besides pointing out that there exists
therein a vastly arrogant and elitist conception of the world, the
rational person is thus also being unreasonable, discounting the
experiences of a myriad of existences in a myriad of places and
times. Rationality proposes progress, that we as humans are slowly
(too slow for their liking) becoming more rational, less likely to
believe in tree-spirits and more likely to believe in the authority
of a great system which disenchants the world. The more honest among
them admit that this is very much merely their hope, their assertion,
a dream of a collective (secular, maybe humanistic, most likely
capitalist) society where we no longer take anything on faith but
instead rely only on observation, testing, and the knowledge of the
wise.
I have embraced a highly irrational
faith, and am happy to have done so and find it to be the most
reasonable thing possible for myself (thus far). I believe in gods,
suspect an Other world, and deeply assert that the earth ought not to
be shat upon (or, that is, not shat upon with things other than
shit). I suspect magic, yet doubt everything.
And to be fair, I like Rationalism. I
find it quite useful for some things, particularly understanding the
world of technology and consumerism and capitalism. It isn't merely
just to “know one's enemy,” but also to enjoy an incredibly
pristine logic which allows for no chance of chaos, no external
forces. It's really nice sometimes to think that a human can be
completely right and be able to explain everything.
But it's also useless for everything
else, particularly when one actually wants to know something. Its
Truth is concrete and dead, dry and staid and very limited in what it
can actually tell you. It can tell you how, but never why or why not
(though it's begun to try, and it's attempts are embarrassing and
mostly have to do with sex*). It can tell you what something is made
of, but never what it means. With rationalism comes the discreet set
of use-values and predictions which work when things always repeat,
but sometimes they don't, and it is this lack of repetition which is
actually the stuff of life, where reason matters more and a system of
rationality is quite useless.
For the rest of life, there is poetry.
There is the truth and reason behind the brilliant lies of art,
startling and dazzling in the reflections they show of an Other
truth. In song find we what was lost when the world became written
words, in story find we what we forgot when the ciphers woke.
*Evolutionary psychology is frightfully
sex-obsessed, and I often wonder how much its prophets have actually
chanced to experience, and I hope they one day have the pleasure of a
bit more of it
