Savvy Western elites are suspicious of the modern
glorification of Reason. They’re aware that postmodernism began with a litany
of critiques of free thinking: David Hume maintained that we’re led by
emotions, not by reason; Herbert Spencer extended Darwin’s explanation of
biological design, reducing society to a set of animalistic compulsions that
should be allowed to play out without unnatural, governmental interference; Nietzsche
wrote that confidence in reason is a booster for resentful losers so they’ll
forget about their foiled will to power; Freud showed that there’s an
irrational unconscious mind that can only be recognized, not controlled by
rationality; Marx argued that ideologies are weapons in economic conflicts
between social classes. So much, then, for the early modern celebration of Reason!
We might have assumed, on the contrary, that the evident progress in the
eminently rational fields of science and technology should inspire us to admire
critical thinking, as we’ve lost lazy faith in feel-good dogmas. But it turns
out that reason ironically undermines itself, as in the above philosophical and
scientific discoveries as well as in Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem and the
quantum observer effect. Mathematical systems can’t consistently express every
true arithmetical statement, because such systems run up against the Liar’s
Paradox. And attempts to measure quantum phenomena perturb them so that a
neutral, objective view of them is impossible. (There’s also the intrinsic
uncertainty of measuring wavelike effects).
But there’s a deeper problem with reason—and here I’m
speaking about our general talent for thinking itself, not just the modern cult
of Reason. The problem isn’t that reason is a two-edged sword, that while
thinking has allowed us to prosper as a species, as we’ve learned how to
exploit natural processes, our power of understanding also saddens us with
knowledge of unpleasant facts such as death’s inevitability for all living
things or the universe’s undeadness. Reason is both a blessing and a
curse, but even this isn’t the problem with which I’m here concerned.
The deeper problem is difficult to articulate, since seeing it requires a rather
mystical, outsider’s view of human life; moreover,
there’s the looming paradox that if you express the problem reasonably, you may
have only reestablished rather than shed light on it. In a word, reason isn’t just cursed, figuratively speaking; it’s literally
a trap.
Reasoning and our Illusory Godhood
The trap becomes apparent when we compare our chief skill
with that of other species. Fish have fins that allow them to swim; birds’
wings enable them to fly; tigers run on four powerful legs in their hunt for
food; spiders spin webs to catch prey, and so on and so forth. These
animalistic virtues are plainly phenotypic, in that the animals have an advantage
that manifests as an outer, bodily attribute which equips them to flourish in a
specific environment. Our primary advantage is less tangible. True, we have
opposable thumbs and we walk on two legs, freeing up our arms to devise techniques
to compensate for our relatively weak bodies. But those mutations would be
useless without the modifications to our protohuman ancestors’ brain. That
which makes us human isn’t immediately visible to us in our daily life—unlike
an elephant’s trunk, a monkey’s prehensile tail, or a lizard’s scales, which
are apparent to them. Our brain gives rise to even more ethereal benefits,
namely language, autonomy, and culture, or in general the ability to think, to
understand virtually any situation and to take appropriate action. We
mythologize these aspects of personhood by calling them supernatural and
spiritual, telling all manner of bizarre religious stories to explain our
uniqueness in the animal world. In doing so, we mistake the inwardness and
complexity of our primary adaptation with crass transcendence. We don’t wear
our brain on our sleeve and the brain’s internal workings are astronomically
complicated; moreover, thinking isn’t a thing,
like a body part that plays some obvious role as a weapon in a competition for
resources. Thus, we’re tempted to think that we’re not really animals at all,
that we don’t belong in the material world of physical and biological machines.
