Now rationalism’s really disturbing implications start to occur to us. Wouldn’t I love to believe that there is some hidden dimension in which the forms exist, perfect and eternal? Of course I would. Then I would know that I was “right.” Then I and a few simpatico acquaintances might agree among ourselves that we were the only people truly capable of perceiving the finer things in life or of recognizing which are the truly moral acts. Our training and natural gifts would have sensitized us to be able to detect the beautiful and the good. For us to persuade the ignorant masses would be only rational; considering their own incapacity to figure things out—it would be an act of mercy.

This view is not just theoretically possible. It was the view of some of the disciples of G.E. Moore almost a century ago and, even more blatantly, of some of the followers of Herbert Spencer a generation before that. (Accessible explanations of the views of Moore and Spencer can be found in Wikipedia articles online.^3,4)

              

                                                                      G.E. Moore

     

                                                                                  Herbert Spencer

I am being sarcastic about the sensitivity of Moore and Spencer’s followers, of course. Both my studies and my experience of the world tell me there are more than a few of these kinds of sensitive aristocrats roving around in today’s world, in every land (the neocons of the West?). We underestimate them at our peril. The worst among them don’t like democracy. They yearn to be in charge, they have the brains to secure positions of authority, and they have the capacity for lifelong fixation on a single goal. Further, they have the ability to rationalize their way into truly believing that harsh and duplicitous measures are sometimes needed to keep order among the ignorant masses—that is, everyone else.

My conclusion was that rationalism was far too often a close companion of totalitarianism. The reason did not become clear to me until my thirties, when I learned about cognitive dissonance and finally figured the puzzle out. I now see how inclined toward rationalization other people are and how easily, even insidiously, they give in to it. On what grounds can we tell ourselves that we are above this very human weakness? Should we tell ourselves that our minds are somehow more aesthetically and morally aware or more disciplined, and are therefore immune to such self-delusions? I am aware of no logical grounds for that kind of conclusion about myself or anyone else I have met or whose works I have read.

In addition, evidence revealing this capacity for rationalization in human minds—some of the most brilliant of human minds—litters history. How could Pierre Duhem, the brilliant French philosopher, have written off relativity theory just because a German proposed it? (In 1905, Einstein was considered and considered himself a German.) How could Martin Heidegger or Werner Heisenberg have endorsed the Nazis’ propaganda? The Führer principle; German science yet! Ezra Pound, arguably the best literary mind of his time, on Italian radio defending the Fascists. Decent people today recoil and even despair.

      

                                                              George Bernard Shaw

  

                                                                   Jean-Paul Sartre.

How could George Bernard Shaw or Jean-Paul Sartre have become apologists for Stalinism? So many geniuses and brilliant minds of the academic, scientific, and artistic realms fell into this trap that one wonders how they could have made such mistakes in their practical, everyday realm. Once we understand how cognitive dissonance reduction works, the answer is painfully obvious. Brilliant thinkers are just as brilliant at self-comforting thinking—namely, rationalizing—as they are at clear, critical thinking. And the most brilliant specious terms and fallacious arguments they construct—that is, the most convincing lies they tell—are the ones they tell themselves.

The most plausible, cautious, and responsible reasoning I can apply to myself leads me to conclude that the ability to reason skilfully in abstract, formal terms guarantees nothing in the realm of practical affairs. Brilliance with formal thinking systems has been just as quick to advocate for totalitarianism and tyranny as it has for pluralism and democracy. If we want to survive, we need to work out a moral code that counters at least the worst excesses of the human flaw called rationalization, especially the forms found in the most intelligent of humans.

Rationalism appears to be a regular precursor to intolerance. Rationalism in one stealthy form or another has too often been a dangerous and even pathological affliction of human minds. The whole design of democracy is intended to remedy, or at least attenuate, this flaw in human thinking. In a democracy, decisions for the whole community are arrived at by a process that combines the carefully sifted wisdom and experience of all, backed up by references to observable evidence and a process of deliberate, open, cooperative decision making. One of the main intentions of the democratic model is to handle secret groups. For example, in the subculture of democracy called science, no theory gets accepted until it has been tested repeatedly and the tests have been peer-reviewed.

While some of my argument against rationalism may not be familiar to all readers, its main conclusion is familiar to philosophy students. It is Hume’s conclusion. The famous empiricist stated long ago that merely verbal arguments that do not begin from material evidence but later claim to arrive at conclusions that may be applied in the material world should be “consigned to the flames.”⁵ Cognitive dissonance theory only gives modern credence to Hume’s famous conclusion.

Rationalism’s failures lead to the conclusion that its way of ignoring the material world, or trying to impose some preconceived model on it, doesn’t work. Rationalism cannot serve as a firm and reliable base for a full philosophical system; its method of progressing from idea to idea, without reference to physical evidence, is at least as likely to end in rationalization as it is in rationality. Finding a complete, life-regulating system of ideas—a moral philosophy—is far too important to our well-being to risk our lives on a beginning point that so much historical evidence says is deeply flawed. In order to build a universal moral code, we need to begin from a better base model of the human mind.

But a beginning based on sensory impressions of the material world, which is empiricism’s method, doesn’t work either. It can’t adequately describe the thing doing the beginning. Besides, if we lived by pure empiricism—that is, if we just gathered experiences—we would become transfixed by what was happening around us. At best, we would become collectors of sense data, recording and storing bits of experience, but with no idea of what to do with these memories, how to do it, or why we would even bother. We would have no larger model or vision to work under and therefore no strategies for avoiding the same catastrophes our ancestors had to learn, by trial and pain, to avoid.

So where are we now in our larger argument? Each of us must have a comprehensive system that gives coherence to all her or his ideas and so to the patterns of behaviour we design and implement by basing them on those ideas. But if both the big models of human thinking and knowing that traditional Western philosophy offers—namely, rationalism and empiricism—seem unreliable, then what model of human knowing can we begin from? The answer is complex enough to deserve a chapter of its own.

Notes

1. Elliot Aronson, The Social Animal (New York, NY: W.H. Freeman and Company: 1980), pp. 99–106.

2. Virginia Stark-Vance and Mary Louise Dubay, 100 Questions & Answers about Brain Tumors (Sudbury, MA: Jones and Bartlett Publishers, 2nd edition, 2011).

3. “G.E. Moore,” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Accessed April 5, 2015. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G.e._Moore.

4. “Herbert Spencer,” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Accessed April 6, 2015. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Spencer.

5. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, cited in Wikipedia article “Metaphysics.” Accessed April 6, 2015. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphysics#British_empiricism.