Rationality is for suckers

At Redeemer, students are forced to take a number of core classes, such as history, philosophy, political science, psychology etc..

One recurrent theme in the liberal arts is reason and rationality. It seems as though since the greeks, every single movement in every single discipline has been to further the cause of reason and rationality. Think about it: The enlightenment. Causality. Democracy. Realism. Plato. Apologetics. The scientific revolution. Darwinism. Building a more reasonable and rational world is the cornerstone of western thought, at least as far as I can tell. Those two r's are basically the building blocks of the last 3000 years of thought and action.

I'm not much of a philosopher, but I think we're about as rational as we'll ever get. Seriously. After well over 3000 years of reason and rationalism being promoted by the leading thinkers of the last three millenniums, I think it's fair to say that the concept has either run it's course or escaped us. There's been absolutely no shortage of time to let it sink in or to let it define our society. Either it doesn't work, or we just don't get it.

Of all the philosophical concepts, reason has probably been around the longest. Academia is founded on it. Compared to other philosophical and political movements, it's the elder statesman. Communism is, comparably, fairly new, and save a few holdouts, has run it's course. The Soviet juggernaut collapsed less than 20 years ago and just over 200 years after Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto. As a form of government, it only had roughly a century in practice, and assuming Cuba and China go democratic in the next decade, exactly a century. I'm not holding out hope for either, but communism is generally speaking considered a failed concept at this point.

So why can't we let reason go? Even if we assume the french revolution to be the start of reason in society, it's fairly obvious that it's been less successful than Marxism in terms of cultural adoption. Don't believe me? Take a look at cultural trends. We clearly don't care for reason, otherwise we wouldn't be living in a world where people put profit before humanity. In a truly reasoned and rational world, Canada wouldn't be the kind of place where you can walk into Toronto and see someone living on the streets and someone who pays six figures for an apartment standing next to each other. There's nothing reasonable about people who appear on TV shows where they compete for the affections of a man with the intellect of a bag of hammers for millions to see.

The way I see it, we've given reason a shot, and we've decided we don't care for it. Simple as that. We've heard about it all our lives, and we've chosen another way to live. Deal with it. I, for one, embrace it. I'm certainly not a reasonable person. I act on emotion. I act on impluse. I go with my gut. I have faith in things unseen. And I'm in the majority, even outside religious folk.

So give it a rest. Reason has had it's chance time and time again, and we simply don't care. This is as good as it's going to get, so we may as well just sit back and embrace it.