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Thank you for the excellent coverage of "The forbidden question - What's wrong with reason?" (July 26)!
I would suggest that our culture has learned a lot from time time of Kant's quote (page 42), "Immaturity is the inability to use one's understanding without guidance from another." If culture is akin to a person, what that describes is perhaps an 18 year old young adult.
What we are sorely lacking is the vision of advancing past that to the equivalent of marriage or civilization. They say that a good marriage is one between two adults who are capable of living separately just fine, but who prefer to live together.
They have gone beyond the need for independence and have moved on to mastering interdependence -- what might also be called "unity with diversity." Neither one dominates and both benefit.
American language has no word for that, as "adult" or "mature" has been converted to mean "able to purchase cigarettes and pornography". Clearly this is not a subject of much discussion.
This is extraordinarily relevant, because it is not in the independent reasoning category that our civilization is breaking down, so much as in this re-linking step into a synthesized larger reasoning, perceiving, and acting unit -- a meta-person.
Our schools still teach the "Rambo" approach to great individuals, but across the board we see the start of realization that we need better group work, or team work, or collaboration, or cooperation, or unity, or something over in that general direction. We need something in which no one person (or corporation, or country, or concept) dominates everyone else to the extinction of the other.
It seems to me that many of the attributes of human beings which appear to be "bugs", so far as pure reason go, will turn out to be "features" that allow this meta-synthesis to take place and work. For this we need empathy, the capacity to be unconsciously moved by the others nearby to leave one's mind and hands free to work on the problem at hand while a subconscious unity is messing and mending whatever it is down there that we lack.
And, we need to be joyous about that activity, and welcome it -- both of which have no meaning at all in pure reason. Reason appears suited for computers that wish to network. Something larger is required for humans who wish to civilize each other.
It is not back to authority we seek, not an abandonment of maturity and reason, but going forward to the joyous interdependence that is the basis of civilized living, and true "maturity."
And, yes, this topic is in Chomsky's category of forbidden subjects in the US -- anything even remotely like extolling the virtues of it would be smeared as socialism or communism or terrorism or the smear of the day.
But we know it's right. We can feel that it's right. We are torn in education and teach both "Do your own work" and "Learn to work well with others." The breakdowns in our teams, families, companies, and societies are in this realm, not in "reason". Reason is the messages but reason does not build the communication lines - something else does that. We need them both.
The prestigious US Institute of Medicine, in Crossing the Quality Chasm, notes the critical role that teams play in health care. In fact, in all critical high-risk industries, it turns out that honest, open teamwork and "psychological safety" are required, not optional. Even the US Army leadership doctrine requires superiors to, gasp, listen to their subordinates and build relationships and trust and integrity and character, as being more important than technology to success in battle. (see links to the US Army Leadership Field Manual in http://newbricks.blogspot.com/
Again, if these are part of "reason" they are not very accessible or explicit. There is ample empirical evidence that these human traits are crucial to survival, success, and any plan for thriving instead of mutual annihilation amid fragmentation.
Please stop destroying those values in the quest for the goal you have for "reason."
1 comment:
For those who insist on purely academic and "scientific" examples, I'd suggest the model of connecting many legacy computer systems together in a company and trying to get that mess to work.
The "tinker toy" model of little balls (legacy systems) connected by little rods (messaging pathways) simply doesn't work, and breaks down pretty rapidly as you attempt to scale it up. Having each agent determine its own version of "truth" doesn't work.
However, having each one chip in to the discussion about accepting each fact does - in what is known as a "two-phase commit."
A true "distributed operating system" is one in which each agent gives up some level of control and self-determination in exchange for the entire thing working at all.
It's a model that works. It's a model close to the way cells relate in the human body, or neurons in the visual system.
It should be explored more as a model for civilized behavior.
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