Why Fear Rationality?

[In my (edited) post of June 22 (2019) I ended wondering why people actually fear our rational capacity.]

I can think of many reasons not to fear rationality. Look at all the benefits it has given humanity, from fire for warmth and cooking, to the wheel, to running water, to electricity. Every material improvement human beings have ever experienced has been a gift of our rational capacity.

It is true that there have been some less positive contributions, as well. For instance, every weapon that has ever been used to hurt or kill another person has also been a result of our rational capacity.

On the other hand, many of those same weapons have been used to put food on the table. Moreover, the difference between being shot by an arrow or a bullet and being clubbed on the head with a big rock or a heavy chunk of wood is of little interest to the victim. Of all the reasons anyone might claim for fearing outcomes stemming from our rational capacity, I submit that only two are even arguably valid.

One of those is nuclear weapons. Though nuclear power has been used for good, nuclear weapons can produce destruction on such a scale that if enough of the nuclear weapons that currently exist were detonated in a single conflict no human being would survive (perhaps no multi-celled land-based form of life).

The other arguably valid justification for fearing what products of our rational capacity might end up doing to us is the impact that products of our rational capacity are having on the ecology of the planet. Threats to that ecology threaten first civilization, then human life itself.

Here we encounter a bit of the irony that seems to be a ubiquitous part of contemporary life: some who fear rationality the most are people who deny that reason for fearing it, who actually get angry at the mere mention of ‘global warming’ or ‘climate change’. Many of those people are religious. Many religious people see the rational capacity a sinister, almost alien force that is in inevitable conflict with God.

Yet, if one believes, as I sincerely do, that God created Homo sapiens, one must acknowledge that our rational capacity is something we received directly from God. All theologies, however, are products of human beings. People insist that they somehow know that the theology they accept is the product of God ‘speaking through’ human beings, but isn’t that putting one’s faith in certain human beings, not God?

The other group of people who fear ‘the rational’ the most is made up of postmodernists. That postmodernists and people who deny the reality of global warming/climate change would have such a big, important attitude in common indicates the edge of the cultural universe, where irony bends back upon itself. Even so, a claim that ‘the rational’ has become a kind of Frankenstien’s monster that humanity has unleashed upon itself is as definitive of the postmodern perspective as any notion can be said to be.

In my aforementioned Medium post I wrote something about a sense that our rational capacity is beyond our control. Here I am suggesting that certain products of our rational capacity have produced threats that are materially, mentally, and spiritually overwhelming. Their mere presence creates a sense of defeat. Those nuclear weapons in their silos and submarines and the vast, complex web of causes and effects that form the ecological threat are enough to make us feel like we have already lost the match.

My position is that any fix our rational capacity has gotten us into, it can resolve. There is no problem that human beings have created that we cannot solve — given enough time.

With a changing climate, time is of the essence. Yet, we know the solution: reduce the amount of greenhouse gases we are emitting into the atmosphere.

So, we know how to remove both of those most dire threats: we know how to disarm (dismantle) those weapons; we know how to stop global warming. If either detonating nuclear weapons or changing the climate ends up destroying civilization or humanity itself — or all life on Earth — it will not be the fault of our rational capacity. It will result from failing to accept what rationality tells us to do.