On the one hand, it refers to masses of men and women who are not yet adapted to the cultural skill of rational inquiry. It also refers to a smaller class of individuals who "believe" in the power of irrationality. These two categories blend, and reinforce each other.
The first group is growing. As the world's population skyrockets, so do the numbers of people in the least educated, least cultured places. Add to this a host of new communication tools which incline the pre-rational masses to a habit of exchanging and consolidating ignorant opinions. There is no sin in this -- only simplicity. These people are key unconscious actors of History. Perhaps we can reduce them as a percentage of the total human population but we will also need to account for them and not to deride them for their subtle primitivism. Their impulses may be useful and must be managed in a manner that renders them largely harmonious and generally beneficial. Some ancient rituals were used for this purpose. When mass irrationality has no constructive role in society -- it can then have only a destructive and corrosive role.
The faux-rational are a more interesting problem.
These people learn the "form" of facts & arguments but maintain an inner cynical distance toward these tools -- in effect, refusing the sting of reasoning. Prior emotional and social commitments are maintained, protected. They exhibit a perverse pleasure, or vanity, associated with the sense of "beating the system." Those who take reason and progressive ideals seriously are assumed to be "dupes" or to have broken instincts. There is also present in these individuals a physiological resistance to that peculiar emotional friction which is involved in the contact between old opinions and new data, between old commitments and sincere pondering.
There is an element of this in all of us.
Any effort to create a "bulwark of progressive social rationalism" must be reinforced by the proliferation of additional supportive tools. There must be therapeutic treatment modalities which attempt to purge the inner obstacles that resist the results of data & reasoning. This is especially critical since the defeat of many progressive political agendas may be directly attribute to the subliminal conservative sympathies within the bodies of progressive thinkers.
There must be a common call for serious independent pondering and experimentation. There is no final attainment of Reason but rather an attitude of perpetual progress toward greater impartial clarity. In order to proselytize this attitude, progressives must embody it. It must be lived and expounded with the seriousness of a moral duty. Such an attitude was associated in certain times and places in History with a culture that accords socio-political honor to those who are perceived as having the "deepest, most comprehensive understanding."
Social actors, as my colleague has written, must cultivate the courage to disregard the irrational -- but not the extent that the irrational is left unchecked to organize itself against the society of more coherent thinkers. They must not be excluded but rather taught a habit of evaluating themselves more appropriately. Society does not flourish unless those who are not wise know that they are not wise. And this knowledge must be experienced with natural shame rather than public opprobrium.
There is an element of this in all of us.
Any effort to create a "bulwark of progressive social rationalism" must be reinforced by the proliferation of additional supportive tools. There must be therapeutic treatment modalities which attempt to purge the inner obstacles that resist the results of data & reasoning. This is especially critical since the defeat of many progressive political agendas may be directly attribute to the subliminal conservative sympathies within the bodies of progressive thinkers.
There must be a common call for serious independent pondering and experimentation. There is no final attainment of Reason but rather an attitude of perpetual progress toward greater impartial clarity. In order to proselytize this attitude, progressives must embody it. It must be lived and expounded with the seriousness of a moral duty. Such an attitude was associated in certain times and places in History with a culture that accords socio-political honor to those who are perceived as having the "deepest, most comprehensive understanding."
Social actors, as my colleague has written, must cultivate the courage to disregard the irrational -- but not the extent that the irrational is left unchecked to organize itself against the society of more coherent thinkers. They must not be excluded but rather taught a habit of evaluating themselves more appropriately. Society does not flourish unless those who are not wise know that they are not wise. And this knowledge must be experienced with natural shame rather than public opprobrium.
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