Something Thoughtful

Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

LIMITS OF REASON

There is a very old folk-tale which has often been passed off as historical fact, and has sometimes been attached to historical figures such as King Henri IV of France. But it is, in truth, a fiction.

A wretched man is hauled before the king. He is accused of stealing a loaf of bread. As the king has to pass judgement on the poor man, he asks him “Why did you steal the loaf?”

The poor man answers “Well, your majesty, I have to live.”

To which the king replies “I don’t see the need for that.”

The old tale often gets a laugh because of the king’s callous wit. Surely we all know that human life is valuable and the poor man wants to preserve his life, as we all do. The story is funny because the king hasn’t even considered such an obvious thing as the value of human life. Unless he is consciously joking, his judgement is based entirely on his own indifference. And after all, if you don’t begin with the premise that human life is valuable, you will be quite justified in making the same judgement as the king. What the king says would be perfectly reasonable.

I often think of this story when I hear people making lofty claims for reason alone as the arbiter of what is right and wrong.

Some years back, I reviewed for a national magazine a foolish little potboiler which purported to expose all sorts of bullshit (this was the author’s preferred word) – religious bullshit, political bullshit, academic bullshit, advertising bullshit etc. The author told us, sometimes with a simple and crude wit, anecdotes about the foolishness of all these things, and gave some convincing examples, because of course there is much bullshit in all these fields. But in the end, his collection of anecdotes seemed like the scrawlings of a cynical adolescent. He was enjoying an extended sneer.

And what was the author’s antidote for misleading bullshit?

Apparently, it was pure reason.

But here’s the problem. Reason is a method of thinking. But, in itself, it is not a value or virtue.

Reason - which includes the ability to judge things empirically, to size up the odds of success, and to make a judgement – can easily be harnessed to the most reprehensible of causes. The people who designed nuclear and chemical weapons were perfectly reasonable people. They were highly-qualified scientists and they were judging that these weapons were necessary. The people who devised Zyklon-B for death camps, who worked out the timetables for the cattle trucks that would take people to the death camps, who decided which people should be killed immediately and which should be worked to death – they too were reasonable people, using their reason to plan and execute all these things efficiently. The people who worked out how best to starve to death Ukranian peasants to make room for collective farms and build the great Soviet state, these too were reasonable people. It took so much planning, so much organization, so much use of reason to bring these things about.

Please let us not delude ourselves that all these people were self-evidently evil madmen. Certainly Hitler's cohorts contained many pseudo-scientists with cranky and untenable ideas about race. But among Hitler’s scientific advisers were Nobel Prize winners and internationally-esteemed chemists, biologists and physicists. Certainly people of great reason. That what they were doing caused millions of deaths was – as far as pure reason is concerned – beside the point.

In our language we have a verb which immediately signals that we know when reason alone is not sufficient. The verb is “to rationalise”. (There are equivalents to this word in other languages too.) When we say somebody is rationalising, we mean that person is genuinely using reason, but using it for corrupt, dishonest or self-interested purposes. “Why shouldn’t I shoplift? The company makes millions every year and they won’t miss what I take.”  “Of course I take things from the office. Everybody else does.” Etc. etc. etc. These are examples of true reason – empirical evidence is used and a clear conclusion is reached. If you don’t begin with the axiom that is it wrong to steal or embezzle, then they are perfectly reasonable statements. Pure reason, in fact.

Reasoning is only as good as its premises. The real arbiter of what is right or wrong, good or evil, ethical or unethical, is not reason itself, but the assumptions, premises and axioms that we have before we begin our reasoning. Where these assumptions, premises and axioms come from is matter for a much longer discussion than I’m prepared to write here. (Is morality the general consensus of society or does it come from God? If it is the consensus of society, can’t it easily be altered with enough public persuasion? If it is from God, which conception of God is being used? etc. etc.) But it remains true that an immoral or plain evil conclusion can be reached by the use of real reason, if the premises themselves are false.

None of this is written to denigrate the very necessary and important tool that reason is. I am not anti-reason. We need the reasoning of planners, doctors making diagnoses, engineers working out stress points, lawyers gathering evidence etc. etc.

But reason is only one of our necessary mental abilites. We also require imagination, faith (in the sense of holding certain axioms and premises to be necessary), sympathy for others, and an awareness of our own self-interest and how it can corrupt our thinking. Reason is a great help in judging the rightness of things – but only a help.

If I didn’t accept this fact, then I would agree with the fictional king’s judgement.

Footnote: This “Something Thoughtful” is a re-working of an argument that I have already made on this blog. But a good argument is worth repeating.