The Trouble With Rationalism
Because of the awkwardness of the topic, the female genitals were one of the last areas of anatomy to get serious scientific attention. This ignorance led to both hilarity and tragedy. To the former belongs the case of Mary Toft of Godalming, who in 1726 convinced the English medical establishment that she had given birth to live rabbits.[i] Many esteemed doctors, including two from the royal household, had even observed the births themselves. Turns out a surprising number of baby rabbits can be shoved into a vagina.
As late as 1878 the British Medical Journal published a series of letters discussing whether a menstruating woman’s touch could spoil ham. Around the same time, a doctor lost his practice because he wrote that a change in color around the vagina suggested pregnancy. This is true, but he was not supposed to know it. In America, a gynecologist was fired for letting his students watch a (consenting) woman give birth.[ii]
Note that the problem was not a shortage of theories. The learned men were happy to discuss these matters and explain all of womankind’s problems. In other words, they were rationalists rather than empiricists, and refused to risk their precious theories in honorable combat with reality. That these men were intelligent (yes) and well-meaning (also yes) did not allow science to progress. Thinking was not enough.
The value of practical testing, even at its worst, is well illustrated by the case of nineteenth century doctor Isaac Baker Brown. This good doctor became convinced that many ailments in women, such as insanity, epilepsy, catalepsy, hysteria, and insomnia, were all caused by masturbation. The solution? Remove the clitoris. He did not always bother to ask before doing this. Perhaps because the women always said “no.” But Brown was an expert, so why should he bother about the opinions of regular people? That would be irrational.
Anyway, Brown had similar ideas about ovaries. But removing ovaries was dangerous, so the good doctor now became a surgical pioneer. Unfortunately, his first patient died. And so did his second. And so did his third. But Brown was no quitter, and he recruited his sister as his fourth patient. She lived.
When Isaac Baker Brown’s activities came to light in 1867, the conservatism of the medical community served it well. It also brought the realization that maybe female reproductive health should be studied more thoroughly, slowly bringing it into the modern age.[iii] Thus, while Isaac Baker Brown’s rationalism killed and mutilated many women, his empiricism saved thousands more. He really did succeed in advancing science, though not in the way he had planned.
This shows how far we humans can go in our respect for thought over practice. Nineteenth-century British physicians are not the only ones who do this. It isn’t difficult to find examples of genuinely smart and educated people who live their entire lives with the strangest and most harmful ideas. There has never been a political, ideological, or religious movement that has not had a cadre of intellectuals supporting it. This is related to rationalism. That is, excessive faith in reason and our ability to think our way to solutions.
A common explanation for the rise of the West emphasizes an eighteenth-century intellectual movement known as the “Enlightenment.” Allegedly, it was then that people realized it was better to be rational than irrational, better to be smart rather than stupid. Reason was key. Steven Pinker presents it thus:
“Foremost is reason. Reason is nonnegotiable. […] If there’s anything the Enlightenment thinkers had in common, it was an insistence that we [ought to] energetically apply the standard of reason to understanding our world and not fall back on generators of delusion like faith, dogma, revelation, authority, charisma, mysticism, divination, visions, gut feelings, or the hermeneutic parsing of sacred texts.”[iv]
A serious problem for those who argue for the importance of rationalism to the rise of the West and the growth of technology is that rationalism has existed for a long time. Yet our present prosperity and tech is much younger.
An intellectual class priding itself on superior intelligence and rationality has existed in virtually all civilizations, and has often ruled them. Consider the scribes of Egypt, the brahmins of India, the mandarins of China, and the nomenklatura of communist states. Plato wrote of the “philosopher king” and the “guardians” who would rule his idealized state. Even in Europe the intellectuals were at their most powerful in the medieval era, when brilliant theologians wielded great influence. Faith in rationality is so obvious an idea that it has cropped up many times in history.
Thus, rationalism is nothing new. But that it is not new does not preclude that its importance has increased. Rationality may not be new, but there may be more of it around. Mightn’t we simply be more rational than we were in the past?
There is no evidence for this. We can tell this from what we know of other civilizations across the globe. Since the great technological awakening first occurred in the West, it is natural to think that if that awakening was caused by increased rationality, then Westerners would be more rational than other people. But is that the case?
Well, we certainly know more than the people of the past did. More successful countries have higher levels of education. But that appears to be an effect of prosperity rather than a cause. Prosperity causes education, rather than education causing prosperity.[v] Prosperity rises before education, and there is no shortage of poor Eastern European, Middle Eastern, and African countries with quite high levels of education. But either way: education is not the same as rationality.
It is important not to confuse knowledge with rationality. Rationality is a way of thinking, of handling information, of processing it. Rationality may help us solve a problem, but information or knowledge just means knowing the answer. Or at least possessing more pieces of the puzzle. According to its supporters, rationalism leads to knowledge, but isn’t identical with it. Thus, if we want to explain the rise of the West with increasing rationality, examples where Westerners get more knowledge won’t do. At least not unless we can prove that rationality brought us this knowledge.
A problem for the rationalist ideal is that it doesn’t make anyone more rational. Or at least not saner. Curiously, rationalists have often been mystics. Consider, for instance, the many Greek and Gnostic sects who literally worshipped reason as “logos.” Even without mysticism, few would like to live in Plato’s ideal republic, with its strict hierarchy, eugenics, lack of privacy, intentional poverty, and ban on music. In fact, rationalism has often been associated with violence as one group condemns another as “irrational” and “superstitious,” and takes it upon themselves to correct them. Or erase them.
It is easy to combine respect for reason with madness, as revolutionary movements have shown again and again. The most clear-cut case may be the French revolution. In 1793, Christianity was banned, and a new state religion, the “Cult of Reason,” was instituted. This was a politically designed religion with icons, rituals, holidays, and martyrs.[vi] By government fiat it held sway for about a year until it was replaced with by the “Cult of the Supreme Being.” A few years later, Napoleon banned both cults. The ideal of rationalism doesn’t make us more rational, any more than an ideal of “healthism” would make us healthier, “strongism” stronger, or “smartism” smarter.
Arguably, these are not “real” examples of rationalism, since they were not rational in practice. But that is the entire point–praise for the theory of rationality need not be combined with the practice of rationality. We do not get rid of human frailty through ideology. But rationalists see rationalism as an ideology, which we can consciously choose to adapt.
Rationalism is often presented as a key component of scientific and technological progress. A problem for this is the unevenness of that progress. Perhaps the most important division in academia lies between “STEM” (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) on the one hand, and the social sciences and humanities on the other. The former are more rigorous and therefore receive more respect.
But why do the natural sciences have this rigor? The standard explanation is that certain methods are more accessible there than in the social sciences and the humanities. Chiefly experimentation. It is easier to run experiments on atoms than on societies.
I believe this to be correct. The natural sciences have advanced much more than the social sciences. This is not because natural scientists are smarter, but because they are active in a field where testing through experimentation is possible. This is empiricism, the investigation of the world through observation, through trial and error. Thus, the distinction between the successful natural sciences and the unsuccessful social sciences is the distinction between where we can test our theories and where we cannot.
How is this connected with rationalism? That’s the thing. It isn’t. There should be no reason rationalism couldn’t influence both the natural and the social sciences. And so it has. Indeed, the social sciences have more rationalist influence than the natural sciences, since they are more political, less specialized, more philosophically inclined, and more enthusiastic about “grand explanations” such as Freudianism, Marxism, and Postmodernism. These ideas are based on argument and thinking, but cut off from facts, experimentation, and observation. The vagueness of the social sciences allows such things to flourish. Those who can’t do, they spend their time arguing about how it ought to be done. Those who can do, get doing. Both Freudianism and Marxism are rationalist philosophies. Postmodernism is explicitly anti-rationalistic, though corrupt reason remains its primary tool.
The natural sciences have some downright anti-rationalistic strains. For instance, the two grand theories of modern physics are the Theory of Relativity and Quantum mechanics. But these contradict each other in important respects. A strict rationalist would never accept this, but physicists have dealt with it in a very “zen” manner, by not dealing with it at all. Other similar examples are Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, where we can know the path a particle moves along, and we can know where the particle is on that path, but where we can never know both at the same time,[vii] and Schrödinger’s famous cat that is both alive and dead at the same time.[viii] Nobody understands modern physics–it is just in agreement with experimental data and mathematics. Very irrational. Or rather, very arational.
Thus, the problem for the idea of progress from rationalism is this: if rationalism brings science forward, why haven’t the social sciences advanced as much as the natural sciences? Especially since the social sciences are at least as rationalistic as the natural sciences. The answer is that it is not rationalism that pushes science forward.
Humans all over the world handle information fairly similarly. Naturally, some will be better at it than others. Trained mathematicians handle mathematics better than non-mathematicians, and blacksmiths are better are better at blacksmithing than non-blacksmiths. Rationalism contradicts this, since it claims that “non-rational” people wouldn’t use all their options. They would be missing many opportunities for not thinking properly. And this is quite unlikely–people are pretty good at finding whatever advantages there are. And someone only needs to find it once, and there will soon be imitators.
People hold many silly ideas. And sometimes those people are us. And sometimes those silly ideas are true. Scientists hold some of the strangest: that we are standing on a sphere shooting around the sun at 107,000 kilometers per hour, that our ancestors were apes, and that if you travel really quickly time slows down. We who hold such ideas do so because people we trust (scientists, friends, teachers, journalists, priests) have told us so, rather than because we ourselves have checked. In today’s world, most of what we know comes from what we have read and heard rather than what we ourselves have seen. We don’t do this because we are irrational, but because the option would be paranoid skepticism.
The same is true the world over, as anthropologists like to emphasize. The mistakes that foreign tribes and cultures make (and that we ourselves unknowingly do) are not caused by stupidity or a lack of rationalism, but by circumstance. Based on a collection of all information available, it may become rational to, for example, believe in witches. If everyone around you is afraid of witches, there is plenty of testimony to that effect. It is wrong, but also rational. We can be rational and wrong at the same time. In fact, most erroneous beliefs belong in that category.
Rationalism even has certain harmful side effects. Rationalists tend to have great contempt for the rationality of others. This is because rationalists must explain why people disagree with them. Rationalists like to believe that their arguments are perfectly solid, since by the creed of rationalism they wouldn’t be allowed to believe what they do if that wasn’t the case. That means that only fools would disagree. But the opinions of fools need not be respected. Force can therefore replace argument. Edmund Burke, writing of the French Revolution put it well:
“They have no respect for the wisdom of others; but they pay it off by a very full measure of confidence in their own.”[ix]
He also opposed it to a more collective form of reason:
“We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason; because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages.”[x]
Rationalism has the unfortunate tendency of concentrating decision-making. After all, not everyone possesses very impressive stores of knowledge and rationality. Most rationalists, when pressed, actually admit that they themselves do not know how to deal with political and economic problems, though they remain convinced that there are others who do. Rationality, as commonly understood, is something that can only exist within an individual head. Thus, rationalists reasons, power must be taken away from the masses and given to the few with understanding. Rationalism justifies moving power away from ordinary people. This leads to rule by bureaucrats, experts, and elites. The rationalist faith decreases the fear that these experts will be misled by bias, ignorance, and selfishness.
The core rationalist belief is that we can solve our problems by thinking better. But that requires the world to treat us fairly. For that reason rationalists often assume a simple world, like a school assignment or mechanical clock. If the world is like that, there is no reason an expert shouldn’t be able to fix social problems in the same way they can fix simpler problems, such as a broken car or busted plumbing. The problem is that societies are too complex. Hence the importance of arational processes such as markets, laws, democracy, that does not require thinking at all.
That we should solve our problems through reason seems so reasonable that it is a wonder why not everybody believes so. The thing is, when something seems obvious but isn’t accepted, it is usually a good idea to wonder why. Rationalists have failed to do this. People all over the world and throughout history have done their best to solve their problems, using whatever clues available to them. In other words, they have tried to be as clever as they can. The limit of their rationality has not been a mode of thought, but that they are human. And that has not changed between history or societies. It is ironic but also very human that an ideal that prides itself on clear thought is so vague and thoughtless as rationalism.
[i] Bill Bryson. At Home: A Short History of Private Life. Doubleday. (2010). Chapter 15, page 353–4.
[ii] Ibid. Page 354.
[iii] Ibid. Page 354–5.
[iv] Steven Pinker. Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. Viking. (2018). Chapter 1, page 8.
[v] Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder. Penguin Books. (2013)[2012]. Chapter 14, page 202–4.
[vi] Niall Ferguson. Civilization: The West and the Rest. Penguin books. (2012)[2011]. Chapter 4, page 153.
[vii] Bill Bryson. A Short History of Nearly Everything. Black Swan. (2016)[2003]. Chapter 9, page 188.
[viii] Ibid. Page 190.
[ix] Edmund Burke. Reflections on the Revolution in France. Yale University Press. (2003)[1790]. Page 75.
[x] Ibid. Page 119.
