270 Rationality unravelling

In this blog, I have been criticising the dreams of reason from the Enlightenment. But present culture appears to go around the bend to replace rationality with intellectual rubbish. We cannot go back to the Enlightenment, but a renaissance of reasonableness is needed. In the preceding item of this blog I argued that philosophical and scientific claims of firm, fixed, indubitable foundations are themselves unfounded. But more modest claims of knowledge as the best we can do at any moment, in ‘imperfection on the move’, are still warranted.

While reason was overrated, emotions and play have been neglected in traditional education. There was too little art, expression and personal development: features that were included in the ideal of ‘Bildung’ proposed by Wilhelm von Humboldt. But now knowledge, analytical skill and depth of understanding appear to be crowded out by feelings, emotions and a craving for excitement and hype.

Opinions are given equal standing as arguments, hunches are presented as facts, invective replaces debate. Public debate becomes uninformed, not only from a dominance of emotion and excitement, but also for lack of capacity to absorb requisite information and insight.

This was evident, in particular, in the recent upheaval of Brexit. Voters were lured by partial truths, at best, and with outright lies. They were diverted with appeals to sentiments of resentment, nostalgia, nationalism and xenophobia.

This is a political, economic, and intellectual disaster.

On Twitter, invective, unsubstantiated accusations, bogus facts, contradictions, and lies are presented on equal footing with facts and logic. Informed arguments are made suspicious as fabulation by ‘the elite’ to protect their privileges. This sets the gate wide open to political opportunists and narcissists to grab power. 

The tragedy is that beneath all this lie justified complaints and grudges concerning lack of democracy and lesser involvement of the lower educated, less prosperous citizens in prosperity and policy.

In a recent article in a Dutch quality newspaper (NRC Handelsblad) the question was put: how to respond to the sloshing waves of twitter garbage in the approach of the upcoming parliamentary election, in 2017. Continuation with informed and well-reasoned argument is discouraged as having an adverse effect, deepening sentiments against the elite, as it did in Brexit.

In the article, the recommendation was given to counter in the same fashion, going along with the tide, with ridicule, accusations and invective against the populists. But this will yield a vicious circle of unravelling rationality and reasonableness. Going along with the barking on twitter (see item 219) will turn politics into a dogfight.