The current emphasis on rationality in our public life and the denigration of religious belief of our elites rests on a misunderstanding of rationality and its role in our civilization. That is a rather bold statement which flies in the face of current liberal orthodoxy and might also be considered unusual form someone who works at the interface of reason (rationality) and irrationality.
It is a safe bet that most members of the intellectual elites in Academia, the MSM, and Politics, among others, would argue that our civilization is based on the ascendancy of reason. We have used our rational faculties to tame the irrationality that resides at the core of our minds. There may be lip service offered to the idea that at one time religion was useful in taming man's irrational inner beast, but most "sophisticates" would argue that religion has out lived its usefulness. This argument can be seen frequently expressed as there being no difference between Christina fundamentalists and Islamic fundamentalists (with occasional references to Jewish fundamentals for trifold symmetry.) This misunderstands Pope Benedict's message.
Daniel Johnson in the Sun writes, in Understanding Benedict:
But the message was, at heart, a straightforward one. The Jewish or Christian God acts in accordance with reason: In the beginning was the Word, the Logos. Benedict emphasizes that this new, logocentric understanding of God is already present in the Hebrew Bible, long before the fusion of Jerusalem and Athens in the New Testament. Our knowledge of God — the God of Israel or the God of Christianity — emerges in the unfolding of the encounter between faith and reason.
As I have written before, civilization depends on binding and controlling the instinctual energies (both aggressive and libidinal) which arise from our irrational, animal, minds. Without such binding, we are left with the brutal Hobbesian world of pre-history. What should have been learned from the 20th Century's blood spattered pages, is that reason alone is insufficient to bind our passions.
The Nazis were famous for their use of "reason" to justify the greatest horrors. The Communists despised and feared religious belief because they knew that their rationalizations (disguised as theory) were rarely adequate to control men (scientific socialism, indeed). Both horrors, derivatives of "Utopian reason", (the oxymoronic quality often overlooked) never recognized that because they denied the irrational, they fully expressed the irrational, though clothed in the language of reason.
Pope Benedict's remarks, an invitation to reasoned discourse with Islam, very much involved the Christian struggle to bring faith and reason into a synthesis. Without faith, irrationality will find its expression through the most intellectualized and rationalized avenues. Yet faith devoid of rationality can be an even more effective avenue for the expression of the irrational. The history of the Church and the persecution of infidels throughout history has not been denied by Pope Benedict but used as an illustrative model for bringing rationality and faith into accord.
There is certainly nothing rational in the current outbreak of indignant rage from much of the Muslim world (though there may well be leaders who rationally attempt to harness such rage for their own purposes). Our current problems with Islam stem, in part, from the use of Islam to justify and facilitate the irrational that lies at the heart of all men.
[The Anchoress has an excellent round-up of links related to this story.]
Sigmund Freud was one of the intellectual giants of the modern era. His core insight, that our unconscious minds contain structures which follow their own rules and can be explored and understood, has vastly enhanced man's ability to understand himself. Yet his antipathy to religion, because of its intimate connection with the non-rational, allowed him to convince himself that reason (rationality) alone could be sufficient to bind the instinctual forces within our minds. Even as Freud recognized that his patients were fully capable of using rationality in the service of the irrational, he fell victim to the same hubris.
Melanie Klein, a brilliant English Psychoanalyst, believed that all of us have a "psychotic core." Our rational minds, that thin veneer of reason that floats atop our passions, are all too easily disrupted. Even the most secular should be able to recognize that our ancestors bequeathed us two precious gifts, religious belief in a just and transcendent Deity and our rational minds, to use to control our passions. Either alone can be too easily turned toward the service of the irrational (evil) and it requires both aspects working in concert to bring out the best in us; only through the synthesis will we be able to find wisdom
Pope Benedict has offered an invitation to the Muslim religious world, just as George Bush has offered an invitation to the Muslim secular world. If they accept the invitations, the world of Islam will be welcomed to the modern world by a grateful and relieved world. Only they can decide if they wish to continue to surrender to the irrational within Islam
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