Psychoanalysis is an extremely taxing treatment and people who enter such treatment require significant cognitive abilities. It is not enough to have an excellent language facility and affect tolerance; it also requires the ability to tolerate ambiguity and to confront and tolerate one's own irrationality. Working in the field, the reality of our basic irrationality is hard to miss, though one often wishes to deny and avoid the recognition. I bring this up now because I think too many people misunderstand our ability to reason as being equivalent to being rational.
When Freud first began to promulgate his theory of the mind, the reaction of horror and fury was focused on his proposition that children are sexual beings and that their libidinal struggles and fixations, often reinforced by overt and/or covert abuse, continued to influence adult behavior and relationships. While most sophisticated people would agree that the existence in children of libidinal drives is no longer in dispute, there was always an underlying tenet to Freud's work that remains a source of tremendous anxiety and dispute. What so many found most threatening in his work was the idea that the rationality upon which our civilization rests is merely a thin veneer over deeper strata of our much more powerful irrationality. In fact, Neuroscience and Psychoanalysis are increasingly coming into agreement that our Conscious minds represent a tiny fraction of what transpires in our cognitive apparatus and further, that rational explanations for our behavior (so often fueled by unconscious motivations) most often represent post facto rationalizations rather than the careful, logical explications based on prior reasoned positions we imagine them to be. (In other words, we most often use our reason to justify our emotionally charged feelings rather than mobilize our emotions in the service of our reasoned thoughts; ie, feeling precedes reason, rather than the other way around.)
Pope Benedict's recent challenge to Islam must be understood as emerging from just such a recognition. Reason is not enough, since it can be so easily harnessed by the forces of unreason.
Lee Harris offers some historical perspective for the Pope's words in Socrates or Muhammad? Joseph Ratzinger on the destiny of reason:
Ratzinger is troubled that most educated people today appear to think that they know what they are talking about, even when they are talking about very difficult things, like reason and faith. Reason, they think, is modern reason. But, as Ratzinger notes, modern reason is a far more limited and narrow concept than the Greek notion of reason. The Greeks felt that they could reason about anything and everything--about the immortality of the soul, metempsychosis, the nature of God, the role of reason in the universe, and so on. Modern reason, from the time of Kant, has repudiated this kind of wild speculative reason. For modern reason, there is no point in even asking such questions, because there is no way of answering them scientifically. Modern reason, after Kant, became identified with what modern science does. Modern science uses mathematics and the empirical method to discover truths about which we can all be certain: Such truths are called scientific truths. It is the business of modern reason to severely limit its activity to the discovery of such truths, and to refrain from pure speculation.
Because people can reason, they believe they are rational, yet the message of science is that the irrational contaminates all thought, which is why science is conducted under such stringent rules. Harris adds:
Modern reason cannot hope to prove these postulates to be scientifically true; but it must recognize that a refusal to adopt and act on these postulates will threaten the very survival of modern reason itself. That is the point of Ratzinger's warning that "the West has long been endangered by [its] aversion to the questions which underlie its rationality, and can only suffer great harm thereby." Because it is ultimately a community of reasonable men that underlies the rationality of the West, modern reason is risking suicide by not squarely confronting the question: How did such a community of reasonable men come into being in the first place? By what miracle did men turn from brute force and decide to reason with one another?
Few Westerners doubt that the passions of our Islamist enemies are fueled by primitive emotions of envy and rage, derivatives of unreason. Yet the exaltation of reason by Western intellectuals, along with their fanciful belief that the primacy of their reasoning abilities render them free of irrationality, has brought us into great danger. Harris, again:
For example, the 19th-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer was an atheist; yet in his own critique of modern reason, he makes a remarkably shrewd point, which Ratzinger might well have made himself. Modern scientific reason says that the universe is governed by rules through and through; indeed, it is the aim of modern reason to disclose and reveal these laws through scientific inquiry. Yet, as Schopenhauer asks, where did this notion of a law-governed universe come from? No scientist can possibly argue that science has proven the universe to be rule-governed throughout all of space and all of time. As Kant argued in his Critique of Judgment, scientists must begin by assuming that nature is rational through and through: It is a necessary hypothesis for doing science at all. But where did this hypothesis, so vital to science, come from?
The answer, according to Schopenhauer, was that modern scientific reason derived its model of the universe from the Christian concept of God as a rational Creator who has intelligently designed every last detail of the universe ex nihilo. It was this Christian idea of God that permitted Europeans to believe that the universe was a rational cosmos. Because Europeans had been brought up to imagine the universe as the creation of a rational intelligence, they naturally came to expect to find evidence of this intelligence wherever they looked--and, strangely enough, they did.
The Post-Modernists who rule Academia have attacked religious faith as unreasoned; at the same time they have attacked certainty (and certainty is always brought into question in science and reason) without admitting their own certainties, which includes refuting the idea that there is a core reality, ie "a rational cosmos." Post-Modern Journalism has imbibed this arbitrariness and has taken on the job of defining reality as they see fit, within a quasi-Marxist template. Dr. Sanity describes this process:
In this postmodern world where perception trumps reality, the media have an important role to play, and they have been taking their job seriously. Their role is to make sure that reality does not factor into people's perception of that "higher truth" that they are attempting to get across.
Postmodern thought (... the best source for understanding the full implications of postmodernism , and which I highly recommend is Stephen Hicks' book) has a built-in defense for the BS it continually promulgates, since, when it is convenient for its adherents to archly reply that truth or reality are "relative" and one person's "truth" is not better than anyone else's, they do so--except, of course, the "truth" that they are promoting is always considered pure and absolute.
The idea that somehow the fourth estate have become immune to unreason, perhaps by virtue of their superior education in schools of journalism, leads them to a dangerous certainty which infects their work. The indefatigable Richard Landes shows how this works in his post Le Monde Tackles Fauxtography at Last: Surprised by the Results? Richard's post is a long one which lays out in painstaking detail some of the ways in which Journalists present their stories in such a way that the outcome is the polar opposite of their conscious intent.
So please, Brendan Anonymous, and all the other reporters and photographers who know better… how about some courage and honesty? How about some accountability not to your handlers who give you “access,” or your fellow journalists who circle the wagons around their professional reputations, but to your readers who depend on you? How about some small cracks in the omertà that has created your Augean Stables?
Then people might be able to assess for themselves who they hold responsible for the victimization of the Lebanese people, rather than you telling us. Then people might be able to defend against an emotional manipulaton by the Jihadis that plays on precisely those humane feelings that these Jihadis do not share (indeed they despise), in order to demonize Israelis, who do share those concerns for life and innocence.
That’s how blood libels work. They project the hatred of the libelers onto the libeled and hope to arouse violent hatred with the resulting tale. Why on earth would our modern MSM want to vehiculate such medieval cruelties? When will they awake from the slumber? CG?
How can it be that Journalists, who embody the perceptual apparatus of our Civilization, end up encouraging the kinds of irrationality that threaten to engulf all of us? By failing to understand how their world, the Western Civilization that nurtures and holds them, rests upon a core belief in "a rational cosmos" (the opposite of Post-Modern thought) the rather limited followers and adherents of such PC thinking facilitate their mis-use by the enemies of everything they hold dear. They ally themselves with those who deny all rationality and demand "submission." The paradox would be merely an intellectual challenge if it weren't so serious.
Victor David Hanson, with his long view of Modern Civilization, worries about our ability to maintain the will to fight:
One of the most disturbing facets of the current war is the sinking realization that we are not fully mobilized against Islamic fascism, that we underplay its dangers—even as we are damned for being Islamophobes.
The Pope incident is a prime example of how the world should be outraged that Muslims are issuing threats and promises of retribution against someone who in academese referred to age-old Islamic propensities for violence. Instead, Europe scrambled to apologize.
What to do about such a syndrome? We saw it in the 1930s when Europe tried to appease Hitler when it should have been building far more tanks. It is indeed an entirely human phenomenon that when we confront a reality too awful to contemplate—that a large part of the world hates Western liberality for what it is rather than anything it has done, and has the wealth and thus soon the means to act on that venom—we construct mental escapes of denial, appeasement, and obsequiousness, turning on each other for insensitivity rather than on the perpetrators for their hate.
Let us hope that there is not another 9/11 which would shatter such a glass edifice rather quickly, but instead pray that the public can be educated about the danger and the unique exceptionalism of its culture of the West, which after all, is really humankind’s last and only hope.
Those who attack people like Hanson as unduly pessimistic are placing their faith in reason without realizing that once divorced from rationality, from a core belief in "a rational cosmos", reason becomes a tool of the enemy.
Just as our Rationality is fragile, so, too, our Civilization is much more fragile than our internal enemies believe.
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