h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Based upon this article can we agree that humans are rarely rational if at all. So let's give up the camoflage of rationality and face the music. None of us are essentially rational, we can pretend to be rational, we can try real hard to be rational and maybe sometimes we are, but that belies the overwhelming evidence that most of the time we are not.

That being said, is the environmental movement a rational movement, based upon our previous paragraph NO. Given the aforementioned assessment what does that mean for our expectations of others behavior? Enough said? Let's just forgive them and go onwith our lives.

Er, no. Just because humans aren't rational doesn't mean that we shouldn't strive to be rational. We aren't altruistic by nature, but we should certainly strive to be so. You wouldn't *really* want to live in a society ruled by the laws of the jungle, would you?

Maybe you haven't yet figured it out yet, "We do" any other response would be such a romantic drivel. Remember Darwin?

Of course there is the occasional island of rationality, but they are rare and almost non-existant amongst the bureaucratic minions, whose main focus on life is remaining in the service until retirement.

As a university student I have seen every rationale for thinking that people in general are logical, positive and good. I'm a history student and I know in the past there have been eras when almost everyone is insane. (not everyone but most people.)

Rationality is not as good as its billed anyway. A person may know all the right reasons why something must be done yet choose another thing anyway. This is not rational is it?

That is why you get those people at your door trying to sell you something that is so idiotic (as you describe it)hopping you'll be like those other irrational people who fall for their tricks.

You, on the other hand seem to be a rare person who exhibits the symptoms of a rational person.
Let go, enjoy, dont waste so much energy attempting the near impossible, it will all fall away when you least expect it and what will you do then. After you prove to yourself that you really arent rational. Guilt, recriminations and promises to never do it again?

Join the rest of the human race and give up, surrender, the life you give up will only be wasted repeatedly and most embarrasingly at the worst possible times.

On the other hand if you join the irrational hoard, you will have no embarrassment, you can just say I'm that way anyway so get over it. Which is what is meant by the messages we give out just in more flowery words with lots of letters to hide the fact that we cannot explain why we did what we just did.

And oh those of us who fall in love. Talk about irrational (fun, good, even great but irrational.) If you can explain why a person falls in love with another person then it isn't love. Our inner most essential selves live in a world of experiences that cannot be explained with words (deeply irrational).

Maybe your messages about rationality need to be modified. Being irrational is not insane (although it could be) it just means that it doesn't necessarily follow logical reasoning.

So enough already OK

Further conversations welcome

No, thanks, I think I'll stay rational. The outcomes of rational decisions, based on evidence, generally are far better than those which are not. Besides, I get pissed off with *irrational* people trying to impose *their* world view on me and other like me who disagree with them. I think, for instance, that certain GM crops could be nothing but beneficial to the environment and agriculture. I don't want to see a blanket ban based on prejudice and ignorance, rather a case-by-case assessment of benefit and risk. However, irrationality seems to have won the day in this case.
Back in the 1600's, the Dutch protestants were instrumental in bringing in the Age of Reason, abolishing superstition and the 'demon haunted world'. Those who have sought to undermine that perspective invariably do so for their own ends, as the process of coming to rational conclusions based on evidence often contradicts their own world view. I think it was Hitler who once stated that the Age of Reason was now officially over. 'Nuff said.

Those Dutch reformers created new superstitions that even today we fight against. Which doesn't mean that their reforms weren't valuable.

Any belief in God is an irrational thing also. This is such a profoundly important issue. All of western civilization which prides itself on such a thing is falsely consummed with worshipping the rational. As far back as the enlightenment faith has been the key ingredient to religious life and that is not rational either. It is effective, it is good, but it is not logical. We need to separate the idea of rationality from the idea of good and bad.

I'll get back to you later if you are still willing
Got to go now. My Latin class is starting.

I think that this quote sums it all up beautifully:

"So long as authority inspires awe, confusion and absurdity enhance conservative tendencies in society. Firstly, because clear and logical thinking leads to a cumulation of knowledge (of which the progress of the natural sciences provides the best example) and the advance of knowledge sooner or later undermines the traditional order. Confused thinking, on the other hand, leads nowhere in particular and can be indulged indefinitely without producing any impact upon the world."

--Stanislav Andreski, Social Sciences as Sorcery

Rationality is good because it is a foundation of an Open Society
Irrationality is bad because it helps the above cause not one jot.

The ideal of rational thought came during the victorian age. Duty honor and clear thinking attempted a coup of human life. Even during that age of clear thinking, the majority of humans had to deal with an undercurrent of unacknowledged sexual irrationality, that affected them adversely.

What you seem to confuse is the idea of irrationality with being confused, they are not the same. The most clear headed individual when under the influence of love will report their thinking as being clearer than at any other time, they see things differently and sense the world differently.

Likewise Christian faith is not a rational thing. We believe inspite of the irrationality, if there was proof of the existence of God then life would be far different than it is. It is the lack of knowing that empowers the belief. The power of God is not in the human organization called the church (any church) but lies in the faith one has in the source of all creation.

Back in the garden Adam and Eve's sin was failing to trust God and attempting to know the world as God knows the world (and by implication to be God). No amount of knowledge will give us the staus of being God, ever. However many of us have pretended, made the claim and then failed.

Yes of course some people have used the power of the irrational to conquer nations. Our vulnerability to it is because we choose to deny it, we should embrace it instead.

When Copernicus wrote his thesis about the planets traveling around the sun in circles he was right in one case but wrong in another. The planets travel in elipses instead. Circles are elipses with both foci in the same point. Likewise rationality is a special case within the irrational, our minds are able to focus into frames of rationality for a certain time, but inevitably they will return to the undifferentiated irrationality they are embued with.

In a sense your rationality arguments are like Ptolemy inventing epicycles to explain the retrograde motion of the outer planets, they seem to work but in reality it is much simpler.

"What luck for the rulers that men do not think."

Ourt friend, A. Hitler, again.

This "A. Hitler" was a rationalist and he lost. His "superior" Aryan race was never going to last.

You continue to mix up the idea of irrationality with hate, or confusion or just plain idiocy, all of which can and does use the rational part of the brain to justify anything. What I am getting at is far more essential to the human experience, even than language itself.

Our selves, who we are as a living breathing entity, try and explain that to another person, you cant, there are no words that can express the ideas you either know or you dont. Most of our scientific knowledge is trivial to such momumentally important knowledge, just knowing who you are will change the world. So few of us humans actually have that knowledge.

Our use of language is an example. Does language affect how we see the world? and if language is not the controlling force then who is behind the language?

n' cest pas

I don't want to go off into the realms of how language shapes thought, as we are then in danger of getting mired in Wittgenstein and his anti-scientific philosophising, and very few people (not including me) understand what he was getting at. What I *would* say is that I don't want to deny the role of the irrational in human life: love is a wonderful thing, for example. However, it's not a basis for a political movement, let alone a blueprint for organising society. In my polemic I describe what I perceive as the drift of the Green movement from a wholly commendably rational basis to one based on irrationality. Politics affects people's lives fundamentally, and we should *not* be other than rational when messing around with society. For instaance, the legalisation of homosexuality, a move which I totally support, was a rational act opposed by irrational people. Clause 28, on the other hand, was a spiteful piece of meat thrown to the wolves in the Tory party.

I'm quite a fan of Karl Popper and his Open Society, which is based *totally* on rationality and being amenable to having one's views changed when out-argued. This is not to say that one should not have one's views of one's own and try to convince others of their rectitude. However, whereas it is everyone's right to hold an opinion, it also is their obligation to change that opinion when the evidence against it becomes overwhelming. This principle is invariably honoured more in the breach than in the observance, and the irrational nearly always has a role to play there.

OK It's obvious that I cannot convince you my point (not that I agree with you) so your entitled to your opinion. Winning is not really most important anyway, the discusion was the point.

Being American I do not know what the clause 28 is, but there is no reason either rational or irrational not to be respectful to people whenever it is possible.

Ultimately for a person to be an integrated whole they need to include their irrational selves in the mix: otherwise they leave out a valuable source of power, leave themselves vulnerable to attack, and fail to understand themselves completely.

Good luck Mr Rationality

Good luck to you to. It's been an interesting discussion. I'd just like to say that I *aspire* to be rational, and I am beginning to understand that the journey is more important than the destination.

Clause 28, see: http://www.libr.org/ISC/articles/12-Ramsden.html