Rationality - Creativity - Morality

Page 164-166: Rationality - Creativity - Morality

Western intellectual traditions have always tended to assume that humans' powers of reason exist, first and foremost, as ways of restraining our basic instincts. The assumption can already be found in Plato and Aristotle, and it was strongly reinforced when classical theories of the soul were adopted into Christianity and Islam. Yes, the argument went, we have animalistic drives and passions, just as we have our powers of creativity and imagination, but these impulses are ultimately chaotic and asocial. Reason—whether in the individual or the political community—exists to keep our lower nature in check, to repress, channel, and contain potential violent energies in such a way that they do not lead to chaos and mutual destruction. It is a moral force. This is why, for instance, the word polis, the political community and a place of rational order, is the same root that gives us both "politeness" and "police". As a result, too, there is always a lurking sense in the tradition that there must be something at least vaguely demonic about our powers of creativity.

The emergence of bureaucratic populism, as I've been describing it, corresponds to a complete reversal of this conception of rationality—to a new ideal one most famously summed up by David Hume: that "reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions." Rationality, in this view, has nothing to do with morality. It is a purely technical affair—an instrument, a machine, a means of calculating how to most efficiently achieve goals that could not themselves be in any way assessed in rational terms. Reason cannot tell us what we should want. It can only tell us how to get it.

In both versions, reason was somehow outside of creativity, desire, or the passions; however, in one, it acted to restrain such passions; in the other, to facilitate them.

The emerging field of economics might have developed this logic the furthest, but it is a logic that traces back as much to bureaucracy as to market. (And one must remember, most economists are, and always have been, employed by large bureaucratic organizations of one sort or another). The whole idea that one can make a strict division between means and ends, between facts and values, is a product of the bureaucratic mind-set, because bureaucracy is the first and only social institution that treats the means of doing things as entirely separate from what it is that's being done. In this way, bureaucracy really has become embedded in the common sense of at least a very substantial part of the world's population for a long period of time.

But at the same time, it's not as if the older idea of rationality has ever entirely gone away. To the contrary: the two coexist, despite being almost completely contradictory—in cinstant friction. as a result, our very conception of rationality is strangely incoherent. It's entirely unclear what the word is supposede to mean. Sometimes it's a means, sometimes it's an end. sometimes it has nothing to do with morality, sometimes it's the very essence of what's right and good. Sometimes it's a method for solving problems, other times, it is itself the solution to all possible problems.