The Earth has music for those who listen
—Shakespeare
Rationality matters. It leads to better choices in our lives and in the public sphere, and is the ultimate driver of social justice and moral progress. Today, humanity is reaching new heights of scientific understanding—and also appears to be losing its mind. How can a species that developed vaccines for Covid-19 in less than a year produce so much fake news, medical quackery, and conspiracy theorizing? Are we former cave dwellers out of time saddled with biases, fallacies, and illusions? Simply put, irrational? After all, we discovered the laws of nature, lengthened and enriched our lives, and set out the benchmarks for rationality itself. We actually think in ways that are sensible in the low-tech contexts in which we spend most of our lives. Let us not continue to fail to take advantage of the powerful means of reasoning we have discovered over the millennia: logic, critical thinking, probability, correlation and causation, and reasonable ways to update beliefs and commit choices individually and for others. These tools enforce practices with our principles and with the goal of human flourishing. They make the difference between moral force and brutal force, between marches for justice and lynch mobs, between human progress and breaking things. The power of rationality reveals moral blights and discovers feasible remedies; guides wise choices in our lives and improves our ability to eke increments of well-being out of a pitiless cosmos; forces us to be good to others despite our flawed nature which depends on grasping impartial principles that transcend our parochial experience. Surely, we are human beings endowed with an elementary faculty of reason that has discovered formulas that magnify scope. Rationality awakens us to ideas and exposes us to realities that confound our intuitions but are true for all that.
The Passion of the Western Mind is a magnificent critical survey, with its inherent respect for both the West`s mainstream high culture and the radically changing world. The read offers a new breakthrough for lay and scholarly people alike. Also, allows readers to grasp the big picture of Western culture as if for the first time. Here, we have the great minds of Western civilization and their pivotal ideas, from Plato to Hegel, from Augustine to Nietzsche, from Copernicus to Freud. Tarnas performs near-miracle of describing profound philosophical concepts simply but without simplifying them. Ten years in the making and already hailed as a classic, this book is truly a complete liberal education in a single, concise volume.
There are at least two kind of games, states James P. Carse in his very engaging book titled Finite and infinite games. A vision of life as play and possibility. Finite games are the familiar contests of every day life, played in order to be won. The infinite games, however, are far more mysterious. Their object is not winning, but ensuring the continuation of play. Rules change, boundaries shift but the game never ends. Carse, essentially, surveys our world, from the finite games of the playing field and playing board, to the finite games found in culture and religion—leaving all we think we know illuminated and transformed—a new way of understanding everything. Finite games offer wealth and status, power and glory, but infinite games offer something far more subtle and far grander. So, what are infinite games? How do they affect our finite games? What are we doing when we play—finitely or infinitely? How do these games affect our life? What kind of games do we play anyway? Who is our audience? The author explores these questions with stunning elegance, teasing out a universe of observation and insight, noting where, why and how we play, finitely and infinitely. “Anyone can be strong”, Carse points out, but while the finite player plays to be powerful the infinite player plays with strength.
Is the world really falling apart? Is the ideal of progress obsolete? In this elegant assessment of human condition cognitive scientist Steven Pinker in his book Enlightenment now. The case for reason, science, humanism, and progress urges us to step back from lurid headlines and prophecies of doom, which bring out the worst in our psychological biases. Pinker shows that life, health, prosperity, safety, peace, knowledge, and happiness, yes, happiness, are on the rise worldwide. This progress is a gift of the Enlightenment—the conviction that knowledge can enhance human flourishing. Enlightenment swims against tribalism, authoritarianism, demonization and magical thinking that demagogues are all too willing to exploit. Its ideals are furiously opposed by political, religious, and cultural pessimists and the result is a corrosive fatalism and a willingness to wreck the precious institutions of liberal democracy and global cooperation. Are we, as human beings, inherently irrational? Do we need religion to ground morality? Has modernity just left us lonely? Are we alone together? Do we live in a “post-truth” fake news era? In an age of terror? And will it come crashing down in an apocalypse of nuclear war, resource shortages, climate change, and runaway artificial intelligence? As Pinker notes “until the day when battalions of robots are inoculating children and building schools, or for that matter building infrastructure and caring for the aged in ours, there will be plenty of work to be done” (p.300). Surely, the same kind of ingenuity that has been applied to the design of software and robots can be applied for the betterment of our society.
Keep some perspective. Not every problem is a crisis, plague, epidemic, or existential threat. Do not confuse pessimism with profundity—problems are inevitable, but solvable, and diagnosing very setback as a symptom of a sick society is a cheap grab for gravitas. The story of human progress is truly heroic. It is glorious. It is uplifting. It is even, I daresay, spiritual. Let us keep it that way.