Tyrannical Reason and Disinherited Minds

Tidbits from current reading

Today I am rummaging around different books, wishing I could read, assimilate, synthesize a swarm of texts all at once. Thinking — for me anyway — is a constant process of shifting between concentrated focus on a particular topic and intentionally “de-focalizing,” which means allowing blurriness, murkiness, ambiguity until a new pattern of meaning becomes clear, coherent, again. New ideas or insights emerge as a result of smooshing different thought-streams from various sources together. It is like an ongoing laboratory experiment taking place in invisible recesses of my brain.

Among today’s books are Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West by John Ralston Saul. Writing in the early 1990s, Saul already saw the West and America in decline due to our over-dependence on managerial elites and technocratic experts, leading to a loss of any sense of shared purpose or transcendent meaning. “Populations throughout the West no longer believe in the certainty of their elites,” Saul writes. “They do not have confidence in the dominant utilitarianism. Elsewhere in the world there is growing contempt for what might be called the Western school, with all its assertions of what and how lives must be lived, societies organized, economies run.” He notes that Voltaire and other philosophes went too far in their promotion of reason, only because they were seeking to avoid being imprisoned and tortured by capricious kings and calculating priests.

I love what Saul writes here — so applicable to our moment:

When we look around at the influence and strength of money, of armies, of legal officials, or indeed at the ease with which writers are silenced through censorship, violence and imprisonment, it seems that the word is a fragile blossom. But one step back from this immediacy is enough to reveal the power of language. Nothing frightens those in authority so much as criticism. Whether democrats or dictators, they are unable to accept that criticism is the most constructive tool available to any society because it is the best way to prevent error. The weakness of rationally based power can be seen in the way it views criticism as an even more negative force than a medieval king might have done. After all, even the fool has been banished from the castles of modern power. What is it which so frightens these elites?

Language — not money or force — provides legitimacy. So long as military, political, religious or financial systems do not control language, the public’s imagination can move about freely with “ts own ideas. Uncontrolled words are consistently more dangerous to established authority than armed forces. Even coercive laws of censorship are rarely effective for more than short periods in limited areas.

I find this to be very true. Even as we enter a dark time of intensifying censorship, Right Wing mass-media consolidation, and violent repression, it is still possible that new ideas could break out of their ghettos to transform society in deeply unpredictable ways — perhaps thwarting the Fascistic agenda of Trump and his cronies. There is no way to put the genie of instantaneous electronic communication all of the back back into the bottle, even if you buy up CNN, CBS, TikTok, X, Substack, and whatever else

In The Disinherited Mind: Essays in Modern German Literature and Thought (1975), Erich Heller finds that modern people believe that any claims about Being—what is real, what things are, what life means—are neither valid nor worth considering. We still — most of us — agree in our hearts with Wittgenstein’s famous dictum: “Of what you cannot speak, you must stay silent.” This isn’t a formal rule written down anywhere, and people rarely state it clearly, but it operates like a dogma, in the ambient background, all the same. This modern attitude, Holler notes,

has made an incurable invalid of that faculty of the human intelligence which, grasping their relevance, is capable of responding positively to questions asked about what the world is. To such questions the modern intelligence is prone to respond with that mixture of shame, embarrassment, revulsion and arrogance which is the characteristic reaction of impotence to unfortunately unmanageable demands. This invalid has been left ever since in the nursing care of unhappy poets, dreamers or religious eccentrics if he was not satisfied with the treatment he received as an outpatient of the Church.

Once man’s ability to respond creatively to the ontological mystery had been stunted into something that produced merely an irritated state of mystification, he was left to the spiritual destructiveness of that battle raging within himself: between the conviction of being nothing in the vastness of the universe, and the natural urge which, prompted by the ungrace of self-assertion, persuades him of his all-importance. To be nothing and yet everything—this seeming paradox is the pride an the humility of the creature before a God of infinite power and infinite love; but it is the spiritual death suffered by man in the incessant struggle between arrogance and humiliation, in his exposure to the mighty lovelessness of a chance constellation of energy.

As you might grasp from reading these excerpts, I am reflecting on the contemporary meaning crisis, how we have respond to it, and how it created this massive opening for resurgent Christian Nationalism.