Reason is just another faith by Mary Midgley in New Scientist

crabsallover says 'Mary Midgley (Wikipedia) thinks 'Reason' is ambiguous. Science subverts religious views. Science alone ('scientism') is not sufficient - different problems need different ways of thinking.'

7: Reason is just another faith

Unconditional reliance on a single authority is never sensible, says philosopher Mary Midgley.

• 23 July 2008
• From New Scientist Print Edition. Subscribe and get 4 free issues.
• Philosopher Mary Midgley

IN 1960 Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of independent India, wrote: "It is science alone that can solve the problems of hunger and poverty, of insanitation and illiteracy, of superstition and deadening custom and tradition, of vast resources running to waste, of a rich country inhabited by starving people... The future belongs to science and to those who make friends with science."

This was doubtless intended as a manifesto for reason, but it also sums up a major justification people have for objecting to reason. Such pronouncements were common at that time. The crucial words in Nehru's stirring speech, for me, are "science alone". It is this exclusiveness that is the trademark of scientism: the belief in the unconditional supremacy of physical science - or of Science with a capital "S" - over all other forms of thought. Scientism sparked many movements, both in thought and politics, especially during the 20th century, from so-called "scientific socialism" to the doctrine in psychology called "behaviourism".

Taken literally, Nehru's proposal is odd. We might think, for instance, that we obviously need other things, such as good laws, good institutions and a clear understanding of history, as well as science, to solve the problems he named. He surely knew this, but he put science first because he thought it was the only cure for what he considered the central cause of present evils - religion.

This function of subverting religion played a huge part in the widespread exaltation of science at this time, both in the east and west. Throughout the Enlightenment, reformers who were struggling against the power of the church had called for the use of reason to undermine Christianity.

But the term "reason" proved ambiguous and, in the 20th century, the rallying cry shifted to something that seemed more specific, namely science. This had awkward effects. It put off those who did not want to be cured of religion and also - perhaps even more unfortunately - it led to science's functioning like a kind of rival religion itself.

The central question here is about trust. What do you put your faith in? The kind of faith that Nehru expresses in science is absolute. It is not at all the qualified, provisional acceptance that might suit actual scientific findings. It claims to answer not just factual questions but every kind of social and moral dilemma. It offers general salvation.

“The central question here is about trust. In what do you put faith?”

This sort of unconditional, general reliance on a single authority is never sensible, whatever god it may invoke. No system provides an infallible oracle; different problems need different ways of thinking.

Indeed the sciences themselves are various and use all sorts of methods. Of course there are clear cases, such as evolution, where scientific doctrines are needed to correct particular non-scientific ones. But controversy on such topics inevitably involves a wide clash of imaginative visions which cannot possibly fall under the physical sciences.

Science then no longer stands for enquiry but for ideology, authority, a general approach to life which demands to prevail in all conflicts: that is, it is turned into scientism. And, as past experience shows, that ideology can include some very odd components. The most obvious example is eugenics, the programme of "improving" the human race. This was fully accepted as an authentic part of science from the time when the Victorian polymath Francis Galton invented the term and proposed incentives for "the lights of the nation" to breed early and often. That was until the arrival of the Nazis, whose activities suddenly made the fearful overtones of eugenics plain.

Another example - less deadly but perhaps more confusing - was the campaign by behaviourists, led by the psychologist B. F. Skinner from the 1950s, to drive all discussion of subjective experience out of psychology. Though this movement had no real scientific basis it has been extraordinarily successful in paralysing thought for much of the last century. Indeed, it has managed to send the crucial topic of consciousness - of our own most intimate experience - into a limbo which it is now proving very hard to extract it from. The campaign has made, and still makes it hard to discuss our subjectivity not as a delusion but as an objective fact, to say that we do have experiences and inner states.

The behaviourist project was, of course, part of a campaign to subordinate the social sciences and humanities to science, on the assumption that they were all merely "folk" doctrines - primitive, uninstructed habits which needed to be simplified, boiled down and reduced ultimately to physics. Indeed, excepting the long-standing war with fundamentalist churches in the US (which is essentially political), it is the social sciences and humanities that have lately been the main targets of scientistic campaigning.

Science does not need to be defended in this way and it is surely not surprising if this kind of reductive chauvinism sometimes confuses the bystanders and makes them hostile.

Read about all the problems with reason in our special issue

Mary Midgley is a moral philosopher, previously at Newcastle University in the UK

From issue 2666 of New Scientist magazine, 23 July 2008, page 50-51

Reason destroys itself by Roger Penrose in New Scientist

Reason destroys itself

• 23 July 2008
• From New Scientist Print Edition. Subscribe and get 4 free issues.
• Mathematician Roger Penrose

6: Reason destroys itself

Even in formal mathematics, reason breaks its own rules, says mathematician Roger Penrose. Watch a related video.

DO WE know for certain that 2 plus 2 equals 4? Of course we don't.

Maybe every time everybody in the whole world has ever done that calculation and reasoned it through, they've made a mistake. Maybe it isn't 4, it's really 5.

There is a very, very small chance that this has happened. But now I am talking about probabilities:

I am using mathematics again, on the basis that it makes sense in the first place. So my reasoning is circular and, as often happens, you have to stand back and ask, well, what is reasonable?

We have to distinguish this question from pure Reason - with a capital "R". Philosopher David Hume notoriously argued, applying the rules of that formal Reason, that induction is impossible: however often we add 2 to 2 and get 4, that does not logically tell us anything about the result next time. And doubt does permeate all our reasoning, or should. But at some point we have to stand back and ask what is reasonable - with a small "r".

When we ask what is reasonable from our direct experiences, we are finding and applying general rules about behaviour which are consistent. In mathematics we demand absolute formal consistency. But often, even when you're doing mathematics, you explore something by trying to prove it, get stuck, and say, oh, maybe it's not true, and look for a reasonable path for your next round of applying pure Reason.

The mathematician Kurt Gödel went through a process like this as he destroyed any hope that formal Reason could be universal. In 1900 David Hilbert proposed that we should build the whole of mathematics on formal, logical rules. But in 1931 Gödel showed that if you have any set of trustable rules that are computationally checkable (a machine could go through them and see whether you've applied them correctly), then statements exist that you have to accept as well, according to the rules, but that you cannot arrive at by means of those rules.

Gödel used the word "intuition" to describe how you get to those statements. For me, that word has connotations which are not quite appropriate: I'd say we need understanding and insight. Gödel's result is one of the things some people correctly use to pick holes in Reason. Another is the very unreasonable behaviour of quantum mechanics where, for example, particles seem to be able to be in two places at once. This doesn't match our normal experience, so we say it's unreasonable.

“Quantum mechanics is one thing people use to pick holes in Reason”

Personally, I think there is something not quite right about quantum mechanics. And quantum mechanics seems to be to blame for some people who'd like to be exempt from Reason being able to say: "Science is full of these contradictions and unreasonableness - and so I can more or less say anything."

You had people saying we shouldn't turn on the Large Hadron Collider experiment because a small probability exists that it might create black holes that would annihilate Earth. Sensible scientists say that this is ridiculous, there's no chance. On the other hand, there's a small chance that accepted theory is wrong, so there is a chance!

That's one example of people putting unreasonable standards on being sure. Another is climate change. Most scientists say that the climate is changing and it's changing for quite clear reasons - because we are pumping in all this carbon dioxide, for one. There's no puzzle, we can see it happening, and we can see why it's happening. But a few don't agree. True, sometimes the small minority turns out to be right. But it doesn't mean you should do what the small minority say. The majority is a majority for good reasons.

To me, Reason is essential for human discourse and all forms of enquiry, whether legal or scientific or mathematical. It is absolutely central. But we have to be reasonable about it.

Read about all the problems with reason in our special issue

Roger Penrose is a mathematical physicist at the University of Oxford, UK

From issue 2666 of New Scientist magazine, 23 July 2008, page 49

Whose reason is it anyway? by Tom Shakespeare in New Scientist

Whose reason is it anyway?

• 23 July 2008
• From New Scientist Print Edition. Subscribe and get 4 free issues.
• Bioethicist Tom Shakespeare

5: Whose reason is it anyway?

Real people don’t live their lives according to cold rationality, says bioethicist Tom Shakespeare.

Watch a related video.

THE 18th-century challenges to superstition, religion, prejudice, monarchical government and lack of freedom all made sense. Replacing the oppressive baggage of the past with ideas of individual autonomy, liberty and, above all, reason, was a considerable step forward. The fruits of that reason have transformed our world and brought many benefits and riches, but they have also brought problems which are rarely discussed in mainstream discourse.

Feminist theorists, for example, argue that the Enlightenment's focus on the individual, on rights, on reason, ignores the complicated and subtle web of networks that we are part of: the interdependencies and the relationships. For them, it's not just about individual choice, but about the context in which we choose.

Then there is the problem that the brain is a "feeling" brain as well as a "thinking" brain. Many modern thinkers are increasingly turning to the 17th-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza for inspiration. Spinoza was a pantheist: for him, God was immanent. He did not believe in mind/body dualism, nor that everything is rational, pure and perfect, and that the body contaminates. For people such as neuroscientist Antonio Damasio or Gaia-theorist James Lovelock, Spinoza holds promise because his thinking offers a way to integrate disparate parts of what it is to be human, and a way to avoid separating humans from nature.

Important things happen when you leave out nature, the body, emotion, the complexity with which lives are lived. The utilitarian thinkers who follow the Enlightenment to its hyper-rational conclusions create arguments with no detail, no bodies, no nature, no complexity. When they say "look, there is your solution", it doesn't work because once you have removed the richness and complexity, you're left with a judgement that is very difficult to implement. It's just not how people work.

A few years ago, I was interested to find when talking to a famous utilitarian philosopher that he and his partner did not want to know the sex of their fetus. When I asked why, he replied, what if the fetus is severely impaired and they had to decide about withdrawing care? In that case (and both of them were medical doctors, by the way), they thought it would be better not to have identified with the embryo so that it would be easier to turn off the machines.

This focus on rationality doesn't speak to how people usually understand their lives and so they reject it for homeopathy, diet pills and Sunday Sun (or The National Enquirer) stories about planes on Mars. People understand the world in stories, not dry rationality. It's not that they are unreasonable, it's that we need ways to look at the world which are both as empirically accurate and rationally sustainable as possible, but which also speak to everyday experience and do not exclude as mere superstition or irrationality the ways most people most of the time live their lives.

The trouble is we don't seem to know how to do this. Measurement, league tables and quantification dominate. A recent news story reported that UK nurses will be rated on how often they smile, thereby reducing to simple arithmetic the most complicated, subtle and important of human interactions - care. We can't agree on thick, complex issues, on our goals, so we spend a lot of time thinking about thin, process measures. How do we measure this? How do we judge that?

If utilitarianism or "straightforward" rationality dominates, and if you fail to see what makes life worth living, many things follow. Disabled or older people become too costly to keep alive. You judge people on their output or performance. Whereas if we look at what we want - happiness, fulfilment and positive living - none of that matters. Most of us aspire to, long for, a much more human-sized, human-centred, emotionally mature way of living, but the chance of that is being squeezed out. If your measure is very objective, rational and limited, you end up with a certain type of school, child, human and society, but it's not one that I'd want to live in, and I think increasingly for many people, it's not one they want to live in either.

Read about all the problems with reason in our special issue

Tom Shakespeare is a research fellow at the Policy, Ethics and Life Sciences Research Centre, set up by Durham and Newcastle universities and the Centre for Life, Newcastle

From issue 2666 of New Scientist magazine, 23 July 2008, page 48

Reason excludes creativity and intuition by Keith Tyson in New Scientist

4: Reason excludes creativity and intuition

Reason is lost without art, says Turner prizewinner Keith Tyson. Watch a related video.

Reason excludes creativity and intuition

• 23 July 2008
• Special Report from New Scientist Print Edition. Subscribe and get 4 free issues.
• Artist Keith Tyson

I'M A great lover of science. It's a fascinating language that I use regularly, and its brilliant insights have inspired my artworks, including some based on mathematical systems that are attempting to visualise higher dimensions: things that we can't make a picture of yet which can be described mathematically. The challenge is to find ways I can use concepts that cannot be visualised in two, three or four dimensions, and yet somehow cast shadows into the world, rather like a hypercube. These concepts are very exciting because they're both rational and counterintuitive.

Here art has an advantage over science in that its methodology can be tumbling and contradictory, whereas strict mathematical language tends to be built on axioms, rules of inference and theorems, and has to be consistent. With art you make a creative leap of faith, and later you explain it.

I'm not interested in science as a process, but I am interested in nature, and science is a very convenient and elegant language to use to explore that. I have works I call the Nature Paintings, not because they are pictures of nature, as in Constable, but because they are paintings made by nature, made by the same forces that made me and you, and the Earth.

They happened when I tried to find chemicals with different viscosities and hydrophobic qualities that didn't mix well and reacted in certain ways to heat. I put them together to create chemical reactions that were scale-invariant, so zoom in and the painting looks as intricate and fractally beautiful as it does from a distance. Some of the paintings are reminiscent of cell structures or river basins. My conclusion, rational or otherwise, is that this is because the same mathematical laws, in a closed system, operate in my painting as operate in that cell wall or river basin. So, I really didn't do them, nature did - although I get a cut!

This makes me feel nostalgic for the days when there was no differentiation between being a natural historian or an artist-theologian. The lives of Newton or da Vinci seem much richer. The specification and reductionism of knowledge has given us many technological advancements, but I feel that we've lost a holistic synthesis. That's not a cerebral question, it's an emotional one.

If you're using reason alone, you're looking at the phenomena and at your paradigm. Ultimately, you will change your paradigm to make sense of the paradoxes that occur, so reason can be a very slow process - it requires a very incremental approach, since those axioms must be preserved if the method of reason is going to be maintained.

Using a more intuitive approach can accelerate the process, but to prove or disprove the result by reason is a long process, and as an artist you're impatient. When people say things, you draw conclusions that are not reasonable, but they are emotional or intuitive, and often very fulfilling creatively - science would never accept that.

When we look at the offspring of reason, such as string theory, which is currently getting a bad press, they look as if reason originally came up with extremely elegant ideas but that now they've got very convoluted. My intuition is that a much simpler paradigm is required to solve the problem: so long as you're trying to solve it using the kind of thinking that created it, you'll come up with complex, bizarre ideas. If you're going to have a grand unified idea of reality, which is basically the simplest reflection of your paradigm, it's hard to do that the incremental way because you can't make a sweeping judgement: you're "artistically" stuck in your process!

Read about all the problems with reason in our special issue

From issue 2666 of New Scientist magazine, 23 July 2008, page 47

I hear 'reason', I see lies by David Miller in New Scientist

Science is routinely co-opted by governments and corporations to subvert people’s ability to make their own decisions, say sociologist David Miller and linguist Noam Chomsky. Watch a related video and hear the full interview (28MB MP3).

I hear 'reason', I see lies

• 23 July 2008
• NewScientist.com news service
• Sociologist David Miller

STRATEGIC use of science, or the appearance of science, is a well-used part of the armoury of the public relations industry. It is effective - it delayed action on tobacco for decades - and it poisons the public perception of actual science.

The public relations and lobbying industries were themselves founded on attempts to pervert rationality and science in the service of vested interests.

The very earliest PR practitioners, such as Sigmund Freud's nephew Edward Bernays, were adept at this. Bernays famously put psychology to use in promoting cigarettes to women in the 1920s - by styling them "torches of freedom" and associating them with equality.

Bernays was among the first to make a profession out of what he called the "conscious and intelligent manipulation" of the beliefs and behaviour of the public. Those who "manipulate this unseen mechanism" of society were, he wrote in his book Propaganda, an "invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country".

The PR industry today prefers to be invisible, particularly when its task is to fend off the consequences of actual science. When the desired message is likely to be treated with scepticism if given openly by a corporation or politician, it must be put in the mouth of someone seemingly disinterested. What appears more disinterested than a dissenting view from a scientist?

When the interested party needs an even greater distance between them and their message, the PR industry sets up "third party" front groups.

Both tactics are clearly documented in the battle to protect the tobacco industry. We see the same strategy of publicising doubts - enough to prevent political action, or merely to delay it until a return has been made on investments - in today's strategic use of science in climate-change denial, and to muddy the waters around obesity and binge-drinking as they become crisis issues.

A local case that I have followed in detail started with a study of toxic industrial contaminants in farmed salmon, published in Science in 2004 (vol 303, p 227). It was greeted with a chorus of condemnation in the press. Many of the voices were described as academic scientists, yet almost all had financial links to the industry which were undisclosed in the reporting. The study was actually well grounded, but the campaign to remove the stain of "poisoned salmon" from the public mind was largely successful.

On a bigger scale, while the International Life Science Institute (ILSI) sounds scientific, it is actually a food-industry lobby group funded by hundreds of the biggest food, pharma and chemical companies. For years it was more or less directed by the Coca Cola company. It was able to infiltrate the World Health Organization process examining dietary sugars by covertly funding some of the scientists involved. In January 2006, the WHO decided that ILSI could no longer take part in WHO activities setting microbiological or chemical standards for food and water.

The PR industry remains busy creating and managing front groups. The Scientific Alliance turned out to be run from the offices of Foresight Communications, a PR firm in central London, and at launch was funded by Scottish quarry owner Robert Durward.

The Social Issues Research Centre "fosters the image of... a heavyweight research body," as Annabel Ferriman wrote in the British Medical Journal in 1999 (vol 319, p 716). It is run by the PR/marketing company MCM Research, which used to announce on its website: "Do your PR initiatives sometimes look too much like PR initiatives? MCM conducts psychological research on the positive aspects of your business... The results do not read like PR."

Ironically, the biggest asset such operations have is humans' deeply ingrained sense of fairness. They do not have to win a scientific argument. They merely have to convince citizens - among them politicians, judges and juries - that there are "two sides to the argument". The stage for inaction, or rather for continuing their sponsors' harmful activities, is thus set. Worse, perhaps, in principle, is the creation of a perception that all rational inquiry is serving some hidden interest. If every dispute is presented as having two incomprehended sides, why, in fairness, not see them as equivalent?

The defence is simple: full public funding of research, with enhanced ethics standards including transparency about funding. Simple in principle, that is.

Read about all the problems with reason in our special issue

David Miller is at Strathclyde University, UK, and co-authored A Century of Spin: How public relations became the cutting edge of corporate power (Pluto Press, 2007)

From issue 2666 of New Scientist magazine, 23 July 2008, page 46

Linguist and activist Noam Chomksy

On co-option: Anything that is co-optable is going to be co-opted by power systems for doctrinal purposes - for exploitation, violence, oppression, whatever - and science is no exception. So scientists should be very scrupulous and clear about the limits of their understanding - particularly important in a culture that tends to be deferential to expertise.

Claims are made by real scientists that go way beyond what they could possibly support. That leads to blind acceptance of, or scepticism about science, both wrong.

On reason and power: George Orwell said that in a free society, ideas can be suppressed but without the use of force. He refers to the indoctrination of educated people, which instils the notion that there are things you don't talk about. Reason is "dangerous" because it leads you to question faith, not just faith that the world was created 6000 years ago but faith in the secular religions that lead to state power. Take Iraq. In the US we cannot have a principled discussion about the invasion of Iraq as we can about the Russian invasion of Chechnya. It's taken for granted that our goals, if achievable, are the right goals. If we approached this with reason, meaning that we apply the same standards to ourselves that we do to others, we would have a radical critique of power structures, and that can't be tolerated.

I think the sharpest turn away from reason is among the educated intellectuals, who advocate reason and blame others for turning away from it. If we can't even reach the level of applying to ourselves rational standards of the kind that we apply to others, our commitment to reason is very thin.

Noam Chomsky is professor of linguistics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology

See www.newscientist.com/reason for the full interview

No one really uses reason by Chris Frith in New Scientist

No one really uses reason

• 23 July 2008
• From New Scientist Print Edition. Subscribe and get 4 free issues.
• Chris Frith
• Watch a related video

THOUGH many may find it troubling, it is now clear that few of the active processes occurring in our brains ever impinge on our awareness. In other words, we do most of our "thinking" without ever being conscious of it.

The simple act of seeing something depends upon what the German physicist, doctor and philosopher Hermann von Helmholtz called "unconscious inferences". It is these that enable our brain to work out which object is causing the crude signals coming from our senses. The same principle applies to action. When we perform a simple action, picking up a glass, for example, we are not aware of the complex decisions our brain has to make about the best way to move our arm and shape our fingers.

It is a good thing that we are not aware of these low-level inferences. The truth is that we would never do anything if we had to think consciously about everything we see and every move we make. And it turns out that even quite important decisions involving many factors, such as choosing which car to buy, are better made if we don't consciously think about them. This is because the unconscious brain is very good at taking many things into account at the same time. We suspect that as soon as you start thinking about those things consciously, a brain system with very limited capacity is employed, which can concentrate on just a few items.

So where does conscious reasoning come into the picture? It is an attempt to justify the choice after it has been made. And it is, after all, the only way we have to try to explain to other people why we made a particular decision. But given our lack of access to the brain processes involved, our justification is often spurious: a post-hoc rationalisation, or even a confabulation - a "story" born of the confusion between imagination and memory.

“Conscious reasoning is an attempt to justify a decision after it's made”

Taking all of this into account, what then is reason? Just because our decisions are not conscious, it does not follow that reason is not involved. Given two options, the reasonable thing to do is to choose the better option. Brains are very good at doing this. After all, this is the basis of learning: to choose the nice things and avoid the nasty ones.

Economists and mathematicians, such as John Nash of A Beautiful Mind fame, have developed mathematical algorithms to ensure the best option is chosen - and brains have been shown to use similar mechanisms. The problem lies in deciding what we mean by "best". For Rational Economic Man, the best choice is the one that gets him the most gain. But do real people make such "best" choices?

In the experimental Ultimatum game, for example, suppose one player is given $10, and can give any proportion of this money to the second player. If the second player refuses their offer, then neither player gets any money. What should the second player do? The rational action is to accept any offer since some money is better than none. But in reality most people reject low offers.

This result is often understood to show that people are unreasonable, that their judgement is clouded by their emotional response to an unfair offer. However, from the point of view of the group, rather than the individual, the rejection of unfair offers is a good choice because it increases the likelihood of group cooperation and fairness. In this case, therefore, we can argue that our emotional responses are more reasonable than our conscious decisions.

In the 21st century,

we are discovering more and more about the brain and the role of emotion, and challenging old ideas about how we learn, make decisions, act and remember. This is already beginning to make us revise our notions of what constitutes reason - and that, in turn, is bound to have consequences for our attitudes to reason and to the endeavours of scientists.

Read about all the problems with reason in our special issue

Chris Frith is at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, University College London. He wrote Making up the Mind (Blackwell, 2007)

From issue 2666 of New Scientist magazine, 23 July 2008, page 45

Reason stands against values and morals by Rowan Williams in New Scientist

Reason stands against values and morals

• 23 July 2008
• From New Scientist Print Edition. Subscribe and get 4 free issues.
• Rowan Williams

1: Reason stands against values and morals

Shaping a moral and humane world requires more than reason, says Archbishop Rowan Williams

TODAY reason has come to be seen as something exercised by an individual, but it wasn't always so. Until the early Middle Ages, being "reasonable" was primarily a matter of being aware of where you belonged in the cosmos. As a human being you were capable, unlike other creatures, of knowing who you were. You knew that you were given the task of using your freedom of choice to act coherently, in accordance with the whole flow of the universe or, more simply, the creative will of God.

To have the ability to shape your life in a certain way, rather than being governed by a system of instinct - impulse and reaction, in other words - was to have a share in the "rationale" of reality itself. Being reasonable was like singing in tune (an analogy the Stoic philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome loved to use) with who you were and what the universe was like.

It was as early as the 12th century that this view was challenged by people such as the philosopher Peter Abelard, who wanted to be clearer about reason's function in telling you what was or was not a good argument. This instrumental view of reason, as the ability to draw sensible conclusions from what was in front of your eyes instead of just reacting blindly, had been a smallish area of its meaning. As enquiry progressed, it steadily colonised the whole territory.

From the 16th century, reason came to be seen as opposed to tradition and authority. Faced with the expectation of believing something just because a particular sort of person said so, the reasonable person was now the one who asked: "What are the arguments for this?" Reason became a tool for protesting against the violence of arbitrary authority, and the great minds of the Enlightenment were confident that they were on the side of equality and universality: being reasonable was the heritage of each human person. Inherited habit and belief would always, they were sure, stand in the way of people growing into this universal heritage.

And thus in the early days of the French Revolution, the new regime tried to replace the traditional days of the week and months of the year with a new, "rational" calendar - an extreme of opposition between reason and tradition. In assuming that the essence of being human was to be found in the capacity to argue your way to the truth, independently of any legacy from history or community, this reason created a highly artificial model of humanity, more or less at odds with how most human beings actually lived.

The result was not an age of unprecedented equality and universal communication, but a different sort of violence: by "real" human beings against the unreasonable remainder. There was a constant risk of slipping into the conclusion - plausible on the grounds of some sorts of Enlightenment thinking - that the unreasonable human being didn't count.

Revolutionary America and France lost no sleep over slavery. Humanity had to wait for another, more traditional sort of rationality, based on a vision of what human beings were in the eyes of God and in the frame of the cosmos, to see the slaves finally emancipated.

As defined by the Enlightenment, rationality could be a tool, not for protest, but for conformity to the agenda of those who saw themselves as fully qualified rational human beings, at the expense of the rest. Even gentle, wise Darwin could use language suggesting that some humans were less "developed", nearer their primate cousins, than others. That language was gleefully exploited by ideologues of empire and racial domination.

These are not grounds for overturning the entire legacy of the Enlightenment, but for pausing before we assume that instrumental reason will answer all the questions about how to shape a moral and humane world. Absolute convictions about human worth, those which prescribe unconditional opposition to experiments on non-consenting subjects, or to racial discrimination, are not simply generated by instrumental reason. They have more in common with the pre-modern "rationality" of recognising oneself and one's fellow humans as standing together in a common relation with a certain kind of "order", a way things "just are" in the universe.

This recognition of commonality is at the simplest level what makes language possible. Instead of indulging in a pointless stand-off between reason and conviction, perhaps we should ask how the meaning of reason can recover some resonance with those skills of self-knowledge and coherent or consistent choice which once belonged to the word.

Read about all the problems with reason in our special issue

Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury

From issue 2666 of New Scientist magazine, 23 July 2008, page 44-45

Editorial: How to make reason more reasonable by New Scientist

Editorial: How to make reason more reasonable

• 23 July 2008
• From New Scientist Print Edition. Subscribe and get 4 free issues.

Read about all the problems with reason in our special issue

WRITING these words in a pavement cafe in Brussels, capital of that rationalist and cosmopolitan project known as the European Union, all seems well with the world. A band is playing. The church at the end of the square is filled with tourists. The passing cyclists look content and healthy. You could experience similar scenes in similar squares in Boston, London, Paris or Tokyo. The streets are calm, the smell of progress towards democratically agreed political, social and cultural goals is in the air. It's hard to see what could be wrong.

Yet it seems that a number of forces are rising up to attack the rationalist thinking that has produced this way of life. New Scientist's own concern in 2005 was - and is - typical: "After two centuries in the ascendancy, the Enlightenment project is under threat." That is how the magazine introduced a special issue on fundamentalism (8 October 2005, p 39), continuing: "Religious movements are sweeping the globe preaching unreason, intolerance and dogma, and challenging the idea that rational, secular inquiry is the best way to understand the world."

Whether the attackers are religious fundamentalists, faith-based terrorists or practitioners of pseudoscience, the discussion feels like a cowboy movie, as Daniel Hind suggests in his book The Threat to Reason (see New Scientist, 19 January, p 46). You either cheer the sheriff, or get behind the outlaws.

But is it so simple? As A. C. Grayling outlines on page 42, the main principles of Enlightenment thinking are that humans are rational, and that we should accept beliefs on the basis of reason, not authority, tradition or the church. Central to this is the idea that the universe is a rational system, wholly accessible to detached, logical enquiry. This magazine stands firmly behind the idea that such enquiry is indeed the best tool we have to understand the physical world. But instead of accepting the polarised "good vs evil" terms in which the reason debate is increasingly framed, this special report has invited thinkers from all areas of public life to look more carefully at people's concerns.

The aim is to understand not just the rise in religious fundamentalism, but phenomena such as the rising popularity of pseudoscience, the falling number of western children who choose to study hard science, and the high number of people who doubt human input in climate change.

Might part of the problem be that reason itself does not always live up to the claims on the label? Might there be legitimate grounds for being sceptical about reason's scope and for arguing for its reform?

“Might reason not always live up to the claims made for it?”

The first problem our contributors have identified is not with reason itself, but with its abuse. Sociologist David Miller argues on page 46 that

governments and big corporations have hijacked the language and methods of reason and science in their PR and advertising to subvert the ability of people to judge for themselves - an end directly opposed to the Enlightenment values we supposedly hold dear.

Environmental activist and former US vice-president Al Gore takes a similar line in his book Assault on Reason (reviewed on 21 July 2007, p 46), in which he argues that propaganda and advertising are a major threat to reason and therefore to democracy.

The feeling that western, "rational" societies are inescapably entwined with these anti-rational and anti-democratic forces lies behind many critiques of the Enlightenment enterprise - from within these societies and from outside them. Linguist and political activist Noam Chomsky argues on page 46 that although we may think of western society as enlightened and free, we are restricted in what we can think and say. In practice, power is with industry and the military, and values are determined by corporations and brands, not individuals and ideals.

The second unifying theme among our contributors, including philosopher Mary Midgley on page 50, is the

concern that science and reason are increasingly seen as providing not just scientific, technical and military fixes, but answers to everything that matters in the world. This alienates people, Midgley warns, because it leaves no room for morality, art, imperfection and all of the things that make us human. Is it really surprising that so many turn to pseudoscience?

As Archbishop Rowan Williams argues on page 44, scientific reasoning is essential but isn't sufficient to guide our moral lives. It can never furnish us with absolute conviction about, say, the value of a human being and the necessity of opposing torture or racial discrimination. Our sense of human rights must be unconditional, based on values that we will not surrender, no matter what.

Artist Keith Tyson sees reason as central in our thinking: in fact, his art is based on keeping the rational and the creative in a productive tension (see "4: Reason versus creativity and intuition"). When reason is allowed to sideline the emotional and intuitive forces that shape the arts, we lose something important. Meanwhile, bioethicist Tom Shakespeare is concerned with the qualities that make us human.

A properly rational society, he says on page 48, might advocate a world in which all disability, or old age for that matter, was eliminated, and it would use medical science to that end.

But he would not have been chosen to live in such a world - and he would not choose it.

So

our current version of reason brings with it major political and cultural baggage, and leaves out much of what makes life both human and humane.

Some of our contributors bring a third charge:

that even on its own terms, reason must own up to some serious limitations. On page 45, neuroscientist Chris Frith explains how even when we think we are being reasonable, we aren't. Our decisions are based on gut instinct, then justified post hoc - and they are made better when we don't consciously think about them.

Researchers are also starting to realise that individual judgements they had long categorised as emotional and irrational may actually be beneficial when seen in the context of a group.

This raises the question of what we even mean by "reasonable". And

researchers are also having trouble with the meaning of "scientific". Science, in the sense of carrying out experiments to test hypotheses, is the best tool we have for understanding the physical world. But that doesn't make it perfect. In fact, the philosophical basis of science is looking increasingly shaky as branches of maths, physics and even biology head into areas that we can't see how to test.

On page 49, mathematician Roger Penrose points out that many insights in science and maths are reached without following the "proper" rules. And Midgley criticises attempts to force all empirical inquiry into a black-and-white "rational" framework, such as when behaviourists stripped subjectivity from the study of psychology. Across biology, scientists are struggling with big concepts such as life, consciousness and free will, which they are finding impossible to define, let alone to split up into smaller components as the traditional reductionist approach to science requires.

Can we do better? The rationalist world view has been incredibly successful, transforming human life vastly for the better. But one big misunderstanding about the Enlightenment is that it is a finished thing, that all the west need do is convert the rest of the world to its merits. In contrast, the Enlightenment that Immanuel Kant described in his seminal essay was an ongoing process. Asking what's wrong with reason and seeking to improve it falls squarely within that Enlightenment tradition of trusting our inquiry over received wisdom.

One central Enlightenment idea was the separation of the human intellect from nature - the notion of a detached observer who manipulates and experiments on the world around him. This is not shared by non-western philosophies, and some argue that rethinking this separation might offer one way forward. After all, 18th-century thinkers applied core Enlightenment concepts such as freedom and equality only to "reasonable" men - that is, white men of a certain class. We have now extended these rights to poor white men, women and other races. Could we extend them again?

As far back as 1992, Gore argued in Earth in the Balance (see New Scientist, 1 August 1992, p 38) that to avert environmental crisis, the rights and freedoms granted to ever-wider groups of people must now be applied to future generations and to nature. Feminist and biologist Donna Haraway (New Scientist, 18 June, p 50) thinks we should extend those values to include other life forms - and even non-life - and maybe even the Earth.

As for science itself, we may need to come up with a definition based on comparing the evidence for rival theories rather than black-and-white falsification. As Lee Smolin discusses in the online version of this special, logicians are already devising techniques that can take into account context and uncertainty.

Meanwhile the political theorist George Lakoff argues in The Political Mind (reviewed New Scientist, 31 May, p 48) that

in a world of complex and life-or-death decisions on issues ranging from climate change to cloning, making informed and democratic judgements will require moving beyond reductionism to a realistic understanding of how individuals and societies make decisions - emotion, intuition and all.

It's a process Lakoff calls a "21st-century Enlightenment" and it feeds into another core Enlightenment value, democracy.

The toughest challenge may be distancing science from the vested interests of governments and corporations, or at least ensuring that voters understand how various groups are trying to manipulate their decisions. Miller's key ingredients for science that works for, not against, Enlightenment values are transparency, stronger ethical standards and increased public funding.

All this sounds daunting. But to judge by the arguments of our contributors and others, much is at stake if we don't open reason up to debate and change. Larger and larger sections of society will be unable to give informed consent for the actions officials take in their name; there will be no chance of reining in corporate power - even if we want to; and important aspects of being human will continue to be marginalised, probably to the detriment of science itself.

We risk never learning that some of the expectations of reason are just, well, unreasonable.

Read about all the problems with reason in our special issue

From issue 2666 of New Scientist magazine, 23 July 2008, page 51-53

EXCLUSIVELY ONLINE

Lee Smolin on negotiating diversity

Mary Midgley on reason and scepticism

Tom Shakespeare on a world based on reason

Peter Singer on science and morality

ARCHIVE

Donna Haraway on human exceptionalism (18 June 2008)

Robert Matthews on defining science (7 May 2008)

David Malone on addiction to certainty (4 August 2007)

Dan Hind on the true threats to reason (19 January 2008)

REVIEWS

The Assault on Reason by Al Gore (18 July 2007)

Earth in the Balance by Al Gore (1 August 1992)

Doubt is their Product by David Michaels (11 June 2008)

The Political Mind by George Lakoff (28 May 2008)

Articles by Tom Shakespeare, Keith Tyson and Noam Chomsky as told to Mike Holderness, Liz Else and Ivan Semeniuk. Reason special edited by Liz Else, Mike Holderness and Jo Marchant.

Reason: How humans dared to know by A. C. Grayling

How humans dared to know

• 23 July 2008
• From New Scientist Print Edition. Subscribe and get 4 free issues.
• A. C. Grayling

Read about all the problems with reason in our special issue

"ENLIGHTENMENT," wrote Immanuel Kant, "is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one's understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another. Sapere Aude! [Dare to know!] Have courage to use your own understanding! That is the motto of enlightenment."

This passage from Kant's 1784 essay "What Is Enlightenment?" was not intended to herald the arrival of an enlightened age, as Kant was keen to make clear, but only the beginnings of a process that might lead to one. Progressive thought in the 18th century was far in advance of the social and political realities of the time, but the thinkers in its vanguard were sure they were witnessing a new dawn in human affairs. The revolutions in America and France, and much that happened in western history since, has proved them right, even though fierce counter-Enlightenment movements have contested its principles at every step.

It is important to distinguish between "The Enlightenment" as a complex historical phenomenon, mainly of the 18th century, and more general talk of "Enlightenment values", where they are used to describe rationality, liberty, democracy, pluralism, human rights, the rule of law and the centrality of science to a proper understanding of the world.

Of course, these values are descended from those put forward by the 18th-century thinkers, but with the modifications one would expect from changed historical circumstances. For example, atheism was regarded with special abhorrence in the 18th century, so to announce oneself an atheist was impossible unless one was prepared to accept pariah status in society. Consequently, most agnostics and atheists described themselves as "Deists", who believed the world had been created by a deity who had since taken no further interest in it - and they limited their criticism of religion to criticism of the church.

As a historical phenomenon, however, the Enlightenment movement emphasised reliance on reason, sought to take a scientific approach to social and political questions, championed science, and opposed the clergy, the church and all forms of superstition as obstacles to progress. Enlightenment thinkers promoted the rights of man and, correlatively, opposed the tyranny of absolute monarchy and unjust social systems associated with it.

The flagship project of the Enlightenment was the compiling of a great encyclopedia, the Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (Encyclopedia, or a systematic dictionary of the sciences, arts and crafts), edited by the philosopher Denis Diderot and the mathematician Jean le Rond D'Alembert. It was published in multiple volumes between 1751 and 1772, and sought to unite all the best discoveries and thinking in the natural and social sciences, technology, the arts and crafts, and philosophy.

The original idea was to translate the English Chambers Cyclopaedia. Progressive thinkers in France, under the spell of John Locke and Isaac Newton, wanted to import the enlightened thinking of the former and the discoveries of the latter. But Diderot and his collaborators found the Chambers unsatisfactory and resolved to produce their own. They were conscious that their efforts would be opposed by traditionalists, not least because the compilers wished the new knowledge and ways of thinking to create a new social order, and even a new, freer human being, characterised by the ability to think for himself and the courage to act on his thought.

In his Supplement to Bougainville's Voyage, Diderot has Nature say to Mankind: "In vain... have you sought your happiness beyond the limits of the world I gave you... Examine the history of all peoples in all times and you will see that we humans have always been subject to one of three codes: that of nature, that of society, and that of religion - and that we have been obliged to transgress all three... because they could never be in harmony."

Because Enlightenment ideas challenged the vested interests of church and state, and because they continue to threaten those who, right or wrong, fear scientific rationality will undermine their cherished beliefs, there have always been vigorous counter-Enlightenment movements. Its critics blame it for the worst excesses of recent history, from the French Revolution's Reign of Terror (the period of exceptional violence thought to have been instigated by Robespierre) to 20th-century Nazism and Stalinism. They also blame it for toppling beauty, morality and faith from the pedestals they once stood upon, from whence they civilised humanity in a way scientific rationality, so its critics say, never can.

The first counter-Enlightenment activists were of two broad kinds: reactionaries, who defended the traditional powers of church and monarchy, and Romantics, for whom nature, emotion and imagination were far more important sources of authority than reason, which they saw as reductive and desiccating.

Reactionaries blamed Robespierre's excesses on the Enlightenment, choosing not to see the Terror as the opposite of an event promoting pluralism and individual liberty. Their spokesman, Edmund Burke, repudiated Enlightenment claims that ultimate political authority lies with the people. For Burke "the people" were nothing but an anarchic mob, and democracy nothing but mob rule.

The Romantics found the Enlightenment's emphasis on science not only reductive but mechanistic and even deterministic. They recoiled from it, elevated feeling over reason, extolled the passions as routes to truth, and applauded spontaneity and chance as superior to rigorous enquiry. No one would wish to deny the importance of feeling, but out of Romanticism also grew nationalism, theories about the spirit of a people or race, and a new religious enthusiasm.

After the atrocities of Nazism and Stalinism, new criticisms were advanced, notably by postmodern thinkers who had been part of the influential Frankfurt School of sociology. They argued that Enlightenment rationalism had soured into repressive notions of bureaucratic efficiency and control, that individuals had become enslaved to economic forces, and that science had bred scientism, a salvation myth falsely promising scientific solutions to all problems, replacing religion as a deceitful and malignant force.

This analysis is odd, not least because it ignores a key feature of the Enlightenment, namely that it specifically opposed the monolithic hegemonies of church, state and ideology, arguing instead for pluralism and individual freedom. Monolithic hegemonies demand that everyone believes the same thing: the tyrannies of Nazism and Stalinism were monolithic hegemonies in precisely this sense and were, therefore, as far from being descendants of the Enlightenment as could be. In fact, Nazism's roots lay in Romantic notions of race and its purity as the highest good. Stalinism was the same kind of juggernaut, using much the same kind of methods as the Inquisition in 16th-century Europe - terror, oppression, show trials and execution.

When people talk about "Enlightenment values" now, they tend to mean a modernised and somewhat idealised take on the 18th-century version. Enlightenment values today are commitments to individual autonomy, democracy, the rule of law, science, rationality, secularism, pluralism, a humanistic ethics, the importance of education, the promotion of human rights. These are not empty or abstract ideas. If one compares the lives of ordinary people 300 years ago with those we can enjoy now, the impact of the Enlightenment on the structure and practice of society can be fully appreciated - and admired.

“Today's 'Enlightenment values' are not empty or abstract ideas”

Read about all the problems with reason in our special issue

From issue 2666 of New Scientist magazine, 23 July 2008, page 42-43