Patrick Lawrence: Our Age of Unreason

Life in the Endarkenment

Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a media critic, essayist, author and lecturer. His new book, Journalists and Their Shadows, is out now from Clarity Press. His website is Patrick Lawrence. Support his work via his Patreon site.

Cross-posted from Scheer Post

(Geralt/Wikimedia Commons)

Remarks delivered in late August at the annual congress of Mut zur Ethik, which translates (a little awkwardly) as “the courage of one’s ethics.” This group gathers in Zürich’s environs each summer to hear a variety of speakers consider a selected theme. This year’s theme was “Reason and Humanity.”  —  Patrick Lawrence

I have titled my remarks this summer “Our Age of Unreason,” and I am aware this may seem a touch grandiose. If this is how my title strikes you I have chosen well, as I mean to imply precisely that we have entered a new age, as consequentially distinct from previous ages as those ages were in their time — the Golden Age of Athens, the Age of Reason, the Age of Materialism, the Atomic Age.

There are many cases in point:

• The Zionist state’s genocide campaigns,
• The dismantling of democratic rights in the West in the name of defending democracy,
• Our purported leaders’ brazen abandonment of law—domestic and international—in the name of upholding the law,
• Pseudo-seriousness diplomats and uniformed officers who advance patently nonsensical military strategies such as “escalate to de-escalate.”
• In everyday life, psychological operations and what we call cognitive warfare have so corrupted our public discourse that we are no longer be certain what is and is not true. Large proportions of the populations across the West are now incapable of understanding the world in which they live — this while remaining obstinately confident they do.

We have taken the ground out from beneath our own feet.

These are varied manifestations, among an infinite number, of our age of unreason. I choose these to mention because each also goes some way to explaining how we arrive in circumstances warranting that we name our age as I propose. Each case is suggestive of whose interests this new age serves.

What Is Enlightenment?

My immediate reference, of course, is the Age of Reason, so named by Tom Paine, the American revolutionary, political philosopher, and pamphleteer. Paine’s “Age of Reason” is otherwise known as “the Enlightenment.” And it is well to spend a few minutes considering what Paine meant and what is meant by “the Enlightenment” so that, as in a concave mirror, we recognize what our age, so far as I argue today, is not.

My editor at Yale University Press told me years ago about a book he was editing but would never publish because the author had died before finishing the manuscript. The book was to be titled The Endarkenment. I have ever since thought what a pity it is the book will never come out. And here, in broad daylight, I am going to steal this succinct term as a useful companion to my “Age of Unreason.” At the horizon they come to the same thing.

In The Age of Reason, the book that named his time, Tom Paine argued in favor of rationality as against revelation and other features of orthodox Christianity, the Christianity of the temporal church. His argument was in large part theological, so it is better we resort to [Emmanuel] Kant for a very basic understanding of the Enlightenment.

In 1784 a German pastor named Johann Friedrich Zöllner asked publicly about the meaning of the term “Enlightenment,” which was by this time coming into common use.

This was in a monthly journal called Berlinische Monatsschrift. Zöllner’s curiosity seems to have prompted a lively debate in Berlinische Monatsschrift’s pages. Kant responded in the journal’s December 1784 edition with “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” and this is, of course, the reply that comes down to us in history.

“Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity,” Kant wrote in his famous first sentence. “Immaturity,” he immediately explained, “is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another.”

Kant was very certain that the condition essential to the transcendence of humanity’s state of immaturity is freedom. “If it is only allowed freedom,” he wrote with reference to the public, “enlightenment is almost inevitable.”

Here I suggest we consider the term “discernment” according to the Jesuits’ definition. In Jesuit education, “discernment” means one’s capacity to make judgments, choices, plans of action, and so on as an autonomous individual, free of the interventions of others, or coercions, or other sorts of external influence.

It means listening to oneself, in a phrase — which implies a certain measure of confidence in oneself. What is more — a key point here — the discerning individual judges and chooses according to his or her moral values and with reference, always, to the commonweal, the greater good of humanity.

Returning to Kant, “What Is Enlightenment?” is but seven pages in the English translation with which I work, and there is a very great deal of insight in it. “Self-imposed immaturity,” an inability to understand anything without guidance from someone else: These are damning phrases to describe the unenlightened, I would say.

What is more, Kant argued that most people prefer this unenlightened state—this endarkenment. “If I have a book to serve as my understanding, a pastor to serve as my conscience, a physician to determine my diet for me,” he wrote, “I need not exert myself at all. I need not think: If only I can pay, others will readily undertake the irksome work for me.”

Being a sympathetic sort, Kant attributed this tendency among the majority of people to “laziness and cowardice” — Kant’s precise words. He meant that listless state of conformity that is now all too familiar among us.

But the new freedom announced by the Age of Reason, Kant asserted, will advance humankind beyond this condition such that he concluded his time deserved the name it had by then acquired.

“Nothing is required for this enlightenment except freedom,” he wrote. And, against the background of the ancien régime, Kant could credibly assume people’s ardent desire for freedom. “If it is now asked,” he wrote, “‘Do we presently live in an enlightened age?’ the answer is ‘No, but we do live in an age of enlightenment.’”

Our reality is very different. We have no ground upon which to make assumptions as to the inevitability of progress, as Kant did. We are, indeed, profoundly mixed up on this point — mistaking as we habitually do technological progress, material progress, for genuine human progress.

Running From Freedom

As [Erich] Fromm and others have persuasively argued, a fear of freedom is now prevalent in our societies. Most people are frightened to death of freedom, and when I say “frightened to death” I mean this literally: They die to their lives, to their own sources of vitality, leading lives that amount to subsistence survival, or “quiet desperation,” as [Henry David] Thoreau had it.

The prevalence of ideologies in our societies seems to me a point requiring no elaboration. And the appeal of ideologies, of course, is that they require belief but not thought or judgment — or, indeed, reason. And so we find that state of self-imposed immaturity everywhere we look.

Ideology, conformity: These are the shelters within which many people, and I would say most, indulge their fundamental fear of freedom. They both derive from what Kant called “guidance from another,” and this implies a certain kind of submission to one or another manifestation of power, as Kant surely meant to suggest.

There is an infinite variety of these manifestations in our lives today, and how very, very dependent upon them are most of us. We are dependent, in other words, on authorities above us to know what to think—“the irksome work”—and equally  what not to think and altogether how to live and not live.

How deeply committed are we, to make my point another way, to our Age of Unreason. This age unburdens us of the responsibilities that come with freedom, with the capacity to discern, with the duty to exercise autonomous judgment.

All that is taken care of by those forms of power that hover above and around us to such an extent we internalize them. In this state one need not think, as Kant wrote 241 years ago. We need not today change a syllable of this passage. And it is when we no longer think that power grows ever more independent from us, ever more sequestered and, so, ever more corrupt.

So do we tumble ever more inevitably into our Age of Unreason.

The Age of Reason was inspired by the scientific advances of the 16^th and 17^th centuries, and this raised a concern among Enlightenment thinkers such as Kant and, indeed, Paine, who was a Deist.

If scientific laws governed our world, what would become of our morality, our defense of such values as justice, our commitment to, in my terms, the human cause? Where would reason, exercised by the individual, untethered by all [that] the Enlightenment would leave behind in the name of freedom, lead us?

To unalloyed materialism, to indifference toward others, to narrowness of mind, to narcissism, to hedonism, to nihilism?

Reason without morality: At the risk of reductive thinking this was a commonly shared anxiety.

And how well we can see now that this concern was justified. Reason was intended to be the agent of human emancipation. In our time reason subjects us to a tyranny of systems, technologies, dehumanized scientific management procedures, and power elites that know no ethics, no morality (broadly defined), no anything other than their own imposition, enforcement, and reproduction.

John Ralston Saul, a Canadian writer I hold in high regard, published a book on this phenomenon in 1992. He called it Voltaire’s Bastards, which he subtitled The Dictatorship of Reason in the West. Ralston Saul argued that the whole of life in the West has been disfigured by the perversion of reason.

Reason no longer has anything to do with human emancipation: It has become a device by way of which elites — political, economic, technocratic, cultural — exert surreptitious control over the fabric and direction of our societies, our public discourse — and, indeed, our ability even to see the world around us — and so our ability to reason.

This is what I mean by our Age of Unreason. At the core of it we find what I took many years ago to calling “the irrationality of hyperrationality.” To put my case I hope not too simply, everything makes sense if we take matters strictly on the terms of their internal frame of reference and remain in the eternal present within which the corruption of reason maroons us.

If we manage to step outside this construct — if we find our way out by means of authentic reason, I mean to say — very little makes any sense at all. This is what I mean by the irrationality of hyperrationality.

In One–Dimensional Man [Herbert] Marcuse wrote of “technological rationality.” I think my “irrationality of hyperrationality” approximates Marcuse’s thought, “The totalitarian universe of technological rationality,” he wrote, “is the latest transmutation of the idea of Reason.” He wrote then of “the process by which logic became the logic of domination.”

This is another way of saying what I mean.

Reason Before Belief

I want now to historicize our Age of Unreason, and to do so I reference another book, one that has meant a lot to me over the course of many years.

Max Horkheimer published Eclipse of Reason in 1947. In it he made the case that reason had been, by the time he brought out his book, “instrumentalized.” This is to say reason is no longer a means of understanding the world around us but is instead applied to justifying and achieving one’s objectives. Horkheimer called this “subjective reason,” as against objective reason.

Going back to the Greeks, objective reason requires that thought be conducted without reference to the desirability or otherwise of its conclusions. Reason should determine belief and not the other way around, as Socrates taught us all:  To allow belief to determine reason is the danger implicit in subjective reason. And, staying with Horkheimer’s term, subjective reason lies at the very heart of our Age of Unreason.

To illustrate the point in the most commonplace terms, what do we mean when we say, “That sounds reasonable,” or “That stands to reason,” or simply “That makes sense”? We mean, one or another way, that for your reasoning to be valid it must serve you in the achievement of your objectives. It is not a big leap to recognize that it is Voltaire’s illegitimate offspring who have instrumentalized reason in this way, just as Ralson Saul argued.

Cold War ‘Certainty’

We should pause to think about Horkheimer’s publication date, two years after the 1945 victories.

Big Science, as we now call it, had begun to rise in the 1930s, and with it came a preoccupation, especially evident in America, with total certainty and total security — neither of which is ever even remotely possible. If ever there was an agent more purely dedicated to the irrationality of hyperrationality than Big Science, I mean to say, I cannot think of what it may be.

By the end of World War II this preoccupation with certainty and security more or less dictated American foreign and military policies. Nineteen forty-seven marked, of course, the start of the Cold War, and this turned what had been a preoccupation in scientific and policy circles — total certainty, total security, the elimination of all risk — into a national obsession.

Authoritarian Reason

To finish with Horkheimer, he associated the corruption of reason with the increasing seclusion of power and a tendency toward authoritarianism in the Western democracies. In response he argued that reason must again be exercised in the cause of fundamentally moral and just societies and altogether the cause of human emancipation.

In Marcuse’s terms this required of us what he termed a “Great Refusal,” a rejection of the dehumanization of humanity by way of what he called “technologies of pacification.”

It may be impossible, or mere folly, to assign a date as the beginning of our Age of Unreason, but I propose, with a view to all I have very sketchily described, the mid–20^th century. It was then Big Science and the Cold War converged in the unhappiest of combinations to assign ideology, on one hand, and technology on the other, the primacy that will be evident now to all of us.

Ideology and technology: Are these not our bane? Both have devastated our common capacities of discernment, judgment, and altogether our ability to think and reason, while encouraging — going back to Kant — our immature over-dependence on various forms of power and authority, which manifest ever more diffusely and remotely.

What Horkheimer and others detected in the 1940s  seems to me so entrenched, so woven into the fabric of our societies as to mark out our time as distinct from what preceded it. Seventy-eight years after Horkheimer published his book, what he saw as an eclipse seems to me the dark dawn of another age.

We in the West have suffered a radical collapse of meaning in this age. We have lost, I think decisively, that connection between reason and morality the 18^th century saw as essential. We have decisively lost our idea of the commonweal as the anchor from which reason will make its case.

We have lost, in other words, any kind of larger notion of a shared telos, an ultimate object or aim. These are casualties of our lapse into hedonism and nihilism, and, among the power elites — to borrow again the phrase of C. Wright Mills — a preoccupation of power for the sake of power, power as the ultimate measure and vessel of value.

As we gather here, and it is always a delight for me to be with you for exactly what I will now say, we are living, breathing proof that there is a way forward from our Age of Unreason, a thought I assume I do not have to explain.

Ages come and expire, and so will this one. I may be stretching Marcuse’s term, but I do not think by much, when I suggest we must consider the value of habitual refusal as a very important means of making our way in our age.

I don’t think we can proceed with our reasoning with any notion that the project is one of retrieval or restoration. There is no going back.

New sensibilities and a new consciousness are in history preface to great change. And so we have to think in terms of a new consciousness such that, with our faculties of reason and judgment, we can see the problems and crises of our time as they are, and with no “guidance from another,” to go back to Kant once more, no reference to any higher or remote or powerful authority simply because such an authority is above us or remote from us or more powerful than we are, and with no presumption that what I call the “what-is” of our civilization is rational or sensible simply because it is the “what-is” we see out our windows.

Equally, we have to find for ourselves a new language, reminding ourselves as we do that the primary function of language is not speech but thought. We will need this new language as we think anew — as we reattach reason to the human cause.

The late Robert Parry was a journalist of impeccable integrity and founded, 30 years ago this year, Consortium News, where I write regularly and whose editor, Joe Lauria, is among us this year. Bob once memorably remarked, on the occasion of accepting one of his numerous awards, “I don’t care what the truth is. I just care what the truth is.”

This is an argument — succinct and elegant all at once — for a return to the Socratic. It is an argument for objective reason, an argument against the blight of subjective reason as we are borrowing this term from Horkheimer.

It is a protest. It is a great refusal, it is an argument against our Endarkenment.

And this is the argument we need to make, just as we make it as we gather here.

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