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In the beginning…
The king was told that all the crops in the kingdom would be affected by a terrible blight. Anyone who ate of them would go mad. He called in his trusted adviser and asked him what to do.
“Of course,” the king said, “there is enough grain left from last year’s harvest so that you and I could continue eating of it. We could remain sane and keep all the others from doing any harm.”
”Your majesty,” replied the wise man, “if only you and I are sane and all the rest are madmen, who is it that will be locked up in the asylum?”
”I understand,” said the king, “but what is left for us to do?”
“You and I will eat the same grain as everyone else,” replied the sage, “but right now I will place a mark on your forehead, and you will place one on mine, so that whenever we look at each other we will be reminded of our madness. And that will be enough.”
(As told to Arthur Green by Rabbi Nahman of Braqtslav)
In our digital age, in which we are immersed in news bites, data, and opinion, is signal being drowned out by noise? Are we are stuck in a crisis of our own making—a crisis in which our technological harvest has overwhelmed our ability to understand who and what we are? If that’s what happening, won’t we just keep repeating the same mistakes, only to greater and greater effect?
Is there something that we can do to temper the hubris that poisons our knowing?
If you get my meaning, place a mark on your forehead.
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Marc, I think we are working along similar lines. My emphasis in “Divine Primates” is to encourage everyone to self-identify ourselves as irrational beings with a frightening talent for rationalization. The mark is there on everyone’s forehead, but we spend enormous energy rationalizing, behaving as if we were intelligent, but masking our irrational nature with rationalization.
Our views differ somewhat but may in final analysis, lead t the same lace. For me, rationality is our device. The structure of rationality itself does not give us access to any true value or theory. Some reasoning may be fallacious according to the rules of reason, and therefore, definitionally irrational. But reason itself is merely a self-consistent construction. It does not take us closer to truth but in most cases, it can take closer to useful predictions. Sometimes we need to work with what seems to be irrational in order to break through some of the barriers imposed by our self-consistent rational constructions. We often call this art.
Bottom line? The only criterion for what we call rationality is self-consistency.
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