Our Age of Unreason

*We have lost that connection between reason and morality …. We have decisively lost our idea of the commonweal as the anchor from which reason will make its case.

“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.”

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.

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.

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, very little makes any sense at all.

Eclipse of Reason---instrumentalized----reason is no longer a means of understanding the world around us but is instead applied to justifying and achieving one’s objectives----“subjective reason,” as against objective reason.

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 18th century saw as essential. We have decisively lost our idea of the commonweal as the anchor from which reason will make its case.

[consortiumnews.com]

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.