Limits of rationalism

The other day, I sympathized with Oakeshott's anti-rationalism. Bang on cue, rationalist-in-chief Richard Dawkins showed one of the weaknesses in rationalism. He tweeted:

Date rape is bad. Stranger rape at knifepoint is worse. If you think that’s an endorsement of date rape, go away and learn how to think.

When some objected to this, he replied:

I don’t think rationalists and sceptics should have taboo zones into which our reason, our logic, must not trespass...
I deliberately wanted to challenge the taboo against rational discussion of sensitive issues.

What this misses is that taboos exist because humans are emotional creatures. We feel upset and disgust, and taboos exist to protect us from such feelings. Introducing rape gratuitously into a public discussion upsets some people unnecessarily. Etiquette dictates that we don't do this - just as it dictates that, on meeting Professor Dawkins, one should say "hello" rather than "you're a cunt aren't you." And disgust, like it or not, is the basis for some moral judgments - such as the belief that some things such as human organs or sex be not traded in markets.

Demanding that there be no taboo zones and that reason and logic go everywhere is, in this sense, a demand that people be dessicated calculating machines devoid of emotion. Even if this were desirable - which is very dubious - it is a futile call.

Nor is it obvious that the emotions which give rise to taboos can be subjected to the tribunal of reason. David Hume, for one, thought not:

Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them...
Where a passion is neither founded on false suppositions, nor chuses means insufficient for the end, the understanding can neither justify nor condemn it.

I'll confess that this is true for me; my antipathy to inequality is, at root, an emotional one and my apparently rational arguments are the slave of that passion. I suspect - though cannot prove - that the same is true of Dawkins. Reading The God Delusion gives me the impression that Dawkins is motivated by an emotion of disgust at some of the effects of religion. I happen to share that feeling in many ways, but it is a feeling.

Here, I suspect, Dawkins is being inconsistent. What he's demanding is not so much that everyone be dispassionate but that they share his disgust at some things and his lack of disgust at others. He's complaining: "Why can't everyone be like me?"

And this brings me back to Oakeshott. The rationalist, he wrote, is:

something of an individualist, finding it difficult to believe that anyone who can think honestly and clearly will think differently from himself...
His ambition is not so much to share the experience of the race as to be a demonstrably self-made man.(Rationalism in Politics, p6-7)

In this sense, rationalism is close to narcissism.

Comments

[Julijuxtaposed]

Great post, Chris!

"For reason, ruling alone, is a force confining; and passion, unattended, is a flame that burns to its own destruction." ~ Kahlil Gibran ('The Prophet')

[Trumpton riots]

I fully take the point of this post.

But then it becomes a battle between what is and what isn't taboo. I think flying an Israeli flag in public is taboo, but some still do it. The official taboo is never personal but related to the balance of power, brainwashing etc i.e. separated from rational thinking.

Freedom of speech is a battleground.

Allowing people to be rational is something the system fights against. It is a revolutionary act to fight for rational thinking, even if it is naive and often misused.

[Luke]

Isn't "Your a cunt" the traditional way to address Prof Dawkins? Rather than "You're...."?

I would expect an Oakshottian to respect such traditions, even if the reason for that tradition is lost in twitter history.

[Ben Greenhalgh]

Very interesting view, one I fully agree with. I think Dawkin missed the point on this. I would have loved to have found out his motivation for such a emotion enducing prod. The fact that he brings this up shows his inability to understand a world outside logic. He examines rape as if its effects are quantifiable, as a rule based concept dependent upon the severity of the event. Great post.

[Rob]

Dawkins is wrong about why people don't like what he's saying. His main problem is that he's not backing his claims up with any evidence, because no evidence exists.

Being assaulted at knifepoint is obviously horrifying, but it's really not obvious to me that it's worse than being, say, assaulted in your own home by someone that you personally know and trust. It's certainly not obvious that Richard Dawkins is in possession of any particular insight into this question.

The whole point of "which bad thing would you rather have happen to you" games is that people's answers are often surprising and subjective. It really does depend on who the person is and how trauma affects them, and since traumas of that level of seriousness are thankfully rare, there's not a lot of data to enable us to predict the outcome ahead of time.

The problem is that he is being perfectly rational in the context of a set of assumptions about what rape is like, and he's interpreting people's disagreement as being an emotional "yuck factor" response to his mention of the r-word, rather than a critique of the lack of support for his conclusions.

[donald]

Rob, I think you're missing Dawkins' point, which he could have made equally well by saying date rape is worse than knife rape.

[donald]

Chris, I expect your general point on Dawkins and his rationality is right. His specific point here though is really quite important and, I think, worth making.

Often people that suggest gradations of terrible and (normally also) sexual things, get shouted down as in some way endorsing or dismissing the lesser evil.

This could be a good thing. It could be that ackowledging that some rape is worse than others make some men more likely to commit the 'lesser' rape.

But it could also be that refusing to acknowledge gradations gives the very people that you need to persuade and excuse to ignore you.

Given the reaction to Dawkinss tweets, I suspect it would be quite difficult to have a reasonable and public discourse on which effect dominates.

[Keith]

Rob is correct. It is noticeable that only rape seems to get this kind of attempt at grading. I never seem to hear people say some murders are worse than others or some armed robberies are not so bad. Rather than being a master of logic Dawkins is just reproducing the widespread social "meme" that excuses rape in possibly consensual contexts as not somehow being rape.

As we know from statistics that it is rare for rape to involve abduction by knife wielding strangers and most victim knows the rapist I do not see what good this evidence free throw away twitter controversy does. It merely shows up the boredom Dawkins must feel now he is retired as an academic and has too much time on his hands.

[Doug]

Yeh, Dawkins is so rational his thoughts on religion led him to approve of that scumbag Sam Harris. There's rationalism and there's rationalism.