I remember some ten or
so years ago being in a hotel in Donegal on a Sunday morning, and a guy going
ballistic at the desk over his stuff being stolen. He was a participant in a psychic fair that
was being held in the hotel, and during the night someone had broken in and
pocketed his wares. And the first thing
that struck me at the time was: ‘Why did he not see it coming?’
Now the modern liberal
movement, which has its roots primarily in the French Revolutionary period,
with the latter’s deification of the goddess ‘Reason’, has something of the
same problem. The motto of modern
liberalism, indeed, of all liberalism, is perhaps best summed up in the
ridiculous battle cry from that ridiculous film 300: ‘This day we rescue a world from
mysticism and tyranny and usher in a future brighter than anything we can
imagine.’
That
being the case, and given the enormous claims being made for Reason, one has to
ask the question: How do they manage to still get things wrong? For example, why do they lose elections, if
everything is calculated on the basis of strict and unarguable reasoning?
The
reason of course lies in the assumptions on which each process of reasoning is
based. Every process of reasoning has to
have a starting point, a belief about the world from which one argues
forward. And it is these beliefs, these
assumptions, which provide the Achilles heel of the whole rationalist movement.
Processes
of reason are merely tools, effective only to the extent that they are in any
particular instance rooted in reality.
And the fact is there is very little, if anything, that can be said
about the world that is and must be true in any and every circumstance. At best, it is a matter of percentages.
In the
main, at the root of individual logical processes one finds assumptions that,
especially in the case of liberals etc.,
are fundamentally emotional. Rather than
embracing what they believe to be a scientific view of the world, people are in
fact feeding an emotional hunger in themselves. At the start of each chain of
reasoning there is an emotional attachment, whether realised or not, and more
often than not it is not realised. Then
reason is introduced as a trellis to help train the weak plant up.
A good
indication of this is the TV coverage of tears flowing in the Clinton camp in
wake of the defeat, and also the childish rioting and demonstrating that came
after it. No evidence of rationality or scientific
detachment here—something which would have factored in the possibility of
defeat in advance—but rather the expression of disappointed hopes. Much like a football fan after a losing
derby.
