Irrationality: A History of the Dark Side of Reason

By Justin Smith-Ruiu

From sex and music to religion and politics, a history of irrationality and the ways in which it has always been with us—and always will be

In this sweeping account of irrationality from antiquity to the rise of Twitter mobs and the election of Donald Trump, Justin Smith argues that irrationality makes up the greater part of human life and history. Ranging across philosophy, politics, and current events, he shows that, throughout history, every triumph of reason has been temporary and reversible, and that rational schemes often result in their polar opposite. Illuminating unreason at a moment when the world appears to have gone mad again, Irrationality is timely, provocative, and fascinating.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Release date: Dec 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9780691210827

Book preview

Francisco Goya, The Sleep of Reason Engenders Monsters (1799).

A HISTORY OF THE DARK SIDE OF REASON

JUSTIN E. H. SMITH

WITH A NEW PREFACE BY THE AUTHOR

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Copyright © 2019 by Justin E. H. Smith

Preface to the paperback copyright © 2020 by Justin E. H. Smith

Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to [e-mail]

Published by Princeton University Press

41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR

press.princeton.edu

All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020936116

First paperback printing, 2020

Paperback ISBN 978-0-691-21051-3

Cloth ISBN 978-0-691-17867-7

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

Editorial: Rob Tempio, Matt Rohal

Production Editorial: Lauren Lepow

Text Design: Leslie Flis

Cover Design: Amanda Weiss

Production: Jacqueline Poirier

Publicity: Julia Haav, Katie Lewis

This book has been composed in Arno with DIN Pro and DIN 1451 Engschrift display

Printed in the United States of America

This book is dedicated to the memory of Kenneth Von Smith (1940–2016)

For to every philosophy there are certain rear parts, very important parts, and these, like the rear of one’s head, are best seen by reflection.

—HERMAN MELVILLE, The Confidence-Man (1857)

CONTENTS

Preface  1

Preamble. A Mathematician’s Murder  9

Introduction  13

Reason’s Twin  13

Enlightenment into Myth  14

The Present Moment  20

Irrationality: A Road Map  27

CHAPTER ONE. The Self-Devouring Octopus; or, Logic  35

The Operation of Falsity  35

Explosions  40

Kaspar Hauser and the Limits of Rational Choice  43

Carrying On about the Ineffable  48

CHAPTER TWO. No-Brainers; or, Reason in Nature  59

An Ordered Whole  59

Brute Beasts  65

An Imperfect Superpower  72

Small Pain Points  77

CHAPTER THREE. The Sleep of Reason; or, Dreams  81

Upon Awakening  81

Breaking the Law  88

Spirits, Vapors, Winds  92

Hearing Voices  96

Bitter Little Embryos  102

Postscriptum Fabulosum  106

CHAPTER FOUR. Dreams into Things; or, Art  107

Many Worlds  107

Bleeding Out  109

Genies, Genius, and Ingenium  116

What Is Art?  123

The Two Magisteria  130

CHAPTER FIVE. I believe because it is absurd; or, Pseudoscience  139

The Stars Down to Earth  139

Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom  146

Alternative Facts, and Alternatives to Facts  153

The Paranoid Style in the Twenty-First Century  166

CHAPTER SIX. Enlightenment; or, Myth  174

Better the Light  174

The World-Soul on Horseback  180

Poetic History  185

Enlightenment into Myth, Again  193

Why Democracy?  203

CHAPTER SEVEN. The Human Beast; or, the Internet  208

An Escargotic Commotion  208

The Modern Shiva  212

Nothing Human Is Alien  220

More Gender Trouble  224

An Age of Extremes  234

CHAPTER EIGHT. Explosions; or, Jokes and Lies  237

Into Nothing  237

Charlie Hebdo and After  238

Pseudologia Generalis  245

Croaking  255

CHAPTER NINE. The Impossible Syllogism; or, Death  260

In the long run we are all dead  260

Radical Choices  264

Youth and Risk  267

The Impossible Syllogism  273

Tie Me Up  281

Cargo Cults  284

In Loving Repetition  292

Conclusion  295

Acknowledgments  299

Notes  301

Bibliography  321

Index  333

Preface

As I write this, I am entering the thirty-second day of quarantine in a small apartment in Brooklyn. New York City is for the moment the undisputed center of the global coronavirus pandemic. Having had mild symptoms myself, but finding it impossible to get tested, I have not been outside for three weeks now. The only common sound we hear out the window at this point are the ambulance sirens, heading to the hospital a block away. There was a record number of deaths in New York yesterday; perhaps, we tell ourselves, that will be the peak, and now we will start to see a flattening of the curve (our everyday speech has been infected, too, with the language of data-visualization). I have seen photographs on the Internet of the refrigerated trucks parked outside that same hospital, in which the surplus of dead bodies are stored as in a makeshift morgue.

The future is uncertain. It will likely look very different when these words go to press, whether brighter or darker, than it does right now. This is of course a frightening moment. And yet, were it not for the sirens and the fear for our loved ones, one might also be tempted to describe it as a moment of unfamiliar calm. It is a rift in history, a suspension between two eras that invites us to take stock of the most recently past one with newfound lucidity.

Irrationality belongs decidedly to the pre-corona era, and yet it is to be hoped that the book’s arrival at that era’s end might make it a sort of missive from the recent past that is also pregnant with the present. We did not know it would be a virus to come and knock us into the next chapter of history (or, more precisely, the epidemiologists did know, or held it probable, even if our irrational political order was not set up to listen to them), but it was clear that any number of triggering events could accomplish the knocking equally well.

To say that the recent past was pregnant with the present is to say, among other things, that tendencies whose heartbeat we might have had to strain to detect just a few years ago are now fully birthed, out in the open, kicking and screaming for all to see. If previously the relationship between pseudoscience, alternative medicine, and right-wing populism, for example, was familiar to some scholars and particularly astute analysts, today it is a central fact of our civic life, evident to anyone paying the slightest attention. That all organized religions exhibit similar tendencies to harm and stunt their believers, to take another example, might have seemed an overgeneralizing and crass thing to observe until recently; the generous-souled person might have felt compelled to reply to such an observation that harm of this sort is a deviation from the true spirit of religion, which builds people up and gives their lives meaning. Today, though, we are witnessing a worldwide convergence, an interfaith unification, bringing together Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn, Orthodox Christians in the Caucasus, evangelical Christians in Florida, nationalist Hindus in Delhi: all defiantly coming out against the call for social distancing, and insisting on bringing their bodies together into compact spaces to carry out their worship services as usual.

In Tbilisi, some priests have affirmed that the Holy Spirit prevents the virus from entering into a place of worship.¹ Pastor Tony Spell of Louisiana adopted another strategy, announcing that the virus … is politically motivated.² After being charged with violating an executive order against large gatherings, Pastor Spell changed his tack and acknowledged that, while the virus might indeed be real, and might afflict believers and unbelievers alike, and might not stop at the doors of the church, nevertheless a true Christian has a fundamentally different relationship to affliction and death than does a secular, rational agent of the sort public health officials imagine they are speaking to when they issue their guidelines and orders. [L]ike any revolutionary, or like any zealot, or like any pure religious person, Spell said, death looks to [us] like a welcomed friend.³

It is difficult, indeed impossible, to argue with the pastor on this point. He is not, in contrast with his initial suggestion that the virus is a political invention, offering an alternative account of the facts about the world. He is not saying that the virus is not a real thing, or that it is a real thing but the officials are lying to us about how it works. He is saying that it is a real thing, that it can kill us, but that we, believers, have a different existential stance towards death than nonbelievers do. And he even, astutely, acknowledges that this stance is shared not just with other believers, but with revolutionaries and zealots of all stripes, with everyone, in a word, who abandons rationality for irrationality.

There is no arguing with a zealot, and a zealot loves a crisis, perhaps especially a natural one that runs roughshod over our fragile social world and all the temporary comforts it provides and all the buffers it holds up against the indifference of nature. The virus, like the zealot, does not care about our little human lives either. The virus, like the zealot, cannot be argued with, but only contained.

In writing Irrationality, I was as cautious as I could be to avoid dwelling overmuch on personalities who might not be with us for long. I passed as swiftly as I could through the controversies surrounding Jordan B. Peterson, for example, and sure enough in the intervening months his star has sunk low on the horizon. I was warned by some at the time of writing that I should be similarly cautious in my engagement with the person and the phenomenon of Donald J. Trump. If you are reading this preface near the time of publication of the paperback edition, however, you will likely notice that Trump is very much still with us, and that however much he was able to help us understand irrationality in the pre-corona era, his behavior in this time of pandemic is more instructive still.

Having only self-idolatry as a belief system and lacking faith in either religion or science, the current president alternates between, at one moment, signaling support to the religious death-cults and to the conspiracy-mongers who go so far as to deny that the virus is anything more than a fiction in the service of dark political forces, and at another moment doing his best to defer to epidemiological experts while also touting unproven remedies of his own, even more like some nineteenth-century elixir-hawking confidence man than ever before. By 2014, as I discuss in chapter 5, Trump was already flirting with the antivaccination movement, not because he had any real commitment to denying the positive scientific claims of the immunologists, but because he instinctively understood that his chance at power lay in muddying the waters, in stoking a climate of diffuse doubt and mistrust of experts. If there was any doubt before the recent crisis, now it could not be clearer, as Trump touts an unproved and unapproved malaria drug for a viral illness, that his earlier antivaxx gestures were part of a long pattern: weakening trust in the epistemic authority of others is part and parcel of Trumpism.

Even a perfect state, under a most just sovereign, would not be perfectly well set up to respond to a virus that, again, does not care at all about human well-being. Even in the most well-prepared and rationally governed countries, there have been at least some deaths, and the measures taken in those places have raised serious issues about civil liberties and government surveillance, issues that are not going to go away after the pandemic crisis is resolved. The deeper problem in the United States is not only that fewer people may have died if the crisis had been better managed, but that those in power have failed to process, or learn, or at least acknowledge any of the significant lessons the virus teaches about the fragility of human society and its embedded-ness within a natural world far larger and more powerful than we are. This failure, in the United States, has not primarily expressed itself as common human foolhardiness or misplaced pseudo-manly war-posturing (though we did see some of that spirit in Boris Johnson’s would-be Churchillian call for Britons to brace themselves and tough it out, and Trump as well has on occasion relied on the clumsy metaphor of war), but only as a sauve-qui-peut indifference to the suffering of the great majority of people, in which the ultrawealthy continue to find ways to profit, states of the union are made to bid against one another for federal relief, and the executive in charge continues to gloat about his television ratings. This is then simply the latest manifestation of the American reigning party’s detachment from reality, its indifference to facts, and its imperviousness to lessons of any sort.

That the virus does not care about human well-being could be, for some, an occasion for learning a valuable lesson. In chapter 2, I explore the idea, often subterranean but always present throughout the history of philosophy, that rationality has its home not in the human mind or soul, but in nature as a whole, that whatever nature does is rational by the very fact that it is nature, law-governed and infallible, that does it. This hypothesis might be easier to entertain when we are contemplating the harmonious and regular orbit of the planets or the rising and lowering of the tides, than when we are observing the destruction of worlds by meteors, rising sea levels, or viruses. But sudden cataclysms, or even slow deviations from the familiar, do not show the irrationality of nature any more than its regular, clockwork functioning does; they only show its indifference to human concerns and desires. Philosophers from Epictetus through Spinoza and beyond have warned not to mistake the realization of those desires for justice itself. But over the past few centuries in particular, human beings have become so effective at screening out the nonhuman world from our social reality that when nature does come roaring back in, as Horace warned it always would, it can be hard to see this as anything other than an injustice, not to mention an effrontery. There is a deep and hard-to-shake sense that the NBA playoffs should happen, that Disneyland should be open for business. We have worked very hard to build up to the point where that should seems to have some real force to it, so that it is cognitively difficult for many of us, even for the intellectuals, to appreciate how fragile the artifice is on which that normative judgment rests.

I personally do not miss at all the rituals and tribalism of professional sports. There are depths of self-obliterating collective experience so much more profound than whatever can be achieved through the communal boosting of one’s city’s athletic squad, and I do yearn for these to make their return: concerts, nightclubs, and, yes, non-illicit religious services too. I mourn for the workers who have lost their livelihood in the restaurant industry, yet no more than I miss the NBA do I miss the absurd and infantilizing rituals of the restaurant cargo cult: the outsized pepper grinders and multiple utensils, the painfully false-sincere introductions from the server and the ensuing recitation of the specials, the precious menu language describing caramelized onions or hints of berry in beer. Away with all that!

Recently I find myself lying awake at night, thinking about the real possibility of imminent food shortages resulting from supply-chain disruptions, yet finding some small reassurance in the recollection that there is currently a ten-pound bag of white rice in the cupboard. When I make a cupful of it, and we eat it, I take pleasure and comfort in how filling it is. That, perhaps with a can of black beans and some salt, is quite enough to make me happy. I often think as I am eating, of Kant’s reasons, laid out in the 1790 Critique of the Faculty of Judgment, for excluding culinary experiences from the category of the aesthetic. When we say, That painting is beautiful, we seek universal assent for this judgment, rightly or wrongly. When I say, My beans and rice are agreeable, by contrast, I know this pertains only to me. Yet I also know that the creations of the cult of foodie-ism are for the most part agreeable only to the cult’s own members, and they have no standing at all to compel my assent to their judgments. So Kant got this much right: gastronomy is not art. There is something, I would add, out of balance about a culture that exalts food talk—on reality TV shows, in the lifestyle sections of text-based media—while at the same time neglecting even the most elementary cultivation of the power of aesthetic judgment directed at works of visual art. While we are for the moment prevented from entering museums as well as restaurants, the temporary closure of the latter might help us to return food to its rightful place in our thoughts: a necessary pleasure, just as good in its simple and common forms as in its complicated and refined ones, just as good when we are not talking about it as when we are.

I bring up these vignettes of our transformed life in the corona era only because they are among the examples that at various points enliven Irrationality, helping us to illuminate the cognitive, moral, social, and political condition with which the book is concerned and which gives it its title. I have insisted that there can be no single definition of the term in question that would capture all of its instances but instead that the concept is best studied by looking at several representative instances of it. Losing ourselves in political rallies, rock concerts, or sport spectatorship; choosing community spirit and the path of death over the path of individual maximized utility; immersing ourselves in table manners and other absurd and culturally specific rituals that enable us to screen out all thought of death: all of these, though very different from one another and in some cases even in conflict with one another, are in different contexts held to be expressions of irrationality.

It is difficult, in the present circumstances, to remain exclusively faithful to the vision of the good life as consisting in that course of action that maximizes individual benefits over the long run, that course of action that makes us live longer, with greater wealth. In this respect it is hard not to sympathize somewhat with the zealot who welcomes death. Most of us, of course, are still rational to the extent that we are following the rules of social distancing as best we can, and we are generally doing our best to scrape by and to stay alive. But many of us have also become aware, in this period of suspension, of the futility of our long-term pursuits, the impossibility, given the uncertainty of the future, of holding unmodified the same vision of the good life that we have long held. Will I be able to just keep writing books and talking about Aristotle, Leibniz, and Kant in front of classrooms packed with students? There is a good chance that I will not be, given the confluence of epidemiological and economic factors, which may conspire to transform publishing and higher education beyond recognition in the coming years.

It is not only the institutions whose existence I always regretted, like sports arenas and Michelin-starred restaurants, but also the ones I always loved, like theaters, museums, libraries, and universities, that we find substantially weakened by the pandemic. And so what happens, in this uncertain suspension, is that many of us, myself most definitely included, continue to do what we have always done, to the extent the circumstances permit, but find that in so doing the thought of future rewards, of prizes and salary increments and other accolades, has entirely fallen away, and the only thing that remains is the love of the work. There is a sense, too, in this suspension, that this is how one should have been approaching one’s life’s work all along, not in collecting prizes like the gaudy medals on a general’s chest, but in thinking things through to their depths, just for the sake of it. One hears distantly, in this calm work, the echo of the gospel of Matthew, where Christ says of the men out there vainly seeking accolades for their earthly deeds: They have their reward.

But it must be acknowledged: this work for its own sake, detached from earthly reward or expected utility, puts one in a frame of mind not altogether unlike that commended to us by Pastor Spell. Even if we do not welcome death, it is in the present circumstances much, much harder to think of the good life as consisting in a maximization of measurable benefits over the longest possible period of time. We may not have much of a future at all; and yet life, some of us are finding, is good. Rationality, as it is usually understood, is on vacation, which means that those of us who may have previously been too rigidly bound to it are experiencing a sort of serenity, while those who always chaffed against it—Pastor Spell, President Trump, and so many others—are free to ramp up the intensity of the death-cults they lead.

Every historical period affords us new and unique opportunities to understand the balance between rationality and irrationality in new ways, and the corona era is certainly no exception to this. As Irrationality shows, moreover, it is always a balance, an exceedingly delicate one, between these two magnetic poles of human life.

—Brooklyn, April 15, 2020

Notes

1. Giorgi Lomsadze, Coronavirus Testing Georgia’s Faith in Its Church, Eurasianet, March 23, 2020, https://eurasianet.org/coronavirus-testing-georgias-faith-in-its-church.

2. Polly Mosendz, Some Megachurches Are Still Packing in Crowds, Bloomberg News, March 29, 2020, https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/some-megachurches-are-still-packing-in-crowds/ar-BB11SBxU.

3. Sky Palma, ‘Death Is a Welcomed Friend’: Pastor Calls on Christians to Defy Coronavirus Lockdown—Even if It Kills Them, Raw Story, April 8, 2020, https://www.rawstory.com/2020/04/death-is-a-welcomed-friend-pastor-calls-on-christians-to-defy-coronavirus-lockdown-even-if-it-kills-them.

PREAMBLE

A Mathematician’s Murder

THE GULF OF TARANTO, FIFTH CENTURY BCE. They held his head under the sea until the life-breath ebbed out of him. The four of them had been chosen by the leader himself, from among the least learned of the sect, brawny men whose lack of comprehension in mathematics was compensated by their zeal for enforcing loyalty. They were instructed to wait for their poor victim to go to the side of the boat to pull up the nets, and to not let up until his limbs had ceased to twitch. He never saw what was coming, passed straight from eager thoughts of the pickerel and mullet about to appear as he heaved the wet ropes onboard, to horrid vision of death.

One does not betray the secrets of the sect, least of all when these secrets undermine the foundations upon which the sect is built. But this is what Hippasus had done. Word got out, among those who do not wear the robes, among those who laugh at the Pythagoreans, about a little problem with the way things, so to speak, add up. The world cannot be built up from numbers, from proportions, from ratio—from reason—because, they had begun to say, mathematics is rotten at its core. If the world is built up from numbers, then it must be as irrational as they are. This is what the sect had lately discovered from the diagonal of a square: it is incommensurable with the square’s side. If you try to calculate it, you will end up with a decimal series that has no natural end. How can that be? If there is no determinate fact about what that number is, how can it possibly be the number that characterizes a particular thing in the world? No, this is wrong. It is irrational. Whoever leaks it must surely die.

It is from Iamblichus that we initially learn a version of this legend: the drowning of Hippasus of Metapontum, a Pythagorean philosopher who flourished, for a while, a century or so before Socrates. The first recorder of this legend, writing seven centuries later, tells us that Hippasus was thrown into the sea not by his fellow sect members, but by the gods, and he seems to believe that it was not for the crime of divulging the nature of irrationality, but rather for teaching to non–sect members the less controversial art of inscribing a dodecahedron in a sphere.¹ Centuries after Iamblichus, Pappus of Alexandria, in the fourth century CE, seems to be the one who first suggests, almost a millennium after the fact, that Hippasus was intentionally killed for revealing the mystery of the diagonal of the square.² It almost certainly never happened, but like any good legend it does not need to have happened in fact in order to convey its profound lesson.

The mythological parallels for this story are many, but it is hard not to think of it as a sort of philosophical analogue to the opening scene of Stanley Kubrick’s 1969 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, the moment when a protohuman creature discovers its own power to use a bone as a weapon, first to kill a lowly tapir, and then to dominate or kill its fellow hominid rivals. Scientific discoveries, technological innovations, cognitive breakthroughs: all mark a step forward for human rationality, even if as a rule they also serve as an engine of new violence, providing the means for new forms of it that the world had not previously known. Rationality and brutality, then, are the twin poles of human history, and each new innovation—weapons from bones, the control of fire, writing, gunpowder, the internet—adds to the stockpiles of each. In both of the essentially fictional cases we have evoked, that of the hominids and that of the Greeks, something in the protagonist clicks, and then he is, or we are, doomed. This clicking is sometimes represented in myth, as in the case of Pandora, as an opening of an external box, but it would be more accurate to imagine it as an internal event, an epiphany, a breaking-through, after which nothing is the same.

New power carries with it new danger, and new occasions for violence. Such examples could easily be multiplied from the history of science and technology, of marvelous theoretical discoveries that are at the same time the beginnings of new chapters of human destructiveness. This is the tragic arc of science, discerned by James Merrill in his 1982 poem The Changing Light at Sandover, when he writes of the powers at the heart of matter that we have hacked through thorns to kiss awake, and that

Will open baleful, sweeping eyes, draw breath

And speak new formulae of megadeath.³

This last term, which would inspire the name of a well-known thrash-metal band, is in fact a unit of measurement, designating one million human deaths by nuclear explosion. The possibility of doing real reckoning with such units, Merrill understands, cannot be separated from our desire to probe into nature and to understand, by reason, its workings. Tool use, geometry, theoretical physics: all seem to be alike in that they have brought out the best and the worst in us. Correlatively, a sober assessment of human history suggests neither progress nor degeneration, but an eternally fixed balance of problem solving and problem creating. Occasions for the employment of the most exalted faculties of the human mind have also been occasions for the flexing of muscle and, when this is not enough, the raining down of blows.

The case of Hippasus, on Pappus’s telling, is in some respects just another in this long and repetitive history, yet there is also something special about it that sets it apart. The discoveries that gave us nuclear weapons did not reveal anything irrational about how the world works; we already knew that the world consists of many things that are too hot or too cold, too corrosive or cutting, to be compatible with human life. These discoveries only afforded us more opportunities to be vicious to one another, and at a greater scale. The discovery of irrational numbers is more poignant, as it involves a group of people, the Pythagoreans, dedicated to a sort of worship of rationality as exemplified in mathematics, who study mathematics precisely as an expression of this worship, and who unwittingly uncover the irrationality at the heart of the very thing they took as their object of worship, unleashing irrational violence on one of their own as a result. This sequence of steps takes us out of the history of science and technology narrowly conceived, and into a social and political history whose chapters are often characterized by just this sort of dialectical motion: from commitment to an ideal, to the discovery within the movement of an ineradicable strain of something antithetical to that ideal, to, finally, descent into that opposite thing.

This is the history of rationality, and therefore also of the irrationality that twins it: exaltation of reason, and a desire to eradicate its opposite; the inevitable endurance of irrationality in human life, even, and perhaps especially—or at least especially troublingly—in the movements that set themselves up to eliminate irrationality; and, finally, the descent into irrational self-immolation of the very currents of thought and of social organization that had set themselves up as bulwarks against irrationality. At the individual level irrationality manifests itself as dreams, emotion, passion, desire, affect, enhanced by drugs, alcohol, meditation; at the social level it is expressed as religion, mysticism, storytelling, conspiracy theory, sports fandom, rioting, rhetoric, mass demonstrations, sexuality when it bursts out of its prescribed roles, music when it breaks away from the notes on the sheet and takes on a life of its own. It encompasses the greater part of human life and has probably governed most periods of human history. Perhaps it has always reigned, while the historical periods in which human beings convince themselves that they are successfully keeping it at bay are few and far between.

Introduction

Reason’s Twin

For the past few millennia, many human beings have placed their hopes for rising out of the mess we have been born into—the mess of war and violence, the pain of unfulfilled passions or of passions fulfilled to excess, the degradation of living like brutes—in a single faculty, rumored to be had by all and only members of the human species. We call this faculty rationality, or reason. It is often said to have been discovered in ancient Greece, and was elevated to an almost divine status at the beginning of the modern period in Europe. Perhaps no greater emblem of this modern cult can be found than the Temples of Reason that were briefly set up in confiscated Catholic churches in the wake of the French Revolution of 1789. This repurposing of the august medieval houses of worship, at the same time, shows what may well be an ineliminable contradiction in the human effort to live our lives in accordance with reason, and to model society on rational principles. There is something absurd, indeed irrational, about giving reason its own temples. What is one supposed to do in them? Pray? Bow down? But aren’t these the very same prostrations that worshippers had previously performed in the churches, from which we were supposed to be liberated?

Any triumph of reason, we might be expected to understand these days, is temporary and reversible. Any utopian effort to permanently set things in order, to banish extremism and to secure comfortable quiet lives for all within a society constructed on rational principles, is doomed from the start. The problem is, again, evidently of a dialectical nature, where the thing desired contains its opposite, where every earnest stab at rationally building up society crosses over sooner or later, as if by some natural law, into an eruption of irrational violence. The harder we struggle for reason, it seems, the more we lapse into unreason. The desire to impose rationality, to make people or society more rational, mutates, as a rule, into spectacular outbursts of irrationality. It either triggers romantic irrationalism as a reaction, or it induces in its most ardent promoters the incoherent idea that rationality is something that may be imposed by force or by the rule of the enlightened few over the benighted masses.

This book proceeds through an abundance of illustrations and what are hoped to be instructive ornamentations, but the argument at its core is simple: that it is irrational to seek to eliminate irrationality, both in society and in our own exercise of our mental faculties. When elimination is attempted, the result is what the French historian Paul Hazard memorably called la Raison aggressive, aggressive Reason.¹

Enlightenment into Myth

The continuous movement between the two poles of rationality and irrationality—the aggressive turn that reason takes, transforming into its opposite—is described in compelling detail by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in their monumental 1944 work Dialectic of Enlightenment.² Composed in Californian exile as the war unleashed by the Nazi regime was raging in their home country and largely destroying the civilization that had formed them, theirs is an account that need not be repeated, and that cannot be bettered. The German authors are particularly interested in how enlightenment reverts to mythology, that is, how a social philosophy based upon the perfection and application of reason for the solution of society’s problems, for the benefit of all, may transform or harden into fascism: a political ideology that involves no real exercise of reason at all, but only the application of brute force, and manipulation of the majority for the benefit of a few.

Quite a lot has happened since 1944. Adorno and Horkheimer were prescient, and remain relevant, but there is much that they could not anticipate. Marxism remains a valuable analytical tool for scholars to understand the course of global history. Revolutionary movements aiming at radical economic redistribution also continue to exercise their attraction for many people throughout the world, even as the first great attempt to establish socialism through revolution collapsed before the end of the twentieth century. In the early twenty-first century, we are still struggling to understand the new phenomenon of Trumpism-Putinism, which seems unprecedented in its ideological nebulousness, but which also seems to be a clear announcement of the end, or at least the life-threatening crisis, of liberal democracy, which had until this most recent era had its stronghold, as an aspiration and an ideal, in the United States.

Adorno and Horkheimer are credited with predicting that the iteration of liberal political ideology—which on their view only pretends to be an absence of ideology—that reigned in the mid-twentieth century had an arc that naturally bent toward fascism. Recently some have similarly argued that the current global surge of populism, locally inflected in the United States with the rise of Donald Trump, is simply the inevitable conclusion of a process. Liberal democracy molts its skin, and what emerges is variously identified as either the slick serpent of fascism or the common garden snake of populist nationalism: in either case an emergence that had been predicted decades earlier by a pair of insightful German Marxists in strange sun-kissed exile. Trump is pretending to be a successor to Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln, but he does not care about the same things they did. The imperative to make America great again is grounded in a mythology of what America once was that is fundamentally incompatible with Enlightenment, with knowing who we are and where we in fact came from. Adorno and Horkheimer’s formula has come true, then: Enlightenment has reverted to mythology. The German authors took this to be a problem with Enlightenment itself, though other explanations, as we will see in the chapters that follow, also present themselves.

It is not at all clear, in any case, that Trump himself is an anti-Enlightenment ideologue. He does not appear to have the requisite clarity or maturity for such a well-defined commitment. He has, however, been surrounded by such ideologues. He benefits from their support, and so has become if not an irrational agent of anti-Enlightenment, then at least a subrational vector of it. His rise coincides historically with the appearance in the intellectual landscape of many authors and personalities who are articulating coherent critiques of the core commitments of Enlightenment philosophy. We may summarize these commitments as follows: first, that each of us is endowed with the faculty of reason, capable of knowing ourselves and our place in the natural and social worlds; second, that the best organization of society is the one that enables us to freely use our reason in order both to thrive as individuals and to contribute in our own way to the good of society. We may wish to make some more fine-grained revisions to this rough-and-ready definition of Enlightenment, but it will be good enough for now. It will be good enough, in particular, for understanding what it is that is now under attack, by Trump and Vladimir Putin and their epigones; by the nouveaux riches of Silicon Valley who are fostering a culture of post-Enlightenment, postdemocratic values, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously; and by the various thinkers who, for now, manage to position themselves within our intellectual landscape as edgy by rejecting such long-cherished desiderata for society as equality and democratic participation.

The dialectic of enlightenment—here I mean not the book, but the process—has been well studied, and not just by Marxists. Even the neoconservative French thinker Pascal Bruckner argued already in 1995 that individualism has tribalism as its ultimate logical terminus, since in a society based on individual freedom the individual may have gained freedom, but he has lost security.³ Thus the now-familiar transformation of the likes of the young computer hacker and the old cattle rancher who, circa 2008, thought of themselves as libertarians, but by 2016 were ready to sign up for a sort of statist-nationalist personality cult.

It was the liberal philosopher Isaiah Berlin who popularized the term counter-Enlightenment in English in a 1973 article. As Zeev Sternhell notes, the term first appears in German, as Gegen-Aufklärung, in Friedrich Nietzsche, and is widespread in Germany in the early twentieth century. Sternhell himself, a liberal historian of ideas, published his important study The Anti-Enlightenment Tradition in 2006; there he details the significance of the work of such figures as Edmund Burke and J. G. Herder for the history of modern political thought. According to Sternhell, the two tendencies are born together in the eighteenth century, a period that marks not only the birth of rationalist modernity, but also its antithesis.⁴ To identify the thesis and antithesis as appearing together both historically and conceptually is to see counter-Enlightenment less as Enlightenment’s opposite than as its twin, and to see unreason less as reason’s opposite than