Should Reason (Ever) Prevail...

I have been silent for a while, as (being high-spectrum autistic) I sometimes am. I am waiting for my Earth Day (more or less) release announcement for my first new eco-thriller in 17 years, Red Tide (stay tuned). (Full disclosure: like all of my books, it will be controversial. But more on that later. (My pen name is E.C. Ayres).)

For now I am driven to write by world news: nothing new, mind you, just increasingly intensified. More and more, of late, I have been thinking--and wondering--if reason even actually exists in our world, or ever did, as a principle upon which people actually acted. I know there to be reasonable people (I like to think of myself as one) and always have been. But how many, and what do they actually control? A few small countries in Europe, I think, at most. Congress? The Military Industrial Complex? The Middle East? If ever there was a place where reason takes a back seat, it is there, where, for whatever historical reasons however historically justified, reason is not even allowed into the room. Where and when else did people in positions of great power demand that the whole world go back in time--at gunpoint--more than a millennium? Or two? Of course we've seen oppression and exploitation before, having done a fair amount of that ourselves, speaking as an American. But to try to roll back time and history on grounds of revenge? This is terrifying.

I am still blown away by the writings of Confucius, almost three thousand years ago. He was a man who gave a great deal of thought to reason, and what is reasonable. For example, he wrote that emperors and their ilk should only make laws that were reasonable to follow; and by the same token people should obey such laws and rules of society only as they saw them to be fair and reasonable. And there was a period of time after World War II (my thanks to David Brooks for bringing this up: I don't always agree with  him but most definitely do in this case) when there were numerous bestsellers about how wonderful we humans are/were, and that we should love ourselves more (why not?) because as 1950s author and psychologist Carl Rogers wrote "Man's behavior is exquisitely rational, moving with subtle and ordered complexity toward the goal his organism is endeavoring to achieve." If only. I look out there and see ISIS, and the NRA. Not that exquisite.

So how far has humanity devolved from Confucius or Rogers' kind of thinking? Pretty far, it seems. And yet we survived the 20th Century (barely) so there may be hope yet for us. For, after all, reason has always existed, at least at some level. But to me the problem is (and always was) that reasonable people are in the minority, possibly a very small minority, and always were. 

True, everyone is capable of being reasonable at one time or another. And of course we demand it of others, always. Just not that often of ourselves. 

Pity, that.