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Are human beings uniquely irrational creatures? And if we are, what are the consequences of basing our society on the opposite assumption?

These are questions Justin E.H. Smith, a philosopher at the University of Paris, takes up in his new book, Irrationality: A History of the Dark Side of Reason. He pokes holes in the story humans in the Western world have been telling themselves for centuries: that we were once blinkered by myth and superstition, but then the ancient Greeks discovered reason and, later, the Enlightenment cemented rationality as the highest value in human life.

Smith argues that this is a flattering but false story. Humans, he says, are hardly rational, and in fact, irrationality has defined much of human life and history. And the point is not merely academic. “The desire to impose rationality, to make people or society more rational,” he writes, “mutates ... into spectacular outbursts of irrationality.”

If Smith is right, that leaves us in a precarious position. If we can’t impose order on society, what are we supposed to do? Should we not strive to incentivize rationality as much as possible? Should we rethink the role of reason in human life?

I put these and other questions to Smith in a recent interview. A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.

Sean Illing

It’s hard to sum up the thesis of a book like this. How would you characterize it?

Justin E.H. Smith

The thesis is that the 20th-century philosophers T.W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer were basically correct when they argued that the Enlightenment world has an innate tendency to degenerate into myth, reason into unreason. And that this tendency of reason toward unreason is exacerbated by overly ambitious efforts to suppress or eliminate unreason. I think this is true both at the level of individual reason, or “psychology,” as well as at the level of society as a whole.

Sean Illing

Some examples of this will help clarify what you mean, but first let’s back up a little. We have this idea, which goes all the way back to Aristotle, that human beings are distinguished from other animals by their capacity for reason. Is this a misleading picture? Should we not think of humans as uniquely rational creatures?

Justin E.H. Smith

This is the traditional view. There is a counter-tradition, however, which says that human beings are the uniquely irrational animal. On this view, animals are rational to the extent that they do not get mired in deliberation and hesitation, but always just cut right to the chase and execute those actions that are perfectly suited to the sort of creatures they are, while we human beings stand there paralyzed by doubt and worry.

I am sympathetic to this view, though it can be carried too far. Obviously, we have been able to choose the correct course of action enough of the time to survive long enough to reproduce. We are a successful species, but not exceptionally so, and as far as I can tell not in virtue of being exceptionally well-endowed with reason.

Sean Illing

That’s certainly one way to think of rationality. By that standard, you might say that human beings are cursed with too much consciousness, that our obsession with thinking creates more problems than it solves.

Justin E.H. Smith

You might say that. But it’s not as if we think just because we are obsessed with thinking. Presumably, we human beings, as well as our hominid and pre-hominid ancestors, thought for a very long time before we began thinking about how this is possible and how it can go wrong.

Sean Illing

Well, let’s talk about how it can go wrong. You write: “The desire to impose rationality, to make people or society more rational, mutates ... into spectacular outbursts of irrationality.” Can you give me an example of what you mean here?

Justin E.H. Smith

The clearest instance in the book, which I set up as a sort of foundational myth, is the Pythagorean cult in the fifth century BC, which becomes so devoted to the perfect rationality of mathematics that it has trouble dealing with the discovery of the existence of irrational numbers. And so when one of its own, Hippasus of Metapontum, starts telling people outside the group that the world can’t be explained by mathematics alone, legend has it that the leader of the group had him drowned in a fit of anger.

The 18th-century French playwright and activist Olympe de Gouges is another example. In the spirit of reason, she famously argued that whatever the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man — the civil rights document produced by the French Revolution in 1789 — said about men must also apply to women. And for that, the Jacobins cut her head off. So the response to her perfect rationality was extreme, murderous irrationality.

Something similar has followed countless revolutions since 1789, and many of these revolutions, notably the Marxist ones, have been at least nominally committed to the rational restructuring of society. I gather some Marxists are perfectly fine with seeing heads roll, and assume that it will only be the right heads that roll next time around and all present-day descendants of Olympe de Gouges will be spared. Or maybe they think it will never actually come to that.

Sean Illing

I think it’s obvious enough why humans are irrational, but where does this mania for rationality come from? Why are we so desperate to impose order on the world and society in the first place?

Justin E.H. Smith

I think we just got a bit carried away. In the modern period, anyway, rationality became a value first in science and technology, where it plainly had its place. Making the correct inferences and following the correct method meant more scientific breakthroughs, which meant faster and more powerful machines.

But then the idea caught on that society itself is a big machine, and that the human being is a small sub-machine within the big machine of society, and that these two kinds of machine can be perfected in the same way that we have managed to perfect the steam engine, the telegraph, and so on.

But this has always been a misguided approach to psychology and politics, based on a weak metaphor drawn from a narrow domain of human life — mechanical engineering — in which we actually do have a pretty good understanding of how things work and of how problems are fixed.

Sean Illing

I wonder where all this leaves us. There are obviously limits to reason, and we can only do so much to curb our worst impulses. At the same time, we want a world that is more intelligent, more wise, more compassionate. But we also have to base our social and political systems on a realistic model of human nature.

Justin E.H. Smith

I don’t really have any formulas to offer here. Caution, pragmatism, case-by-case consideration of questions of justice, all seem advisable to me. I am not a political theorist, let alone a policymaker, and I think I manage to get to the end of the book without pretending to be either of these.

In spite of everything I’ve said, I believe in some amount of redistributive justice, including taking away about 99.9 percent of the fortunes of Bezos, Zuckerberg, and others, and turning the big tech companies into public utilities. I just think this should be done with good laws and broad public support, in such a way as to make it inevitable and ultimately painless for everyone (after all, these men would still be multimillionaires after the great confiscation).

The big error of so many schemes to rationally improve the human condition has been to spread the belief that there must be some great event in order for the new order of things to take hold, that rationality must be stoked by irrationality in order to work. That’s Leninism in a nutshell. But if society is ever going to be organized rationally, getting there is going to be very boring.

Sean Illing

I’m curious how you think about progress in a big-picture sense. Reading your book, I thought about the story people like Steven Pinker tell, which is essentially that human history is a bumpy but nonetheless steady march of reason and progress. What’s wrong with this narrative?

Justin E.H. Smith

Some of the data are pretty compelling about overall improvements in human life. If you look at India just in the past few years, the number of people with access to plumbing has skyrocketed, and disease has correspondingly gone down significantly. This is part of the legacy of Narendra Modi, and it is likely that the new era of authoritarian capitalism, perfected by China with runners-up like Modi, Erdogan, Bolsonaro, and Trump trying to get in on the game, will likely involve some improvements in the standard of living, at least for members of favored groups.

But I’m not sure this counts as overall improvement. For one thing, it is proving to be, in the regimes I’ve cited, at the expense of someone else that the improvements are carried out. What’s more, it will all be for nothing if any of the apocalyptic scenarios of the near future, which all serious people take seriously, comes to pass.

Sean Illing

I take Pinker’s point about how quality of life has improved, and yet I look at our civilization’s incapacity to curtail its own destruction. I look at the fact that we’ve built a civilization predicated on the destruction of our own environment, and we’re unable to change course because we’re too blinkered by short-term interests. That doesn’t feel like progress to me.

Justin E.H. Smith

Pinker probably sincerely believes he’s got an answer to this question, but honestly, when I consider his argument about the steady improvement of things, I just want to say: Well, let’s check back in 50 years. Is the Amazon [River] still there? Have the nuclear weapons been used?

And as for the Enlightenment and the purported achievement of perpetual peace in Western Europe in the 20th century, is it not plain that these two great victories had to do, first of all, with the pillaging of the rest of the world, and, second of all, with the fact that since the end of World War II, Western Europe has been surrounded by two superpowers ready to blow up the world if anyone makes a false move? Of course Europeans have been behaving themselves!

Sean Illing

Do you see the global resurgence of nativism and right-wing populism as a rejection of Enlightenment principles?

Justin E.H. Smith

It’s an old dialectic. The populist right is articulating most of its opinions and aims in terms derived from the Enlightenment — distorted terms, but still the same terms. The clearest example of this is the invocation of “freedom of speech” as a bludgeon for pushing extreme-right ideology into the center of public discourse.

Sean Illing

Is that to say that the rational and technocratic world built on Enlightenment principles will always produce these sorts of reactionary crises? And what exactly are these populist movements rejecting?

Justin E.H. Smith

I think it’s a question of managing these tendencies so that they don’t rise to crisis level: managing them without heavy-handedly suppressing them, and at the same time without nurturing them. That’s a delicate balance, as we’ve been seeing in the past few years.

When I was a kid, I assumed it was good to allow Nazi parades in Skokie or wherever, in part because I believed this was an effective form of containment. I see now that I took for granted that these parades would never build to anything truly threatening, and I think it’s impossible to think that anymore. The parades have moved online, but with that minor difference accounted for, they are much, much larger than they were a few decades ago.

Sean Illing

I’ll ask what might seem like a strange question: What’s the utility of irrationality in human life? How do our irrational instincts actually serve us?

Justin E.H. Smith

I place a lot of good things under the heading “irrationality” — not just dreams but also drunkenness, stonedness, artistic creation, listening to stories by the campfire, enjoyment of music and dancing, all sorts of orgiastic revelry, mass events like concerts and sports matches, and so on. I think most people would agree that these things make life worth living. And I think it’s impossible to account for the value of these things in purely utilitarian terms.

Sean Illing

I could make a utilitarian case for some of those things, but I know what you mean. Maybe the point here is that the choice isn’t between a rational or irrational society, but rather a question about how best to manage the tensions between these two forces.

Justin E.H. Smith

That’s right. It’s all about managing it rather than suppressing it or, the opposite approach, letting it run loose. An analogy: Scientists who study addiction have noted the problems biochemically for some people with eating disorders are scarcely distinguishable from drug addictions. You can advise a person to quit heroin cold turkey, but what do you tell them if they’re addicted to food? Irrationality is more like food in this regard than like illicit drugs. You can’t eliminate it, but obviously if you’re bingeing, you’ve got a problem and should get some help.

Sean Illing

If you’re right that we can’t contain our own stupidity, how should we think about the role of reason in human life?

Justin E.H. Smith

I think the value of reason is exaggerated by some and downplayed by others. It’s also very often invoked disingenuously, as a bludgeon to assert one’s will. This is what Nietzsche understood so well about the history of rationalist philosophy, and it’s what we see vividly illustrated countless times each day by Twitter’s “reply guys,” who are always ready to jump in with a “Well, actually” to pretty much anything anyone says, and particularly if that person is a woman or someone they think they can easily upstage.

Now, what they are saying might be true and reasonable, but it’s just obvious that the reason they’re saying it has to do with self-glorification, venal ambition, and other base motives. From a certain point of view, the history of philosophy is a history of reply guys who just happen to be very good at masking the true nature of their project. I don’t necessarily think that, but that thought nevertheless comes to me whenever I hear someone exalting too fervently the importance and the power of reason.

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