Irrationality in the Modern World-System

Over the last few years I have read a number of books dealing with irrationality as a political phenomenon. These include: John Ralston Saul's Voltaire's Bastards, Tariq Ali's Clash of Fundamentalisms, Francis Wheen's How mumbo-jumbo conquered the world and most recently Dan Hind's The Threat to Reason. Pondering these books has left me with a bigger ponder: the role of reason and unreason in the modern world-system. The next sequence of posts while explore this issue.

Let me try and unpack an evolving sequence of thought.

Saul provided at the empirical level a compelling case that many of the practitioners of reason (public administrators, research scientists, medical institutions, corporations, military strategists, economists) while operating with precise logic and calculation, pursued ultimatley irrational ends. The path of reason had led them to unreasonable objectives, or to plans and procesess that had outrageous and irrational consequences. Now Saul is not strong on theory, and himself prefers to use the highly problematic concept of 'common sense', but clearly his critique represented a watered down and empirical version of the 'critique of the Enlightenment' within contemporary French theory, which may or may not derive from Adorno and Horkheimer's post WWII writings. But what struck me most forcibly in reading Saul was that some of the concepts of dialectical reason were well illustrated by his book, particularly the idea that notions produce their opposites, so reason pursued rigourously produces unreason. But of course categories of thought and logic are not living things and cannot 'do'anything, so it is not really a notion that produces its contradiction, but real people using that notion over time in real social circumstances that transfrom a notion or concept into its opposite. And I would venture to suggest as a principle, that that transformation had more to do with changing social relations, so that the content of the notion (ie. what we mean when we do whatever) comes into contradiction with the form of the notion (ie. what we say we are doing).

Missing from Saul's book was any real sense or account of history, as was the concept of capitalism, and the two concepts need to be put togtether to make sense of the question: how had reason come to be betrayed by its practitioners? Saul's view is grounded in in the form of common sense utilitarianism, in which rationality or reasonableness is grounded in a sense of the common good, and his critique is thus that public institutions, supposedly there to protect, defend, preserve, safeguard or whatever verb you like, the common good, were in fact acting against it. Reason is now being exercised unreasonably. My immediate thought was that a history of reason and unreason within the capitalist system would go some way to answering this question. Tariq Ali's work account of the current middle eastern miasma helped me to tease out some further links in the chain of argument. In my next post I will discuss my readings of Ali's work.