Rationality, Loach, Trump, Science
A few years ago I read John Raulston Saul’s excellent “Voltaire’s bastards”. The thesis of this book is that in the West we have fallen under the control of vast rational systems which have no underlying morality of their own. These systems allow our society to function but they function outside any moral system. The link between justice and reason has been cut, and governments use rationality as a means to justify their actions.
I couldn’t help thinking about this book after we went to see Ken Loach’s excellent new film, “I Daniel Blake”. The eponymous Daniel Blake is a honest tradesman who loses his job after a heart attack at work. Although he has a serious medical condition, his honestly leads him to falling onto the wrong side of the benefits system, and although his doctors strongly believe otherwise, he is declared “fit to work”. But he isn’t fit to work, not really. To get his benefits, he must look for work, but he is unable to accept anything he finds, because of his medical condition.
He patiently explains these contradictions to anyone who will listen in the benefits office, but to no avail. What struck me most is the constant refrain to him from various council employees (in a strong Geordie accent): “It’s not against you, like, it’s what we have to do”. It is not us, it is the system. The refrain of the last hundred years. It’s not a big leap to go from the there to consider the results of the British referendum and the American elections. The most striking aspect of these two events is the complete disregard of any opinion of “experts”. There are certainly a large number of reasons for that, but one that seems relevant here is how disconnected many people have become from the enormous systems that have become enormously important for our lives and well-being, and which just don’t care what we think.
Perhaps we could extend this thought a little further? Science has become even more incremental in the last few years. Part of the the problem is that any new theory of the Universe must also explain the last few hundred years of observations as well as any new ones. Each minuscule advance now requires an enormous amount of work. And these advances take place inside enormous systems which have been calibrated extremely finely to succeed. It is the old problem: you cannot build anything expensive and complicated unless you are certain it will work, but how in this case are you ever certain to discover something new? And behind that there is a system of thousands of people somehow trying to work together, in a system doesn’t care anything for the people inside it
The conclusion: I do want to suggest that rationality is a bad thing. Of course it is not ! But we must find a way reconnect rationality and reason to a sense of social justice. And as for science? That is for another post.