Against shallow anti-rational humanism

When is rationality associated with the left and when with the right?

Jessica writes:

I get so tired of people dumping on decision theory because real world decisions are complex. If decision theory is so deeply flawed, I’d love to know what alternative methods the critics advise for trying to evaluate and improve decision making in some real world setting. Should we give up on modeling completely because some cause problems for our assumptions? What happened to the epistemic value of attempting to formalize goals so as to better understand what components we think are at play? Do we really want to go back to talking about man as a creature of instinct and habit and leave it at that?

I agree, and this reminds me of a discussion from twenty years ago (!) about the transition from viewing people as “rational animals” to viewing people as “irrational computers.”

Here’s Thomas Jefferson from 1823:

We believed . . . that man was a rational animal, endowed by nature with rights, and with an innate sense of justice; and that he could be restrained from wrong and protected in right, by moderate powers, confided to persons of his own choice, and held to their duties by dependence on his own will.

He’s coming from a liberal (in the U.S. politics) perspective, with the idea being that rationality is a way to move forward from outmoded feudal arrangements. Not that this was so easy–Jefferson owned slaves!–, but nobody said that rationality was easy, just that it’s a way forward.

This association, in which the left was associated with utopian rationality and the right was associated with sensible acceptance of irrationality, continued for another century. Consider, for example, the contrast between the rationalist and socialist George Barnard Shaw and the Catholic conservative G. K. Chesterton. This association of rationality with the left continued through the New Deal period in the U.S. and the idea of the Soviet Union as being scientifically socialist. The second world war pitted Soviet central planning and “Fordist” American organization against the blood-and-soil Axis powers.

Sometime during the mid-cold-war period there was a shift, at least in the U.S. and its allies, where science and technology was associated with the military-industrial complex and gained a conservative tinge, while the left embraced an anti-technology, back-to-the-land vision. “Humanism” moved from a conservative, roll-back-the-tide, Chestertonian position to a liberal, fight-the-Man position.

Nowadays things are a mess: conservatives support military and police hardware, coal, nuclear power, bitcoin, data centers, and gas guzzlers more generally, but conservatives also oppose vaccines and scientific more research more generally, and Biblical creationism hasn’t gone away either. And, with conservatives in charge of the country and much of public discourse, liberals are often defining themselves based on what they oppose.

I’m with Jessica in that I see no conflict between humanism and rationality. Rationality is an ideal or a way of being, not an algorithm. Yes, we’re animals, and rationality is one of our very useful tricks. I wouldn’t want to abandon rationality or define ourselves against it, any more than I’d want to abandon running or singing or any of the other things that we can do so well, when we do them well.