As I write this the biopic of Robert Oppenheimer is opening in London. What fascinates me about Oppenheimer is not so much his personal story, but what he represents - the way reason, in this case the ideal reason of mathematics and physics - can lead to deeply irrational consequences.
After all, what kind of maniacs build massive arsenals of planet-destroying weapons pointed at one another to be released at the press of a button?
Supposedly rational human beings, that’s who.
But then we have never been truly rational and we never will be.
Living in a secular world, at least in the West , we convince ourselves that we are now sensible human beings - unlike all those crazy people in the past, who believed in gods and devils and monsters in the deep.
But it’s very far from the truth.
When I was growing up my main response to the world, vast and confusing as I found it to be, was simply ‘it doesn’t make sense’.
I thought it was because I was a child. Now, after a lifetime of trying to make sense of the world, I realise it was because I was a human,
I plagued my parents with questions they could not answer. Why do people hit the palms of their hands together when they want to show appreciation for something? Why do we have to hide parts of our body from private view? Why do we lock ourselves in cubicles to go to the loo? Who came up with the idea of putting a tree in the front room at Christmas and covering it with baubles and sweets? Or hiding chicken eggs at Easter? Why do you have to have cake at the end of a meal instead of the beginning? Or why can you have bacon and eggs for breakfast, but not roast lamb and vegetables on the side?
I was a very annoying child.
Now, many years later, my confusion has not departed. The list of peculiarities of everyday life has, for me, only multiplied.
Who decided we should clink glasses when we celebrate at a meal? Or drink a wine with bubbles in it for special occasions? Why cups and saucers? What’s with wrapping a length of cloth round your neck when you go to any formal occasion, and why are women exempt? How come women put paint all over their faces and men don’t? Why don’t airline pilots wear T-shirts and jeans? Or funeral directors?
Talking of funeral directors what’s the point of ‘paying your respects’ with flowers to someone who is already dead? Why do we cover up dead bodies in such a hurry in the first place? Why are mortuaries always in basements ( a question Karl Ove Knaussgard, doubtless another annoying child, asked in his memoir/novel ‘A Death in the Family’.?
I could go on for some time - which is why I remain an annoying adult. ‘Following’ a football team comprised to total strangers? Graduating from college with a strange black flat hat on your head? Lowering your voice in an art gallery? Three meals a day? Touching wood? The fear of ‘tempting the gods’ who apparently don’t exist? Getting upset when you ‘lose’ a ‘game’ of something or other?
These matters puzzled me for a long time until I worked out a truth that was staring me - and everybody - in the face, but we seemed to be collectively in denial about.
That, despite the decay of organised religion and the rise of scientific, rational thinking, we are deeply tribal, profoundly irrational, symbolic and ritualistic creatures.
This is so obvious, it hardly bears noting, and yet somehow the public discourse - reflected in the sonorous tone of the newsreaders and media pundits - seems to favour the view that we are sensible people doing sensible things all the time, for entire;ly rational ends - whereas nothing could be further from the truth.
What kind of species will humiliate, denigrate and keep from full citizenship people just because of the tone of the skin colour, or their sexual orientation or sex?
What kind of species will slaughter and cripple each other for four years in a war nobody wanted for absolutely no gain for anybody as happened in 1914-1918?
Human beings, that’s who.
The crazy species who are convinced that while everyone else may be nuts, they themselves are completely rational.
And we do think we are rational. ‘I’m nobody’s fool’ is the most common conceit. This is why people - most notably large corporations - are so successful in getting us to behave irrationally. In fact, we are everybody’s fool. Who came up with the idea of putting a tube of tobacco in our mouth, lighting it, and inhaling the smoke when it clearly wasn’t a good idea or even that pleasurable? But the power of marketing sent whole generations down the road to early death, imagining they were John Wayne when they lit up a Marlboro ( I was one of them for years).
It’s not there’s a sucker born every minute. It’s far more suckers than that. It’s me and you. What the cigarette manufacturers used to do to sell their products, now AI controllers do with their algorithms. Click here for a shot of serotonin. Meanwhile our other pointless addictions - sugar, alcohol and caffeine - with turbo-charged media and marketing messages tapping into our collective unconscious, all help keep huge industries running. I sometimes think we are not far from being complete puppets.
But who is pulling the strings? It’s not as simple as wicked capitalists - although that is definitely part of it.
Ever since Freud discovered the unconscious mind it has been suggested by some schools of psychology, notably the Jungians, that we are driven by irrational impulses that are far from random. They are encoded, as it were, in our DNA. For instance, the myth of the Virgin Birth and the death of a martyr only to be reborn is not only a Christian trope but appears in many cultures ( as does the Great Flood ). In fact, I’ve lost sight of the number of times Luke Skywalker dies and comes back to life in the Star Wars movies. Just as countless cartoon and fairy tale figures, like the Beast in ‘Beauty and the Beast’, Pinocchio, Gandalf and scores of others either die - or seem to die and return to life.
What does the myth of the Virgin Birth and the martyred, reborn hero mean? Far greater minds than mine can venture explanations. The only point I’m making here is that we are not only irrational in our behaviours but, in a very real sense, our ‘entertainments’ - our stories, if you will ( as if sitting in a darkened room with a hundred other people sitting in the dark staring at a two-dimensional image projected on a screen - many of them ritually consuming the snack of popped corn - isn’t irrational enough.)
Of course, there is a very powerful rational side to our brains - but even that is in a sense irrational - as the movie Oppenheimer points us towards. Science, the most rational of all enterprises, has given us atomic bombs, germ warfare, disappearing and a planet that is heading for destruction.
At least religion admitted it was irrational and glorified that side of human nature, as anyone who has attended a high church mass can testify. A scientist, meanwhile, thinks the closest analogy to a human mind is a computer. But the is that computers don’t live off ancient fantasies and myths disguised as ‘common sense’. They are too rational for that.
Thought provoking Saturday Essay Tim. Thank you.
But the development of the atomic bomb was rational. How else would the Japanese have been defeated without massive loss of Allied soldiers? My grandfather was one of them--he was being trained as one of cannon fodder to storm Japan's beaches--and without the bomb, I wouldn't be here.