Serrated Voices
If I imagine my life as a problem statement, it would be logical construction of unsolvable chaos . Humans are good at figuring out patterns and remembering them. We have rationality to solve our issues, or at least make peace with actions we undertook to tackle them.
The rational thought for long has guided us into prosperity. Rationality brings reason into our thinking. Through reason we navigate through challenges of daily life. A systemic level of reasoning are scientific experiments, with all the protocols scientific experiments are frontiers of rationality. The scientific experiments have served humanity well for centuries now.
I can’t imagine anybody being anti science, or anti reason. I mean the only reason we have hustled through this pandemic is due to scientific understanding we have developed of viruses through scientific experiments. It would be foolish if you do not want believe the science. As rational thinking has enabled us to make better systems. We do not have absurd laws or beliefs as our ancestors did because we have rational thought guiding us.
What if rational thinking isn’t the only way to solve our problems?
Over last two years I have been engaging with this particular person whose beliefs at times are not rational. He believes that renaming the roads of Delhi and various cities of Uttar Pradesh are key achievement of an elected government. I am of the view that building new roads and cites (and then to name them) would be a better achievement. For me the other person is by default irrational. I want to show his bias against a particular religion, he feels it's payback time. I come to him with data of number of roads dedicated to the Sultanate and Mugal emperors are too less than number of roads in Delhi. He comes up with a caveat that all major roads are named after them, I show them statistics he refutes by claiming my sample size as biased. I tell them we have not developed not more that 10 cities in post independence India, He believes cultural recognition is more important.
In many conversations like this, I end up hurting people. The issue remains unsolved. I keep fixating on my rationality, they keep fixating on centrality of belief.
I question if there is a way out, is it possible that rationality and reason not the only way to attain truth?
I mean, I am not questioning the feats achieved by reason and rationality. But there are aspects of being human have not yet been figured out completely by science and rational methods of deduction. In the podcast by Philosophize This there is a segment about the same thought and I quote it in verbatim.
“Kierkegaard has a quote and I’m paraphrasing here, but he says here are all these philosophers and scientists of his time that understand the deepest levels of reality and existence…and here he is and he can’t even understand Abraham. What he’s saying is science and rationality during his time is supposedly producing some of the most comprehensive understanding of reality that we’ve ever had…but when it comes to certain aspects of what it means to be a human being…rationality just can not help you, it’s not a useful tool in that context. So many things about your life on an every day level…human existence is FILLED with paradox. There are times in our lives, and he gives examples from the life of Abraham, there are times when continuing to live in the FACE of that paradox…REQUIRES irrationality. Kierkegaard thinks this irrationality is an important part of our existence…JUST AS IMPORTANT as rationality…and if you ever tried to swear off irrationality completely and make purely rational choices all the time…you’d be left in a state of total paralysis.
Maybe a good metaphor for this is to think what it would be like to look at the contents of a book that tried to tell you in 300 pages… how to be a person…a field manual for life. Better yet, picture having a book that is supposed to tell you how to raise a child…right? You open it up… and it’s filled with math equations, syllogisms, geometric breakdowns of the nursery…for anyone that’s ever actually raised a child before…you know how tremendously oversimplified something like that would HAVE to be. Now, the intent of the author may have been to arrive at a NEW level of certainty about raising our children…you know, let’s dare to think for ourselves! Remove ourselves from the tutelage of the parenting dogma of the past…but the best intentions in the world don’t change the fact that there is something missing there. There is something about being a human being that’s lost when we’re using purely using rational analysis to try to explain it. More than that…no matter how much scientific progress we are making…the tools we use to catalog that scientific data…the means of analysis aren’t even remotely similar to the way we experience reality.
Perfect example to describe this phenomena used in the work of Professor Lloyd Kramer. So take time for example. There’s this thing about the universe that we call time. We want to use rational analysis to understand it better. So we measure it, record and study it through the use of tools of rational analysis called clocks. Now for a clock…seconds are uniform. 60 seconds in a minute. 60 minutes in an hour. So on and so forth. Time…when viewed purely through the lens of rational analysis…looks like that. But what is our actual, human experience of time? Well sometimes… time flies. Sometimes a few seconds of something agonizing can feel like an hour. The point is: when it comes to understanding the universe clocks might be the ultimate tool, but when it comes to understanding aspects of our human experience of the universe”
I believe We need to be more human with the approach with other humans, It may not be completely beneficial to fixate on any certainty, either rationality and reason or on faith. I have started to believe to acknowledge the other person as human is the most important part the conversation or debate. I believe with this method we can end the herds, which polarise our world in every way possible.