Pauline Hanson denies she's being hypocritical by doing a preference deal with the Liberals in Western Australia after blaming the party for landing her in jail.

WA Premier Colin Barnett has defended a "practical, pragmatic" decision to preference One Nation ahead traditional coalition partners the Nationals in the coming state election.

Asked whether she was being hypocritical by now siding with the Liberal Party despite her history, Senator Hanson told the Seven Network on Monday: "It's about getting on and moving on and doing what's right for the people in this country."

Federal cabinet minister Steve Ciobo has flagged further coalition preference deals with One Nation ahead of the Queensland state election.

Polling shows One Nation winning up to 23 per cent of the primary vote in the Sunshine State, taking voters from both the LNP and Labor.

"That's a fair swag of voters ... we can't be dismissive of that," Mr Ciobo told ABC radio.

That didn't mean the coalition should embrace or "cuddle up " to One Nation policies, just as Labor would argue it didn't adopt all the "kooky" polices of the Greens when it preferenced the minor party.

"What we've got to do is make decisions that put us in the best possible position to govern, ideally obviously with the support of the vast majority of people in Queensland," Mr Ciobo said.

The trade minister said there were One Nation policies he rejected unequivocally, but he noted the minor party generally supported the government's legislation in the Senate.

"There's a certain amount of economic rationalism, a certain amount of an approach that is reflective of what it is we're trying to do ... in a fiscally responsible way," Mr Ciobo said.

"They've signed up to that much more than Labor."

Mr Ciobo acknowledged that a section of the community felt their vote was best anchored in a protest against the major parties.

But in the end it was either the coalition or Labor that won government.

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Hanson denies Liberal preference hypocrisy - SBS

A surgeon who views patients not as people, but as timed puzzles to be solved, offers a raw and moving memoir, says Oliver Moody

The marketing bumf that arrived in the post with Fragile Lives, a memoir by Stephen Westaby, a distinguished cardiac surgeon, declared it to be a book in the tradition of Henry Marsh and Paul Kalanithi.

Strewth. When did we hand over the keys of our souls to physicians? Why is the publishing industry so stuck on this strange, but luminous sub-genre of religious writing in which doctors draw up schematics of the human condition under portentous titles like When Breath Becomes Mortal Harm?

In 1933 the literary critic FR Leavis identified scientific rationalism as the worlds present sickness. Now, in an age that is minutely obsessed with bodies, yet blankly terrified of their ceasing to be, hospitals are increasingly charged with the care of the

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Fragile Lives: A Heart Surgeon's Stories of Life and Death on the ... - The Times (subscription)

Not in a negative sense, Vienna-based mad scientist/producer Florian Hecker seems to make some of the most inaccessible music out there right now. So it wasnt surprising to hear that he was collaborating with Iranian philosopher Reza Negarestani for 2012s Chimerization project, which combined an experimental libretto with the abstract synthesis on which Heckers a veritable expert. (I can think of no better way to attract the margins of artistic consumers than to bring on a guy whos written and spoken extensively about Rationalism and related subjects so prodigiously it makes my out-of-school braincry.)

Now, Hecker has re-recruited Reza for the third chapter in the trilogy of text-sound pieces (in case you lost count, the first was the just-mentioned Chimerization and the second was 2014s Articulao). The newest installment is called A Script For Machine Synthesis. Its out February 24 on Editions Mego and is said to present a complex simplicity that spirals in an unending manner as an audio image of the uncanny valley. (Something tells me this uncanny valley should be limited to children 10 andup.)

Heckers anti-hit-parade dont stop there, though; because in addition to A Script For Machine Synthesis, Hecker has also just released Articulao Sintetico, a limited-edition cassette that, as the title suggests, purports to be a complete resynthesis of Articulao which therefore pretty much makes it a resynthesis of the voice of artist Joan LaBarbarba.

Buy Articulao Sintetico here, and pre-order Script right over here.

Articulao Sinteticotracklisting:

01. Synthetic Hinge 02. Modulator (Scattering Transform) 03. SyntheticHinge

A Script For Machine Synthesistracklisting:

01. Prologue 02. A Script For Machine Synthesis 03.Credits

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Hecker reemerges with more text-based synthesis on two new releases on Editions Mego - Tiny Mix Tapes

Laura Akin: Overwhelming majority of the Founding Fathers were Christian Modesto Bee Of the 55 Continental Congress delegates, 28 belonged to the Church of England and 21 were protestants. The six remaining members supported theistic rationalism. So there you have it, only six of the signatures on the Constitution were not Christian. I ...

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Laura Akin: Overwhelming majority of the Founding Fathers were Christian - Modesto Bee

Openness. That is the word Reserve Bank governorPhilip Lowechose to emphasise at his first public outing this year.

In Australia there is an "openness and transparency" not always found elsewhere, he told a high-powered business gathering at the Opera House on Thursday night.

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We asked thousands of people across Australia hundreds of questions, and used the answers to look for patterns. It turns out we are a divided bunch.

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Matt Black of Parramatta keeps his cats in a purpose built cat enclosure in his backyard.

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An extraordinary heatwave scorching much of NSW is set to bring yet more grief, with health authorities issuing an air pollution alert for increased levels of ozone in the atmosphere in Sydney. Vision courtesy ABC News 24.

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Liberal Party member and Sky News presenter Ross Cameron has issued an apology of sorts for the remarks he made about homosexuals at a conservative fundraiser. Vision: SKY NEWS.

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More than a hundred anti-racism protesters clashed with people heading to a secret fundraising dinner in Melbourne for the anti-Islam organisation Q Society.

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The luxury cruise ship Norwegian Star is adrift at sea with over 2000 people on board, due to an engine failure, requiring the ship to be towed back to port. Vision: Seven News

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NSW Energy and Utilities Minister Don Harwin has requested the public to make restrictions to their power usage between peak times, in order to prevent potential rolling blackouts, despite claiming we have a power surplus.

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Former Liberal MP Ross Cameron has appeared on SKY NEWS to defend the comments he made about homosexuality and The Sydney Morning Herald at the Q Society fundraising dinner in Sydney. Vision: SKY NEWS.

We asked thousands of people across Australia hundreds of questions, and used the answers to look for patterns. It turns out we are a divided bunch.

And openness to trade and investment has been fundamental to the nation's prosperity.

Australia is "committed to an open international order," Lowe said.

Those sentiments might have seemed routine a few years back. But in the wake of Brexit and the election of Donald Trump "openness" to the world economy often referred to as globalisation is now a hotly contested political issue.

A little over a year ago Marine Le Pen, the leader of France'sfar-right FrontNational partyand a presidential contender, cast political battlelines as being no longer "between the left and the right but the globalists and the patriots". The globalists, she sneered, are for the dissolution of France into a "global magma".

Greg Ip, a Wall Street Journal economics commentator, wrote last month that Le Pen's remarks foreshadowed "the tectonic forces that would shake up the world in 2016".

Opposition to globalisation the increasing movement of goods, money and people across international borders was a key theme of Trump campaign to become president of the US. From now on it is going to be "America First", he says repeatedly.

In Australia, Pauline Hanson has globalisation in her sights.In her maiden speech to the Senate in September she accused national leaders of giving away our sovereignty, our rights, our jobs and even our democracy.

"Their push for globalisation, economic rationalism, free trade and ethnic diversity has seen our country's decline," she said.

In pitting globalists against patriots Le Pen neatly summed up a new and unpredictable political fissure that cuts across old divisions between left and right.

Ip predicts the tussle between globalism and nationalism "will shape the coming era much as the struggle between conservatives and liberals has shaped the last".

This political split has emerged during a period of rapid global economic integration.In the two decades before the onset of the global financial crisis in 2007 international trade in goods and services grew by 7 per cent a year on average a much faster rate than global GDP.

This has been a period of great prosperity for Australia, which has not experienced a recession for a quarter of a century. But there has also been a marked shift in the structure of the economy. Since the mid-1990s manufacturing's share ofAustralia's economic output has fallen from 14 per cent to about 7 per cent.Meanwhile, the importance of knowledge-intensive service industries such as finance and professional services has grown significantly. Similar trends have been at work in other advanced economies.

The flow of migrants to Australia another factor many associate with globalisation has also been strong. The proportion of Australians born overseas reached 28 per cent in 2014-15, the highest proportion in more than 120 years.

There are now signs the tussle Ip describes between globalist and nationalist sentiment has become an important political fault linein Australia.

Polling for the Political Personas Project commissioned by Fairfax Media and conducted by the Australian National University and Netherlands-based political research enterprise Kieskompas, shows public opinion is divided over the merits of trade liberalisation, one of globalisation's fundamentals.

The statement "free trade with other countries has made Australia better off" could not muster support from the majority of the 2600 voters surveyed 44.7 per cent agreed (but only 7.1 per cent strongly), 27.5 per cent disagreed and 27.8 per cent were neutral.

There is a similar split when voters are asked to assess the impact of globalisation.

A separate Ipsos survey released in December found 48 per cent of Australians considered globalisation a "force for good" while 22 per cent said it was a "force for bad", with 29 per cent undecided.

Carol Johnson, professor of politics and international studies at the University of Adelaide, said many voters have, over time, become more aware of globalisation's drawbacks.

"Twenty years ago, the electorate seemed prepared to believe that while there were some risks to opening up the economy, there would also be benefits," she said.

"Part of what happened is that people are now more aware that many of our competitor countries, including Asian countries, are more than capable of developing these [high-tech and service] industries themselves.

"The assumption that Western countries will always be superior has started to come undone and voters are becoming worried that government hasn't got right the mix of balancing the benefits and downsides of globalisation."

Polling for the Political Personas Project found more than eight in 10 voters believe "we rely too heavily on foreign imports and should manufacture more in Australia" .This statement received more support than any other proposition in the survey, which covered dozens of hot-button political issues.

Jill Sheppard, a researcher from the ANU's Centre for Social Research and Method who was involved in the project, said public concern about the decline of manufacturing was linked to perceptions of globalisation.

"Globalisation seems to manifest in people's minds as manufacturing and jobs going offshore. They think about cheap labour in Asian countries, which seem like a direct threat to us."

The project sheds light on the types of Australians most likely to embrace globalisation and most likely to dislike it.Support for free trade was strongly linked to feeling financially secure, confident in society and optimistic about the future.This is illustrated by differences between seven distinctive political "tribes" identified by the project.

The three most financially secure groups Progressive Cosmopolitans, Ambitious Savers and Lavish Mod-cons (that is, moderate conservatives) were also the strongest supporters of free trade. More than 70 per cent of Cosmopolitans, 68 per cent of Mod-cons and 62 per cent of Savers agreed with the statement: "Free trade with other countries has made Australia better off."

These three groups also had the highest levels of agreement with the statement: "I am feeling pretty good these days about how much money I can spend" and were the most likely to earn high incomes of $91,000 or more.

When it came to optimism about society and the future, Cosmopolitans and Savers were the most likely to agree with the statement: "I have confidence in society" and to disagree with the statements: "I sometimes feel that the future holds nothing for me" and: "I feel let down by society."

At the opposite end of the spectrum, 64 per cent of the group called "Anti-establishment Firebrands" and 51 per cent of tribe called "Disillusioned Pessimists" disagreed that free trade had made Australia better off.

These two tribes were also the most likely to agree with the statements: "I sometimes feel that the future holds nothing for me" and "I feel let down by society,"and to disagree with the statements: "I am feeling pretty good these days about how much money I can spend" and "I have confidence in society."

The project draws attention to another way globalisation is reshaping Australian politics it splits both progressives and conservatives.

Two of the tribes Progressive Cosmopolitans and Activist Egalitarians were distinguished by their socially progressive values and support for left-leaning political parties.

And yet their feelings diverge when it comes to globalisation: the Cosmopolitans are much more comfortable with trade liberalisation.

There are similar divisions among the more conservative tribes. Four groupings the Ambitious Savers, Lavish Mod-Cons,Prudent Traditionalists and Anti-Establishment Firebrands favoured right-leaning political parties. And yet only the first two of those tribes were strongly in favour of free trade. The Prudent Traditionalists are split on the question of free trade and the Anti-Establishment Firebrands (who have much in common with Trump's core support base) are strongly opposed.

Sheppard said voter suspicion about globalisation was likely to increase.

"This generation has seen some very rapid changes towards more liberal social attitudes and I think some of this protectionist sentiment is a reaction to that that we need something to slow down a little bit," she said.

"Globalisation is an obvious target."

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Australia's new political divide: 'globalists' versus 'patriots' - The Sydney Morning Herald

Were now 363 days until the opening ceremonies of the Pyeongchang Olympics and the National Hockey League and International Olympic Committee are as far apart today as they were a year ago. The writing has been on the wall since Sochi: the NHL doesnt want to go to the Olympics, much the same way it didnt want to go to Russia.

If youll allow me to put on my speculation hat, the only reason the negotiations have lasted this long is because the NHL desperately wants to go to Beijing, a market it covets. The IOC knows this as well as the rest of the world and if the NHL wants to keep its players home next year, the committee is comfortable allowing the league to do it for years to come.

Okay, Ill take my speculation hat off now. Heres the deal: the NHL doesnt want to send its players to the Olympics for one very simple reason ($ $ $ $ $ $ $). Taking weeks off the season hurts the NHL financially, or so they claim, and the owners dont feel taking the show on the road helps grow the sport.

The league could very well take some blame for the sport not growing further than the Etobicoke city limits, but Gary Bettman isnt likely to see it that way. Heres what we do know: the players want to go, the league executives dont want the players to go and the fans (generally) want the players to go. Sound familiar? It should. This is just about the same position we find ourselves in when rumblings of a work stoppage roll around, albeit with far less serious consequences.

Your personal feelings on the importance of NHL players taking part in the 2018 Olympic games aside, Bettman and the owners are nearly always the enemy of fans and the players. They will speak in grandiose terms about the growth of the game, the league and the respect of hockey on the national stage while caring about one thing only: the expanse of their wallets.

So lets call this article a preemptive strike on Bettmans particularly odious brand of rationalism. NHL players going to the Olympics wont hurt anyone but the NHL, and even then, does anyone believe three weeks off in February every four years actually hurts the on-ice product? Perhaps the better question is: Does anyone else believe the NHL actually gives a shit? The league introduced the World Cup of Hockey this season and as a result introduced the exact same problems while ostensibly pocketing the profits.

Its all about the money, baby. Dont let anyone tell you differently. If you dont mind NHL players skipping the Olympics (frankly, I dont) fair enough. But dont accept the NHLs arguments for doing so. The only thing the league cares about is its bottom line it doesnt care about the quality of its product, the disruption to the season or the respect it receives on the world stage. Frankly, it should be so lucky to be recognized on any stage at all.

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Don't become a pawn in the NHL's Olympic Games - Fear the Fin

During his speech at the National Prayer Breakfast on Feb. 2, the President issued a stark forecast that should have every freedom-loving American deeply concerned. There has always been a thinly-veiled assault on the separation of church and state by the religious right, but the Constitution has performed as intended by successfully keeping imaginary deities out of our national governance. The Johnson Amendment is a vital tool against efforts to make our country a theocracy. It rightfully strips away the tax-exempt protections for any religious figure or church that openly endorses or opposes a political candidate or referendum.

President Trump has pledged to eliminate the Johnson Amendment from the U.S. tax code, promoting the unfettered accumulation of tax-free wealth by religious fundamentalists and thereby paving the way to mono-theocratic rule. The Constitution protects each citizens right to individually choose freedom of, or freedom from religion and nobody has the right to impose their particular brand of superstition on anybody else. Despite the fact that reason, rationalism and access to science-based information arecompelling intelligent people to turn away from faith in record numbers, the accelerated accumulation of obscene wealth by organized religion will make the fight for freedom of thought more difficult.

President Trumps misguided pandering to religions power structure should give everybody pause -- at least everybody capable of thinking for themselves. Call your congressional delegates and demand that the Johnson Amendment stand as a vital protection to our democracy.

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The separation of church and state - Helena Independent Record

With every change of administration come charges of hypocrisy. Those who governed by executive order suddenly learn the dangers of unilateral presidential power, and those who thought executive orders were an impeachable violation of the separation of powers start using them without missing a step. Supporters of federalism embrace the benefits of national uniformity. How soon is too soon to start protesting a new administration? When does criticizing a president spill over into disrespecting the presidency? Should we insist on patient bipartisanship, or is it enough to say that elections have consequences and the winner is in charge? Should officials treat a court decision as the last word and the law of the land, or should they stand up for their understanding of the Constitution?

With depressing regularity, partisans and pundits switch sides on political principles depending on who gains and who loses.

At its worst, hypocrisy can be a kind of furious projection of ones sins onto others; think of the official filled with obnoxious self-righteousness about other peoples sexual behavior whose personal life turns out not to bear scrutiny. Or it can turn values into mere talking points, and drain them of any real force. But what the great Harvard political theorist Judith Shklar called anti-hypocrisy is a talking point of its own. It is a lazy substitute for making and defending real value judgments; I dont have to be able to show which principles are good ones if I can just show that you violate your own. That strategy encourages a spiral downward; having higher standards always increases the chance that one wont live up to them. In a culture that cant agree on shared moral judgments but that delights in exposing hypocrites, the easy strategy might be to have no standards at all.

The 17th century French author La Rochefoucauld famously described hypocrisy as the tribute that vice pays to virtue. Ordinary political hypocrisy of the sort that we see when parties trade power typically has that character. The out-party hypocritically recites principles it violated just yesterday important legal changes should be made by congressional lawmaking, not executive order, for example. But in so doing it rearticulates norms and principles that officials, institutions and citizens can use as benchmarks. Without that rearticulation, the norms themselves would lose their force and be forgotten.

In 2017, we should be less worried by hypocrisy than by its absence. Some hypocrites dont feel shame, but at least they formally acknowledge that there are things about which one should be ashamed (the norms the other guy is violating). The Trump administration operates on a different, shameless, plane.

In a recent interview, the Fox News host Bill OReilly asked President Trump about his admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin, saying Putins a killer. Trumps reply was astonishing: There are a lot of killers. Weve got a lot of killers. What, do you think our countrys so innocent?

Theres often been real hypocrisy in American denunciation of authoritarians, dictators, warmongers and killers. The United States has shed a lot of blood, including innocent and civilian blood. We dont have to go back to the Cold War, with CIA assassinations and support for murderous Latin American dictatorships, to see this. The Obama administrations drone war campaign is more than enough.

But that hypocrisy was itself an acknowledgement that America aimed to do better. The public expected, and elites at least tried to deliver, a government that could claim the moral high ground.

Trumps shrug abandons that striving idealism. Why bother to have standards? Why bother to treat political killings as even worth criticizing? Why bother to acknowledge that, even granting American misbehavior, Putins regime today is accused of doing far worse: murdering critical journalists, assassinating political dissidents, committing war crimes from Chechnya to Syria?

The president wasnt just suggesting that government is a morally gray business thatalways involves some violence and wrongdoing. In his comments, he seemed to give up on the idea that there is such a thing as wrongdoing at all.

More talked about but quite similar is the possibility that Trump either doesnt think truth matters or doesnt think it exists.

Think of the Trump administrations constant, brazen falsehoods about easily checked facts from violent-crime rates to election fraud to inauguration crowds. Theres no real pretense of telling the truth; the virtue of truthfulness isnt getting its normal tribute.

For another example, think of Kellyanne Conways abrupt reversal of the election-season pledge that Trump would release his tax returns once they were audited. Hes not going to release his tax returns. People didnt care. They voted for him.The audit excuse was a bad one, but at least it was an excuse; it paid lip service to the norm of presidential financial transparency. Abandoning the excuse, treating the election victory as a substitute for the norm, is a way of saying that the norm doesnt bind at all.

Compared to that nihilism, hypocrisy is a vice well worth preserving.

Jacob T. Levy is Tomlinson Professor of Political Theory and director of the Lin Centre at McGill University, and a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center. His most recent book is Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom.

Follow the Opinion section on Twitter@latimesopinionandFacebook

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Hypocrisy isn't the problem. Nihilism is - Los Angeles Times

Imagine a budding philosophy professor on a tenure track at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell coming across a library built at West Wind, the private estate of American philosopher and Harvard professor William Hocking.

It's a library that had not been touched since Hocking's death in 1966; a library full of first editions of American thinkers such as Thoreau, Emerson, James, Royse, and of the European philosophers Descartes, Hobbes, and Locke; a library of precious books mildewing in the cold New England winters and the heat of summer.

American Philosophy, A Love Story, by John Kaag, (Farrar, 2016), combines Kaag's own modern existential conflict with his discovery of the story of America's brand of philosophy as seen through the writings of its most influential thinkers from 1825 to 1966.

With his marriage breaking up, Kaag's experience cataloging and storing the 10,000 volumes in Hocking's library helped him work through not only his love of philosophy, but the meaning of love itself and the idea of a life well-lived as examined by the world's most notable philosophers.

Kaag's book is as slow going as his work in Hocking's library was. The reader must digest a compendium of American thinking on idealism, naturalism, rationalism and pragmatism that has made us who we are as a nation. But it is worth every minute of discovery in the library of modern American thought.

Out here, we have our own philosophy when it comes to steak. Serve this Valentine's Day menu prepared with love for your Oklahoma philosopher.

Reach Melony Carey at foodbythebook@gmail.com or (918) 683-3694.

MARINADE FOR GRILLED STEAK

2 garlic cloves, finely minced

1/2 teaspoon dried thyme

1/2 teaspoon oregano

1/4 teaspoon cayenne

5 tablespoons soy sauce

4 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce

1/4 cup vegetable oil

1/4 cup red wine

1 teaspoon black pepper

Daddy Hinkle Dry Quick Marinade

Sprinkle steaks with Daddy Hinkle. In a 2-cup measuring cup, place remaining ingredients. Whisk until emulsified. Place steaks in zip-lock bag and pour marinade over. Seal and place in refrigerator for 6 or more hours. Remove steaks, throw marinade away. Grill over medium coals until desired doneness. Adjust quantity for amount of meat.

BROWN BUTTER MASHED POTATOES

Salt

3 1/2 pounds white or all-purpose potatoes, peeled and cut into large chunks

1 stick plus 2 tablespoons unsalted butter

1 cup milk

1/4 cup crme fraiche or sour cream

In a large pot of boiling salted water, cook the potatoes over moderate heat until tender, about 25 minutes. Drain well. Return the potatoes to the pot and cook over high heat for 1 minute to dry them out slightly. Pass the potatoes through a ricer and return them to the pot.

In a small saucepan, cook the butter over moderate heat until the milk solids turn dark golden, about 4 minutes. Add all but 2 tablespoons of the brown butter to the potatoes along with the milk and sour cream and stir well. Season with salt and stir over moderate heat until hot. Drizzle the remaining brown butter over the potatoes and serve.

RUSTIC PEAR AND APPLE GALETTE

1 refrigerated pie crust or home made

Streusel:

2/3 cup chopped walnuts

1/2 cup all-purpose flour

1/2 cup packed light brown sugar

1/2 teaspoonkosher salt

6 tablespoons cold unsalted butter, cubed

Filling:

2 Granny Smith appleshalved, cored and thinly sliced lengthwise

2 firm Bartlett pearshalved, cored and sliced lengthwise 1/4 inch thick

1/4 cup granulated sugar, plus more for sprinkling

1/4 teaspoon kosher salt

2 teaspoons fresh lemon juice

1 large egg beaten with 1 teaspoon water

Confectioners' sugar, for dusting

Preheat the oven to 400. Spread the walnuts in a pie plate and bake for about 4 minutes, until lightly browned. Let cool.

In a medium bowl, whisk the flour with the brown sugar and salt. Add the butter and, using your fingers, pinch it into the dry ingredients until the mixture resembles coarse meal. Add the walnuts and pinch the streusel into clumps. Refrigerate until chilled, about 15 minutes.

Line a rimmed baking sheet with parchment paper. In a large bowl, toss the apples with the pears, 1/4 cup of granulated sugar, the salt and lemon juice. On a lightly floured work surface, roll out the dough to a 19-by-13-inch oval. Ease the dough onto the prepared baking sheet. Mound the filling in the center of the oval, leaving a 2-inch border. Sprinkle the streusel evenly over the fruit and fold the edge of the dough up and over the filling.

Brush the crust with the egg wash and sprinkle evenly with granulated sugar. Bake the galette for 45 to 50 minutes, until the fruit is tender and the streusel and crust are golden brown. Let the galette cool. Dust with confectioner's sugar before serving. Adapted from Food and Wine, November 2015.

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Food by the Book: Philosophy, love, steak - Muskogee Daily Phoenix

Every once in a (long) while a book comes out that rips the zeitgeist, shining on like a crazy diamond.Age of Anger, by Pankaj Mishra, author of the also-seminal From the Ruins of Empire, might as well be the latest avatar.

Think of this book as the ultimate (conceptual) lethal weapon in the hearts and minds of a rootless cosmopolitan Teenage Wasteland striving to find its true call as we slouch through the longest the Pentagon would say infinite of world wars; a global civil war (which in my 2007 book Globalistan I called Liquid War).

Mishra, a sterling product of East-meets-West, essentially argues its impossible to understand the present if we dont acknowledge the subterranean homesick blues contradicting the ideal of cosmopolitan liberalism the universal commercial society of self-interested rational individuals first conceptualized by the Enlightenment via Montesquieu, Adam Smith, Voltaire and Kant.

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Historys winner ended up being a sanitized narrative of benevolent Enlightenment. The tradition of rationalism, humanism, universalism and liberal democracy was supposed to have always been the norm. It was clearly too disconcerting, Mishra writes, to acknowledge that totalitarian politics crystallized the ideological currents (scientific racism, jingoistic rationalism, imperalism, technicism, aestheticized politics, utopianism, social engineering) already convulsing Europe in the late 19th century.

So, evoking T.S. Eliot, to frame the backward half-look, over the shoulder, towards the primitive terror that eventually led to The West versus The Rest, weve got to look at the precursors.

Enter Pushkins Eugene Onegin the first of many superflous man in Russian fiction, with his Bolivar hat, clutching a statue of Napoleon and a portrait of Byron, as Russia, trying to catch up with the West, mass-produced spiritually unmoored youth with a quasi-Byronic conception of freedom, further inflated by German Romanticism. The best Enlightenment critics had to be Germans and Russians, latecomers to politico-economic modernity.

Dostoevsky: Society dominated by the war of all against all in which most were condemned to be losers.

Two years before publishing the astonishing Notes from the Underground, Dostoyevsky, in his tour of Western Europe, was already seeing a society dominated by the war of all against all in which most were condemned to be losers.

In London, in 1862, at the International Exhibition at the Crystal Palace, Dostoyevsky had an illumination (You become aware of a colossal idea that here there is victory and triumph. You even begin vaguely to fear something.) Amid the stupor, Dostoyevsky was also cunning enough to observe how materialist civilization was enhanced as much by its glamor as by military and maritime domination.

Russian literature eventually crystalized crime at random as the paradigm of individuality savoring identity and asserting ones will (later mirrored in the mid-20th century by beat icon William Burroughs claiming shooting at random as his ultimate thrill).

The path had been carved for the swelling beggars banquet to start bombing the Crystal Palace even as, Mishra reminds us, intellectuals in Cairo, Calcutta, Tokyo and Shanghai were reading Jeremy Bentham, Adam Smith, Thomas Paine, Herbert Spencer and John Stuart Mill to understand the secret of the perpetually expanding capitalist bourgeoisie.

And this after Rousseau, in 1749, had set the foundation stone of the modern revolt against modernity, now splintered in a wilderness of mirrored echoes as the Crystal Palace is de facto implanted in gleamy ghettos all around the world.

Mishra credits the idea of his book to Nietzsche commenting the epic querelle between the envious plebeian Rousseau and the serenely elitist Voltaire who duly hailed the London Stock Exchange, when it became fully operational, as a secular embodiment of social harmony.

Nietzsche: Ultimate cartographer of Resentment. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

But it was Nietzsche who eventually came from central casting, as a fierce detractor of both liberal capitalism and socialism, to make Zarathustras enticing promise a magnetic Holy Grail to Bolsheviks (Lenin, though, hated it), the left-wing Lu Xun in China, fascists, anarchists, feminists and hordes of disgruntled aesthetes.

Mishra also reminds us how Asian anti-imperialists and American robber barrons borrowed eagerly from Herbert Spencer, the first truly global thinker who coined the survival of the fittest mantra after reading Darwin.

Nietzsche was the ultimate cartographer of Resentment. Max Weber prophetically framed the modern world as an iron cage from which only a charismatic leader may offer escape. And anarchist icon Mikhail Bakunin, for his part, had already in 1869 conceptualized the revolutionist as severing every link with the social order and with the entire civilized world He is its merciless enemy and continues to inhabit it with only one purpose to destroy it.

Bakunin: the revolutionary as merciless enemy of the civilized world. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Escaping the Supreme Modernist James Joyces nightmare of history in fact the iron cage of modernity a viscerally militant secession from a civilization premised on gradual progress under liberal-democratic trustees is now raging, out of control, far beyond Europe.

Ideologies that may be radically opposed nonetheless grew symbiotically out of the cultural maelstrom of the late 19th century, from Islamic fundamentalism, Zionism and Hindu nationalism to Bolshevism, Nazism, Fascism and revamped Imperialism.

Not only WWII but the current endgame was also visualized by the brilliant, tragic Walter Benjamin in the 1930s, when he was already warning about the self-alienation of mankind, finally able to experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. Todays live-streaming DIY jihadis are its pop version, as ISIStries to configure itself as the ultimate negation of the pieties of neoliberal modernity.

Weaving savory streams of politics and literature cross-pollination, Mishra takes his time to set the scene for The Big Debate between those developing world masses whose lives are stamped by the Atlanticist Wests still largely acknowledged history of violence and the liquid modernity (Bauman) elites yielding from the (selected) part of the world that made the crucial breakthroughs since the Enlightenment in science, philosophy, art and literature.

This goes way beyond a mere debate between East and West. We cannot understand the current global civil war, this post-modernist, post-truth intense mix of envy and sense of humiliation and powerlessness, if we dont attempt to dismantle the conceptual and intellectual architecture of historys winners in the West, drawn from the triumphalist history of Anglo-American over-achievements.

Even at the height of the Cold War, US theologian Reinhold Niebuhr was mocking the bland fanatics of Western civilization in their blind faith that every society is destined to evolve just as a handful of nations in the West sometimes did.

And this the irony! while the liberal internationalist cult of progress glaringly mimicked the Marxist dream of internationalist revolution.

Arendt: Homelessness on an unprecedented scale, rootlessness to an unprecedented depth. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

In her 1950 preface to The Origins of Totalitarianism now a resurgent mega-best seller on Amazon Hannah Arendt essentially told us to forget about the eventual restoration of the old world order; we were condemned to watch history repeat itself, homelessness on an unprecedented scale, rootlessness to an unprecedented depth.

Meanwhile, as Carl Schorske noted in his spectacular Fin-de-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture, American scholarship cut the cord of consciousness linking the past to the present; bluntly sanitized history; and then centuries of civil war, imperial ravage, genocide and slavery in Europe and America simply disappeared. Only one TINA (there is no alternative) narrative was allowed; how Atlanticists privileged with reason and individual autonomy made the modern world.

Enter master spoiler Jalal Al-e-Ahmad, born in 1928 in poor south Tehran, and the author of Westoxification (1962), a key reference text of Islamist ideology, where he writes about how Sartres Erostratus fires a revolver at the people in the street blindfolded; Nabokovs protagonist drives his car into the crowd; and the stranger, Mersault, kills someone in reaction to a bad case of sunburn. Talk about a lethal crossover existentialism meets Tehran slums to stress what Hanna Arendt called negative solidarity.

And enter Abu Musab al-Suri, born in 1958 one year after Osama bin Laden in a devout middle class family in Aleppo. It was al-Suri not the Egyptian Al-Zawahiri who designed a leaderless global jihad strategy in The Global Islamic Resistance Call, based on unconnected cells and individual operations. Al-Suri was the Samuel clash of civilizations Huntington of al-Qaeda. Mishra defines him as the Mikhail Bakunin of the Muslim world.

Responding to that silly neo-Hegelian end of history meme at the end of the Cold War, Allan Bloom warned that fascism might be the future; and John Gray telegraphed the return of primordial forces, nationalist and religious, fundamentalist and soon, perhaps, Malthusian.

And that leads us to why the exceptional bearers of Enlightenment humanism and rationalism cannot explain the current geopolitical turmoil from ISIS to Brexit to Trump. They could never come up with anything more sophisticated than binary opposition of free and unfree; the same 19th century Western clichs about the non-West; and the relentless demonization of that perennially backward Other: Islam. Hence the new long war (Pentagon terminology) against Islamofascism.

Islamofascist? Photo: AFP

They could never understand, as Mishra stresses, the implications of that meeting of minds in a Supermax prison in Colorado between Oklahoma City bomber, all-American Timothy McVeigh, and the mastermind of the first attack on the World Trade Center, Ramzi Yousef (non-devout Muslim, Pakistani father, Palestinian mother).

And they cannot understand how ISIS conceptualizers can regiment, online, an insulted, injured teenager from a Parisian suburb or an African shantytown and convert him into a narcissist Baudelairean? dandy loyal to a rousing cause worth fighting for. The parallel between the DIY jihadi and the 19th century Russian terrorist incarnating the syphilis of the revolutionary passions, as Alexander Herzen described it is uncanny.

Bombing Barcelona in 1893

or executions in the 21st century. Photo: Reuters

And the DIY jihadis top enemy is not even Christian; its the apostate Shiite. Mass rapes, choreographed murders, the destruction of Palmyra, Dostoyevsky had already identified it all; as Mishra puts it, its impossible for modern-day Raskolnikovs to deny themselves anything, and possible to justify anything.

Its impossible to summarize all the rhizomatic (hat tip to Deleuze-Guattari) intellectual crossfire deployed by Age of Anger. Whats clear is that to understand the current global civil war, archeological reinterpretation of the Wests hegemonic narrative of the past 250 years is essential. Otherwise we will be condemned, like puny Sisyphean specks, to endure not only the recurrent nightmare of history but also its recurrent blowback.

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Look back in anger, unplugged | Asia Times - Asia Times

Its time the Left parties introspect where they had floundered, and developed a lingo to address the aspirations of the new middle class, Hamid Dhabolkar, son of the slain anti-superstition campaigner Narendra Dhabolkar and a leader of the Maharashtra Andhashraddha Nirmoolan Samiti that works towards eradicating superstitions, has said.

They must ask themselves and find out where they went wrong. As to whether they were not adequately appreciative of the new role of the middle class that emerged in the 1990s, he said in an interaction with The Hindu on the sidelines of the DYFI national meeting which he addressed on Thursday.

Dr. Dhabolkar, a psychiatrist by profession, feels that Left politics for some reason had taken the back seat in national polity in the 1990s and the vacuum thus created was soon captured and filled by the far Right communal forces with a flourish. It is therefore important that the Left in India remain sensitive to issues of culture, which are political as well, and address them as part of their pro-poor agenda, he says.

To cite an instance, sorcery and black magic have been used time and again by opportunistic, self-proclaimed godmen to exploit the poor, he says. While his father had led the struggle for legislation against black magic, Maharashtra promulgated an Act after his father fell to the guns of bigots in 2013.

Dr. Dhabolkar is happy that the Kerala Sastra Sahithya Parishad has taken up the cause for such an act with the Kerala government.

Sabarimala temple

If the anti-superstition body that he is part of had successfully led a struggle for entry of women into the Shani Shingnapur temple in Maharashtra, he now would want the same to be allowed at Sabarimala temple.

The case is coming up for hearing in the Supreme Court on February 20, on the second anniversary of communist leader and rationalist Govind Pansares murder by anti-nationalists, he says.

It pains Dr. Dhabolkar to think that justice has not been delivered yet in the murders of Narendra Dhabolkar, Govind Pansare and M.M. Kalburgi; trial has been rather slow and the actual shooters are absconding. But it is important that the message left by them go far and wide.

Megha Pansare

Govind Pansares daughter-in-law Megha Pansare thinks combating superstition is as important as the fight against globalisation. By opposing superstition, you are promoting rationalism, scientific temper, and freedom of thought, says Dr. Megha, an activist with the National Federation of Indian Women and a lecturer in Russian at the Shivaji University in Kolhapur, Maharashtra.

Govinda Pansare was a cultural activist and a politician and deemed cultural activity as part of his political commitment. He was gunned down when he was on the morning walk with his spouse. Now, as an act of resistance, Dr. Megha is organising morning walks by people on the 20th of each month.

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Go for introspection, Left parties told - The Hindu

1. Our way of life takes liberties with human nature. It uses Enlightenment ideas about reason which Samuel Hammond says psychologists know are very unrealistic (if not laughable).

2. Hammonds essay on liberalism (=workable liberties sought by lefties and conservatives) makes many crucial points, but isnt entirely realistic about reasons role.

3. Key principles of workable liberty are discovered, not invented. For instance, Hammond says, church/state separation and multicultural religious toleration were discovered in 1590s India under Islamic rule. And in 1640s Europe after many wars. (Aside, the supposed failure of multiculturalismisnt universal).

4. Certain behavioral rule patterns (like the Golden Rule, or property rights) are discoverable by any perspective-taking game-theoretic thinking.

5. Game theory enables mathematicalethics" with patterns as provable as geometry. And like geometry, game theory takes teaching (try rediscovering Euclid). But cooperation-preserving game theory matters far more than geometry.

6. Hammond mentions the badly taught Prisoners Dilemma game. If the strategy labeled rational produces bad results, is it rightly called rational? That the Golden Ruled or god-fearing beat rationalists suggests we need to rescue rationality.

7. Experts play a vital role says Hammond. Yes, but only if theyre properly motivated. If experts (or leaders) arent loyal to something above self-gain, like the public good, theyre buyable and unreliable (see Plato on greed-driven politics, + original idiocy).

8. Hammond feels that reason can help establish cooperative norms. But theyre also established, transmitted and internalized emotionally (see paleo-economics). Social emotions evolved partly for cooperation, as did language (weve got evolved social cooperation rule processors, akin to our tacit grammar rule processors).

9. Darwin saw that in humans workable cooperative norms work like natural-moral selection. Your way of life discovers them, or it dies out (see needism, + negative telos).

10. Hammond advises reason and persuasion, not fear-mongering or other emotive strategies. But persuasion often requires emotion (see Aristotles rhetoric). The trick is to recruit emotions for good, not to ignore them (see Platos emotive Chariot, + facts versus fears).

11. Many besides psychologists know that the Enlightenments reason-reliance is laughably unrealistic. Only the unobservant or experts educated into rationalist delusions or theory induced blindness (like model-mesmerized economists) could believe otherwise.

12. Some Enlightenment thinkers understood; Hobbes>Reason is not...born with usbut attained by industry, Hume>Reason Is and Ought Only to Be the Slave of the Passions:

13. But less realistic ideas won, and Enlightenment errors, though unempirical, still underpin democracy and economics.

14. Three unempirical Enlightenment errors, rationalism, individualism, and hedonism, are particularly seductive because theyre partly truth. However their elegant oversimplifications exclude much that matters. Theyre typically empirically complex compositions hybridized with their opposites (emotional and relational rationality, self-deficient individualism, painstaking mattering and meaning-seeking).

15. No workable liberty can permit freedom to harm what your community depends on. Yet logic that pits self-interest against collective self-preservation lurks among the market-mesmerized.

16. Ways of life built on unempirical views of emotions or reason arent sustainable. Hammond makes progress by using empirically sounder psychology (e.g., mentioning System 1 + System 2). But long-lived liberty requires behavioral politics and better behaved behavioural models.

--

IllustrationbyJulia Suits,The New Yorkercartoonist & author ofThe Extraordinary Catalog of Peculiar Inventions

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Taking Liberties With Workable Liberty - Big Think

The history of philosophy has seen many warring camps fighting battles over some major issue or other. One of the major battles historically has been over the foundations of all our knowledge. What is most basic in any human set of beliefs? What are our ultimate starting points for any world view? Where does human knowledge ultimately come from?

Empiricists have always claimed that sense experience is the ultimate starting point for all our knowledge. The senses, they maintain, give us all our raw data about the world, and without this raw material, there would be no knowledge at all. Perception starts a process, and from this process come all our beliefs. In its purest form, empiricism holds that sense experience alone gives birth to all our beliefs and all our knowledge. A classic example of an empiricist is the British philosopher John Locke (16321704).

Its easy to see how empiricism has been able to win over many converts. Think about it for a second. Its interestingly difficult to identify a single belief that you have that didnt come your way by means of some sense experience sight, hearing, touch, smell, or taste. Its natural, then, to come to believe that the senses are the sole source and ultimate grounding of belief.

But not all philosophers have been convinced that the senses fly solo when it comes to producing belief. We seem to have some beliefs that cannot be read off sense experience, or proved from any perception that we might be able to have. Because of this, there historically has been a warring camp of philosophers who give a different answer to the question of where our beliefs ultimately do, or should, come from.

Rationalists have claimed that the ultimate starting point for all knowledge is not the senses but reason. They maintain that without prior categories and principles supplied by reason, we couldnt organize and interpret our sense experience in any way. We would be faced with just one huge, undifferentiated, kaleidoscopic whirl of sensation, signifying nothing. Rationalism in its purest form goes so far as to hold that all our rational beliefs, and the entirety of human knowledge, consists in first principles and innate concepts (concepts that we are just born having) that are somehow generated and certified by reason, along with anything logically deducible from these first principles.

How can reason supply any mental category or first principle at all? Some rationalists have claimed that we are born with several fundamental concepts or categories in our minds ready for use. These give us what the rationalists call innate knowledge. Examples might be certain categories of space, of time, and of cause and effect.

We naturally think in terms of cause and effect. And this helps organize our experience of the world. We think of ourselves as seeing some things cause other things to happen, but in terms of our raw sense experience, we just see certain things happen before other things, and remember having seen such before-and-after sequences at earlier times. For example, a rock hits a window, and then the window breaks. We dont see a third thing called causation. But we believe it has happened. The rock hitting the window caused it to break. But this is not experienced like the flight of the rock or the shattering of the glass. Experience does not seem to force the concept of causation on us. We just use it to interpret what we experience. Cause and effect are categories that could never be read out of our experience and must therefore be brought to that experience by our prior mental disposition to attribute such a connection. This is the rationalist perspective.

Rationalist philosophers have claimed that at the foundations of our knowledge are propositions that are self-evident, or self-evidently true. A self-evident proposition has the strange property of being such that, on merely understanding what it says, and without any further checking or special evidence of any kind, we can just intellectually see that it is true. Examples might be such propositions as:

The claim is that, once these statements are understood, it takes no further sense experience whatsoever to see that they are true.

Descartes was a thinker who used skeptical doubt as a prelude to constructing a rationalist philosophy. He was convinced that all our beliefs that are founded on the experience of the external senses could be called into doubt, but that with certain self-evident beliefs, like I am thinking, there is no room for creating and sustaining a reasonable doubt. Descartes then tried to find enough other first principles utterly immune to rational doubt that he could provide an indubitable, rational basis for all other legitimate beliefs.

Philosophers do not believe that Descartes succeeded. But it was worth a try. Rationalism has remained a seductive idea for individuals attracted to mathematics and to the beauties of unified theory, but it has never been made to work as a practical matter.

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Rationalism verses Empiricism - dummies.com

D. Rationalism vs. Empiricism

Theories of knowledge divide naturally, theoretically and historically into the two rival schools of rationalism and empiricism. Neither rationalism nor empiricism disregards the primary tool of the other school entirely. The issue revolves on beliefs about necessary knowledge and empirical knowledge.

1. Rationalism

Rationalism believes that some ideas or concepts are independent of experience and that some truth is known by reason alone.

a. a priori

This is necessary knowledge not given in nor dependent upon experience; it is necessarily true by definition. For instance "black cats are black." This is an analytic statement, and broadly, it is a tautology; its denial would be self-contradictory.

2. Empiricism

Empiricism believes that some ideas or concepts are independent of experience and that truth must be established by reference to experience alone.

b. a posteriori

This is knowledge that comes after or is dependent upon experience. for instance "Desks are brown" is a synthetic statement. Unlike the analytic statement "Black cats are black", the synthetic statement "Desks are brown" is not necessarily true unless all desks are by definition brown, and to deny it would not be self-contradictory. We would probably refer the matter to experience.

Since knowledge depends primarily on synthetic statements -- statements that may be true or may be false -- their nature and status are crucial to theories of knowledge. The controvercial issue is the possibility of synthetic necessary knowledge -- that is, the possibility of having genuine knowledge of the world without the need to rely on experience. Consider these statements:

1) The sum of the angles of a triangle is 180 degrees.

2) Parallel lines never meet.

3) A whole is the sum of all its parts.

Rationalism may believe these to be synthetic necessary statements, universally treu, and genunie knowledge; i.e., they are not merely empty as the analytic or tautologous statemenst (Black cats are black) and are not dependent on experience for their truth value.

Empiricism denies that these statements are synthetic and necessary. Strict empriicism asserts that all such statements only appear to be necessary or a priori. Actually, they derive from experience.

Logical empiricism admits that these statements are ncessary but only because they are not really synthetic statements but analytic statements, which are true by definition alone and do not give us genuine knowledge of the world.

GENUINE KNOWLEDGE

Rationalism includes in genuine knowledge synthetic necessary statements (or, if this term is rejected, then those analytic necessary statements that "reveal reality" in terms of universally necessary truth; e.g., "An entity is what it is and not something else.")

Empiricism limits genuine knowledge to empirical statements. Necessary statements are empty (that is, they tell us nothing of the world).

Logical empiricism admits as genuine knowledge only analytic necessary (Black cats are black) or synthetic empirical statements (desks are brown). But the anyalytic necessary statements or laws of logic and mathematics derive from arbitrary rules of usage, definitions, and the like, and therefore reveal nothing about reality. (This is the antimetaphysical point of view).

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Logic: Rationalism vs. Empiricism - Theology

In Philosophy, there are two main positions about the source of all knowledge. These positions are called rationalism and empiricism. Rationalists believe that all knowledge is "innate", or is there when one is born, and that learning comes from intuition. On the other hand, empiricists believe that all knowledge comes from direct sense experience. In this essay, I will further explain each position, it's strengths and weaknesses, and how Kant discovered that there is an alternative to these positions. The thesis I defend in this essay is that knowledge can be of both positions.

According to Rationalists (such as Descartes), all knowledge must come from the mind. Rationalism is concerned with absolute truths that are universal (such as logic and mathematics), which is one of the strengths of this position. It's weakness lies in the fact that it is difficult to apply rationalism to particulars (which are everywhere in our daily life!) because it is of such an abstract nature.

According to Empiricists, such as John Locke, all knowledge comes from direct sense experience. Locke's concept of knowledge comes from his belief that the mind is a "blank slate or tabula rosa" at birth, and our experiences are written upon the slate. Therefore, there are no innate experiences. The strength of the empiricist position is that it is best at explaining particulars, which we encounter on a daily basis. The weakness of this position is that one cannot have direct experiences of general concepts, since we only experience particulars.

Noticing that rationalism and empiricism have opposing strengths and weaknesses, Kant attempted to bring the best of both positions together. In doing so he came up with a whole new position, which I will soon explain.

Kant claimed that there are 3 types of knowledge. The first type of knowledge he called "a priori", which means prior to experience. This knowledge corresponds to rationalist thinking, in that it holds knowledge to be...

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Rationalism vs. Empiricism Essay - 797 Words - StudyMode

By Andrea Borghini

Updated September 04, 2016.

Rationalism is the philosophical stance according to which reason is the ultimate source of human knowledge. It stands in contrast toempiricism, according to which the senses suffice in justifying knowledge.

In one form or another, rationalism features in most philosophical traditions. In the Western tradition it boasts a long and distinguished list of followers, including Plato, Descartes, and Kant. Rationalism continues to be a major philosophical approach to decision-making today.

How do we come to know objects --through the senses or through reason? According toDescartes,the latter option is the correct one.

As an example of Descartes' approach to rationalism, consider polygons (i.e. closed, plane figures in geometry). How do we know that something is a triangle as opposed to a square? The senses may seem to play a key role in our understanding: we see that a figure has three sides or four sides. But now consider two polygons -- one with athousand sides and the other with a thousand and one sides.

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Which is which? In order to distinguish between the two, it will be necessary to count the sides -- using reason to tell them apart.

For Descartes, reason is involved in all of our knowledge. This is because our understanding of objects is nuanced by reason. For example, how do we know that the person in the mirror is, in fact, ourself? How do recognize the purpose or significance of objects such as pots, guns, or fences? How do we distinguish one similar object from another? Reason alone can explain such puzzles.

Since the justification of knowledge occupies a central role in philosophical theorizing, it is typical to sort out philosophers on the basis of their stance with respect to the rationalist vs empiricist debate. Rationalism indeed characterizes a wide range of philosophical topics.

Of course, in a practical sense, it is almost impossible to separate rationalism from empiricism. We cannot make rational decisions without the information provided to us through our senses -- nor can we make empirical decisions without considering their rational implications.

Further Online Readings and Sources "Rationalism vs. Empiricism" at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

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Rationalism in Philosophy

ENLIGHTENMENT RADICALISM AND THE ROMANTIC REACTION

MARX AND AFTER

VARIANTS OF RATIONALISM

CRITICAL RATIONALISM

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Rationalism comes in various versions and makes wider or narrower claims. The idea underlying most versions is that reason is the most characteristic faculty of Homo sapiens. Appeal to reason is part of traditional wisdom, yet traditional (ancient Greek) rationalism includes an out of hand dismissal of traditional wisdom. The modern version of this dismissal is the radical demand for starting afresh (Enlightenment radicalism) and admitting only ideas that are proven, absolutely certain, and fully justified by rigorous proof. Science begins with rejecting all doubtful ideas. Francis Bacon initiated the idea that traditional unfounded views are the causes of all error; Ren Descartes tried to ignore all doubtful ideas and start afresh from nothing. David Hume began his investigations in efforts to delineate all that is certain while ignoring all else; he and many others, from Denis Diderot to Pierre Simon de Laplace, took it for granted that Isaac Newtons success was due to his adherence to Bacons advice. Auguste Comte and T. H. Huxley took it for granted that other fields will be as successful if they only jettison tradition more fully; Ludwig Wittgenstein went further and said only scientific assertions are grammatical (positivism, scientism).

Yet what proof is no one knew. Mathematics was the paradigm of proof, and the success of physics was largely ascribed to its use of mathematical methods, a practice for all to emulate. What is that method, and how can it be applied to the social domain? How does the relinquishing of tradition help word theories mathematically? This was unclear even after the discipline of statistics was developed enough to become applicable to some social studies (as in the work of Adolphe Qutelet, 1796-1874). Yet clearly as usefulness gives rational thought its initial (even if not final) worth, at least the rationality of action is obvious: its goal-directedness. Hence the study of rationality is vital for the study of the rational action that is the heart of the study of humanity. Whereas students of nature seldom pay attention to the rationality and the scientific character of their studies, students of humanities are engrossed in them. And whatever their views on this rationality, at least they openly center on it. Thus in the opening of his classic An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), Adam Smith declares his intent to ignore irrationality, no matter how widespread it is. Slavery is widespread, yet everyone knows that putting a worker in chains is no incentive, he observed.

The Enlightenment movement deemed Smiths argument obvious; this led to its dismissal of human history as the sad story of needless pain caused by ignorance and superstition. This was an error. The advocacy of the abolition of slavery came in total disregard for its immediate impact on the lot of slave owners. Smith spoke of rationality in the abstract. Because high productivity depends on the division of labor and because this division leads to trade, freedom is efficient. Selfish conduct is rational as long as it is scientific, that is, undogmatic. Life in the light of reason is egalitarian, simple, and happy. This abstract reasoning led to concrete results, including the French Revolution and its terror and wars. Edmund Burke and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel blamed the radicalism of the revolution for its deterioration into terror. The reaction to the French Revolution was aggressively hostile to radicalism, to egalitarianism, and even to reason (Hegel).

Karl Marx wedded the two great modern movements, the radical Enlightenment movement and the Romantic reaction to it. The former had the right vision, and the latter had the historically right view of the obstacle to its realization. Smith-style harmony between individual and society has no place in traditional society. Hence the institution of enlightened equality is an essential precondition for it. The realization of the radical dream of harmony requires civil war. But it is certainly realizable, he insisted.

Marxs critique of radicalism from within is as popular as ever. We are chained to our social conditions, and rationalism cannot break them. Max Weber, the author of the most popular alternative to Marxs ideas, stressed this; so do all the popular radical critics of the ills of modern (bourgeois) society, chiefly imperialism, racism, and sexism, perhaps also alienation from work. These critics puzzle the uninitiated, as they seem to belabor condemnations of obviously indefensible aspects of modern society. But they do something else; they advance a thesis. Social evils will not go away by sheer mental exercises. Are there any reasonable people who disagree with this thesis? It is hard to say. Perhaps some thinkers still follow the central thesis of the Enlightenment movement. If such people do exist (as seems true but not obviously so), then they are the neoliberals, the Chicago school of economics, which is not confined to economics, as it preaches the idea that a world with free markets still is the best of all possible worlds, even though it is far from ideal (Friedrich A. von Hayek).

What then is rationalism? Of the alternative views on reason, which can count as variants of rationalism? Consider pragmatism, the view of the useful as the true (Hegel, William James, John Dewey). It is unsatisfactory, because assessments of usefulness may be true or not; but is it a version of rationalism? Consider the traditionalist reliance on the test of time (ordinary-language philosophy; neo-Thomism). The assessment of the relative worth of traditions may be cultural (Martin Buber, Amitai Ezioni; communitarianism) or intellectual (Michael Polanyi, Thomas S. Kuhn; postcriticalism). It is unsatisfactory, as these assessments may be true or not; but is it a version of rationalism? There is no telling. The same holds for appeals to other criteria for truth. These are common sense (Hume, Smith, Thomas Reid, Adam Ferguson, George Edward Moore), the intuitions of Great Men (Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Hegel, Martin Heidegger), higher religious sentiments (Friedrich Schleiermacher, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy), and superior tastes (Richard Rorty). Are these variants of rationalism? Do they lead to more reasonable human conduct? The standard claim is that their asset is in their ability to maintain social stability. But in the early twenty-first century stability is unattainable and even deemed inferior to democratic controls (Karl R. Popper).

There is no consensus about whether the counsel to limit reason and admit religion is rationalism proper (Moses Maimonides, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Robert Boyle, Moses Mendelssohn, Polanyi) or not (Immanuel Kant, David Strauss, Ludwig Feuerbach, Sigmund Freud, Bertrand Russell, Adolf Grnbaum). The only consensus is about the defiance of reason (Sren Kierkegaard, Max Stirner, Joseph Arthur Comte de Gobineau, Georges Sorel, Friedrich Nietzsche, D. H. Lawrence, Heidegger, perhaps also Paul Feyerabend). The only generally admitted necessary condition for rationalism is the demand to side with reason. Therefore it is fashionable to limit rationalism by allowing the taking of a single axiom on faith while otherwise swearing allegiance to reason (Polanyi, Richard H. Popkin, Pope John Paul II; fideism). The default view should then be that this allegiance suffices. Add to this the consensus around a necessary condition for this allegiance. It is the critical attitude, openness to criticism, the readiness to admit the success of the criticism of any given view. Consider the view that the critical attitude is sufficient as the default option (Popper) and seek valid criticism of it that may lead to its modification, to the admission of some unavoidable limitations on reason, whether in the spirit of Marx or in that of his critics. The need for this limitation comes from purely philosophical considerations. Hume said that we need induction for knowledge and for practice, yet it is not rational (it has no basis in logic); instead, we rely on it out of habit and necessity and this is the best we can do. A popular variant of this is that because induction is necessary, it is in no need of justification (Kant, Russell). Another variant takes it on faith (Polanyi, Popkin; fideism). Is induction really necessary?

This question is welcome. Since finding alternative answers to a worthy question improves their assessment, they are all worthy. Hence all versions of limited rationalism are welcomeas hypotheses to investigate (Salomon Maimon, Popper). This is the power of the method of always trying out the minimal solution as the default.

Critical rationalism is revolutionary because it replaces proof with test; it replaces radical, wholesale dismissal of ideas with the readiness to test piecemeal (Albert Einstein, Popper; reformism). The demand to prove thus yields to the critical attitude (William Warren Bartley III, Willard Van Orman Quine; non-justificationism), recognizing that theories possess graded merit (Einstein, Leonard Nelson, Popper; critical rationalism)by whatever rule we happen to follow, no matter how tentative. Rules are then hopefully improvable (Charles Sanders Peirce, Russell, Popper; fallibilism). Hence diverse rules may serve as competing criteria or as complementary. Being minimalist, critical rationalism invites considering some older theologians as allies, although not their contemporary followers. Unlike radical rationalism, critical rationalism is historically oriented. (It is the view of rationality as relative to contexts and of truth as absolute, as a guiding principle la Kant.)

This invites critical rationalism to enlist rational thought as a category of rational action (Ian C. Jarvie and Joseph Agassi). And this in turn invites the study of rationalism as an aspect of extant scientific research. It also invites comparison of the various versions of rationalism as to the degree of their adequacy to this task: take scientific research as it is, warts and all, and examine its merits and defects according to the diverse alternatives. This attitude is new and expressed in various studies of the sociology of science, so-called, that often spread over diverse disciplines, including political science and even criminology no less. This renders a part of the project of rationalism the assessments of the intellectual value of the outcome of research, theoretical, practical, or culturalor even aesthetic. The only intellectual justification of a scientific theory, said Einstein, is its ability to explain; its best reward is its successors admission of it as approximate. In this way he stressed that the aim of research is to explain in the hope of approximating the truth. This is open to debate. Social science as a whole may serve as a test case, with the sociology of science at the center of the debate on this matter.

Historically, rationalism doggedly accompanied studies of nature, not social studies. What in these should rationalism approve of? Discussion of this question allowed rationalism to inform the social sciences. A conspicuous example is the vagueness in social studies of the boundaries between philosophy, science, and practice that still invites open discussion. Anything less is below the minimal criterion of the critical attitude.

Critics of minimal rationalism find criticism insufficient, since positive criteria of choice need justification. If so, then rationalism is back to square one. If not, then positive criteria must be tentative, and the issue must shift from their justification to efforts at their improvement. Some do not like this, as it rests on their initial choice that was too arbitrary. They prefer to return to the initial criterion and replace it with the least arbitrary one. They are radicals. The clash is thus between the radical and the critical version of rationalismas well as between them and fideism.

The agenda of rationalismin philosophy, in science, or in practiceis the same: heightening the critical attitude, seeking improvement through criticism everywhere. Where is the starting point? How are we to decide on our agenda? Parliamentary steering committees decide on agendas. The commonwealth of learning, however, is its own steering committee. Those concerned to promote rationalism should do their best to put discussions of it high on the public agenda.

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Joseph Agassi

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Rationalism, also known as the rationalist movement, is a philosophical doctrine that asserts that the truth can best be discovered by reason and factual analysis, rather than faith, dogma or religious teaching. Rationalism has some similarities in ideology and intent to humanism and atheism, in that it aims to provide a framework for social and philosophical discourse outside of religious or supernatural beliefs; however, rationalism differs from both of these, in that:

Outside of religious discussion, the discipline of rationalism may be applied more generally, for example to political or social issues. In these cases it is the rejection of emotion, tradition or fashionable belief which is the defining feature of the rationalist perspective.

During the middle of the twentieth century there was a strong tradition of organized rationalism, which was particularly influenced by free thinkers and intellectuals. In the United Kingdom, rationalism is represented by the Rationalist Press Association, founded in 1899.

Modern rationalism has little in common with the historical philosophy of continental rationalism expounded by Ren Descartes, however it has large affinities with the work of Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz which influenced the development of empirical rationalism, or logical positivism. Indeed, a reliance on empirical science is often considered a hallmark of modern rationalism, whereas continental rationalism rejected empiricism entirely.

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