Naive Rationalism
Going Into Overdrive (Not Monday Map)
Hello reader, you are welcome to my second day of Going Into Overdrive. I am dedicating this week to recovering my energetic reading, writing, and sharing prowess. I happened to receive a text from a reader yesterday who also said he was going into overdrive mode too. Well, let's drive together.
Today, I will be sharing with you how people mistake the unexplainable for the irrational; and the unintelligent for the unintelligible.
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SOCRATES: “My dear Mega-Tony, we need to know what we are talking about when we talk about things. The entire idea of philosophy is to be able to reflect and understand what we are doing, examine our lives. An unexamined life is not worth living.”
FAT TONY: “The problem, my poor old Greek, is that you are killing the things we can know but not express. And if I asked someone riding a bicycle just fine to give me the theory behind his bicycle riding, he would fall from it. By bullying and questioning people you confuse them and hurt them.”
FAT TONY: “My dear Socrates … you know why they are putting you to death? It is because you make people feel stupid for blindly following habits, instincts, and traditions. You may be occasionally right. But you may confuse them about things they’ve been doing just fine without getting in trouble. You are destroying people’s illusions about themselves. You are taking the joy of ignorance out of the things we don’t understand. And you have no answer; you have no answer to offer them.”
(Fat Tony debates Socrates culled from Nassim Taleb’s book: Antifragile: Things that gain from disorder)
Once in a while, someone comes to remind everyone who cares to listen that there are no selfless reasons for having kids. Some (of these reminders) often go ahead and challenge their audience to draw up a list of pros and cons to confirm their theory. As expected, there are people who start jostling to disconfirm this hypothesis of no selfless reasons for having kids. In the end, no matter the outcome, the reminders have one aim: to tell us that having kids is a selfish act.
In the goodness of my heart, I do not bother trying to confirm or disconfirm this position held by Online Philosophasters (OPs). I instead prefer to reply to jostlers who try to make a pros and cons list. I reprimand them to not waste their precious time on such a defeating activity. It is a lost game. But today, I have a different intention. I will reprimand instead, the peddlers of this naive rationalism that their project is wrong simply because it is a misappropriation of the word "reason."
To simplify going forward, and so that you may have an anchor for what will go on this essay, here is a simplified statement that encompasses all I will be analysing: naive nationalism - confusing the unintelligible for the unintelligent.
For context, I have provided some images (of tweets) as a background for this discussion. And also, to refute those who may think that I am fighting some imaginary enemy.
(Observation: Most tweets and statements like these that I HAVE SEEN are from women)
It is Naive Rationalism
Still writing in Antifragiile: Things that gain from disorder, Nicholas Nassim Taleb wrote that:
“Consider two types of knowledge. The first type is not exactly “knowledge”; its ambiguous character prevents us from associating it with the strict definitions of knowledge. It is a way of doing things that we cannot really express in clear and direct language—it is sometimes called apophatic—but that we do nevertheless, and do well. The second type is more like what we call
“knowledge”; it is what you acquire in school, can get grades for, can codify, what is explainable, academizable, rationalizable, formalizable, theoretizable, codifiable, Sovietizable, bureaucratizable, Harvardifiable, provable, etc.
The error of naive rationalism leads to overestimating the role and necessity of the second type, academic knowledge, in human affairs—and degrading the uncodifiable, more complex, intuitive, or experience-based type.”
That is naive rationalism. Naive Rationalism is thinking that the reasons for things are, by default, accessible to you. And most importantly, that they are articulate and codifiable.
Naive rationalism as I have come to see is a strong instinct. And I dare say that it is an instinct that consumes the weak and deceives them that they are strong (if you classify intelligence and rationality as strengths).
I cannot speak well enough, clearly enough, about how human distaste for uncertainty, volatility, randomness, and inarticulateness is strong. I can only liken the feeling of uncertainty - a more subtle feeling to its stronger, emotional counterpart, anxiety. That we don’t know for sure, the pathways and outcomes of things pertaining to our lives leads us to endless cravings for formulas, theories, predictions that will help us make sense of our lives in the world. We cling to foretelling - whether mystical or “scientific” to help us cope in this world that we do not understand. Once again, because this feeling of uncertainty is subtle, and the cocaine for its satisfaction is abundant, we hardly notice how sick we are and how addicted we are to the things that make the world appear neat and sensible. That cocaine or any other substance that helps its addicts to cope in terms of knowledge are theories, prophecies, forecasts, and predictions. Every mission pertaining to knowledge according to Nassim Taleb, is a mission “to domesticate, even dominate, even conquer, the unseen, the opaque, and the inexplicable.”
Hopelessly, the people who belong to the reminders category (let’s call them Online Philosophasters (OPs)) are one of such victims of naive rationalism who have so far being consumed by the thought that the reasons for things are by default accessible to them as long as they can make a mental list of “reasons.”
They have become this cyclopic set of epistemologists — pathetic ones— such that if anything fails to appear on a neat list, they assume that such does not exist. So they go ahead to tabulate people’s reasons for having kids. They draw the pros and cons. They judge the weight of both sides — as if people’s desires are crisp mathematical properties and then come to the conclusion that people who decide to continue on this path that “the list” failed to approve are selfish.
Referring to the opening dialogue between Fat Tony (a fictional character from N.N.T) and Socrates, Fat Tony exemplifies discerning minds who are more sophisticated than they appear. And Socrates is our icon of naive rationalism.
SOCRATES: “My dear Mega-Tony, we need to know what we are talking about when we talk about things. The entire idea of philosophy is to be able to reflect and understand what we are doing, examine our lives. An unexamined life is not worth living.”
FAT TONY: “The problem, my poor old Greek, is that you are killing the things we can know but not express. And if I asked someone riding a bicycle just fine to give me the theory behind his bicycle riding, he would fall from it. By bullying and questioning people you confuse them and hurt them.
Taking a cue from Fat Tony’s response, we know and can verify that not everything we know is linguistically or intellectually knowable. And that you do not need explicit intelligence to live well (where explicit intelligence means theory and up to date vocabulary and definitions).
Socrates on the other hand, as depicted by Friedrich Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy,
“is the archetype of the theoretical optimist whose belief that the nature of things can be discovered leads him to attribute to knowledge and understanding the power of a panacea, and who understands error to be inherently evil.”
Simply put, Socrates believed that if you don’t know it articulately enough, whatever you have been doing in “ignorance” (ignorance is quoted because it is not really ignorance but poor vocabulary) is really errant. Artisans prove otherwise.
The thing — the pathology inherent in naive rationalism is the blindness it unknowingly exhibits and accuses others who see better for not falling for the blindness. It confuses neatness and easy comprehension for knowledge.
It is a Moral game
Heavily implied in the statements of OPs is the moral weight of “reasons.”
The endgame as observed by any discerning mind is the afflicting emotion that the jostlers eventually face. I call it “guilt-by-shortage.” It is a kind of shame that comes from being short handed. In essence, when you have drawn your list with a good number of reasons available in your finest vocabulary, you are expected to proceed; not by reason, but by feeling. It is a subtle detour that as I said earlier observable to discerning minds.
The game at play here is a rigged game. I will explain.
Let us use this analogy. Imagine your school (say your university) has a scheduled football (soccer) game with another university. Then, the team which is to host you sends you a memo that the game is scheduled for 1 hour instead of the regular 90 minutes, and as such you do not have to bother bringing a complete squad of 23 players. Rather you should bring 15 players as there are only 3 substitutes allowed. So, you prepare with this information.
Fast forward then to game day. You appear at your host's stadium. Then as you step down from the team bus, you as the coach are handed a memo containing the details of the match. The memo states that you registered 15 players meanwhile your opponents, the host, registered 23 players as there will be 9 substitutes allowed. Even worse, you will play the full 90 minutes. Let me guess, you are enraged and you feel like a fool. You want to leave in protest. But you are warned that should you leave and choose not to play, you will lose the game by 3 automatic goals and lose 3 points from your existing ones. To top it off, you will pay a fine. What do you do? You play anyway. Then your players are exhausted. And you lose. But your opponents have a glorious day. And their substitutes come in handy to rail your team. They win for this reason: that you were understaffed. Fair or not fair?
It never feels good to be blindsided. Whether deliberately or not, the feeling is devastating. Here, however, our OPs cannot stop themselves from blindsiding jostlers probably because the OPs are not so sophisticated themselves. They don’t know what they are actually doing (that is why they are philosophasters).
OPs right from time, know the endgame (without being conscious of it). The endgame is always a moral chokehold - where they will put to sleep your desire for kids with accusations of selfishness. If you are an undiscerning jostler, you will walk right into that trap even without ever getting a beating from OPs. You will do the beating by yourself.
Who says wanting kids is selfish? In fact, what does it mean to be selfish?
By now, you already think of “selfish” with a negative connotation. As something close to immoral. When we find someone who uses someone else’s trauma to give themselves an advantage, we accuse such person of being selfish because they have made the situation about themselves. We don’t think of selfish first of all as passive. This does not mean we don’t accuse passive people of being selfish. But we accuse people of being selfish precisely because their gain is someone else’s loss. So we accuse passive people, apathetic people also, of selfishness because their prioritized safety may sometimes mean someone else’s guaranteed destruction. Selfishness is zero-sum. Someone must lose for you to gain.
With this, we can now reflect on our unsophisticated OPs as they accuse every natalist of selfishness. In simple terms, they say that the kids we bring to life lose so that we might gain. They are authoritatively—not speculatively declaring that bringing kids to the world is a zero-sum event of life: the kids lose so that we gain.
This is where we then can ask them to move aside with their balderdash. OPs cannot on any account—none in a universal and objective sense of our conceptual analysis of selfishness—say that reasons for having kids is hundred percent selfish. For them to do so, they must prove two things: (1) life is objectively about suffering (2) all children (Including those of us opposed to their views) born universally agree that life is objectively suffering. On the second point, should a child come into the world and find joy, and by any means appreciate that he was born, we can boldly claim that the OPs are pessimists who think and expect that the whole world shares their window. They have no right as parents of children whom they neither carried nor bore to declare for the children what their outlook of the world should be. We who think that there is joy in this world, and that there is joy in being born, have already disputed their right to claim number 2. Hence, their views cannot have the authoritative appeal that it exudes.
And back to the nature of the detour as typified by the analogy of the football game, OPs encourage you to lower your facilities, preparation, and resources by asking you to come at them with reasons. We know that when we call for something to be done by reason, the first thing jostlers do is to leave the mess of their emotions, desires, and biological instincts behind and proceed with “objectivity” (whatever that means). But it is when you have come shorthanded that OPs beat you with what they told you to exclude. Emotions and desires. In this instance, they redirect your moral and emotional wiring that seeks to be a good person and use it against you. They beat you with shame and the fact that you're ill-supplied for reasons.
Reason, schmeason.
You want kids because you want kids. Simple as that. You want kids because as a living being you are made to reproduce. Whatever you decide to do with that ability is a choice. And neither of those choices are inherently immoral or selfish. To capitulate to your unsophisticated hosts then is to try to occupy a category that was not made for you to fill. It is to play a game with twisted rules.
If you are looking for a reason, there is a reason available in your reproductive abilities and instincts. It is not just accessible to your intelligible faculties—to that piece of meat that enables you to compute. To succumb then to the shortage experienced by that squishy wrinkled meat is to submit to the shame and guilt that was originally planned by OPs. And for emphasis, I tell you that the OPs are sometimes too unsophisticated to know that their “plan” entailed the outcome already (so don’t come at me with the “it was not intended” line).
Just in case you need simplification, it goes like this: OPs tell you to use reason, causing you to exclude your nuanced emotions and sense of desire and reproductive instinct, and the power of your will. Because you are understaffed, you will definitely come up short of reasons. Then OPs will remind you (or at least you will succumb to the fact) that yes you are indeed selfish for wanting kids (primarily because you want to be seen as a good person. They rely on this). Then, you will live with that feeling of defeat as a selfish person. The only way they win is because you want to appear as a good person and you decided to play their game.
The endgame of OPs is the authoritative use of pessimism rather than a speculative function.
It is Self-interest not Selfishness
I conclude with this - with something more intelligible that unsophisticated OPs and undiscerning jostlers will lap up quickly. Selfishness is not synonymous to self-interest.
Selfishness as earlier described, is zero-sum. One person’s gain is another’s loss. But self-interest is not in its fundamental form, zero-sum. Self-interest is not selfishness.
Your desire for biological offspring is not selfish. It is informed by self-interest. File your desire under self-interest. Self-interest is about you satisfying your own needs but not at the expense of others. You can give your kids the best life. Both you and your kids will benefit from it. One’s benefits do not cancel the other’s. Self-interest fosters cooperation. You don’t need anyone to beat you over the head because you have needs that you need someone else to meet. After all, good parenting also requires sacrifice. And sometimes, the sacrifices we make make us better people. We identify familial love by sacrifice. And even long seasons of the absence of making sacrifices disintegrates our beings. So why not go ahead and do all you can to give the best to who you can knowing that you will also enjoy something from it? People like OPs will make you if you allow them, hate the thought of enjoying the fruit of your labour.
Do not let self-righteous moralizers and naive rationalists delude you with tales of altruism and then paint altruism as the ideal and anyone who falls short as condemned. To be human is to be self-interested to a healthy degree. Deny that and OPs will make you miserable.
Whoever wants to use “reason” and “selfishness” to bludgeon you out of what is rightfully your choice is attempting to, according to Fat Tony, “take the joy of ignorance out of the things we don’t understand.” The unintelligible is not necessarily unintelligent.
Lastly…
If you are a jostler who made it to the end of this essay, congratulations. You are now a discerning mind. And my job here for today is done.
Before I depart, here is something Friedrich Nietszche had to say about naive rationalism (Socrates really):
“Perhaps—thus he [Socrates] should have asked himself—what is not intelligible to me is not necessarily unintelligent? Perhaps there is a realm of wisdom from which the logician is exiled?”
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This is me Going Into Overdrive. See you tomorrow.