The Reason for Reason
An executed baby's head was visible in the top-left region of my forehead, but only in a mirror. I was dreaming; more accurately, nightmaring. It was frightening. I was young in this dream, my room was the way it was when I was a kid, and I had run from to it to my mother's room, which was the way it was when I was a kid too. I told her of what I was seeing in the mirror; it was (in this dream) five in the morning and she was loathe to either believe it or wake up. I remember shaking in fear and trying to explain to her how scary it was. I described it as looking like an executed baby's head, and like Humbaba, from the Gilgamesh epic -- as if anyone had ever knew what he looked like.

I wondered myself what it was. The ghost of an actual baby that was executed in my room, long ago, wanting to make itself remembered? How odd that the room I spent most of my life in would have that; this undoubtedly had an effect on my development, it might explain how strange I became, or how ruthless.

I convinced my mother to come back with me to my room to check out this supernatural visage. When we were both in my room, you'd expect it not to appear when looked at in the light, right? Wrong: this was a dream, and anything's possible. It appeared, and she saw it, but she didn't really want to look at it. She kept looking at me rather than at the spot in the mirror on my forehead where the face appeared. I repeated to her: "look at the mirror, not me!" but she only looked at it in short glances. I don't know why, this was a dream, this was unreasonable. It took a lot of bravery -- even for something taking place inside a dream -- for me to look at it. It was smaller than it used to be, that face. Less scary. When I did eventually awake, I would be panting a bit from the remenant fear, intentionally dissipating it.

Dreams are one of the few places remaining where I see anything supernatural; which means: unexplainable, which means: uncaused. The supernatural, you see, is the realm of the unexplainable. There's a reason why reasonable people don't believe in most supernatural phenomena, and that reason is that such phenomena are causeless phenomena. They don't have reasons. Reason is, in its primary, original meaning, the art of identifying reasons. Reasoning is identifying a string of such reasons: w causes x; y because z. Classically speaking, logic is associated with identification, and reason is associated with causality (I really hate when people equate logic and reason, by the way: the two are not the same thing. Both are good, but they are distinct, and using them as synonyms is sloppy, like equating forks and spoons and calling both of them sporks.)

The supernatural, as said, is the uncaused. It's the false idea that something we experience could have no reason behind it. But calling it a false idea underestimates it: human civilization began with the supernatural, and so does each individual human. It's only later that reason develops. During most of our childhood, we operate superstitiously. We sometimes believe in Santa Claus, we usually believe ghosts are possible, we might even believe in God; we have really wild ideas at that time, much like primitive men did, inventing gods in every nook and cranny. Most people of course still dwell in the supernatural at least in part, but children dwell in it through necessity and not knowing any better, adults dwell in it through choice.

The banishment of the supernatural is the onset of reason. Why? Because we begin to demand explanations. For everything. We ask "Why?" over and over until it's gone. But that's not an easy process, it's a long process, requiring relentlessness, and achieved in different degrees in different people. To keep a child from asking why, or worse, to not answer those whys, is to reduce the child's capacity for reason, to keep them in the supernatural. The complete banishment of the supernatural, especially during times of great trauma and stress and sickness, is the greatest achievement anyone can ever accomplish. All the other feats of body and mind, including the development of abstract intelligence, are less important because they rely on (and correlate with) this primary mental achievement.

There's a lot not to like about rationalization (and by that I mean explaining things incorrectly, such as saying that Zeus causes lightning or saying that your friend died because the stars weren't right that day), but one thing should be said for it, grudgingly: that it sometimes is necessary to patch the holes of reason so that the flood waters of the supernatural don't break through the dam of reason and destroy the town of life with floods. Optimally you never need to use it, that requires the ability to deal with uncertainty, to say "I don't know" and just leave a hole in that part of your knowledge of the universe. But such holes are difficult to monitor, it's easier to temporarily fill that hole with a wrong, but reasonable, explanation. Rationalization can thus be looked at as reasoning's protective mechanism, like the body's ability to create scar tissue when cut. Like scarring, it's ugly, and hard to remove once it's in place, but like scarring it prevents you from bleeding to death.

Rationalization doesn't always involve obviously mockable rationalizations. Sometimes it's quite subtle and cloaked. Why did I do bad on this test? Because I was having "a bad day". No, that's not the truth, you actually did bad on it because you didn't study. But it's easier to blame your mood, and those around you for causing it. Why can't I draw? Because I wasn't "born with talent". No, that's not the truth, you actually can't draw because you never really put the effort into drawing. But rationalization works even when the actual reason for something is unknowable to you, in fact, it especially works in such cases. Why do I feel bad today? Because "I didn't have a good breakfast." No, it's because five years ago on this day your cat died, and you don't remember. Why do I like the taste of raspberries? Because they "just taste good". No, it's because someone you liked once gave you raspberries, and you've forgotten.

So both reason and rationalization can be described "interpretors" of all phenomena you come across. A supernatural object is something that is unexplainable. Such things don't exist. And that's good. But we believe they do, unless and until we use reason or its evil twin. Reason is best envisioned as a series of whys, going further and further back. In the novel trilogy Red, Blue, and Green Mars there's a character named Sax, and he teaches these kids who tease him by asking "why?" to everything he says. He always has an answer, even if that answer is (although this is rare, and is usually at the end of a long string of whys) "that's how things are", which isn't really a good answer but is sometimes the real, true, and only answer for certain questions, such the question "why do things exist?"

Reason is misrepresented, even by those who like it. Reason is not a light, although it can mistaken for such because it clears away darkness. Reason is bright, to be sure, but not as bright a sunny day after a snowstorm: with light, too much of it will blind you, which isn't the case with reason. Nor is reason a fire, because although it can spread between people it doesn't burn. Analogies fail it, as they do all great things. If you have to use one, make it something that you can't live for long without, like your heart; reason is to the mind what your heart is to your body.

In today's culture reason is commonly associated with three widely hated objects: Western Civilization, Ayn Rand, and science. I'll go into each, briefly.

Associating reason with Western Civilization is premature. While true that most reasonable people have come out of it, most people in Western Civilization, now and historically, are, like the rest of the world, still locked in superstition, still not in the habit of seeking out explanations for things. But the leaders of the West often are steeped in reason, although rationalization is common too. Reason is so powerful that an entire civilization can be associated with it simply because it has a slightly higher incidence in that culture, much like freshly ground cinnamon is so powerful only a dash of it enough to make an entire pound of sugar smell just the same as a pound of cinnamon. It's indicative of that power, but it's inaccurate, and as I said, premature. We don't call Japan the civilization of suicide because it has a slightly higher incidence of it, for instance. And reasoning well is far rarer than suicide. Even in Europe during the Enlightenment, I'd wager.

The reason the West is hated *is* the result of reason, however: reason makes you powerful. The technological instruments the West has used to build its empire are echos of the reason of somebody or another. But you shouldn't blame reason for their use, no more than you should blame ancient Greece for ancient Rome. The gap is usually that large. There's a quote I like about the Nazi's, by Ken Wilber, which goes: "Auschwitz is not the product of reason; Auschwitz is the product of reason hijacked by tribalism."

Associating reason with Ayn Rand is okay, she was a reasonable person, but what's most interesting about her is that she popularized elitism. Now, there were people who argued for elitism before, and in the ancient past elitism was taken for granted as a good thing, but I expect that most people who consciously prefer elitism -- and by that I mean the idea that some people are better than others, and that this is unavoidable -- have read her, and at least once, liked what she wrote.

Objectivism is roughly speaking the romanticization of reason. The Enlightenment was too to some extent, but the Enlightenment was largely scientific in tone, not romantic (passionate, sharply seperating of dichotomies, essentializing, full of moral indignation, and so on) in tone. Everyone who succeeds Ayn Rand (and succeed is a better term than follow, although both literally mean the same thing, the tone is different) may not be rational, but they are all passionate for the cause of reason.

And for that she's one of the most popular philosophers -- among the masses, ironically. She often introduces people to reason. Now, most people who read her don't follow through on it; as the moderator of a forum about her I come across this weekly. Basic logical fallacies being abused, or else reactionary emotional thinking, or else senile theorizing in the air, stuff like that. Still, it's an amazing accomplishment to take one of the massminded and make them desire to be more, and to do it so subtlely that they believe they always wanted it and were never part of those who work only by superstition and borrowed ideas.

Science isn't so much hated as it is disliked, or treated as something that has to be "kept in its place". It isn't yet seen as essentially human, it's seen as something in an ivory tower, or better, it's seen as something on Mount Olympus. It's taught that way too, which is unfortunate, but better than nothing. The scientific method, as it's usually stated, is not quite reason, but it's of the same family; it's sort of a "social" reason, in the good sense of the word social. Science is impossible to do alone, you need at the very least a friend to report it to. Its methods tend to discourage personal experience though, which reason when used on an individual basis can't do without; it also has too much emphasis on controls, which while useful, are not always necessary, because something can be its own control (for instance, if you exercise and get stronger, the time when you did not exercise and did not get stronger is your control).

But what science shows us about reason is not so much the scientific method (although that is important), but through its imitation, psuedo-science. That psuedo-science is growing is actually a good thing, because it shows that superstition now has to pretend to work like science in order to be taken seriously. So you have mock-studies which show that prayer helps people heal faster, and stuff like that. But remember this: that superstition didn't even bother with that kind of facade until recently.

Being able to use reason, while rare, is not as rare as being able to understand reason. Even reasonable people believe a lot of unreasonable things about reason, but it's not unexpected: think of what is trying to be done, a mere few pounds (how much does the brain weigh again?) of matter trying to model the way those pounds of matter work. It's like a program trying to read and understand itsself, even as you read it, it changes and is something new to read. And there's nothing to directly sense it with either, there is no internal eye. So it's difficult, but not impossible: to study epistemology is to understand the technical details of reason -- the process of abstraction, the very difference between instances and universals, how induction works, and all that. My topic is not how reason works, however, but why.

And that's an interesting thing: if you ask "why use reason?" you're using reason. To ask why, to seek for some cause or because, is to use it. The only way not to use it, is to not wonder why to use it, or why anyone else uses it. And that's increasingly impossible. It used to be possible, you could go your entire life without seeking the causes and effects of the things around you, but that's only easy when your environment contains a small set of things which you can understand on the basis of accepted wisdom and declarations from the tribe, it's less easy when your environment includes many strange things that never existed before and that the people around you disagree about. Just like reason caused the modern lifestyle, the modern lifestyle is causing reason. The same is true of its other creations, such as philosophical tomes, and the internet. It's self-perpetuating. It's not unbeatable, and it is corruptable -- broadly speaking "postmodernism" is a virus which counters it -- but in most conflicts, including most wars, you want to be on its side.