Justin Smith on "Irrationality"

Why do  people hold seemingly irrational opinions?  The question has a long
and troubling history.  Now I've opened philosopher Justin Smith's new
book, *Irrationality.  A History of the Dark Side of Reason*, which begins
with ancient Greeks and ends with Silicon Valley.  I'm not ready to assess
Smith's claim that efforts to be rational often end in irrationality (many
examples from Silicon Valley), but, maybe.  He concludes with an
endorsement of old-fashioned Athenian direct democracy.

Some excerpts below.  Vivid opening on the history of mathematics, sort of.

Dan

PREAMBLE A Mathematician’s Murder THE GULF OF TARANTO, FIFTH CENTURY
BCE. They held his head under the sea until the life-breath ebbed out of
him. The four of them had been chosen by the leader himself, from among the
least learned of the sect, brawny men whose lack of comprehension in
mathematics was compensated by their zeal for enforcing loyalty. They were
instructed to wait for their poor victim to go to the side of the boat to
pull up the nets, and to not let up until his limbs had ceased to twitch.
He never saw what was coming, passed straight from eager thoughts of the
pickerel and mullet about to appear as he heaved the wet ropes onboard, to
horrid vision of death.



One does not betray the secrets of the sect, least of all when these
secrets undermine the foundations upon which the sect is built. But this is
what Hippasus had done. Word got out, among those who do not wear the
robes, among those who laugh at the Pythagoreans, about a little problem
with the way things, so to speak, add up. The world cannot be built up from
numbers, from proportions, from ratio—from reason—because, they had begun
to say, *mathematics is rotten at its core*. If the world is built up from
numbers, then it must be as irrational as they are. This is what the sect
had lately discovered from the *diagonal of a square: it is incommensurable
with the square’s side*. If you try to calculate it, you will end up with a
decimal series that has no natural end. How can that be? If there is no
determinate fact about what that number is, how can it possibly be the
number that characterizes a particular thing in the world? No, this is
wrong. It is irrational. Whoever leaks it must surely die.



It is from Iamblichus that we initially learn a version of this legend: the
drowning of Hippasus of Metapontum, a Pythagorean philosopher who
flourished, for a while, a century or so before Socrates. The first
recorder of this legend, writing seven centuries later, tells us that
Hippasus was thrown into the sea not by his fellow sect members, but by the
gods, and he seems to believe that it was not for the crime of divulging
the nature of irrationality, but rather for teaching to non–sect members
the less controversial art of *inscribing a dodecahedron in a sphere*.
Centuries after Iamblichus, Pappus of Alexandria, in the fourth century CE,
seems to be the one who first suggests, almost a millennium after the fact,
that Hippasus was intentionally killed for revealing the mystery of the
diagonal of the square.2 It almost certainly never happened, but like any
good legend it does not need to have happened in fact in order to convey
its profound lesson. The mythological parallels for this story are many,…

…

This is the history of rationality, and therefore also of the
irrationality that twins it: exaltation of reason, and a desire to
eradicate its opposite; the inevitable endurance of irrationality in human
life, even, and perhaps especially—or at least especially troublingly—in
the movements that set themselves up to eliminate irrationality; and,
finally, the *descent into irrational self-immolation of the very currents
of thought and of social organization that had set themselves up as
bulwarks against irrationality.* At the individual level irrationality
manifests itself as dreams, emotion, passion, desire, affect, enhanced by
drugs, alcohol, meditation; at the social level it is expressed as
religion, mysticism, storytelling, conspiracy theory, sports fandom,
rioting, rhetoric, mass demonstrations, sexuality when it bursts out of
its prescribed roles, music when it breaks away from the notes on the sheet
and takes on a life of its own. It encompasses the greater part of human
life and has probably governed most periods of human history. Perhaps it
has always reigned, while the historical periods in which human beings
convince themselves that they are successfully keeping it at bay are few
and far between.



*Conclusion* (after a spirited riff on the comments of psychiatrists Robert
Lifton and Judith Herman on leaders’ failure to distinguish reality from
fiction):



What the rise of the internet shows, with all of the disastrous
consequences of the absence of democratic deliberation over how it is going
to be used, is that such deliberation still holds out the best hope for
ordering society in a rational way conducive to the greatest thriving of
the most people. The internet was unleashed by self-appointed experts, who
knew how to engineer, but had very little ability to reason about the
social consequences of what they were doing. Many of them already think of
themselves as epistocrats, of sorts, as sufficiently qualified to take over
where failed democracy has left off. But the *engineers have proven
themselves no better able to make good decisions about how to order society*
than any Trump-voting denizen of Applebee’s. *Restoring the ideal of
universal democratic participation, even only as an ideal, and restoring
along with it rigorous civic education, remains the best hope for staving
off—indeed reversing the rise of—both the illiberal populism of “real
America” and the new technocratic anti-Enlightenment forces emerging out of
Silicon Valley.*



Smith, Justin E. H.. *Irrationality
<https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fsmile.amazon.com%2FIrrationality-History-Dark-Side-Reason-ebook%2Fdp%2FB07JD9QVH4%2Fref%3Dsr_1_2%3Fkeywords%3Dirrationality%26qid%3D1563110382%26s%3Dbooks%26sr%3D1-2https%3A%2F%2Fsmile.amazon.com%2FIrrationality-History-Dark-Side-Reason-ebook%2Fdp%2FB07JD9QVH4%2Fref%3Dsr_1_2%3Fkeywords%3Dirrationality%26qid%3D1563110382%26s%3Dbooks%26sr%3D1-2&amp;data=02%7C01%7CCLASSICS-L%40lsv.uky.edu%7C8425b2481b164b6a33cb08d708674b48%7C2b30530b69b64457b818481cb53d42ae%7C0%7C0%7C636987112060826629&amp;sdata=%2B2NmjpA4xWVICXKKHiLZ%2Fs%2FLyuxXnfxSsTbkGiFVPn4%3D&amp;reserved=0>*.
*A History of the Dark Side of Reason.* Princeton University Press.  2019.