THE LIMITS OF REASON
Kelly, James R
THE LIMITS OF REASON JAMES R. KELLY Reconfronting the 'lifeboat' ethic of survived Last semester two colloquia at the college caused me to reflect on the limits of rationality. I am a teacher and...
...Comprehensive reason is reason informed by moral and communal purpose...
...Reason should have searched for every way to make the value of sharing food with the hungry more realizable...
...Long-range problems dissolved the moral impulse of helping now...
...The more many knew, the less they seemed able to suggest...
...At least we should divest ourselves of all conveniences before we allow this to happen...
...But once again it seemed that reason left to its own devices paralyzed itself...
...At a minimum, to be rational means to be logical and to make conclusions on the basis of evidence...
...As rational men, he argued, we could do little for overpopu-lated countries...
...By directing our behavior and our social policy, moral imagination can create more evidence...
...Indeed it would...
...Would those countries do anything for us...
...I am a teacher and I should quickly say that I was provoked to question the limits of "technical reason" or "functional reason" or, simply, reason separated from a vision of human purpose, since reason must never be disparaged...
...Even the triumphant foolishness of St...
...Even though the United States has done more than any other nation to feed the hungry, our relative affluence makes us morally vulnerable in the eyes of other nations and in our own eyes...
...Our cultural deprivation is not unrelated to their physical deprivation...
...Lacking a religious imagery to imaginatively sustain it, comprehensive reason is especially vulnerable...
...The value of generosity can be appropriated and renewed only by our experiencing this value as a recipient or by performing it...
...Teilhard de Chardin once remarked that were it not for the liturgy he feared he might suffocate...
...Contemporary life affords few opportunities to affirm common bonds with those outside our kinship or friendship networks...
...Many die from lack of food...
...The "is" and the "ought" may be logically distinct but they are psychologically interdependent...
...While there is much honest disagreement about many values, most would agree, I hoped, that living human beings on no account should be allowed to starve...
...Now, no one should offer solutions merely because solutions are desired, and the primary social responsibility of the researcher and the teacher is to truth, not to the virtue of hope...
...Intelligence was made the antinomy of morality...
...Even worse, the morally good action now was rationally thought to lead to a future evil...
...james R. kelly is a professor of sociology at Fordham University...
...We often wonder what we actually accomplish by our small gestures which seem so tenuously related to public events...
...What appeals to trust and respect can be made if the most rudimentary of moral impulses-feed the hungry- is not strenuously incorporated into national policy...
...The truth is that we can be reasonable only in the context of value and communal purpose...
...It is of the utmost importance that our modest efforts not be disparaged...
...We can provide reason with more data...
...In addition to reason, the responsible thinker relies on powers of moral imagination...
...Paul was grounded in a higher logic and structure of being...
...Technology is imitable and nuclear weaponry certain to proliferate...
...If, indeed, the nation did finally fail in the effort to prevent deaths by starvation we should learn this not from a priori reason or calculating thought but sorrowfully through the failure of our actual strenuous and self-sacrificing efforts...
...They affirm a shared fate...
...By theological he seems to have meant something like "well-meaning but stupid...
...I had approached the discussion with, I thought, simple and agreeable premises...
...Indeed, that is the point...
...We must continually remind each other of this...
...Reason should not disparage this faculty of imaging more moral worlds, especially since reason itself shows the necessity of supporting these moral impulses...
...But, again, many saw only problems: "The food will never get to them...
...In the second discussion the direct question of sharing America's food resources with other nations followed similar lines...
...Reason reflects on experience and experiences can be created through moral effort...
...We must be careful never to disparage what some pejoratively call "symbolic actions," as though-symbols which assert a shared fate were not absolutely crucial for our own and the nation's life of reason...
...A final point about personal effort and public result should be made...
...Thought paralyzed action...
...Personal regard can be directly shown to very few...
...This is the source of disquiet I felt at both colloquia: Far too many made the basic impulse of feeding the hungry seem unreasonable...
...An able demographer suggested that aid to these countries merely enabled people to live longer, encouraged the recipients to have more children, and, finally, almost guaranteed social unrest in that country and future political difficulties for ours...
...Perhaps one of the infrequently noted cultural consequences of the weakening of religious traditions is related to this impoverishment of rationality...
...Half a billion deaths by starvation is not an uncommon estimate...
...In Western traditions mankind is one creation, in sin, and in redemption...
...As we nervously explore ways to increase productivity and to protect national self-interest, reason can become purely technical and unable to imaginatively question ultimate purposes...
...We die inwardly from lack of moral purpose and sustaining symbols...
...Crackpot rationality is reason unhinged from a larger religious and moral context...
...In both cases many could see only problems...
...Logic requires propositions, propositions assume evidence, but evidence is always partial...
...None of these objections is outlandish...
...We cannot appropriate values by thinking about them...
...No one, of course, argues that rationality alone rather than morality obliges us to share our food with the hungry of other countries...
...The Secretary of State recently described criticisms of United States foreign policy based on humanitarian grounds as "theological...
...If we as a nation allow people to starve while we could, through some sacrifice, make more food available to them, what hope can any person have for the future of international relations...
...We must suspect any use of reason which allows our symbols of mankind's shared fate to loosen their hold on our deepest convictions.pest convictions...
...Many of those countries are corrupt...
...We tell others and ourselves that we ought to help feed others and, of course, no number or arrangement of facts on their own can produce an "ought...
...Small wonder, then, that those values associated with feeding starving strangers can seem remote and unreal to many...
...Few would root virtue in foolishness...
...Even our gestures of charity are usually mediated by bureaucratic agencies...
...Let us return to the question of food...
...There is a deadly temptation to minimize the modest good that we do...
...Without vigilance, our culture's emphasis on efficiency, technology and ever increasing production can erode our powers of moral imagination and diminish the exercise of comprehensive reason...
...In the session on population the demographers described the difficulties of curbing births in the developing nations...
...The more we know, the less we seem able to do...
...The symbols of all advanced religions are communal...
...The morality of our everyday life was exposed as inept sen-timentalism...
...The reverse should have happened...
...It has been estimated that the 3.5 million tons of fertilizer spread on American golf courses and lawns could provide up to 30 million tons of food in overseas agricultural production...
...Again, a representative of the National Security Council recently remarked that "to give food to countries just because people are starving is a pretty weak reason...
...The nightmarish thought intrudes itself...
...Responsible agronomists report that before the end of the year millions of people if unaided might starve to death...
...The long-range best was made the enemy of the immediate good...
...One of mankind's oldest revelatory stories tells us that we are our brother's keeper...
...Even the simplest of moral impulses-the biblical injunction to feed the hungry-seemed beyond our rational ken...
...We do not appreciably affect the world...
...Even worse, technical reason finds it difficult to understand elusive notions such as a common humanity, national humility, or global responsibility...
...In modern society there are few opportunities to experientially assert common bonds with others not based on self-interest or mutual protection against real or imagined foes...
...Perhaps the point can be illustrated by a distinction between "crackpot" rationality and "comprehensive" rationality...
...If we cannot agree on this most basic of values-feed the hungry-what hopes for the future can we entertain...
...Yet, if our values can be shown to be impossible of realization or of limited efficacy, they become dim and their hold on our attention and on our personal lives is correspondingly weakened...
...And, of course, only reason can teach us to discern what is the good and what is the bad fruit of mysticism...
...Appeals to help others are directed to our sense of decency and common humanity...
...Both remarks illustrate the baleful consequences of the severance of reason from moral vision...
...Garret Hardin who has argued for a "lifeboat" ethic of survival (if you take all the passengers aboard, everybody drowns) admits that the decision not to feed all the hungry requires of us "a very hard psychological adjustment...
...One colloquium dealt with population and the other with the world food crisis...
...Still, something was wrong in both discussions...
...But when even the most elementary human impulse seems stilled by an appeal to rationality it is time to re-examine what we mean by rationality...
...Even some of the mystics remind us that if there are proper limits to reason, only reason can teach us this...
...We could not, it seemed, be rational and moral at the same time...
...Our talk about hunger, our financial contributions to relief agencies and our own occasional fasts and abstinances seem to do little good for starving people...
...Most difficult of all was the question, "Would food relief solve the long-range problem of providing a lifetime of food to a dizzying number of people...
...Yet it is incontrovertible that values can be grasped and renewed only in actual experience...
...If we do not continue to insist on mankind's common fate, surely technical reason "will devour us all...
Vol. 102 • September 1975 • No. 13
