One of the points of looking in detail at the Conservative Tenets was to see where Your Humble Blogger was in agreement, as well as the dissent. I've found a bit of agreement, and a lot of disagreement, as well as pretty clearly defining the difference between my bias (or my model of the world, perhaps) and the conservative one. Still, it's nice to find lucky # 13:
13. The fallibility and limited reach of human reason.
Before I pontificate on this, it's certainly possible, particularly reading this after # 12, to read this as an attack on human reason. I don't think it is. Human reason is a marvelous thing, one of the greatest gifts we have (along with the opposable thumb, terrific memories, and the 1940-1942 Ellington "Blanton-Webster" Orchestra). To say that human reason is fallible and limited, is not to say that it is worthless or even secondary. Human reason is beautiful. Human reason is fallible. Human reason is useful. Human reason is powerful. Human reason is limited. Human reason is delightful. Human reason is enduring. Human reason is essential.
Thank you,
-Vardibidian.
“the fallibility and limited reach of human reason.”
is that a fancy way of saying “shit happens”?
or maybe our authors are upset about the gracelessness of the learning process. as vardibidian says, this may not be an attack on reason, but it sure sounds like an attack on science.
I think it’s a fancy way of saying “religion matters”. If people are capable of achieving complete and perfect understanding with human reason alone — not just if they do it easily, but if it’s possible — then there’s no place for religion. If there are things that cannot be understood by human reason, then one can turn to religion to understand them.
I personally would go with “fallible” (at least in the sense that people who are trying to apply reason can certainly do it wrong), but I’m not sure about limited; I don’t like the idea of saying that there are things that are theoretically impossible for human reason to understand. I think there are many things we’ll never know, but not because it’s impossible, just because it’s impractical.
i don’t understand the difference between impossible and impractical in this situation. we depend on shorthand analogies of the universe, tested by experience, to manipulate our environment, to act in our environment.
practicality seems like a buffer to me between our image of ourselves and our actual capacity. there’s no way to prove that we could have gone all the way to the places we’ve decided not to visit.
perfectly happy to say that our ability to estimate and model is “essential” to what we have done. can’t trust anything that says any aspect of us is perfectible. “perfect” itself is another human shorthand, unknowable.
Here’s how I see the difference: If it’s impractical to know or understand something, that could change. Perhaps we can improve our understanding (and our tools and methods of knowing and understanding), and gain this knowledge at some point in the future. If it’s impossible to understand or know something, the best we can do is pray.
That’s why I see this tenet as a justification for religion; it reads to me like “there are things humans can’t possibly understand, and must rely on religion for an explanation”.
I would read it as “there are things humans can’t possibly understand, and so when we rely on our pattern-matching and story-telling to get by, it behooves us to keep remembering that we do not fully understand, but are just getting by.”
The humility that comes with that is, or can be, a part of religion; the Master of the Universe is capable of understanding what we cannot, in my belief system. But that kind of humility can be atheistic, and certainly agnostic; it has to do with a person’s willingness to question the universe he or she perceives.
As for the difference between full understanding being impractical and impossible, I would say this: part of what it is impossible to fully understand is what we will, eventually, understand. The history of science is full of things that were impractical to understand and were considered impossible to understand (for instance, the elements, or the movement of planets) and, when it became practical to understand much of them, it became clear that they were really really complicated and that a basic understanding really made it clear that there was a lot more that remained beyond present understanding. When areas moved from “beyond present understanding” to “understood,” they illuminated other areas, further beyond understanding (as well as, in a fractal way, details that remained beyond understanding, and which, when understood in general, had as part of that understanding, details that remained beyond understanding).
Whew.
Thanks,
-V.
In this context, I’d like to mention the weather. Human reason is capable of understanding the way that weather works. But even those who understand the weather nearly perfectly can’t _predict_ it with any great accuracy more than a day in advance, at best. It’s not that we’re incapable of understanding what happens, but we can’t gather and process enough data rapidly enough to work it out.
All that is to say that the limited reach of human reason is not due so much to the working of reason not being good enough (as if we were too stupid to understand something), but to its limited _reach_; we just can’t know enough. Our reason needs experience and information to work from. We’re finite beings in an infinitely complex universe, so we always have less than full infomation about anything we try to reason about, so we’re likely to make mistakes as a result, even if we reason correctly (which we don’t necessarily do, as our reasoning is fallible).
Does this tenet justify religion? It could, but what it most emphatically justifies is caution, which is just what we would expect from a conservative, and a big reason why Our Only President (as V. calls him) is a pretty poor excuse for a genuine conservative.
The limitations of reason, in fact, justify this very conversation. We finite humans rely on principles to guide us in the face of uncertainty: if our reason were infallible and unlimited, we’d have much less need for principes, as we could calcuate the results of given actions much more accurately, and so could guide our choices simply by following the path that would lead to the end we desired.
That’s to say I’d much rather talk about conservative tenets, about which I can reason, than about economics, which makes my head hurt. But I’m going to pop over to the globalization thread now and put my oar in a bit there.
Good evening!
I suspect that the limitations of our biological abilities will limit what our reason can achieve. I don’t think we’re near those theortical limits, though.
And I suffer from not enough data, myself 🙂