I have a bigger thought coming but wanted to get this littler thought out, as a direction to where I’m headed.
My main theme is “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters,” the title of a famous aquatint, circa 1799, by Francisco Goya.
This is what’s happening today and there’s a longish history behind this sleep of reason, which I intend to trace in the future. But for now I want to set out some preliminary thoughts: 1) religion has no place in political discourse; 2) “reason” is simple, basic, but powerful; and 3) we see un-reason everywhere.
I have a lot of friends who are Christians; I myself am not religious, which simply means that I don’t go to church, not that I’m an atheist (I actually have an unshakeable faith in a higher power.) But I think it’s extremely important to recognize that although many of us might say that the way forward is to turn to God, that’s a personal decision but it can never be part of public discourse about our common good.
The reason I say this is simple: the sleep of reason produces monsters. Once we admit faith into public discourse, then that opens the door to any faith whatsoever, to any belief, to any idea at all that might be grounded in nothing but whim, fancy, speculation, or whatever; then monsters arise. I’m not saying we can never discuss matters of faith; we can discuss them all we want to in groups, at gatherings, anywhere at all except when it comes to having religion as a driver of public policy. Matters of faith can never be the basis for public policy. Perhaps this is one reason why the founding fathers separated church from state: they recognized that the sleep of reason produces monsters.
The other thing I see is that many people don’t seem to take good care of their reasoning or their logic; instead of questioning things, they listen to what they’re told by authorities without asking if it makes any sense. Covid revealed this: unthinking obedience was/is widespread, even in the face of vocal opposition by many authorities (doctors, epidemiologists, virologists, etc.) who disagreed with the CDC.
We’re all very capable of using our reason and logic and we do this every single day: it’s innate to us. There’s a logic to driving a car, for example: you stay in the right lane, stop at red lights, etc. Not to get too-in-the-weeds about this, but these rules of the road are identities that we take care not to contradict, and this is the essence of logic: the recognition of identities and of contradiction. It gets a lot more subtle than that, but that’s the essence of it. There’s a logic to building a bridge which we don’t want to contradict. There’s a logic to farming, to music, even to painting, which might seem to be wholly intuitive but there are steps and procedures and identities (which can be fluid) even with something like painting. There’s a logic to fixing a car, etc. We use our logic all the time but when it comes to public policies it seems that many of us don’t use our heads and question whether what we’re told makes any sense at all. Turns out, with Covid, nothing the authorities told us made any sense. In fact, much of what we did contradicted everything we knew up to then regarding public health, as well as common-sense (“logical”) procedures for discovering treatments for diseases during outbreaks of new pathogens. But we did it anyhow, with great harm to society.
So our response to Covid is one example of the failure of basic logic, or our neglect of it, in contemporary life.
I originally wrote about BLM and CRT, but I’ve deleted those comments as too controversial. They were examples of un-reason but I judged they’d be pushing too many buttons, at least for now. Unfortunately, there are many examples of bad logic out there. The new Disinformation Governance Board (DGB) our government has set up is a blatant example of a program that contradicts what a free society is about: freedom of speech is essential to a free society yet the Disinformation Governance Board aims to first identify, and then presumably to regulate, speech that it has somehow identified as dangerous to society. This is a tactic of tyrannical governments, not free societies, and it’s being sold to us as “protecting the homeland.” We should ask, well, what is this homeland that we’re protecting? Are we a free country that honors freedom of the press (our “identity”) or not? If we are, then the DGB has no place in it.
Logic is simple, we just have to be willing to think about things and question our assumptions. We have to care. We should care because the sleep of reason is everywhere.
"The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters" <--- love it. So true. It could be the motto of our collective substacks.
There is no covid. That means there is no covid vaccine and it is something else. That also means the pathology tests can not identify a virus and there is a false positive reading only possible. .. This means that there will be zero evidence of covid. and evidence of the cover-up.. Evidence that there is no covid. And there will be a reason for everything. the evidence is hidden hard, but i have it if you want to view it. Thats the only way covid goes away, is when people know the scam