John Gray and the perils of rationality

[IrenetheQuaint]

A poster on another thread posted a link to this interesting and (to me) convincing piece by John Gray, whose book Straw Dogs argues along similar lines.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-28341562

Basically he says that human history shows that we can't rely on rationality - humans are naturally emotional creatures prone to cruelty, violence and magical thinking.

I tend to agree with him, though I think he downplays the role of committed and idealistic humans who set up institutions that can make our societies better, if certainly not perfect.

But my question is, where do we go from here? Rationality is unreliable. There may be a kernel of truth in religion and there is certainly a lot to learn from the kinder and more tolerant religious traditions, but there is far too much contradiction between the different religions and sects for me, at least, to take any of the doctrine seriously.

So, how to be a human being? How can we operate, mentally and day-to-day, in the face of the evidence that humans are basically irrational and not very nice?

Quaint Irene! I love Mapp and Lucia :-)
More to the point, Maestro has posted pretty much what I thought when I read the Gray piece, which I thought was rather intellectually shallow tosh.

John Gray is very far from an idiot but his views do not go down well with some sections of the atheist community. This article from he Rationalist Association explores this in an interview with Gray here

I sort-of agree with a fair amount of what he wrote there but I'm not sure I agree with his conclusion. Consistent application of rationality is hard and I agree that humans do have a real tendency to indulge in magical thinking. But he seemed to be concluding that we should therefore just give up.

I think we can, and should, continue to strive towards rationality and reason while accepting that there are aspects of our mental processes that make us susceptible to error. That's fair enough. We're humans, not computers. Our brain structure evolved for much different purposes than that we are pursuing now so it's not always going to work well. But as long as we are aware of these weaknesses we can work around them. Our visual system is similarly limited by evolution and so easy to trick and confuse (notice how your eyes and brain struggle to make sense of this image). But that doesn't mean we should give up on looking at things.

I don't get the article. he seems to be saying look at how poorly we apply reason in our lives. Hence, "belief in reason" (not actually sure what he means by that) is unreasonable.

???

his examples seem to be of that form. "look at all the disasters that occur because people are unreasonable". so, we shouldn't use reason?

I think he is arguing that our faith in "reason" as we use the word today is very naive, as we (as a race) are so prone to prejudice and irrational convictions. Even when we think we're being reasonable we're not, because there are so many unexamined beliefs and values at the heart of our arguments, and our conclusions vary enormously according to the evidence and value weighting we use.

I do agree with Howard though that we should keep trying, while realising that our mental processes are prone to errors, faulty assumptions and leaps of logic. There is no alternative, really!

I think he is arguing that our faith in "reason" as we use the word today is very naive,

this is what I am confused about. what is meant by "our faith in reason"? is it the faith that reason works at all or the faith that we are rational? The examples he gives seem to be that we should be skeptical of our conclusions obtained through rational discourse (I am thinking of the example of eugenics).