I Am An Unreasonable Man & Now I Know Why

I have been unreasonable and irrational of late. If this be (fair & balanced) self-disclosure, so be it.

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Unreason's Seductive Charms
By DAVID P. BARASH

I teach a course titled "Ideas of Human Nature." When we talk about reason and rationality, my students are respectful but restrained; when it's time to deal with unreason and irrationality, they are downright enthusiastic. Was Hamlet wrong? And Aristotle?

"What a piece of work is a man!" exulted the otherwise melancholy Danish prince. "How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In form, in moving, how express and admirable! In action how like an angel! In apprehension how like a god!" Nearly two thousand years earlier, Aristotle maintained that happiness comes from the use of reason, since that is the unique glory and power of humanity. Indeed, for the Greeks generally, reason distinguishes us from all other living things, and the life of reason is thus the greatest good to which human beings can aspire. So why doesn't it attract more adherents these days?

For one thing, it may simply be that reason -- by definition -- is dry and cerebral, only rarely making inroads below the waist. Omar Khayyam made this trade-off uniquely explicit: "For a new Marriage I did make Carouse:/Divorced old barren Reason from my Bed/And took the Daughter of the Vine to Spouse."

To be sure, excessive reason is easy to caricature. Thus, at one point in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, our hero journeys to Laputa, whose male inhabitants are utterly devoted to their intellects: One eye focuses inward and the other upon the stars. Neither looks straight ahead. The Laputans are so cerebral that they cannot hold a normal conversation; their minds wander off into sheer contemplation. They require servants who swat them with special instruments about the mouth and ears, reminding them to speak or listen as needed. Laputans concern themselves only with pure mathematics and equally pure music. Appropriately, they inhabit an island that floats, in ethereal indifference, above the ground. Laputan women, however, are unhappy and regularly cuckold their husbands, who do not notice. The prime minister's wife, for example, repeatedly runs away, preferring to live down on Earth with a drunk who beats her.

Thus presented, to reject reason seems, well, downright reasonable. Consider how rare it is for someone caught in the grip of strong emotion to be overcome by a fit of rationality, but how frequently events go the other way. After all, Blaise Pascal, who abandoned his brilliant study of mathematics to pursue religious contemplation, famously noted "the heart has its reasons that reason does not understand." Or as the 17th-century English churchman and poet Henry Aldrich pointed out in his "Reasons for Drinking," often we make up our minds first, and find "reasons" only later: "If all be true that I do think/There are five reasons we should drink:/Good wine -- a friend -- or being dry -- / or lest we should be by and by -- /Or any other reason why."

We may speak admiringly of Greek rationality, of the Age of Reason, and of the Enlightenment, yet it is far easier to find great writing -- and even, paradoxically, serious thinking -- that extols unreason, irrationality, and the beauty of "following one's heart" rather than one's head. Some of the most "rational" people have done just that.

Legend has it, for example, that when Pythagoras came up with his famous theorem, justly renowned as the cornerstone of geometry (that most logical of mental pursuits), he immediately sacrificed a bull to Apollo. Or think of Isaac Newton: pioneering physicist, both theoretical and empirical, he of the laws of motion and gravity, inventor of calculus, and widely acknowledged as the greatest of all scientists. ("Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night:/God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.") This same Newton wrote literally thousands of pages, far more than all his physics and mathematics combined, seeking to explicate the prophecies in the Book of Daniel.

Montaigne devoted many of his essays to a skeptical denunciation of the human ability to know anything with certainty. But probably the most influential of reason's opponents was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who claimed that "the man who thinks is a depraved animal," thereby speaking for what came to be the Romantic movement. But even earlier, many thinkers, including those who employed reason with exquisite precision, had been inclined to put it "in its place." The hardheaded empiricist philosopher David Hume, for example, proclaimed that "reason is, and ought to be, the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them." Furthermore, when reason turns against the deeper needs of people, Hume argued, people will turn against reason.

Probably the most articulate, not to mention downright angry, denunciation of human reason is found in the work of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, especially his novella Notes From the Underground, which depicts a nameless man: unattractive, unappealing, and irrational. In angry contradiction to the utilitarians who argued that society should aim for the "greatest good for the greatest number" and that people can be expected to act in their own best interest, the Underground Man -- literature's first "antihero" -- jeered that humanity can never be encompassed within a "Crystal Palace" of rationality. He may have a point: Certainly, unreason can be every bit as "human" as the Greeks believed rationality to be. You don't have to be a Freudian, for example, to recognize the importance of the unconscious, which, like an iceberg, not only floats largely below the surface -- and is thus inaccessible to rational control -- but also constitutes much of our total mental mass.

It is one thing, however, to acknowledge the importance of unreason and irrationality, and quite another to applaud it, as the Underground Man does: "I am a sick man. ... I am a spiteful man. I am a most unpleasant man." The key concept for Dostoyevsky's irrational actor is spite, a malicious desire to hurt another without any compensating gain for the perpetrator. Consider the classic formulation of spite: "cutting off your nose to spite your face," disfiguring yourself for "no reason."

Significantly, spiteful behavior does not occur among animals. Even when an animal injures itself or appears to behave irrationally -- gnawing off its own paw, killing and eating its young -- there is typically a biological payoff: freeing oneself from a trap, turning an offspring that may be unlikely to survive into calories for the parent. Spite is uniquely human.

The Underground Man goes on to rail against a world in which -- to his great annoyance -- two times two equals four. He claims, instead, that there is pleasure to be found in a toothache, and refers, with something approaching admiration, to Cleopatra's alleged fondness for sticking golden pins in her slave girls' breasts in order to "take pleasure in their screams and writhing." As the Underground Man sees it, the essence of humanness is living "according to our own stupid will ... because it preserves for us what's most important and precious, that is, our personality and our individuality." He believes that people act irrationally because they stubbornly want to, snarling that "if you say that one can also calculate all this according to a table, this chaos and darkness, these curses, so that the mere possibility of calculating it all in advance would stop everything and that reason alone would prevail -- in that case man would be insane deliberately in order not to have reason, but to have his own way!"

Such sentiments are in no way limited to this most famous apostle of the dark Russian soul, or to European Romantics. Here is a poem from that quintessentially American writer, Stephen Crane: "In the desert/I saw a creature, naked, bestial,/Who, squatting upon the ground,/Held his heart in his hands,/And ate of it./I said, 'Is it good, friend?'/ 'It is bitter -- bitter,' he answered;/'But I like it/Because it is bitter,/And because it is my heart.'"

But no matter how fashionable it may be to "dis" reason, let's not be carried away. Strong emotion can be wonderful, especially when it involves love. But it can also be horrible, as when it calls forth hatred, fear, or violence. In any event, one doesn't have to idolize Greek-style rationality to recognize that excesses of unreason typically have little to recommend themselves, and much misery to answer for.

We may admire -- albeit surreptitiously -- the Underground Man's insistence on being unpredictable, even unpleasant, spiteful, or willfully irrational. But most of us wouldn't choose him to be our financial, vocational, or romantic adviser, or, indeed, any sort of purveyor of wisdom. Maybe unalloyed reason doesn't make the heart sing, but as a guide to action, it is probably a lot better than its darker, danker, likely more destructive, albeit sexier alternative.

In Newton's case, as in Pythagoras', the most exquisite rationality did not preclude unreason or, as some would prefer to call it, faith. But at least, no great harm seems to have been done by the cohabitation. Sadly, this isn't always the case. "Only part of us is sane," wrote Rebecca West.

"Only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our 90s and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set life back to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations. Our bright natures fight in us with this yeasty darkness, and neither part is commonly quite victorious, for we are divided against ourselves. ... "

It may be significant that West wrote the above while reminiscing on her time in the Balkans, among inhabitants of what we now identify as the former Yugoslavia, people with a long, terrible history of doing things to each other that many outsiders readily label "insane," or at least "unreasonable." Her point is deeper, however, not merely a meditation on Balkan irrationality, but on everyone's.

Take, for a more pedestrian example, the following: Imagine that you have decided to see a play and paid the admission price of $10 per ticket. As you enter the theater, you discover that you have lost the ticket. The seat was not marked, and the ticket cannot be recovered. Would you pay $10 for another ticket? Forty-six percent of the subjects of an experiment answered yes; 54 percent answered no.

Then, a different question was asked: Imagine that you have decided to see a play where admission is $10 per ticket. As you enter the theater, you discover that you have lost a $10 bill. Would you still pay $10 for a ticket for the play? This time, a whopping 88 percent answered yes and only 12 percent answered no.

In other words, most people say that if they had lost their ticket, they would be unwilling to buy another, but if they had simply lost the value of the ticket ($10), an overwhelming majority have no qualms about making the purchase! Why such a huge difference? According to the psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky (the former a recent economics Nobelist), it is explicable -- not by reason but by the way people organize their mental accounts.

Here is another one: Would you accept a gamble that offers a 10-percent chance to win $95 and a 90-percent chance to lose $5? The great majority of people in the study rejected this proposition as a loser. Yet, a bit later, the same individuals were asked this question: Would you pay $5 to participate in a lottery that offers a 10-percent chance to win $100 and a 90-percent chance to win nothing? A large proportion of those who refused the first option accepted the second. But the options offer identical outcomes. As Kahneman and Tversky see it: "Thinking of the $5 as a payment makes the venture more acceptable than thinking of the same amount as a loss." It's all a matter of how the situation is framedin this case, the extent to which people are "risk averse."

Which brings us to yet another perspective on why Homo sapiens isn't always strictly sapient. Let's start by agreeing with Herbert Simon (who also won a Nobel Prize in economics) that the mind is simply incapable of solving many of the problems posed by the real world, just because the world is big and the mind is small. But add this: The human mind did not develop as a calculator designed to solve logical problems. Rather, it evolved for a very limited purpose, one not fundamentally different from that of the heart, lungs, or kidneys; that is, the job of the brain is simply to enhance the reproductive success of the body within which it resides.

This is the biological purpose of every mind, human as well as animal, and moreover, it is its only purpose. The purpose of the heart is to pump blood, of the lungs to exchange oxygen and carbon dioxide, while the kidneys' work is the elimination of toxic chemicals. The brain's purpose is to direct our internal organs and our external behavior in a way that maximizes our evolutionary success. That's it. Given this, it is remarkable that the human mind is good at solving any problems whatsoever, beyond "Who should I mate with?," "What is that guy up to?," "How can I help my kid?," "Where are the antelopes hanging out at this time of year?" There is nothing in the biological specifications for brain-building that calls for a device capable of high-powered reasoning, or of solving abstract problems, or even providing an accurate picture of the "outside" world, beyond what is needed to enable its possessors to thrive and reproduce. Put these requirements together, on the other hand, and it appears that the result turns out to be a pretty good (that is, rational) calculating device.

In short, the evolutionary design features of the human brain may well hold the key to our penchant for logic as well as illogic. Following is a particularly revealing example, known as the Wason Test.

Imagine that you are confronted with four cards. Each has a letter of the alphabet on one side and a number on the other. You are also told this rule: If there is a vowel on one side, there must be an even number on the other. Your job is to determine which (if any) of the cards must be turned over in order to determine whether the rule is being followed. However, you must only turn over those cards that require turning over. Let's say that the four cards are as follows:

T 6 E 9

Which ones should you turn over?

Most people realize that they don't have to inspect the other side of card T. However, a large proportion respond that the 6 should be inspected. They are wrong: The rule says that if one side is a vowel, the other must be an even number, but nothing about whether an even number must be accompanied by a vowel. (The side opposite a 6 could be a vowel or a consonant; either way, the rule is not violated.) Most people also agree that the E must be turned over, since if the other side is not an even number, the rule would be violated. But many people do not realize that the 9 must also be inspected: If its flip side is a vowel, then the rule is violated. So, the correct answer to the above Wason Test is that T and 6 should not be turned over, but E and 9 should be. Fewer than 20 percent of respondents get it right.

Next, consider this puzzle. You are a bartender at a nightclub where the legal drinking age is 21. Your job is to make sure that this rule is followed: People younger than 21 must not be drinking alcohol. Toward that end, you can ask individuals their age, or check what they are drinking, but you are required not to be any more intrusive than is absolutely necessary. You are confronted with four different situations, as shown below. In which case (if any) should you ask a patron his or her age, or find out what beverage is being consumed?

Nearly everyone finds this problem easy. You needn't check the age of person 1, the water drinker. Similarly, there is no reason to examine the beverage of person 2, who is over 21. But obviously, you had better check the age of person 3, who is drinking beer, just as you need to check the beverage of person 4, who is underage. The point is that this problem set, which is nearly always answered correctly, is logically identical to the earlier set, the one that causes considerable head scratching, not to mention incorrect answers.

Why is the second problem set so easy, and the first so difficult? This question has been intensively studied by the evolutionary psychologist Leda Cosmides. Her answer is that the key isn't logic itself -- after all, the two problems are logically equivalent -- but how they are positioned in a world of social and biological reality. Thus, whereas the first is a matter of pure reason, disconnected from reality, the second plays into issues of truth telling and the detection of social cheaters. The human mind, Cosmides points out, is not adapted to solve rarified problems of logic, but is quite refined and powerful when it comes to dealing with matters of cheating and deception. In short, our rationality is bounded by what our brains were constructed -- that is, evolved -- to do.

One of Goya's most famous paintings is titled "The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters." Monsters, however, arise from many sources, and not just when reason is slumbering and our irrational, unconscious selves have free play. Sometimes, in fact, it is reason itself that generates monstrous outcomes. After all, the gas chambers of Auschwitz and the nuclear devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were technical triumphs, involving no small amount of "rationality." And perhaps I need to acknowledge that no matter the extent to which my students' embrace of the Underground Man seems to me downright unreasonable, it is also profoundly human.

David P. Barash is a professor of psychology at the University of Washington at Seattle.

Copyright © 2003 by The Chronicle of Higher Education