OPINION

Reason is Dead!

Intellectual obedience, rebellious prophets, and the freedom to conform

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Much Madness is divinest Sense —
To a discerning Eye —
Much Sense — the starkest Madness —
’Tis the Majority
In this, as all, prevail—
Assent — and you are sane —
Demur — you’re straightway dangerous —
And handled with a Chain —

— Emily Dickinson

You are having a relaxing afternoon stroll when, suddenly, a little child strays ahead of an incoming car. What will you do?

I surmise that, instinctively, you will rush to grab the child out of the way. Most people will. Even if you were physically impaired, I doubt you could stop the rush of adrenaline. Deep inside you know that, were the child to be hit, you wouldn’t be able to live with yourself.

“I’m scared of the dark, come get me.” Those were the last words of six-year-old Hind Rajab, on an hours-long emergency call from a battered car with the dead bodies of several of her family members. An Israeli tank had them trapped. Nearby, and unknown to anyone at the time, the Israelis had killed the two medics sent to rescue her. An investigation by Forensic Architecture determined that 335 bullets were fired into her car. (Photo from Quds News Network on Twitter)

Why is no one rushing to save the children of Gaza?

“We are helpless”, “cannot do anything”, “wait for the ICC,” “October 7”, “Hamas”, “aircraft carriers”, reasons, reasons, reasons. In other words, reason is used to prevent us from doing what is most natural and instinctive. Reason is used to make us accept a child-slaughter.

The so-called “Age of Reason”, at the height of “humanistic thought” that put “man” (read white, Western man) in the center, witnessed the large-scale genocide of many of the Indigenous peoples of the Western hemisphere. The genocidal trans-Atlantic slave trade was in full swing.

What has all that Age’s literary flourishing produced but support for a predatory system — a force-based world order that grinds the weak to fill the coffers of the rich?

The map of Africa ~ 1914 AD in my textbook from the 1980s (Photo by the author).

Wasn’t it ‘reason’ that led to the colonization of Africa?

Wasn’t it reason that necessitated the mass slaughters of the two World Wars?

At the start of the COVID pandemic, I had a chance to homeschool my daughter, who was 10 years old at the time. She was shocked when I showed her a map of Africa from 1900, the whole continent splattered with…