Enlightened rationality has had a good run — some three hundred and fifty years, by my count. But all good things must come to an end, apparently. Let’s all lift a glass to the end of Reason.

Perhaps you believe I’m premature in heralding rationality’s demise. I can, however, make a convincing case that a majority of the public no longer adheres to it, and indeed, no longer holds it in any kind of regard whatsoever. It’s been sacrificed in the name of ideology, and it’s not coming back, no matter how hard many of us want it to.

In truth, the core concepts of rationality have been decaying for quite some time. Freedom of speech, and the reasons for it, were the first to come under concerted attack, along with freedom of association. Voltaire would have stood up for the right of anyone to say anything; we now live in a world where this kind of thing might well put you in grave danger of physical harm. Freedom of speech is a key underpinning of rational endeavor, because there can be no rational discourse if communication of ideas is prohibited.

Lately, we’ve fallen even further behind Enlightenment ideals. Black Lives Matter protesters in Baltimore demanded convictions; court trials held under evidentiary rules and designed to prevent the conviction of innocent parties were no longer considered adequate. Indeed, we’re now told that the Enlightenment goal of a color-blind society is, in fact, profoundly racist, and we need to have separate systems of justice for people of color, because there is no such thing as color-blind justice. There have been numerous other signs of the decay of rationality, including the politicization of science and the rejection of logic itself as being inherently racist. I could go on.

These have set the stage for perhaps the most complete destruction of rationality we’ve yet seen.

When Donald Trump was elected, nobody was more surprised than I was. I view Trump’s election as, in many ways, a desperate response to the decay of Enlightenment rationality, a kind of “Hail Mary” pass that mainly expressed the disillusionment of the American public with the direction our leaders had been taking. Whether or not this is a correct view is immaterial to my point, though: American society is now in full retreat from the principles of rationality upon which it was formed. Let’s review some events of the recent past, and put them into context.

(1) The Dossier document
The so-called Dossier document was published by Buzzfeed in January, after this document had been making the rounds for nearly a year among campaigns, news organizations, the FBI, and the CIA. The document was compiled at the behest of presidential campaigns looking for dirt on Trump, and contains numerous vague descriptions of meetings and Kremlin dialogue. The document was taken over after the election by John McCain, who gave it to the FBI and demanded that it be investigated, even though the FBI had already looked at the document and concluded it was largely a fabrication. The “Dossier” document names some names within the Trump organization but is extremely vague as to dates. So many interactions between Trump organization personnel are described that it should be relatively easy to determine if the “Dossier” document is largely true or largely false. So far, none of the claims have been shown to be true. That alone is logically pretty damning. And yet, this document is, as far as I can tell, the genesis of the whole Trump/Russia theme, and it continues to be taken seriously.

The “Dossier” kerfuffle has obvious hallmarks of a conspiracy theory: it describes nefarious collusion requiring almost superhuman abilities to pull off, and requires secrecy which not only has been exposed but is also secret enough that nothing can be confirmed. Rationality demands that we ask the following questions: Since when are conspiracy theories like this considered valid evidence of malfeasance? Why is this document taken as gospel by so many people, with absolutely no evidence of truth?

(2) The Sessions Kerfuffle
Attorney General Jeff Sessions has now been “unmasked” as a possible Russian stooge because he met twice with Russia’s ambassador in 2016. The first contact was at a Heritage Foundation “meet the ambassadors” setting at the Republican Convention. The second contact was at Sessions’ Senate office purportedly in the conduct of Sessions’ Armed Forces Committee duties. This in no way seems interesting, much less criminal, and yet we have Democrats coming out of the woodwork demanding that Sessions resign and that a special prosecutor be appointed. A rational person might ask: Isn’t it part of a Senator’s duties to meet with ambassadors for foreign governments? Don’t you need evidence of a crime before demanding a prosecutor? When did meeting with the Russian Ambassador become criminal? How can these resignation demands be considered
anything remotely like rational behavior?

(3) The FISA Wiretapping
Elements of the Obama Administration, during the campaign, seems to have accepted the hypothesized-but-never-confirmed relationship between Trump and Russia at face value, to the extent that they obtained a FISA warrant to bug Trump’s communications. Whether they really believed in a Russian connection, or not, is difficult to determine at this time. Given that the hypothesized connection still has zero evidence behind it, one wonders whether the Administration was really trying to protect America, or just looking for dirt to support their favored candidate in the election.

One of the core principles of enlightened, rational government is that people are not persecuted because they belong to the wrong political party. The Obama Administration has, in the past, definitely stepped over that boundary when it sicced many of its letter agencies on Republican groups. Targeting Republican presidential candidates with the full power of the State is a development that demonstrates that government is now being made to serve whoever is in charge of it, rather than the people for whom it nominally exists to serve.

I have some final questions for those who have been greasing this slippery slope, or apologizing for it: Don’t you realize that in your partisan desire to obstruct and make the country ungovernable, the country will be just as ungovernable by a Democrat as a Republican? Don’t you recognize that this is precisely the route that will yield authoritarianism in the long run? Can’t you see that discarding Enlightment principles will bring our society back to a dark time in history?

For it is the doom of men that they forget…

• About the Author

About Karl Wright

I am a long-time software engineer, with wide-ranging interests including music, the sciences, politics, economics, and medicine. I've been active for a decade in the open-source community and I work for a major mapping company.