The Religion of Reason (with Steven Pinker and Rebecca Newberger Goldstein)

Hard to disagree with too much of what Pinker and Goldstein say about Reason. Yay Reason, right?! They also make a very persuasive case for (neo)liberal capitalism. Pinker’s bit about empathy was a nice reprieve, but Goldstein shut him up fast by recounting Reason’s historical march toward the Good. In the end, I prefer Schelling’s, Hegel’s, or Marx’s mythologies of Reason to P. and G’s. Then there is Whitehead’s stab at a history of Reason, which I’m still trying to make sense of.

Contra P. and G., I think we really need to think again about the legacy of liberalism (and by proxy our looming neoliberal future, should we choose not to think otherwise). I think our civilization is faced with a crossroads: either continue to modernize, or avert planetary collapse by ecologizing (to borrow Bruno Latour’s way of phrasing it). One direction leads straight into extinction, for our species and for most of the other megafauna on earth. The other direction leads to what the Whiteheadian philosopher John Cobb is calling an ecological civilization (Cobb has a big conference coming up on this in June: http://www.ctr4process.org/whitehead2015). Thomas Berry called it the Ecozoic Era. Latour calls it a Gaian Religion (https://footnotes2plato.com/2013/03/12/discussing-bruno-latours-gaian-political-theology/).

But do we really still need to bash religion, as they do at the end? What is P. and G.’s video really preaching (and every TED video, really) but that Reason (which all too often is reduced to science and technology) must become our new religion? Fine. Let’s praise Reason! But what is Reason? Let’s not pretend it is simply logic and objectivity that drives us to be reasonable. If Reason is to drive us anywhere, it must call upon our feelings and our desires. Reason without desire is aimless, impotent; without feeling, it is dumb and blind. Our rational and emotional natures must work in concert for life to be possible. When P. and G. joke about getting rid of religion, they pretend that we could be rational (i.e., have mastered our thinking) without also having come into right relationship with our feelings and our desires. Religion is an activity primarily concerned with finding viable ways of relating to the pain and to the love of life, and also to the pain of love, and yes, to the love of pain. In some Christian traditions this whole complex perichoresis of life, love, and pain is nicely summed up in the word (and story of Christ’s) Passion. Modern societies have always needed religious practices and discourses in order for Reason to continue to believe in itself as the new God. Today we still need religious practices and discourses to remind us that Reason itself is a work of love freely carried out. Religion is what allows us to relate to love and to pain in public, communally. It is only modern Enlightenment liberalism that has privatized religion, where it festers still today in parts of America. We don’t need more “private” religion based on personal dreams and wish-fulfillment. We need collective rituals and planetary liturgies that form cross-cultural church communities–that is, that form planetary political bodies–to help us convince each other to decommission our nuclear arsenals and stop treating the animals we happen to think are tasty like soulless machines. Reason needs religion to put its ideas into heartfelt action.