Presented by: Rev. Dale Arnink

The title of this article is a variation on the lyrics of the song “Can’t Help Loving Than Man of Mine” from Porgy and Bess. Ed Cahill, a retired UU minister, wrote a little essay in which he used the phrase: “Fish Must Swim. Humans Must Think,” so I’ve borrowed the title from him. Later on I’ll refer to his essay and quote from it.

There are a lot of different kinds of thinking: some bad thinking, some good thinking, and a whole lot of just adequate thinking. But this topic (reason, rationality, and thinking) is a hot button for me. It’s a sensitivity issue with me; and lately it seems my buttons are often pushed.

I think we all have security blankets. We like to feel secure. Understanding is my security blanket. My security blanket is to be able to understand things and to tell other people that I understand things. Understanding is my growth hormone. It’s my ecstasy pill. It’s my relational path. It’s my primary spirituality.

Of course, thinking people very often rely too quickly on a particular understanding that results in incomplete and harmful pictures not adequate to the situation. We thinking, understanding people may arrive at conclusions that aren’t right–or are based on inadequate data or input or considerations. Understanding and thinking as a security blanket has its flaws.

Also, a whole person is more than just a thinker. There are other equally adequate ways of relating to life and feeling secure within life. There are a variety of security blankets available to human beings; we don’t all have the same one, and they are all perfectly legitimate. There are people for whom emotions are a security blanket as through them they “read” life. Others may depend on sensations, or physical activity or social activity or experiential projects or intimate love attachments, etc., as their most basic and reliable way to read reality.

Have you seen the essays having to do with the Emotional Quotient? What is your E.Q.? Emotion is a necessary corrective in our society, where intelligence has been of such primary importance. We measure kids by their I.Q.! Now somebody has proposed that there be an E.Q. measurement. That’s also an important consideration. Do you relate to life adequately, emotionally?

When I was in the sixth or seventh grade I discovered philosophy. I liked it. I took to it like a fish to water. It set me on the path to the Holy Grail, which I considered to be Truth. I thought there would come a time when I would really understand things. I thought I would know the answers to all the basic questions. Now I think I do know some pretty good answers to all the basic questions. But it doesn’t matter too much if my answers are the only answers or the absolutely right answers, because my understanding of what constitutes truth is no longer simple and sharing insights with others on the quest is most important. What is discomforting–for those of us who have looked to truth and knowledge and understanding and rationality–is to find out that understanding and knowledge and rationality and science are being downplayed in our society. They were riding high on the horse for a long time, and maybe it is appropriate that they be downplayed a little bit, but the current attack on them is very disturbing to us. That’s why I have hot buttons of sensitivity on the issue.

Lately, there has been information overload in our society–without any scheme or coherence or interpretive framework or deep wisdom put into use. We have a proliferation of data and information that is overwhelming a lot of people, including very many intelligent people who are capable of handling data. The information overload includes scientific information itself–conclusions made by scientists without an adequate understanding on the part of the public of what the process and the method of science is.

Some people think that science is exemplified by the latest nutritional report about what’s really healthy for you. If that is science–who cares? The scientists seem to change their mind every two weeks. Such so-called scientific reports and the information overload have distorted and belittled our quest for understanding.

Rationality, out of a rich philosophical history, has in popular understanding been reduced to logic, data sorting, mathematics, efficiency and technology. Those things are rationalism–with a great big ISM; they are not rationality.

Lately, when people talk about reason, they tend to associate it with logic or data or efficiency; and they say reason isn’t adequate. That’s right; that kind of reason is not adequate. There’s a lot more to reason than those few aspects. If you think of reason in those ways, you fall into an error often encountered in current literature–the error of saying that the highest forms of rationality in a society are exemplified by Nazism and the Holocaust. They are examples of what is called the “rationalization of society.” Nazism was making society well-ordered, logically directed, and efficiently carried out. Such thinking exemplifies what rationalism is, not what rationality is.

By the same token, we hear that factory production, careful application of technology, computerization, down sizing, moving to less expensive countries–are all called “rationalization of the economy.” Such policies don’t sound very rational to me. They sound potentially harmful.

What to do with reason and what reason really is have become problematic in our time. Most people like simple answers, so they just throw reason out with rationalism. They throw good thinking out because it hasn’t provided absolute certainty and it hasn’t solved all the problems.

It’s very appropriate that rationality be criticized. In fact, it is inherent within rationality that the critical factor play a role. some criticisms are valid; some are not; but the act of criticizing is certainly valid.

In graduate school I pursued philosophy of thinking. I was taught that what accounts for a good logical argument is setting up premises, having the proper inferences and associations, and arriving at a good conclusion. But I soon discovered that there are other aspects to thinking, aspects other than that textbook version.

I became interested in what persuades people, in what is persuasive–more interested in everyday thinking and reasoning than more logical argument. Persuasion is fascinating. It depends on your psychology; it depends on your early childhood experiences; it probably has a genetic factor. Which may account for why emotion or understanding or sensation or activity, etc., becomes our security blanket. What persuades us is dependent on a lot of very complex factors. We can all look at a well-ordered argument and say “Yes, that makes sense, but who cares?” and walk off, because it hasn’t really touched us in our living being as persons. There is a whole variety of thinking that isn’t strictly logical, yet is very important. It should not be discounted. Good thinking is not always persuasive. And what is persuasive often isn’t strictly logical. Too many complex factors are at work in each individual.

Have you ever been out on a hiking trip and come to a steep incline? Someone says, “Now, put your toe right there. Grab hold of that little tuft of grass. And then reach up for that little wedge.” You try it and can’t do it, because your limbs are not built right. Eventually you find your way up the rock, but it isn’t the instructor’s way.

What way is persuasive? Perhaps because there is information overload, young people no longer seem to be concerned about the truth. They seem to be saying, “Everything’s adequate. Everything’s equal. There is no truth. There are lots of ways up the rock, and every way is equally valid.” Sometimes that is true and sometimes not. Sometimes there is only one way up the rock.

True–humor, intuition, fantasy, paradox are as necessary to understanding as logic, math, data and technology. The human way of living is full of thinking–but also emotions, and drives and hopes and skills, a whole basket full of aspects that are important in determining what amounts to good thinking.

But the complexity of thinking should not lead to the conclusion that all thinking is equal. There is still good thinking, sloppy thinking, and wrong thinking. The feeling of certitude does not make for certainty. A wrong hunch can feel as right as a correct one. In our society, perhaps too often, the rational and practical have pushed out the emotional and the imaginative; but, after all, it is thinking that is the bottom line. Results are what are finally relevant.

I believe Aristotle was right; we are the rational animal. We are the thinking creature. We aren’t very fast; we don’t have very long claws; our teeth are too short; and we’re not very shaggy. What helps us survive as creatures in the evolutionary process is our ability to think, our ability to evaluate, to put things together and say, “This worked, and that didn’t; this makes more sense than that.”

Thinking can be wrong, but so can emotions, so can hunches, so can intuitions, so can imagination. Everything we do as humans can be wrong. Thinking often goes wrong when it doesn’t take account of feelings and hunches and imagination. All of our individual abilities are important, but thinking does seem to be an essential one. In Plato’s metaphor of a chariot, recognizing many human “parts”, reason is in the driver’s seat. It has become a special tool, and it’s dangerous to underplay it. It’s anti-human to underplay it. It’s the thinking aspect of ourselves that is capable of saying, “That was a mistake. Don’t do it again,” or “This isn’t quite right; we’ve got to find something better.”

From our earliest organizational days our Unitarian and Universalist leaders combined religious living with scholarship. In the Enlightenment people started thinking about thinking again, as the Greeks had done. We Unitarians and Universalists jumped on the bandwagon and said this is a good thing. Thinking ought not to be inimical to religion. Channing and Ballou drastically re-thought Christianity.

In the mid- and late 1800′s, when science was really becoming popular, it was Unitarians and Universalists who said there need be no conflict between science and religion. There were very few other religious people saying that at the time. Rationality–thinking–was at the heart of our religion. As a person who has studied world religions a great deal, I’ve not found any other religious movement that has thinking so central to its religious life.

Cahill quotes Earl Morris Wilbur, who, at the close of his two volume work on our history, said, “My purpose has been to trace the development of three controlling principles that have characterized this movement, normally the liberal religious movement of which Unitarianism is the emergent institution in our civilization. Those principles are complete mental freedom, unrestricted reason, and generous tolerance of differences.”

In the last few years, just as our society has lost faith in science, and has failed to understand it, just as our society has been confused by reasons, and has been confused by what constitutes good thinking–so our religious movement has experienced a similar confusion, and my buttons have been pushed. I don’t mind being confused; I worry about what is so easily thrown out by some of the confused..

For example, Cahill refers to a Boston Globe article in which a minister reported that at a meeting of UU Ministers, “We took the three great denominational watchwords — ‘freedom, reason, tolerance’ — and agreed that these were no longer the hallmarks of our religion. They were gradually being replaced by another three: ‘interdependence, community, and spirituality.’” I also have noted that many of our leaders seem to delight in such a replacement trend, minister and lay both.

Yes. We do need to recognize interdependence. I’m glad that is becoming part of our movement. We do need to build community. And we need a wider variety of spiritualities than we have had. But that these should replace freedom, reason, and tolerance is to me as close to a heresy as we can have. I find it very, very dangerous. I particularly am appalled that reason should be replaced by spirituality, as though they were contrasting or contradictory.

Our history shows that reason is a vital spiritual path for many, many people. We don’t all have to follow the same path, but to say that some people are spiritual and other people are reasonable is not true to our tradition. And when people place in conflict reason and spirituality, it is my immediate suspicion that they are either being careless or simply don’t have a full appreciation of what either word means.

Yes, some additions and some changes of emphasis are needed and welcome. But there are attitudes and voices amongst us which are ignorant of our history, or would knowingly throw out what are essential parts of our tradition, or are causing damage through carelessness.

It is appropriate to do more thinking about thinking as we devote more time and attention to the deep psychic dimensions of being human. It’s certainly all right to give a bigger place than we have in the past to intuition and imagination and fancy and sensation, to emotions. They’re not only appropriate to full human living, they’re necessary. If we’ve neglected them in the past, let’s give more room to them. But let’s not forget that these are as capable of error as reason.

We must agree with Plato and Aristotle that to be successful as a human being, you have to think. You have to be able to evaluate and to judge and detect error — at a bare minimum.

In our Unitarian-Universalist communities anti-thinking and anti-rational talk is very dangerous and heretical–heretical at least to our historical tradition. Religion, historically and in all cultures, has been a place for the non-rational and the irrational. There are such things as superstition and error, things that are not conducive to being full human beings, and they find their home in religions throughout the world — and amongst us!

We must be true to our heritage. We must be careful of the incursion of irrationality, not the addition of the more inclusively rational. We must protect the important place of good thinking in our tradition.

In my theology all human potentials are sacred and holy. All the ways of being human–whether they be mental or emotional or sensory or intentionally oriented to activity–all are sacred. But reason is a little higher god than all the other gods, a little more sacred than the other things that are sacred.

There is a place for the non-rational, for the unconscious, for imagination, for all kinds of creative skills, for hunches, for intuitions–but it is reason, good thinking, that evaluates what place those things should have in our lives. We cannot do without it.

Special thanks to Cary Neeper for transcribing and doing major editing of this talk.