You know then that it is not the reason
That makes us happy or unhappy.
Wallace Stevens
The word reason has to do with explanations and rationality. To be reasonable is to be logical, persuasive, and persuadable. We imbue reasonableness with all manner of virtue. Justice is reasonable. Sobriety is reasonable. Common sense is reasonable. Fact is reasonable. Tradition is reasonable.
And yet, it is the reasonable that allows for injustice. The people regarded as most reasonable are the ones who sit idly not wanting to make waves even if others suffer. The reasonable can be too sober, stripping life of its joys, large and small. The most common sensical humans often misunderstand and misjudge the counterintuitive, the absurd, and the innovative. They hold us back. Some extremely reasonable people accept and repeat untruths as facts because they seem familiar and safe. And citing tradition without question is the trump card of the reasonable.
So, on the one hand reason grounds us, allowing us to grow roots in sound logic, which is good. What is not good is that reason also reinforces the status quo, anchoring us in one place when we could and should be moving forward.
You can consult any number of treatises on the virtues of reasonableness, and they are all, I am sure, perfectly reasonable. I want to be a bit unreasonable today, though, and enumerate the virtues of unreasonableness and of unreasonable people.
George Bernard Shaw the Irish playwright said:
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
Similarly, American activist and philosopher Angela Davis said,
I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things that I cannot accept.
Perfectly unreasonable, yet these two wise humans from different times, cultures, and parts of the planet came to the same conclusion. True progress is entirely dependent on an unreasonable rejection of the unacceptable, which — when put like that — somehow seems reasonable.
The easiest place to see the power of unreason is in technology. Historically, a horse is a reasonable form of transportation. Yes, horses have their drawbacks, such as low speed, constant upkeep, and poop, but horses served to transport humans for millennia quite effectively. Cars, on the other hand, seem unreasonable. After all, how many people in the early days of the automobile would rush to purchase a vehicle if they truly understood that it was propelled by an ongoing series of small explosions under the hood. Tiny but proximate explosions vs. piles of poop? There is only one reasonable choice even if it regularly soils our shoes. And don’t get me going about air travel and rocket ships!
Medical advances are another source of positive unreason. Inoculation is about as counterintuitive and therefore unreasonable as you can get, but so are the diseases inoculations immunize us against. Centuries ago people were left to meet the unreason of a devastating disease like smallpox with the unreason of inoculation — purposely infecting people in minute doses. The thing is it worked for hundreds of years across many cultures with Europeans among the last to adopt the practice. Indeed, the ongoing controversy over vaccines, which have descended from those early inoculations, is partially a result of just how unreasonable they seem. You’re going to inject me with what, why? Meanwhile vaccines have saved millions of lives, eradicating the plague of smallpox from the earth, nearly eradicating polio, and more recently helping to lessen the scourge of Covid 19.
Want another example of a historical unreason we cannot do without? How about the American Civil Rights Movement? Or let’s consider the united opposition to fascism that resulted in World War 2. War is always unreasonable, yes, but it’s sometimes the most reasonable of the alternatives. And what would America be today if a bunch of unruly colonials had not taken a wildly unreasonable stance against what they perceived as unfair taxation?
Unreason inspires vision. No one sits around fantasizing about the delights of the wonderfully reasonable status quo. Unreason inspires imagination, invention, and innovation. Idle dreamers are unreasonable, yes, but so are the many freedoms we enjoy in our society. Stacked next to historic norms our liberty is unfathomably unreasonable. And yet now we find it unreasonable to imagine life without our freedoms.
All learning starts with unreason. We learn best through discomfort, error, and even struggle. A child may be told, “do not pull the cat’s tail,” which seems unreasonable to a playful child, but only that child’s unreasonable disobedience will fully drive that lesson home. When parents, students, and politicians complain about the content of classrooms, they may sound reasonable, but they are stripping teachers of the ability to teach. Teaching and learning are unreasonable by definition. Do your classroom lessons make you uncomfortable? That is probably a good thing. I mean within reason.
As for reason, being reasonable can, as I said, be vitally grounding. A reasonable person does not drive at highway speeds down a residential street. Without reason, we would be adrift on sea of recklessness, whimsy, and indecision. But reason can also be overly complacent. The complicit are reasonable. So, like unreason, reason can sometimes be good and sometimes be bad.
So, how are we to make sense of all this? Maybe the only choice we have is to acknowledge that we exist on a continuum of reason and unreason. That we can or should never be fully one or the other. That we carefully mix and balance our decisions somewhere in between the two extremes. We must calibrate and recalibrate constantly, adjusting the degree of our reason and unreason to each circumstance and situation,
In the world of finance, in which I am a world-renowned inexpert, novice investors are told to carefully balance their investments between stocks and bonds. Bonds are safer, yielding modest dividends over the long haul. Stocks are riskier but yield potentially larger dividends faster. Investing in just one or the other is regarded as unwise, but the degree to which you invest in either is a matter of your personal circumstances, your financial abilities, your financial needs, market forces, and so on. Actual successful people make such decisions every day, so we know it can be done.
It’s the same thing with reason and unreason. Your decisions and actions must have a degree of each, never just one, and you determine the degree based on several considerations such as the situation at hand, your personal needs and values, and your ability to tolerate current circumstances.
Like stocks and bonds, reason and unreason are neither entirely good nor bad in and of themselves. And like stocks and bonds, in order to maintain a healthy mental portfolio, you need to rely on a mix of reason and unreason.
So, let us praise unreason, without which all would be the status quo forevermore. Our unreason advocates and agitates for change and against the same-old, same-old. Unreason is the source of all significant progress. For this reason alone, it is clear that nothing could be more reasonable than praising unreason.
Do you ever allow yourself to be unreasonable? How effective are you at grounding yourself in reason while striving for unreasonable progress?
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In Praise of the Unreasonable