The age of reason.

I used to believe that we lived in the age of reason. An age when we learn from
experience and an age where we change the way we do things as we learn. I believed that
science and technology could lead us to a world of prosperity for all; where wars would
cease as scarcity diminished. But that was years ago.

Even though technical changes occur at a very rapid rate the human race doesn't change
in step. In war we used to kill each other one at a time, but now we kill each other en
masse. Slavery appears to have died out in the Western world, but we have learnt the art
of economic slavery. We still have slaves but they are slaves in their own country, which
has removed the need to transport them, and house them in a new country. Technology
changes but we do not.

My focus changed from believing that the human race was rational to trying to
understand why it is not. To my surprise I found the paradox that while the human race is
not rational there are well documented rational reasons why it is not rational.

The human race lives according to paradigms. In the social science context this means we
have collective belief systems. In the hard sciences the meaning as applied to
experimentation is slightly different.

We have the Christian paradigm, the Islamic paradigm, the Jewish paradigm, and so on
for each country and subgroup. There is a white Anglo Saxon paradigm and the Arab
Islamic paradigm and so on. Each group has a mass belief system that is as stubborn to
shift as any belief we are likely to find in an individual.

Paradigm is the polite word for collective group thinking patterns. The less polite term
used in psychology is “groupthink.” Groupthink would be applied to a group with
“disturbing” group thinking patterns such as the German people in the Nazi period.

One of the factors that seems to be involved in the maintenance of paradigms is Wolfe's
Linguistic Theory.

B. L. Whorf, a student of American Indian languages, translated ideas from one

Indian dialect to another. In many cases, he was incapable of carrying out the
translation. One Indian language made no distinction between nouns and verbs;
another had no term to distinguish events from the past from those in the present or
the future; still another used the same word for different colours. From this
experience, Whorf formulated a controversial thesis: Thought is relative to the
language in which it is expressed. The Whorfian Linguistic-Relativity Hypothesis
concludes that:

1 the world is conceived very differently by those whose language is different;

 2 the structure of the language is the cause of these different ways of conceiving the
world.

(Restak, 1979)

Everything is perceived in the language we think in. It is the thinking language that
matters, not the spoken language. If a Jewish person talks to a Palestinian in a common
language they still perceive in their thinking language. Within “common” language
groupings the use of the same word can have different meanings. The reason men and
women do not always understand each other could be that there is a “male” language and
a “female” language even though the words are the same.

We live in groups who see things differently to other groups. But surely if we were in fact
rational beings we would learn from each other and form a human paradigm? Would not
a collection of paradigms converge towards a single point of humanity?

Paradigm shifts do occur, but unfortunately they usually occur explosively with no
guarantee that the new paradigm will be any better than the last. Paradigm shifts are
revolutionary rather than evolutionary and throw out the good with the bad. The
paradigm shift of the Bolshevik revolution did not bring peace and prosperity to Russia.

So why is that we only change when we are forced to, and often destroy everything in the
process, instead of learning and making changes as we learn? The answer is cognitive
dissonance. Cognitive is basically perception, and dissonance is conflict. It would be
helpful if psychologists spoke English. But since cognitive dissonance is the official
terminology I had better stick to it.

When there is conflict between our paradigm and another paradigm or external contrary
evidence we have cognitive dissonance. This is usually dealt with by ignoring it in the
hope that it will go way. We do this individually and collectively. In the process we
render ourselves blind to anything about which we don't want to know.

As an example we have a Western paradigm that relies heavily on an oil based society. If
we ignore global warming long enough it will go away. Rationality has no place in our
paradigms. The challenging of our paradigms can be very difficult and confronting.
Cognitive dissonance is a challenge to who we perceive ourselves to be. It is a challenge
to our very being and must be resisted.

At first cognitive dissonance causes us to pretend what we don't want to know does not
exist. Then it causes conflict, and the conflict increases until the old paradigm prevails or
is overthrown. This might be an intellectual overthrowing or it might be physical. Either
way it is unlikely that the new paradigm will be any more successful than the last
anymore than a new dictator is likely to be any better than the old dictator.

The age of reason is a myth. We do not listen to each other and if we try we are talking a
different language. We will first of all ignore anything that interferes with our paradigm
and if we cannot ignore it fight to the bitter end to maintain it. We just don't learn. It is
comforting to know that there are rational explanations as to why we are not rational.
Maybe someday psychologists might be able to work out how to overcome cognitive
dissonance and the conflict and killing can stop.