Dear Theophilus, 

It seems that you are still interested in the rational side of things and you would like us to explore this more. I know the lure of rationality - it is crystalline and satisfying. We do not like things we do not understand. However, there is much more to us than rationality and we ignore this at our own peril.

The ancient Greeks were amazing psychologists plumbing the depths of the human heart and there is still much in their writings which applies to us today. There are two noticeable categories in which life is perceived in the ancient Greek tradition and all of history has, in one way or another, underlined them. There is what is sometimes called the Apollonian path and the Dionysian path. The first one celebrates the rational side of man but the second, pays tribute to what is non-rational. It seems that we cannot get away from either because when we try we run into problems. In a sense, all of life is a struggle between cosmos (order) and chaos (disorder).

In Asia there used to be a region called Malay, deriving its term from malu, a word meaning gentle and the Malay are a gentle people. In this culture, some men, who had previously done their duty by their family and friends, around the age of forty would snatch their kriss (Malay dagger) and rush out to kill as many women and men and children as were near them although up to that moment, they loved them and suffered no personal injury from them. This occurrence has a Malay word to denote it and this word is amok (and this is the origin of the term in the English language, to run amok). There is no rational explanation for this and yet it occurs. History is laden with these strange events which seem to be totally cut off from rational explanations.

Or take the example of Germany in this century. Here is a civilized country producing many wonderful musicians and with a rich cultural heritage. Its contribution to science is unparalleled and yet, what happened? All this was overthrown in an orgy of violence and hatred unseen before. It seems that there are forces lurking in the minds and souls of men which defy reason. Attempts have been made to explain Hitler and all that he stood for by referring to the humiliating conditions of the Treaty of Versailles which ended World War I. But, the Germans were really overthrown by the forces of darkness motivated by the logic of a mythology full of darkness and tragedy. Christianized Germany had somehow bypassed the transformation of her myths in which the gods bring down the world in a conflagration and this is what Hitler almost did.

What this tells us is that when we consider people, we must include the non-rational otherwise we are courting disaster. There is therefore a role to be played and an important one for the arts, which fundamentally concentrate on the side of man which is complementary to reason. In this area, religion has a major role to play and those societies that try to kill man's religious yearnings, invariably fail. The former Soviet Union is a good illustration of the dictum voiced by Chesterton to the effect that if men have nothing to believe in they will believe in anything. The involvement in psychic research and in the applications of so-called paranormal phenomena to the military were some of the areas being looked at by the former Soviets. Theirs was a society that had become bankrupt and was searching desperately for something to fill the gaping void of meaninglessness.

What I would like to do is to explore these two aspects with you - the rational and the non-rational and we will begin with the rational. When we think of science or scientists, one of the terms that comes to mind is objective versus subjective. We can broadly define objective as that which is the same to you, to me and to many others. The subjective is that which is accepted by yourself only. Having said this, we run into a problem. Isn't it true that all ideas are subjective because they originate in our brains where no-one else has any access and which represent our own internal experiences? In a sense, our definition has led us to the conclusion that we seem to live in two different worlds, one, the physical world, which we accept on faith and the completely private world of our thoughts and inner feelings. You will notice that I said that we accept the existence of the world on faith and you may find this a strange idea. Everybody can see that the world exists. But matters are not really as simple as that but we, in general accept the world as existing because we see the world as others. Central to our thinking and accepting information is the mind and this can be divided into two main compartments - sense and intellect. Very often, what scientists do is to equate the mind with senses because, it is claimed, all ideas result from the sensory input of the world. We interact with the world through sight, touch, smell, sound. But there is a further aspect here. Ideas which are obtained through sensory information do not have meaning and so, how does this information about the world become organized and meaning and order are seen in the world? It is this confusion between sense and intellect (the ability to analyze sensory information) that leads some scientists to state that the difference between animals and humans is mainly one of degree and not of kind. With proper training, animals can be taught to behave as humans do. What this fails to do is to differentiate that the intellect and senses are not the same, and we can quickly convince ourselves of this in the comparison between humans and animals. Humans have the power to abstract and generalize which animals lack. Thus humans have a capacity to interact with the world in a very different manner from animals and this is due to the existence of intellect in people.

This brings us to some loaded words which we throw around and which have a meaning which is sometimes blurred. Let's consider the difference between opinion and knowledge. Opinions can be false; knowledge cannot. Thus, apprehension (that which we see or interact with) cannot be true or false; it is our judgement, which we bring to the information we receive from the world which judges something as true or false. Belief is seen as an even weaker word immediately implying the existence of some doubt. Belief can be true or false and therefore is part of what we would call opinion and not knowledge. This brings us to an attitude popular among some scientists. This view is referred to as positivism and claims that only scientists know reality, that is, what is out there, because their dealings with the world is objective and they do not permit their views or opinions to color their conclusions.

One important area where the difference between knowledge and opinion is the area of morals. It is said that morals are mere opinions. These opinions express our likes and dislikes and nothing more or, as one wag put it, ethics is the art of recommending to others what they must do in order to get along with us. But what scientists fail to do (and believe me they have tried) is to draw a clear connection between the descriptive (that which is) and the prescriptive (that which ought to be). How do you link these together? How can you make any statements as to how people should behave when the only bases you have is the world as it is?

One way that has been tried in order to get around this dilemma is to label the good (which describes how you should properly behave) as that which satisfies us, that which we naturally want. You will see scientists quoting and endorsing the golden rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. But this still leaves unanswered the question: what is it that you should wish for yourself? In a sense, we can see two different kinds of desire in us. One is called the natural desires and this represents the needs that we all have and so we can say that this is a general good common to all such as food, shelter, respect. This is the basis for all claims of human rights. But there is also another major category of desires which we can call acquired and these we can, more correctly, call wants, as opposed to needs. These wants can be subdivided into good and bad. The good wants are those which we ought to desire for our good. We can desire to eat to survive and this is good, but, when we overeat or overindulge, then this is not good.

The reason why morals and ethics are important is due to the fact that they touch on meaning and happiness within our lives. A common mistake is to see happiness as a psychological state as opposed to an ethical state. In a sense, we spend our whole life looking for happiness and a major role played in this search is that of religion.

I'll give you a breather to go over what I have written and we'll take up the topic again in the next letter.

Yours,

Bar-Abbas

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