return to right reason
Sense Vs Nonsense Ball Pyramid Illogical Vs Logical Idea

Return to right reason

“How are you?”

I stared at him, choked by the avalanche of tears threatening to erupt.

Steve, my former doctoral advisor and head of dissertation committee, nodded and said, “Come see me.”

I’d just completed a talk on medical ethics bolstered by my dissertation research.. My professional life was at an all-time high. The reorganization at the hospital where I worked had resulted in a hefty increase in money and authority. I’d become known as an expert, not just in medical ethics, but a variety of other topics applicable to academic health care through my lengthening list of publications. Requests for consulations at other AMC’s were numerous, requiring extensive travel. In my field, I’d achieved the ‘fame‘ I told my mother I wanted when I walked away from God.

And I’d never been unhappier. I felt emptied out, hollow and painfully aware of the absurdity of being considered ‘expert’ in anything. Each time I tried to explain this sense of despair to close friends, I failed. From the outside, my life was perfect. So their reactions varied from, “Well, you really like school, so go get another degree…maybe law or an MBA” to “You should go see someone, you’re depressed.”

I did go to see Steve. He listened silently to my torrential outpour of profound confusion and sadness. Unlike all my friends and boyfriend, he didn’t think I should seek another advanced degree or pyschiatric counseling. Rather he seemed to comprehend what I was only just beginning to. I was dealing with the death of a certainty I’d had since I’d decided I was an atheist: if I studied hard enough, collected enough advanced degress and read the works of experts, I’d find wisdom. I could relax in the security of the knowledge I’d worked so hard to achieve.

So many years later, I realize the immensity of the gift.

We can’t know what we want

while filled up with knowledge. Cardinal John Henry Newman deliciously phrased the human intellect as aggressive, capricious and untustworthy. Although I didn’t know those words, I knew their truth, in myself and each of us, no matter how lettered. Not, mind you that I regret those ten years of doctoral study. No, because as Steve had predicted, my deep dive into medical decision making research would result in the acquisiton of friends for life. Like Israeli decision-making theorist Daniel Kahnemann.

Kahnemann’s precise prose serves as balm for those of us trying to make sense of what we see and hear from irrational superiors, colleagues, friends and ourselves.

…the concept of rationality is a technical, mathematical concept. It’s a logic. And it is actually completely not possible for a finite human mind to be rational or to obey the axioms of rationality. You’d have to know too much. The difficulty of being consistent in all your beliefs is impossible. And if you are not consistent in all your beliefs, you can be trapped in an inconsistency, and then you’re not rational. So the concept of rationality, the technical concept of rationality, is psychologically nonsense…

Our beliefs do not come from where we think they came. And let me elaborate on that sentence. When I ask you about something that you believe in — whether you believe or don’t believe in climate change, or whether you believe in some political position or other — as soon as I raise the question why, you have answers. Reasons come to your mind. But the way that I would see this is that the reasons may have very little to do with the real causes of your beliefs.

So the real cause of your belief in a political position, whether conservative or radical left, the real causes are rooted in your personal history. They’re rooted in who are the people that you trusted and what they seemed to believe in, and it has very little to do with the reasons that come to your mind, why your position is correct and the position of the other side is nonsensical. And we take the reasons that people give for their actions and beliefs, and our own reasons for our actions and beliefs, much too seriously.

Do We See What is There Or What We Expect to See?

Humiliation as gift

That was the immensity of the gift: humility. By that I mean the emptiness, the total loss of confidence in my own or others’ ability to define what I want, what and who to believe in. Very early in my career, I could see that academic medicine was broken—anyone with eyes in their head can see that. But I thought I could repair what was broken–at least in the institutions I worked in.

“The rise of reason did not take power into account.”

It’s the first sentence of Paul Starr’s The Social Transformation of American Medicine, and although written forty years ago, details how and why our medical and judicial systems became derailed from their original goals. Starr’s crisp declaration doesn’t just explain the messes in medicine and the judicial systems, does it?

Everywhere we look, we can see the effects of untrammeled [Godless} human reason, will and power, the list is endlessly tiresome. And growing, exponentially.

So how do we return to right reason?

Unlike everything else, the answer’s simple, anyone can grasp it.

He wrote it in our hearts.

And he waits for our overflowing minds, hearts and appetites to create enough space to hear the whispered words,

Follow me and I will give you rest.

return to right reason

4 thoughts on “Return to Right Reason”

    1. For some reason, that piece was supposed to be told–I’d not planned to write that…smile. Hope you and your fmmily enjoy the the blessings of this Lord’s Day!

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