It’s Not Irrational to Party Like It’s 1999
Must we always follow reason? Do I need a rational argument for why I should fall in love, cherish my children, enjoy the pleasures of life? Isn’t it sometimes OK to go crazy, to be silly, to stop making sense? If rationality is so great, why do we associate it with a dour joylessness? Was the philosophy professor in Tom Stoppard’s play Jumpers right in his response to the claim that “the Church is a monument to irrationality?”
The National Gallery is a monument to irrationality! Every concert hall is a monument to irrationality! And so is a nicely kept garden, or a lover’s favour, or a home for stray dogs! . . . If rationality were the criterion for things being allowed to exist, the world would be one gigantic field of soya beans!
Here I’ll take up the professor’s challenge. We will see that while beauty and love and kindness are not literally rational, they’re not exactly irrational, either. We can apply reason to our emotions and to our morals, and there is even a higher-order rationality that tells us when it can be rational to be irrational.
Stoppard’s professor may have been misled by David Hume’s famous argument that “reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” Hume, one of the hardest-headed philosophers in the history of Western thought, was not advising his readers to shoot from the hip, live for the moment, or fall head over heels for Mr. He was making the logical point that reason is the means to an end, and cannot tell you what the end should be, or even that you must pursue it. By “passions” he was referring to the source of those ends: the likes, wants, drives, emotions, and feelings wired into us, without which reason would have no goals to figure out how to attain. It’s the distinction between thinking and wanting, between believing something you hold to be true and desiring something you wish to bring about. His point was closer to “There’s no disputing tastes” than “If it feels good, do it.” It is neither rational nor irrational to prefer chocolate ripple to maple walnut. And it is in no way irrational to keep a garden, fall in love, care for stray dogs, party like it’s 1999, or dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free.
