Rational violence

Two of my heroes were sharp observers and commentators on the human condition/comedy, Robert Burton who wrote the Anatomy of Melancholy, and G.K. Chesterton. Some quotes from GKC should explain my infatuation:

'The free man owns himself. He can damage himself with either eating or drinking; he can ruin himself with gambling. If he does he is certainly a damn fool, and he might possibly be a damned soul; but if he may not, he is not a free man any more than a dog.' 'Moderate strength is shown in violence, supreme strength is shown in levity.' 'Bigotry is an incapacity to conceive seriously the alternative to a proposition.' 'Reason is always a kind of brute force; those who appeal to the head rather than the heart, however pallid and polite, are necessarily men of violence. We speak of 'touching' a man's heart, but we can do nothing to his head but hit it.'

What Chesterton is talking about in this last quote is that true violence occurs in the fanatic adherence to rationalizing everything, that reason itself is a blunt instrument, that the force of imposing ideas is more violent than mere physical subjugation. In the full quote, which follows, he explains that the more significant violence of the Puritanical movement in England was not physical.

... it is seldom remembered that the Puritans were in their day emphatically intellectual bullies, that they relied swaggeringly on the logical necessity of Calvinism, that they bound omnipotence itself in the chains of syllogism. The Puritans fell, through the damning fact that they had a complete theory of life, through the eternal paradox that a satisfactory explanation can never satisfy. Like Brutus and the logical Romans, like the logical French Jacobins, like the logical English utilitarians, they taught the lesson that men's wants have always been right and their arguments always wrong. Reason is always a kind of brute force; those who appeal to the head rather than the heart, however pallid and polite, are necessarily men of violence. We speak of 'touching' a man's heart, but we can do nothing to his head but hit it. The tyranny of the Puritans over the bodies of men was comparatively a trifle; pikes, bullets, and conflagrations are comparatively a trifle. Their real tyranny was the tyranny of aggressive reason over the cowed and demoralised human spirit. Their brooding and raving can be forgiven, can in truth be loved and reverenced, for it is humanity on fire; hatred can be genial, madness can be homely. The Puritans fell, not because they were fanatics, but because they were rationalists.

I read that paragraph and I think about the articles of faith that we have today. Standardized testing, types of learning, categorization, naming every quirk so that it can be diminished or eradicated. Rationalism today is the most insidious and vile form of tyranny. How easy it is to medicate people into a bland porridge of humanity. We have pills to lift us up if we're low, pills to bring us down when we're high, pills to make us act just like everyone else. It reminds me of one of the most horrifying visions in the text of Handel's Messiah. It was drawn from Isaiah 40:4

Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low. The uneven shall be made level, and the rough places a plain.

Imagine a world that really looked like that. Flat, level, featureless, a world that only a corporate farmer could love. Yet that's what I see as the goal of those people who aggressively medicate or discipline or shame our kids out of developing their uniqueness. ... and that is what Chesterton is describing. It is a tyranny of mind that is epidemic. We can see it in the fires of Islamic and in the fury of Christian fundamentalism. We see it in politicians and governments. Worst of all we see it in our schools. "It is not rational that what is a challenge for the rest of the kids is easy for this one," they say, followed by:

• "He's not bored, he's innattentive."
• "I can't understand what he's doing so it is wrong."
• "It is not rational to enjoy being ADD, take this Ritalin."
• "Don't be different."

Where, dear God, did this passion for homogenization come from? Who or what decided that it was wrong to be an individual, to be irrational. The Puritans, like the Taliban, like the Christian right, (yes dammit I know I'm generalizing) wanted a predictable logical society based on their own logic. Any idea counter to that world-view had to be suppressed. Think of it as a Whack-a-Mole game where ideas are pounded down to keep the board smooth. I need some coffee.