Don’t call it a comeback

I have rationalism on my mind a lot lately. The idea that we can make consistent and smooth logical decisions is utterly unappealing when you forget all the hype, even for a moment

The world is full of twists and turns, randomness and mysteries; so, let’s break everything down into minute parts and master each lesson progressively while scolding each other whenever one of us becomes overtaken by emotion. What a drag!

We are sold rationalism as something remarkable: you can learn to understand. However, rationalism is the simplest way to humiliate someone. If you can string together concepts in a neat array and present it to another, then you get to call the other person irrational when she disagrees with you. Look, my words fit together neatly! She must disagree because she does not understand. Hence, she is irrational.

Irrational people don’t warrant our respect. Irrational people lack credibility. Therefore, you can curry a lot of favor by appearing rational.

The tricky thing is that hating women is a natural extension of a misogynist culture. Therefore, reason and logic are tilted to uphold the status quo, which is decidedly against women. How can you reason against reason? To be rational, you can’t.

To challenge the status quo, you have to challenge what has already been accepted. Even reluctant acceptance is still acceptance. We know we can live with the status quo. After all, we are already living it.

When you talk about another way, you challenge the status quo. Who doesn’t fantasize about how the world could be better in some way: minute or grandiose? It could be simple: wouldn’t it be awesome if everybody travelled exclusively via hover boards? It could be serious: wouldn’t it be cool if women didn’t have to fear for their safety at work, at home, at any store, parking lot, office building, airport, bus, train, or sidewalk? That would be so cool!

Problems present themselves immediately. It is rational that we don’t travel via hover boards when we have so many effective modes of transportation already. Where could a hover board take you that a car or bicycle could not? We would have to legislate the use of hover boards by writing new laws for personal and commercial use, change requirements for licenses, and implement oversight for hover board manufacturing. Why would we go through all of that for hover boards? Is that any better for the environment? Worse? Is it even safe? How would we compare it?

We cannot conceive of a population that exclusively uses hover boards because we live in a world of cars, buses, trains, planes, and boats. There are plenty of downsides to these modes of transportation: carbon emissions, overcrowding, traffic, seasickness, lack of legroom, etc. However, we see what we would give up more clearly than we see what we would gain. In fact, we compare what we would lose without, for example, cars to what we would gain with a hover board. With a hover board, I guess I wouldn’t need to worry about parking anymore. That would save me time and money. But, what about the rain? What will I do when it rains? I won’t be able to get anywhere without getting wet!

This conflict occurs because we have to give something up. We are not starting from a world where the only means of transportation is our own two feet or the four feet of a larger mammal.

If the only way we could get around was by walking, running, or riding horseback, we would be elated to take the hover boards. We would celebrate the efficiency and the ease. We wouldn’t be worried about rain because we would already be used to dealing with it. The hover board offers us potential. It offers the promise of advancement.

In this more simple world, a rational person would weigh the positives of introducing the hover boards against the negatives of introducing the hover boards. In our actual world, the rational person weighs the positives of introducing the hover boards to the negatives of abandoning the cars, trains, planes, and so on.

Rationalism changes given the circumstances. The rational outcome is subjective. The simple world can choose to introduce hover boards because they are perceived to advance transportation efficiency while the actual world can oppose the hover boards because they are less efficient than what we already have. So, two outcomes to the same question can be both rational and inconsistent.

Now, we cautiously approach a more controversial example. A woman campaigns to become the next President of the United States. (Take a deep breath. I promise this will stay apolitical!) I choose President of the United States with intention because that particular job comes with the built-in role of Commander in Chief of the military; i.e., the job has a military function built-in. For reference, most - though not all, especially in recent years - presidents have served in the military in some capacity. Very few were high-ranking in the military prior to becoming President. This means that you can be completely inexperienced or experienced and unimpressive in military functions and still qualify as President, subject to votes of course. There are military decisions the President has to make, but these decisions are considered a formality for it is the high-ranking military leaders who frame and advise in the process.

If actual experience in the military is unnecessary in practicality and precedent in deciding who becomes the Commander in Chief, then, logically, it follows that you do not need to understand military operations to qualify as President.

So, this woman runs for President. The media pundits ask, “Does a woman have what it takes to serve as Commander in Chief?” and “Will a woman in the White House make us more vulnerable to violent attacks by our enemies?” There are pundits, debates, op-eds to follow.

How do we arrive at this point? We established that we have had presidents with no baseline military experience and presidents with minimal experience. If you are a woman who has zero years of military experience, then how could you have less experience than a man who has zero years of military experience?

What matters is that the woman is a woman with no military experience, not that she has no military experience. We count the female identity as a point against her. When you consider those questions with the assumption that women are inferior to men, the rational conclusion is to fear a woman as Commander in Chief. When you consider those same questions with the assumption that women are equal to men, the rational conclusion is to identify the questions are inherently irrational.

Rephrased, if we considered women equal to men, then those pundits would effectively be asking: “Does a person have what it takes to serve as Commander in Chief?” and “Will a person in the White House make us more vulnerable to violent attacks by our enemies?”

Huh? Can a person do a job? Can a person make us worse off by doing a job? Seems odd all of a sudden.

There are many challenges of rational thinking like this that I plan to further explore on this blog.

See you next time.

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