A Plea for Irrationality

‘Rational or not, life without myth is like life without sex or art – insipid and inhumane’

John Gray, The Silence of Animals

Of all Karl Marx’s writings, perhaps the most quoted is his line that ‘religion is the opium of the people’. This has been interpreted to mean that the chief function of religion is to provide a crutch to the damaged, to comfort in times of hardship. Indeed, this assumption is now so clichéd that noted One Direction groupie Alain de Botton has written a book about it.

To spout this line, though, does a disservice to Marx, to religion, and to opium. Yes, opium can be used to numb painful sensations, but it also allowed Thomas De Quincey to behold ‘such pomp of cities and palaces as never yet was beheld by waking eye’. Likewise, religious fervour can act as a gateway to hallucinatory ecstasy. I defy you to read Revelation and then deny that St John the Divine would have made a better party guest than Richard Dawkins. Do Marx the kindness of listening to his full statement: ‘religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people’.

I don’t intend to speak exclusively about religion; what I am arguing for, though, is irrationality and imagination, and the creation of new myths. As the public discourse becomes increasingly secular and scientific, we risk privileging logic and reason over the sort of ecstatic imaginative feats of which the human mind is capable.

Atheism & Imagination

I grew up in a matter-of-factly atheist household. My dad was actually baptised twice, Catholic and Church of England – maybe the two immersions cancelled each other out, as he never expressed any interest in religion, and nor did my mum. I never had to make a conscious decision to reject God. I don’t have any regrets about missing out on Sunday school or confirmation, but I wonder if there was an unintended consequence of this upbringing.

Being raised in a profoundly unspiritual household may have left me unable to fully appreciate some of the philosophical beliefs which have shaped the work of great artists. For example, while the Romantic poets’ notion of the spirit which flows through all living things appeals to me intellectually, I find myself unable to be moved by it on an emotional level.

So what concerns me is the possibility that putting a premium on reason and logic can deny us the opportunity of truly moving experiences. Science expands our knowledge of the universe, and about our own genetic make-up, but we need imaginative, at times irrational, artists to mediate and interpret these discoveries if we are to fully appreciate their implications.

Examining the Normal

The American writer Robert Anton Wilson describes a talk in 1986, where he was asked for his thoughts about the existence of UFOs. He replied that he believed in them, after which his questioner launched into a speech arguing that all UFO sightings are in fact heat inversions. Wilson's response was to say ‘Well, we both agree that UFOs exist. Our only difference is that you think you know what they are, and I’m still puzzled’.

This rationalist desire to explain away unusual phenomena can be reductive. We seek to make our experiences fit within a conventional framework, without questioning the idea of normality. After Wilson’s UFO discussion, he fell into conversation with the founders of ‘The Committee for Surrealist Investigation of Claims of the Normal’ (CSICON). On the principle that ‘I’ve never seen a normal day, and I never met an average man neither’, CSICON offered a reward of 1 million Irish punds to anyone who could provide evidence of ‘a normal sunset, an average sonata, or any thing or event in space-time that qualifies as normal, average or ordinary’. This world view, which welcomes mystery and celebrates difference, is surely more attractive, and richer in artistic possibilities than one which seeks to force unusual events into the existing conceptual frameworks which we have built for ourselves.

Freedom and the Imagination

Imaginative leaps can fire political and cultural change as effectively as any well-reasoned piece of logical argument. Lenin’s revolutionary fervour was inspired as much by Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s novel What Is To Be Done as much as by the words of Marx, while Animal Farm became the most iconic of all anti-Soviet protests. Political leaders from Augustus Caesar to the Ayatollah Khomeini have attempted to suppress satire, in fear at the subversive effect of the well-aimed joke.

The potential of humour or imagination to inspire political activity was demonstrated practically in 1968 Paris, by the Situationist International. The Situationists described Western capitalism as a society dominated by constructed media images designed to ensure the hegemony of the ruling elite. This is manifested in the media images we experience, the routines of our days, and even the lay-out of our cities. In order to subvert this form of control, Situationists advocated the derive, a form of pyschogeographical rambling which took the participant down unplanned routes, stepping outside of the logical systems which underpin our daily lives, and developing an idiosyncratic understanding of the world. This was combined with detournement, the subversion of common images in order to shock viewers out of their complacency.

These acts of radical imagination fanned the flames of the 1968 revolution where students and factory workers joined together to bring the city to a standstill, and influenced a generation of artists and thinkers. Their slogans – ‘beneath the paving stones lies the beach’, ‘je suis Marxiste, tendance Groucho’, still capture the imagination today - I doubt a well-argued pamphlet on historical materialism would have had the same impact. This effect is replicated in miniature each time we read a book which questions the basic assumptions about the world, or takes us down a surreal path we never imagined for ourselves.

The New Irrationalists

So what do I want? I want books which take risks, which reject the desire to classify, quantify and prove. Art should help us to transcend the everyday, and reject the dogma of Dawkins and Grayling as much as it rejects the petty moralising of the old religions. It should remind us of the bizarre uncertainty of existence, thriving on chaos and chance, throwing up the incongruous and esoteric. I want myth-makers, cat-worshippers and psychogeographers.

Which authors fit the bill for The New Irrationalists? We could claim the likes of Murakami, and appreciate the early novels of Salman Rushdie, Angela Carter and the magical realist canon. I’m open to suggestions about which current writers could be co-opted to the cause. I was thinking of making John Gray our honorary leader, but after reading his The Silence of Animals, I wonder if he might be too pessimistic*. If you’re with us, then you can declare your allegiance or suggest more additions in the comments.

Hail eris.

* honestly, he picks one time when Russians started eating each other, and talks as if it were an everyday occurence. What about all the Russians who aren’t cannibals, Mr Gray? Where do they fit in to your world-view?