“Irrationality is the square root of all evil.” –Douglas Hofstadter.

Hofstadter’s half-joking quote implies that evil is irrationality squared, or irrationality about irrationality. In other words, it’s not evil to be irrational, but it’s evil to be irrational about being irrational–to reject awareness of one’s irrationalities, to distort said awareness of one’s distortions.

Hofstadter’s quote also implies, interestingly, that rationality is the square root of all good–that to be rational about being rational is to be good. Perhaps to be rational about being rational involves a total lack of pride in one’s rationality, a total humility and refusal to be biased toward oneself on the basis of one’s lack of bias. This equation, then–to be good = to be rational about being rational = to be humble–would explain the fact that holiness seems to require that one be blind to one’s own goodness, seems to require that one attribute any of one’s own goodness back to God. Said equation of goodness with humility would similarly shed light on, and add a dizzying wit, to the ancient riddle, “Why call me ‘good’? No one is good but God.”

As fun as the above line of reasoning may be, even I can see it’s too cute by half.  Nevertheless, I think it goes pretty far toward showing how virtues we consider rather distinct–rationality and humility, rationality and goodness itself–actually seem to be entangled.

So let’s start again, more slowly.  Rationality, is the ability to balance considerations accurately in one’s mind, without the distortions that seed personal grief (hence the root “ratio,” as in proportionality).  This is why, when a man dives into a bonfire to recover his Rolex watch, we say his choice is irrational–he’s got a distorted sense of the relative values of his body and his watch. 

It might be tempting to think of such distortions as pure accidents, for which we are not morally accountable. However, against such a possibility, we must remember that evolution has generally favored creatures less vulnerable to truly accidental misperceptions, misconceptions, distortions. Rather, due to the selfishness of our genetic nature, our most common distortions are not accidents and serve a certain evolutionary purpose. Which is to say, we most commonly fail to be rational when trying to balance considerations involving our own desires and needs and those of our neighbors. Hence, humanity broadly considers its highest law–the most overarching correction it must make to its genetic nature–”Love thy neighbor as thyself”–where “neighbor” means any other with whom one comes in contact.

It’s fair to call this ideal “love,” as we call affection “love,” and to thereby associate this ideal with affection, because in developing durable ideals we must always start with what we know at a primate level and expand upon it, and the closest a genetic self comes to love is when it sacrifices, or wants to sacrifice, for other copies of its genes without knowing this action is in any way a matter of selfishness–in other words, affection is the genetic germ of real love. We often think that affection, since it’s often self-serving, is almost the opposite of “real” love, as though “real” love were selfless. However, note that the golden rule cannot function without an agent with a thorough self-love; the dictum “love thy neighbor as thyself” misses its mark and encourages universal apathy or malice if the practitioner does not love himself. We do well to remember that organic selves capable of self-concern and self-awareness are thus far the universe’s crowning achievement, and the universe rarely erases its best developments (e.g., multicellular, thinking genetic selves) entirely in moving into a new order of complexity (e.g., multicellular, thinking memetic-genetic selves).

Since genetic affection is in some sense the germ of real love, we ought to be careful here to make a distinction between the genetic and memetic meanings of love without opposing them: in genetic laffection, a self embraces and supports another being insofar as that being’s welfare aids the survival of the self’s own genes; in the case of higher, memetic, ideal, real, transcendent (or pick your own qualifier) love, a self values itself and others equally, or rather without bias toward its own survival. But to ensure against bias, one must be know what non-bias looks like. Despite many journalists’ understanding to the contrary, non-bias does not look like the sum of two biases, AKA hearing all sides of the story. A non-biased perspective is something other than, and in addition to, and above, every biased (subjective) perspective. In other words, a non-biased perspective is a God’s eye perspective, a view of the objective, always-true reality in which the rest of our perspectives float and intersect.

In other words, to love one’s neighbor as oneself, implies that one has a standard by which to compare one’s self-love and one’s love of neighbor. This standard can only be useful if kept pure, objective, unbiased, and can only be kept so if one gives oneself over to its maintenance and development wholeheartedly, whole-mindedly, whole-soul. In other words, to have a viable standard for loving others as oneself, implies an ongoing and exhaustive effort, rather than a one-time adoption of a rule of thumb or two, the reason being that the possible diversity of neighbors one encounters is infinite. This sounds like a recipe for suffering, and in some sense it is. The tyranny of selfishness would be easier, we feel, wherein we draw a boundary around our affection and call everything within it, self. However much this ancient genetic selfishness tempts us, though, we must repeatedly bear in mind (again with the suffering!) that humanity and individual human beings, unlike perhaps ants, antelope, and lions, thrive only when we reach beyond selfishness and adopt a standard which embraces diversity as much as it embraces harmony. (This same principle holds true as much for how we treat our selves’ own components as for how we treat our external neighbors.) Thus, in order to be able to love one’s neighbor as oneself, one must first have obeyed an even higher-order law, a “platinum rule” if you will, which has been put thus:

Love God with all your heart, all your mind, and all your soul.

Here “God” is synonymous with one’s conception of God, of all that one considers good, unified into an organic whole. Beyond this definition of “one’s conception of God,” we won’t now go–that way lies all of theology. We can, however, point out that by such a definition of “one’s conception of God,” any human being cognitively equipped enough to be considered a moral agent, will likewise have a conception of God–a model of all that one considers good, unified into an organic whole. If a human being who loves neighbor as self is the goal, then that human being’s first priority must be the maintenance and development of–the love of–such a model, for this is the scale by which all other models are to be weighed against each other rationally.

Of course, I’m now speaking of God as a cognitive model, a subjective conception, a set of scales–by which one may weigh all persons, self and other, powerful and low, corrupt and innocent–but which “God” itself seems hardly a person.

Which is a shame, because a human being’s first nature is that of a primate, and a primate mind is more suited to making cognitive models of primates than to making cognitive models of impersonal scales, abstract goods, Platonic ideals, hierarchies of values. This is especially true considering that any model of God must be not just a handful of values, but an imagined organic and unified whole, in much the way our models of ourselves and of fellow primates imagine more or less unified whole persons, and not just lists of attributes.

If only, if only, the primate mind could be supplied with an external model to internalize as its standard, its God, its scale, an external model which was as much a primate as it was a set of ideals.

Now, of course, history has shown that humans will gladly trade any abstract god for something more accessible.  Even a non-human and inhumane god will do, so long as it’s embodied.

But a kiddie-vaporizing bastard like Moloch distracts us from the possibility that a biological being might very well offer a perfect, particularized reflection of the divine.  After all, this is equivalent to a belief that a being like ourselves might be able to live by the golden and platinum rules–a long shot, sure, but perfectly conceivable.  After all, every codification of rules and laws is based on the notion that we could conform ourselves to ten million little addenda; if we trace them all back to their source, we at least simplify our task–all the good laws in the world are hung from the same two (gold and platinum) nails.

Maybe, as long as we’re dreaming, this conceivable avatar, this external model of That By Which All Is Weighed could even be made to resemble a set of scales. Kind of like the scale of truth the Egyptians envisioned as judge of their souls, on which their souls were weighed against the feather of Ma’at… only more sympathetic, more as though… as though the scale itself understood the suffering it was dealing out.

But where would one find such a ridiculous image?

*Shrug*

Tags: genes, God, justice, love, memes, truth

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