People who were living at the time of the Enlightenment did not know that, although the enlightened ones sensed that something was happening. Of course, their precursors did not know they lived in the “Renaissance” or the “Dark Ages.” (On the Scottish Enlightenment, see adamsmithworks.org.)
Similarly, we have problems characterizing the times we are living in, and even more what will follow—and which labels future historians will use. But there are troubling indications that we are experiencing a retreat from reason.
An article in the November 24th issue of The Economist (“The Man Who Would Be King: The Person Who is Doing Most to Undermine the Reserve Bank of India”) provides another indication. Appointed last August to the board of India’s central bank, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), Mr. Swaminathan Gurumurthy is one of its most influential members. A chartered accountant, he is thought to be close to the prime minister, Narenda Modi, and to have assisted him in the disastrous withdrawal of 85% of banknotes in 2016.
Gurumurthy does not seem to believe that economics, as it developed over the past two centuries and a half, is a useful science. The Economist writes:
Mr Gurumurthy believes, as he put it in a speech last year, that the “the subject of economics is collapsing” and should be replaced by an Indian economics based on Swadeshi (self-reliance). Foreign capital should be kept out; the government should manage finance directly and small businesses should be prioritised over big ones. Western-educated economists who disagree need a “correction” of the mind.
There is certainly progress to be made in economics, but it seems unlikely that starting de novo on the basis of nationalistic, populist, and socialist intuitions will accomplish much except a retreat from reason. Why should self-reliance be a collective self-reliance, based on often arbitrary political boundaries, and serving the very politicians who advocate it?
Like The Economist, I could not help recall Rudyard Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King as well as the fabulous movie made after the novel, directed by John Huston and starring Sean Connery in the role of Dravot and Michael Kane playing Peachy. Before leaving on their adventure, the two heroes wanted a map of their destination “even if it’s all blank where Kafiristan is.” They planned to “make Kafiristan a country where every man should eat in peace and drink in quiet, and specially obey us.”
As an aside, Murray Rothbard wrote an enthusiastic review of the movie. He saw in the demise of the heroes a victory of the tribal autarky that benefited the ruling class. Despite their ruling ambitions, Dravot and Peachy represented enlightenment of a sort. Rothbard explains:
Connery had constructed this bridge, which had made the monastery-capital city accessible to the masses, had cheapened the cost of transportation, and was in the process of developing a newly prosperous class of bourgeoisie who would eventually threaten the feudal caste-rule of the priests. Hence the vengeful joy with which the priests cut down the hated bridge.
Kafiristan and India are not alone. Irrationalism seems to be gripping many of today’s countries and has washed on our Enlightenment shores too. Reading any speech by the current president of the United States should persuade one of that. The phenomenon covers the whole political spectrum, as the politically correct intelligentsia regularly demonstrates. As I reported before, engineering professor Donna Riley criticizes intellectual rigor, of which “one of [the] purposes is, to put it bluntly, a thinly veiled assertion of white male (hetero) sexuality.” Another group of academics, Mark Carey et al., criticizes “stereotypical and masculinist practices of glaciology” linked to “imperial and hegemonic capitalist agendas.” In the same vein, just a few weeks ago, a Wall Street Journal story (“Fake News Comes to Academia,” October 5, 2018) revealed that (following the example of the famous hoax by Alan Sokal two decades ago) many intentionally nonsensical articles were recently submitted to, and published by, postmodernist-style “academic” journals.
READER COMMENTS
Philo
Dec 4 2018 at 8:46am
There always have been and always will be some people who argue [!] against the use of Reason. We meed more than a few anecdotes to show that the situation is getting worse.
Daniel Kian Mc Kiernan
Dec 4 2018 at 11:28pm
Professor Lemieux does make the point that it is difficult to see one’s own era objectively. And, while we need more than anecdotes properly to reach a conclusion, investigations often reasonably begin from anecdotal observations.
For my part, I do not so much perceive bad ideas taking hold more firmly amongst supposed experts as I do a frightening lack of progress. The experts look away from the critiques of those bad ideas. That makes the efforts of reasonable men and women seem more hopeless than once I had thought.
Benjamin Cole
Dec 5 2018 at 7:57am
Mr Gurumurthy believes, as he put it in a speech last year, that the “the subject of economics is collapsing” and should be replaced by an Indian economics based on Swadeshi (self-reliance). Foreign capital should be kept out; the government should manage finance directly and small businesses should be prioritised over big ones. Western-educated economists who disagree need a “correction” of the mind.–Economist
Well, this may not be the best path forward, and also it not really clear what Gurumurthy is contemplating.
However, the concept of money-financed fiscal programs, which were so successful in allowing Japan to sidesteap the Great Depression (under Finance Minister Takahashi Korekiyo) is a history worth knowing (and untaught in the West). Perhaps some element of money-financed fiscal programs would help India expand its economy, without running up debts.
Giving small businesses a leg up vs big ones is not the worst idea.
Now, we have the Yellow Vests in France, Bolsonaro in Brazil, Brexit and Trump and so on. Are populations everywhere wrong?
We saw the intelligent and economist-directed EU-ECB solution to Greece: A permanent depression. Singapore is booming with a dirigiste government. Detroit is a toilet.
So who is lacking reason?
mbka
Dec 10 2018 at 2:57am
Benjamin Cole,
you are a broken record.
Yes. Just as they were in the 1920’s and 1930’s when many supported fascism and racism worldwide. Sometime, the zeitgeist just goes off in the wrong direction, when people forget how bad the old times really were.
Your examples are a motley crew. You seem to be calling for a kind of nationalist socialism. But the yellow vests in France were _against_ taxes meant to prevent global warming… supposedly a left wing thing. The EU-ECB solution to Greece was trying to fix a debt situation created by socialist governments. Greek GDP, interestingly, is now on a level consistent with where it would have been without the growth burst 2002-2008 – the decline has stopped and it looks on the upswing with yearly growth of about 2% since 2017. India itself has had a long history of stunting its own growth by protectionism, so a return to these methods hardly seems to indicate progress.
And Singapore is not dirigiste.
Terry Hulsey
Dec 5 2018 at 11:00am
Solution: Abolish every English department in every university on the face of the earth.
Mark Z
Dec 5 2018 at 12:05pm
There’s definitely a strong argument to be made that the humanities departments no more deserve public funding than churches do.
Hazel Meade
Dec 5 2018 at 2:34pm
Could “fake news” come to be seen a a positive thing?
In the same vein as the Sokal Hoax stories, fake news could be thought of an an exercise is testing our intellectual defences. How credulous are we? Could our culture not evolve defenses to fake news by becoming less credulous ? IT security people and hackers often argue that computer hacking serves a positive purpose by exposing security holes in existing software. Similarly, why not see fake news as a way of exposing vulnerabilities in our society’s information disemmination mechanisms?
Mark Z
Dec 5 2018 at 6:52pm
Perhaps the decline in the public’s trust in media is evidence that people already have become credulous? Much like with monetary policy, where public expectations of inflation rise when the central bank resorts to more expansionary policy, thereby limiting the ability of central bank to artificially boost demand (since only ‘surprise’ inflation can do that), maybe the more a source exaggerates, embellishes, or falsifies, the more people expect it to do so in the future, thereby negating the intended effect of influencing people’s opinions. So, if a source that wants to convince people crime is more common than it is reports (via lying or selection bias) that the murder rate is twice what it really is, at first, people will believe it and panic accordingly, but over time, once it becomes known that the source exaggerates by a factor two, people will instead expect and psychologically account for it.
I’m not sure of such a corrective mechanism actually occurs for news sources; it seems to exist in how markets treat central banks, so it seems plausible.
Hazel Meade
Dec 6 2018 at 11:26am
I think you are correct. People became less credulous of “mainstream” media news sources in part because they were seen to be biased. They turned to alternative sources, which have unfortunately proven to be no better. I think some of what is going on is the “mainstream” media complaining about being forced to become more reliable and unbiased, and the power structures which depend on it wanting to preserve their ability to “spin” the news to their advantage. The two major parties don’t actually <i>want</i> unbiased media, they just want to exclude their rivals from the market, so they can control it. We all know there are massive apparatuses in both parties that derive their livelihood from media manipulation. Why would they want an actually unbiased media? Better to have some sort of government mechanism to regulate “truth” so they can continue fighting to control that mechanism.
The parallels to IT security continue to be useful here. The big tech companies hate it when hackers poke holes in software and point out security flaws, and they push for laws to make it illegal to do that. Which means that the security holes remain- they don’t want to have to do work to fix the security flaws. Better to make it illegal to talk about them. But that leaves those vulnerabilities there to be exploited by foreign governments and criminals, or even our own government. (See encryption here). Just like how the major parties would rather just have laws banning “fake” news than have the media be forced to do work to regain people’s confidence in their truthfulness.
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