viragette

I once clipped out a panel from The Lockharts, the cartoon dedicated to a contentious marriage. Mr. and Mrs. Lockhart are sitting with their marriage counselor, and he and Mr. Lockhart are regarding Mrs. Lockhart with cool surprise as she declares “Be Reasonable! You men are all the same.” I clipped that cartoon out at the age of 18 because I recognized Mrs. Lockhart’s argument as a dangerous trap to be avoided, and / or mocked. But, upon further consideration, Mrs. Lockhart had a very good point.

The thing about logic is that it can often lead to foolishness. Socrates (or maybe Aristotle, I can’t recall) argued that people always do exactly what they think is right, although sometimes this belief extends only so far as the moment of action. That’s a hard notion to swallow, especially regarding the actions of others, and it was one of those ideas I got stuck on in High School. I tried to evaluate my own behavior; did I do anything I knew was wrong? I was often conflicted about my choices, but in truth, I can’t think of a single instance when I voluntarily did something I firmly believed was the wrong thing for me to do. In my thinking, there was always an exception or argument for going ahead. “Yes, I’ll look back on this and think it was dumb, but I want to do it anyway.” Logic in action.

Humans are capable of logical and symbolic reasoning because our physical brains have developed these capacities, capacities we share with some animals but not others. This system, while capable of flights of fancy and the recognition of universal external truths, such as those of mathematics, is also clearly limited by its basic design. There are some things that the logical brains of humans just aren’t very good at. An obvious example is that most people cannot compute numbers as quickly as a computer, although this is a simple logic problem that follows set rules. A less obvious but perhaps more relevant example is that people make poor decisions in complex logical problems, when many different variables or factors must be considered. People tend to give excessive weight to a single or a few factors at the expense of the best overall logical solution. This may seem abstracted, but I promise you that this particular constraint upon human neurobiology plagues you daily.

The problem has been well documented in situations where decision making has an important outcome. For example, when doctors try to discover whether a patient has had a heart attack. This decision involves many possible factors, none of which can clearly indicate the solution. The doctor must take all these factors into account and see the larger pattern as “yes” or “no”. It turns out that a computer running a neural network or learning enabled program is far more accurate in making this decision, because a computer is capable of giving proper weight to a large set of variables. (Problems like this in the medical profession are a particular obsession of Dr. Atul Gawande, a surgery resident at Columbia in NYC and a frequent contributor to the New Yorker. I recommend his book, Complications.) This is also why a computer will vanquish most human opponents in Chess, a game for which weighing a huge number of variables (future scenarios) is a prerequisite.

I can offer a more mundane example from my own life. At one point I considered buying a certain new car, and I researched the options. Although I only wanted a certain engine and a certain configuration of features, the next model up came with a 6-CD in-dash CD player. And I wanted that option. I seriously considered purchasing the higher model, until it occurred to me that the price difference was approximately $4000 - and the cost of having a CD player installed in the dash of the lower-grade model would be less that $400. All the other features of the higher-grade model had become more relevant and attractive precisely because they were co-packaged with the one feature I actually did want. Human logic in action.

Even with these known constraints upon logical ability, people persist in trying to make their lives fit into logical patterns. Some scientists believe that our perception of consciousness follows in the wake of our actions. Although we perceive that we make a decision and then following it with decisive action, scientists can prove that, for some decisions, the reverse actually occurs. We begin to act, and then our consciousness recognizes the action and explains it to us. What a horrible thought, right? Free will out the window. There is no reason to take that particular bit of information to its logical conclusion, however. Because we already knew that our decisions were, for the most part, not logical.

If you have ever had an ugly row with someone you love over a comparatively trivial matter, you know the force of illogical reasoning. It turns out that the part of your brain that manages the symbolic reasoning, logic, and consciousness is not actually in charge, most of the time. Rather like in the Wizard of Oz; what is going on behind the curtain of conscious perception is actually far more relevant. Parts of the brain that manage emotions, for example, are not really set up for conscious perusal. We do not always understand why we feel as we do, and sometimes we do not really know how we feel. The logical parts of our minds make up stories to explain these feelings, and thereby create poetry, grand romances, and a whole lot of trouble. Because our logical minds are often wrong.

And the smarter the logical reasoning, the more difficult it is to disentangle this web of misconceptions. Ever wonder why some very intelligent people have great difficulty relating to others? Because humans, in the great majority of instances, simply don’t follow any patterns of behavior that can be understood from a logical perspective. People who rely less on logic, and more on recognizing and/or empathizing with the illogical forces that drive us all, are much more likely to be socially adept.

This problem has infuriated the thoughtful for millenia. If only we could all just be reasonable. In fact, we cannot help but try. We are driven to attempt to enforce logic onto our world because our conscious mind is a logical machine, and it has a very difficult time embracing illogic. And the crucial variable, the truth that sometimes things just cannot be logical, is one that only a few of us can put adequate value on in our complex calculations. And so we muddle through. The thing that keeps this whole system in balance is the incredible and demonstrable strength of our illogical minds. Relatively few people are driven mad by their logical faculties, but everyone who has ever fallen in love has been driven mad by their illogical brain. And this, rather than logic, is in fact the most redeeming feature of the human mind.

There are those among us who will argue that love, and certainly monogamy, make no logical sense. They are logically correct (given certain antecedents). However, to that part of the mind which falls in love, which creates an emotional and very physical dependance on another individual, love and devotion are forces to be protected above all others. Few of those who argue that monogamy is outmoded and over-rated would want their own mother, reptile like, to have neglected her emotional attachment to them in their infancy. It is logic which allows a corporation to poison the environment and its own workers in pursuit of a greater profit. It is the illogical, emotional mind that declares this abominable.

The good news is that the logical mind can recognize these truths with effort. Scientists can document the very real advantages of emotional attachment, and the price of emotional deprivation. Human infants deprived of emotional interaction will die, in spite of adequate nutrition and medical care. Human adults who suffer the loss of a loved one also suffer a predictable set of physical symptoms, ranging from restlessness, insomnia and depression to impaired immune function. Medical science has documented the increased longevity of patients who have formed stable, supportive relationships with other people. For example, a patient recovering from a heart attack who goes home to a loving spouse is something like 4-fold less likely to have further medical complications. Happily married people are less likely to die, of any cause, than are the single and lonely. Can’t stand people? Get a dog, because Fido will make you healthier too. The list of possible examples is very long. Once we recognize these truths, any logical person can see that it is very, very important to make your spouse happy because your seemingly crucial stand on taking out the trash, buying a new purse or the beach vs. hiking could end up as the most pyrrhic of victories. By winning the logical battle, you may lose the opportunity to reap the many benefits of your illogical, emotional attachment.

The bottom line is that perhaps it is time for the age-old lament of the thoughtful to be reconsidered. We cannot help but be reasonable, any more than we can help being fundamentally dependent on one another. If we really want things to be better, everyone will have to learn to be reasonable about precisely that which cannot be reasoned with.