Rationality's bumptious myopia

Almost exactly a year ago I wrote a post, based on an aside in John Lukacs’s book The Hitler of History, about why it’s a mistake to assume Hitler was insane. In addition to being untrue—which is reason enough—to do so absolves Hitler of moral responsibility for his actions and distances us from some needed self-reflection.

Today at The Critic I came across this excellent short piece by Stephen Wigmore: “Putin must be mad… and other lies Western elites tell themselves.” From the introduction:

Nobody is infallible, but it’s interesting that many commentators seem to respond, not by reflecting on their own mistaken assumptions, but by declaring that the problem wasn’t their analysis, but just that Putin was intrinsically “irrational”, “deeply irrational”, “not in his right mind”, an “irrational actor”, etc, and therefore, presumably, impossible to predict.

This sounds suspiciously like a cop-out, from people who have failed again to do the thing they claim expertise in: understanding the minds and thinking of global leaders and political actors. This isn’t just people instinctively covering their backsides, but reflects a mistaken and superficial understanding of what “rationality” is, that underpins the worldview of modern progressive liberalism.

Wigmore examines Putin’s perspective on world events, contemporary political alignments, Russian security and economic needs, and the very history of Russia itself—filtered through Putin’s Pan-Slavic nationalism—to explain that Putin is, by his lights, proceeding rationally: “None of this is to say Putin’s decision was wise or correct or even safe for him, let alone anyone else. The decision to invade Ukraine clearly represented a huge risk but for Putin and Russia, given his aims and objectives, a measured one.”

Describe Putin as evil, certainly (I do, and find this covers most of what I need to communicate); talk of him having miscalculated or having made strategic errors; describe his assessment of the relative preparedness of his own forces as mistaken. But to describe him as irrational or mad? Wigmore digs into this:

What do Western commentators mean when they label Putin irrational? Some appear to simply mean that he does not think like they do, or make the decisions they would. They appear genuinely unable to understand how someone may coherently and logically think from different assumptions than Western Liberals to reach different conclusions. One particularly laughable set of questions was asked by a liberal US commentator called Lawrence O’Donnell, who back in the day was also a writer for The West Wing, the political fiction so beloved of American and British liberals. “Is Putin smart? What would make him smart? His (weak) education? […] Has he had any valuable learning experiences anywhere in the world?”, he sneered to his 2.8 million twitter followers. He may as well have said with appropriate hauteur, “well, he’s not an Ivy League man, is he?” Bizarrely, it did not seem to occur to O’Donnell that after rising from being an obscure KGB officer to the undisputed ruler of Russia for over 20 years, Putin might have had some relevant experience and skills, despite not attending Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

Throughout his piece, Wigmore makes similar arguments to those of Lukacs but goes yet further, arguing that the retreat to insanity or “irrationality” as an explanation of Vladimir Putin’s actions is a symptom of intellectual failure: “Western elites must label Putin irrational because they are committed to the idea it is not really possible to be intelligent, rational or logical and disagree with them.”

This is the fruit—borne out, as Wigmore notes, everywhere from John Rawls’s philosophical arguments that “by sheer coincidence” lead to liberal social democracy to the implosion of nation-building experiments in Iraq and Afghanistan—of Enlightenment assumptions. High on the discovery of the laws governing physical reality, Enlightenment rationalists sought analogous universal laws for what had previously been the realm of art, theology, tradition, or happenstance and arrived at the conclusion that their preferred systems—liberalism, democracy, and secular representative government—are universally accessible to pure reason and therefore not only universally desirable but universally applicable. The two-hundred-odd years of application have been mostly a disaster.

Wigmore rightly condemns this misbegotten “bumptious myopia.” But he might have used one word, which Chesterton defined as “the incapacity to conceive seriously the alternative to a proposition” or elsewhere, and more pithily, as “the failure of the mind to imagine any other mind.” That word is bigotry.

To return to Wigmore:

Western secular elites are committed to their ideas; their policies and conclusions follow inevitably out of “Reason” itself. But any mathematician could tell you that Reason is a GIGO system—Garbage In, Garbage Out: any amount of nonsense can be logically derived from incorrect premises.

And until Western elites reckon with that, recognizing that even evil men can be just as rational as they are, and return reason to its rightful and honorable place as a tool—but just a tool—there will only be more hubristic bigotry, and more nasty surprises.

Read Wigmore’s entire piece at The Critic here. You can read that lengthy passage from Lukacs with my glosses here, and I quoted from the same book in a more apocalyptic register here. Finally, here’s Chesterton on bigotry.