[This is Chapter 3 of Murphey’s book Emergent
Man:]
Chapter 3
*********************************
The theme of Dostoevsky's writings was the struggle
between good and evil, between the holy and criminal impulses in man. What
weird and yet believable combinations he devised as the characters in his
novels!
Outside of Dostoevsky, one of the most
striking presentations of this awareness of evil, of criminality, blind
destruction and irrationality, was made by Ayn Rand in The Fountainhead where
the sculptor Steven Mallory explained to Howard Roark (at page 352) the image
of the drooling beast. He says:
I know that the terror exists. I know the kind of terror it is. ...Listen, what's the most horrible experience you can imagine? To me -- it's being left, unarmed, in a sealed cell with a drooling beast of prey or a maniac who's had some disease that's eaten his brain out. You'd have nothing then but your voice -- your voice and your thought. You'd scream to that creature why it should not touch you, you'd become the vessel of the absolute truth. And you'd see living eyes watching you and you'd know that the thing can't hear you, that it can't be reached, not reached, not in any way, yet it's breathing and moving there before you with a purpose of its own. That's horror. Well, that's what's hanging over the world, prowling somewhere through mankind, that same thing, something closed, mindless, utterly wanton, but something with an aim and cunning of its own. I don't think I'm a coward, but I'm afraid of it. And that's all I know -- only that it exists. I don't know its purpose, I don't know its nature.
This drooling beast, or rather a man with his
mind eaten out, is a fitting poetic image for one of the major facts about
human relationships. This fact is that men often act in a mindless way, going
according to innumerable fallacies known to logic as the ignoratio elenchi fallacies,
which involve an ignoring of sound argument and the replacement of it with
spurious premises made up of irrelevancies. Not only does the image of the
beast pertain to this mindlessness, but it depicts in a striking way the horror
to which the mindlessness, when seen in its full force, must give rise. And
this horror reflects, in turn, the wanton destruction of which the mindlessness
is capable.
During my senior year in law school I taught a
few informal classes in logic to some of my fellow students. When I came to the
point of lecturing on what logicians call "material" or “informal”
fallacies, I found the going very difficult. It is easy enough to explain the ignoratio
elenchi fallacies, such as the appeal to force or to pity or to an ad
hominem attack upon the proponent of the opposing view. These things can be
easily explained in a few minutes. But when a lecturer has finished, what has
he ordinarily accomplished other than to draw the yawns of his audience, who
sense the obviousness of all that the lecturer has said and who feel that they
have been told something so simple that in fact they have been told very little
indeed? It is hard to impart in a lecture sandwiched into a coffee hour the
vast significance of the ignoratio elenchi, which is in essence the
significance of the drooling beast itself. The beast as such is nothing other
than those habits of mind that 'blank out," as Ayn Rand would say, the
processes of reason. When a man, for example, uses the force of his personality
to overcome in another person the will to dispute a fallacy that the man has
just uttered, or when a man flies into a rage rather than to resort to reasoned
argument to get his way, the beast is lurking underneath with all its potential
horror. I have chosen these everyday examples deliberately, in order to show
just how widespread the
"mindlessness," the "blank out," is, just how far it
pervades human action.
Serious reflection will easily bring to the
reader's mind demonstrations of the great extent to which these habits of
irrationality undermine his own relations with other people. They come in on
virtually every level and at all points, distorting the truth of one situation
after another, creating fictions by which men and women live in a monkeyish
sort of way. To a large extent
this fictional fabric enters into the extroverted social reality that I have
discussed.
It is important to sense fully the horror of
this beast of unreason and to know with a developed sensibility the full impact
of its destructive power. This is important because only then, by way of
contrast, do the words "mind" and "reason" assume their
proper significance as imperatives in a religious sense rather than remain just
common, ordinary words. "Reason" is far from a lifeless, purely
intellectnal matter. It is the vital spark of civilization.
At the frightening public meetings of the
Nazis, where thousands of people shouted up their adulation to Adolf Hitler,
reason was a common enemy and the shouts were an ignoratio elenchi the
function of which was to drown reason in a sea of military passion and tumult.
Most human beings feel passionately a revulsion toward Nazism and the carnage
it brought in its wake. If this revulsion is to be made into a consistent
philosophy, it is mind that one must exalt, it is reason that one must
passionately favor. One must realize that the great positive alternative to
this bestiality exists in the lives of such men as Voltaire, Leonardo de Vinci,
Benjamin Franklin and other men of mind.
Why does the beast exist? One could scarcely
pretend to state all the reasons. To fathom them all would be to probe very
deeply indeed into the depths of the human soul, something about which no man
really knows very much. Be this as it may, however, the following reasons suggest themselves as among the operative
causes.
The most obvious cause, of course, but hardly
the most dangerous one, is that good-faith error that must necessarily accompany
much mental effort because of the inherent difficulties in the process of
reason itself. Errors may be made even by those who have made a special study
of logic and epistemology. Such error
will often creep into a chain of strict deduction. It is, however, even more
likely to occur in induction and in introspective thinking, because of the lack
of a formalized pattern and because the "tests" that scientific
method and sound epistemology provide can hardly affirm the truth of any proposition
more than provisionally, such "tests" being designed more than
anything else to weed out wrong hypotheses, but without being able to assure us
that those that remain are correct.
But "good-faith" error, while a
cause of unreason, is not the core of the "beast." The poetic image describes much more than
this.
The beast exists most in a semi-conscious
fiction that settles over a people and gives expression to their many
prejudices and misconceptions. Many dogmas, large and small, that will not
stand up before critical examination, are accepted as commonplace truths. It is
social heresy to disagree with these "truths." To a large extent these are matters of
ideology and there is an emotional dogmatism quietly lurking about in regard to
them, protecting and nourishing them. Then, too, there is the further element
that they reflect patterns of power that are exerted in our extroverted society
politely under a pretension of not existing at all.
Often it is considered an insult to say what
is literally, starkly true. But the fact that the truth is taken as an insult
shows that truth is relegated to the position of an obscenity. It shows the extent
of the disguise and the semi-conscious nature of its presence. This sort of
fiction is present on a vast scale, distorting the very reality in which we
live and breathe, creating an unreal reality of its own. I have referred to
this previously in connection with the extroverted reality, which is so sterile
and distorted, full of irrelevancies that mask the many varied humanities that
are underneath. The ignoratio elenchi is very much a way of life. It
becomes a mentality of its own and a type of thinking that in many subtle ways
diseases the mind and makes unflinching observation and inference exceedingly
difficult. As such, it is anesthetic and dangerous. It acts directly against
clarity of mind and makes a man's integrity become an act of martyrdom rather
than the natural and easy humanism that it should be.
This quixotic mask covering so much that goes
on between human beings is, as I have said, to some extent a cloak for power .
It is also a stubborn adherence to erroneous ideology in the face of everyday
realities. Most people come to feel a vested-interestedness in the ideas they
have accepted. They do not remind themselves, as a moral and intellectual
maxim, "I have nothing to benefit from error that I may accept; I must be
willing to throw off old ideas when they are shown to be wrong; and I must be
willing to hear the criticisms of my present view." Such a spirit is rare. The rigidity of mind
that blanks out other ideas critical of one's own dogmas reflects a shallowness
and insecurity of mind, an intellect that is unwilling to stand the test of
full inquiry.
This rigidity is most obviously present in America
in the great "liberal" orthodoxy that now prevails almost everywhere,
defining all issues, announcing its own accepted truths, intolerantly failing
to hear or else actively punishing such opposing views as may from time to time
find expression. Since much of this book will pertain to this orthodoxy, I will
do no more than just mention it here. Its vital connection with the mindless ignoratio
elenchic mentality, though, ought to be thoroughly
appreciated since as an intolerant orthodoxy this mentality is one of its main
characteristics.
One reason the fictional blanket is so
significant is that there is little pulling in the other direction to be found
anywhere. Though there are many
people who are honest in the sense that they would not steal or deliberately
lie, few people have an active devotion to truth for its own sake. Certainly
this lack is one of the important causes of the extensive fiction. The eroding
quality of error is too great for us to avoid a significant washing away of the
topsoil of truth if we do not live with frank, unvarnished truth as an object
of personal devotion and so much a part of our make-up that we are at least to
some extent surprised and resentful
when at times we come face to face with presumption and falsity.
Conscious falsehood is itself no small part of
the beast. It is hard, of course, to say just how much fully conscious
distortion there is among people.
From time to time I have been struck with a sense of the "world's
insanity" when I have been most closely affected by deliberate lies.
Lawyers are well aware that a surprising
number of witnesses will lie when they think it beneficial to their interests.
Surely most perjury goes unpunished. And unfortunately the journalistic profession is far below its proclaimed
ethics in terms of a dedicated adherence to truth. There is a notorious
carelessness about fact and a vicious propensity to paint a distorted image to
suit the writer's purpose. Of course this is not true of all journalists; such
a qualification seems so obvious that it hardly seems necessary to mention it.
But anyone who has known the facts first-hand about controversial public events
must remark upon the weird and fantastic image that is very often given to the
people by the press.
Deliberate falsification on a massive scale is
almost certain to result where
massive governmental institutions exist. In a sense they all have something to
sell, but it is a something that cannot be tested and rejected in the
marketplace day after day if what is claimed by it is false. All bureaucracy
must be suspect so far as this is concerned. I may speak from my personal
experience about the Marine Corps. It has public relations offices that
actively construct a public image of the Marine Corps that is very much unlike
the underlying facts. I have known men who spent their days in such an office
as writers and radio announcers making the Marine Corps appear a fitting place
for men of courage and pride, and who passionately hated the Marine Corps. They
often remarked among themselves that it would be difficult to imagine a more
highly cultivated hypocrisy. But it exists nevertheless, and goes unchallenged.
The beast of unreason stalks through mankind
as a type of omnipresent barbarism that mixes invisibly with civilization.
Emergence as a civilizing and religious force that fully appreciates the
elevation of mind and integrity must necessarily be a force that is consciously
aware of the fictional, quixotic, ignoratio elenchic nature of our
existence and that opposes it by a sensitive inculcation of the true spirit of
inquisitive and vital intellectuality. Only a living philosophy of mind and
integrity, a real commitment to those ideals of truth that are so often
expressed and yet so often ignored, will kill the beast. Until critical and
creative intellect comes to be held religiously as a matter of the highest
value, the beast of unreason will remain valid as a poetic image of much that
surrounds us.
[Note from 2001: During the forty years since this was written,
my mental approach has moved somewhat from what it expresses. At that time, I was very much under the
influence both of Ayn Rand and the Austrian School of Economics (particularly
Ludwig von Mises, whose seminar and classes I attended at New York University
in 1956-7). Each of them believed strongly
that their body of thought was the truth, and that positions that differed from
them were necessarily fallacies. That
is not an attitude that I would nearly so much take today, since I am persuaded
that the issues of politics and society involve many difficult decisions about
fact and a great many value judgments about which reasonable people can
differ. I have moved away, at the same
time, from the strictly deductive method of a self-contained system of thought
based on axioms, since I have long-since come to believe that axioms cannot
adequately capture all there is to know about human beings and society. This, too, has made me less inclined to
assert a clear line between views that are “true” and those that are not.
And yet, what is said in this chapter
certainly serves as an apt critique of many human mental processes. People do believe many things, most
especially of a broad cosmological nature, on the most irrational grounds; and
they tend generally to imbibe the conventional wisdom of their time
unquestioningly and to stand behind it with a strong moral insistence even
though they haven’t themselves given so much as five minutes’ serious study or thought to it. Often, they go to war and kill unspeakable
numbers of other people, and suffer equally unspeakable losses themselves, on
no better basis. The “Beast of
Unreason,” then, was not an ill-placed metaphor, and Ayn Rand was very much on
the mark with it.
Years after this chapter was written, I wrote
the four-volume set that started with my book Understanding the Modern
Predicament. The last three volumes
of that series deal with the vast ideological systems that have served to
“mediate” reality during the past two centuries. Those books show in elaborate detail how people live by ideas,
which are the mental atmosphere within which they think. The chapter here on the “Beast of Unreason”
presages these books, in that it speaks to the importance of ideas, and of the
sociology of ideas, in human life. The
chapter is sound, too, in expressing in deeply poetic terms the danger that
palpitates from within those mental constructs. Humanity can only operate through mental constructs that mediate
an otherwise too varied and complex reality, but there needs to be a full
appreciation of their dangers.]