Irrationality is ineliminable. We have no choice but to sleep at night, and so to lose our grip on the law of the excluded middle. When we wake, we cannot help but feel, whatever our society tells us to the contrary, that what we experience in our dream life has some share of truth, even if it is strictly speaking impossible. Nor can we help but throw ourselves into things that are in important respects really not good for us. The problem is a serious one. It is not just that we are not doing things quite right. Rather, we sense that if we were exclusively to do things that are good for us, this would in itself not be good for us. Because we are all going to die, and therefore we know that all expected rational utility of our actions will eventually be canceled out, life itself can easily appear intrinsically irrational, and all the more so when it is spent in zealous commitment to the enforcement of rationality.
The thesis of this book—that irrationality is as potentially harmful as it is humanly ineradicable, and that efforts to eradicate it are themselves supremely irrational—is far from new. You did not need to hear it from me. It has by now been perfectly obvious for at least a few millennia. The dual case, however, against mythologizing the past, and against delusions about our ability to impose a rational order on our future, always benefits from being made afresh, as evidently what has been perfectly obvious for a few millennia nonetheless keeps slipping back into that vast category of things we know but do not know.
There are a number of other works that have served in varying degrees and ways as models for the present one. The most obvious is Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly of 1511. For folly, or madness, is a species of irrationality. But what the great Dutch humanist praises and celebrates, we have sought here rather only to understand and, as necessary, to accommodate, in a spirit that is neither for nor against the condition in question. This has not been a contribution to what in German is helpfully called Narrenliteratur, the “literature of fools,” celebrating human weakness through caricature and exaggeration. Indeed I have followed at least somewhat more closely in the spirit of Michel Foucault, in his 1961 Madness and Civilization: History of Madness in the Age of Reason (Folie et déraison. Histoire de la folie à l’age classique), for whom fools arise in the world more through society’s imposition of this category than through their own foolish thoughts and actions. This book, moreover, like his, is a “history” in that it attempts to paint a broad picture of how the current world came to be as it is, while dispensing with rigorous chronology and any purported causal sequence of events (in French, again, “history” and “story” are the same word). But here too the author’s focus is on a relatively narrow species of the broad genus that interests us, and his conclusions about madness’s historical contingency are ultimately somewhat too far from the humanist affirmation of an innate foolishness in our species that cannot be analyzed away as a mere construction or contingency. There is also an echo of William Barrett’s Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy of 1958, which for all its many virtues seems nonetheless far too contingent upon the concerns of its historical era, upon the midcentury mood that it breathes, to appear as having either much currency in the present moment, or much timeless insight to lift us out of the present moment. And there is surely a significant residue here, too, of Thomas Browne’s delirious Pseudodoxia epidemica of 1646, in which the English author records, with prurient fascination, the “epidemic” of popular false beliefs of his revolutionary age. It is a great paradox of the present age that, even though the totality of all human learning is more accessible than ever before in history, indeed billions of us on earth can now easily access it with a special device we carry in our pockets, nonetheless false beliefs are as epidemic as ever.
Perhaps one more title is worth mentioning, but not without some preliminary explanation. In the writing of this book, mostly between 2016 and 2018, I quit drinking, I bought a Fitbit and a blood-pressure monitor, I closed my Facebook account (a plague on humanity worse than any drug), I finally committed to being fully honest with everyone in my life, and I got my long-sloppy finances in order. I pulled myself together, wised up: finally carried out the “impossible syllogism” and realized I’ve got only a finite amount of time to do everything I want to do. I got rational, in my limited and relative way. In this respect, I tell myself, I have followed in the path of Richard Klein, who finally and unexpectedly quit smoking in the course of writing his wonderful paean to that filthy habit, Cigarettes Are Sublime of 1993. The true self-help, it turns out, is not in the facile teachings of the self-help professionals and confidence men, but in thoroughly working through everything that is good, everything we love, in what we also hate and wish to be free of: all the delirium and delusion, the enthusiasms, excesses, manias, mythmaking, rhapsodies, stubbornness, and self-subversion that make human life, for good or ill, what it is.