The Best Passage I read this Year
René Girard on modern rationality, experts, and how we've come full circle from rejecting religion to embracing a new form of irrationality.
The Best Passage I read this Year
May 16, 2021
The best passage I read this year:
Once we are deprived of transcendental guideposts we must trust our subjective experience. Whether we like it or not, we are little Cartesian gods with no fixed reference and no certainty outside of ourselves.
Since modern man has no way of knowing what is going on beyond himself, since he cannot know everything, he would become lost in a world as vast and technically complex as ours, if he had really no one to guide him.
He no longer relies on priests and philosophers, of course, but he must rely on many other people nevertheless, more people than ever as a matter of fact. They are the experts, the people more competent than we are in innumerable fields of endeavor. The role of our subjective experience, therefore, is more restricted than it seems. All it can hope to do, really when we are in trouble is to direct us to the right experts.
The modern world is one of the experts. They alone know what is to be done. Everything boils down to choosing the right expert. Our attention is focussed so narrowly on our immediate surroundings that we lose all sense of the wider context, of the broader picture. Our balance becomes precarious and our gait seems unsteady, a little Frankenstein-like. That is why we must cling to experts.
Having repudiated religion in order to be more rational, a modern man comes full circle and, in the name of superior rationality, embraces a rational and technical form of irrationality.
- Rene Girard, Resurrection from the Underground: Feodor Dostoevsky (Studies in Violence, Mimesis, & Culture)
Some paragraphs are skipped as they cannot be read without the context of the book.