On Reasonableness

Shaking out a few ideas on Good, Evil, and Normal

An Atheist, a Baptist, and a Catholic all walk into a bar.

There’s already lots of other types gathered. They’re greeted with a knowing “Ah, you know Josh, too?”

“He’s cooking on some new idea” a lady with silver hair mutters. “Don’t know what’s wrong with that boy. But he’s called us all here.”

Indeed I have, my dear friends! I’ve got Dostoevsky and Bohr and Jesus and Solzhenitsyn and departed pals like Pastor John all swirling around in my head, and could use your help.

The idea isn’t half baked. I’m still tossing ingredients into the pot. It’s got so many loose ends that maybe it won’t work, but–something smells promising, and I could use your help thinking on it. Maybe it’ll turn into a real essay someday. But it’s been nagging at me, and I keep saying I’ll write it, and well, enough with the excuses. Here it is.

Question 1: Has Reasonableness has morphed into an automatically accepted virtue, sometimes to our detriment. (I think yes.)

Bestselling true-crime author Dianne Fanning gave a talk at the local library on Monday evening, riveting us with accounts of conversations with serial killers. I asked her if they were as different from us as we’d wish.

She thought a moment, then said what I hoped she wouldn’t. “They don’t have a mark on their foreheads.”

Oh, hiding in plain sight. Like this.

This is one of the scariest photos I’ve seen: the secretaries and staff of Auschwitz on a day off.

Don’t they look reasonable?

Credit: Auschwitz Memorial

Following orders. Doing their job. I met a man recently who manned a nuclear silo. His job was to push the button. “Did you ever get close?” I asked him.

“Yeah, once. Five minutes away. It turned out to be a mistake. But I would have pushed it. It was my job.” (Emphasis mine.)

I’m not clean, either. I’ve used the same line, I’m bitterly ashamed to say. I told plenty of old folks to get back in their lockdown rooms, and helped restrain a man for his COVID test, and have done plenty of things that I expect to account for. It’s not pleasant to think about, but seems necessary.

Question 2: Is Reality reasonable? (I think not.)

Jesus dying for all sin of all time, offering Grace and eternal life to anyone who accepts him is not reasonable. But the Christians say that’s how it works.

Quantum Mechanics, not to be outdone, have cooked up a zany theory with their own light source.

According to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, one can’t know with 100% certainty both the position and the momentum of a particle like an electron or a proton. The more you know about one, the less of the other. It will likely be at a certain place, and less likely at another. Graphing this out, you’ll wind up with a probability cloud, not a little marble solar system we learned back in school.

“Ah ha!” you say. “What if I make a clever device that slowly boxes this proton in, until I know precisely where it is, and how fast it’s going?

Tough luck, pal. It might “tunnel” through your fancy walls, and show up on the other side. Probably not, but it might. The cloud will not be contained. It’s not a measurement problem. It’s a fundamental truth about reality.

Deep in the core of our Sun, at roughly 27 million degrees Fahrenheit and a billion times atmospheric pressure, conditions are still not extreme enough to fuse protons if they were classical points, little marbles running around.

But if they’re probability clouds, they might overlap. The proton might “tunnel” through and be close enough to another proton, and then fuse.

The chances are (scientifically speaking) one in a mega-gazillion, but there’s a mega-uber-gazillion protons in the core, so….

According to current theory, the Sun shines because of quantum tunneling.

Not reasonable. But true. (Maybe.)

Even the “intuitive” idea that a baseball, thrown up, will return to Earth is an anomaly found only in a fraction of the Universe. If we were in space, it would keep going.

Maybe all of this is wrong. But maybe it’s not.

Is Reality reasonable? Do Truths fit in our heads?

Question 3: Is Reasonable always good (or bad) (Or do we need more terms?) (Still cooking.)

It’s reasonable to pay my bills on time. Late fees are a pain. It’s reasonable to wear shoes, take out the garbage, keep my word, and drink enough water.

But I can also make war reasonable, justify stealing, and refuse to play the Cha Cha Slide at DJ events. (Shoot me.)

Genesis wrestles mightily with the question. Reason seems Man’s undoing. I’m still wrestling with this, too I collect fossils, but feel fallen. I think there’s a lot to this text. (And now I annoy everyone.)

Question 4: Is the Devil in the Details? (I think yes.)

Perhaps it’s a deliberate twisting of this phrase, but perhaps not. Dianne’s statement of the murderers she’s met seeming normal. The secretaries of Auschwitz. My following orders. “Just” wars. (Oh, I know the rot in my heart loves to start them.)

If the Devil has one house, I think it would be beige, third from the left on a cul-de-sac, with a slightly oxidized black plastic mailbox.

The whole Banality of Evil thing.

Reasonable.

Question 5: Is Reasonableness a problem because it’s not Transcendent?

Reasonableness seems terribly grounded. It works well in terms of bills and garbage, but when it becomes its own master, we occasionally wind up with a holocaust.

Is it because it’s not transcendent? One of those Truth Goodness Beauty things? I read Solzhenitsyn’s Nobel lecture the other day. He tangles with the Dostoyevsky statement that “beauty will save the world.”

This made me scrunch up my face, and I think I missed most of it, but seems worth sharing.

So perhaps that ancient trinity of Truth, Goodness and Beauty is not simply an empty, faded formula as we thought in the days of our self-confident, materialistic youth? If the tops of these three trees converge, as the scholars maintained, but the too blatant, too direct stems of Truth and Goodness are crushed, cut down, not allowed through – then perhaps the fantastic, unpredictable, unexpected stems of Beauty will push through and soar TO THAT VERY SAME PLACE, and in so doing will fulfil the work of all three?

In that case Dostoevsky’s remark, “Beauty will save the world”, was not a careless phrase but a prophecy? After all HE was granted to see much, a man of fantastic illumination.

And in that case art, literature might really be able to help the world today?

–Solzhenitsyn

Maybe stuff down here on the ground only goes so far. Maybe Reasonableness isn’t a good master. Anything that’s not the ultimate isn’t. Golden cows come in many shades.

I’d like to stop taking part in the Lie, as Solzhenitsyn puts it. I’d like to find some Light.

I can also see Pastor John pausing, peering at me, and suggesting I go eat some dinner.

Thoughts?

–Josh

Seems reasonable to me….