By and large, humans are not good at
thinking rationally, but, really, who can blame us? We have not had much
practice at it. According to the accepted wisdom of anthropologists and
paleontologists, by no later than 12,000 B.C.E. – approximately 14 millennia
ago – humans already had spread to and settled in every continent on the planet
except Antarctica. Yet we only started to make rational sense of our existence a few hundred years ago. Prior to
the mid-seventeenth century, nearly all human understanding of ourselves and
our world arose out of a mythic, poetic, narrative sense – not a rational one.
Of course, that is because “rationality” – properly understood – is not a
concept easily embraced by humans. We are drawn to certainty and to firm, fixed
answers, but for an idea to be rational it
must be capable of being proved false. To embrace rationality means to embrace
uncertainty, rationality’s essence.
