The Early History of Irrationality

 

Humans have almost certainly thought, spoken, and acted irrationally since they essentially reached their current biological state, around 60,000 years ago in eastern Africa. Irrational belief and activity were likely common phenomena then. Even high-order animals occasionally think and behave irrationally. So superstition – or arbitrary, false conclusions about cause and effect – is evidently a standard human error. Mythical stories and explanations of various types were very probably typical for the tribal people of that era.

But when human beings changed their lifestyle and started to live together permanently in large cities around 5,300 years ago in Sumaria, and 200 years later in Egypt, they no doubt compared and contrasted the many irrational beliefs and myths that they all had. The intellectually and esthetically best probably soon came to dominate. The poor and weak ones were deliberately forgotten. Very likely the most wise and entertaining mythological tales were improved, elaborated on, and spread wide.

Soon enough there were superhumans, supernatural powers, magical creatures, and gods all over the place. They performed miracles of goodness, badness, and strangeness. And these fanciful entities engaged in all kinds of mischief – to educate and amuse us. Irrational nonsense was institutionalized and gained a prominent place in the culture of the West.

Meanwhile, nation-states and elaborate mythology or polytheism also emerged in India around 2500 B.C. and in China around 1800 B.C.

But 2,600 years ago, reason was discovered and invented in Greece. With it came science to explain the physical and natural world, along with philosophy to explain the intellectual and human world. The old Greek mythologies involving Zeus, Apollo, Athena, and the like were radically changed. They were made more simple and yet more profound. The primitive irrationality and superstition of mythology was updated and improved to the sophisticated irrationality and superstition of religion.

The newly-invented monotheism – however fraudulent and absurd – could at least somewhat stand up to science and philosophy. Reason didn’t immediately extinguish this belief-system, high-level irrationality, and destroyer of man. However false and evil the new phenomenon was, it didn’t succumb to the powerful intellectual and cultural forces of rational observation and analysis.

This was almost certainly the result of the preachers and cultists brazenly promising an "afterlife" and "immortality in paradise" to their followers. The Greeks created a variety of such "mystery cults" starting around 2,500 years ago. Many were based in Eleusis – about 20 miles from Athens and the first "Jerusalem".

However openly irrational and nonsensical, these "mysteries" were often exalted by Greek intellectuals, playwrights, and others of social and political prominence. And this way of thinking, so to speak, quickly made its way to Greece’s closest advanced neighbor, Persia. The Persians used it to invent Zarathustraism, the world’s first fairly elaborate and well-thought-out monotheism or religion.

A century or so later came Plato. His ideas made their way to another advanced culture on the border of an expanding Greece: Judea. The thinkers of that nation combined traditional Hebrew mythology, independent new-style monotheism, Zarathustraism, and Platonism to create Judaism. This irrational idea-system was the first truly sophisticated religion.

The Hebrew nation’s powerful belief-system eradicated all other competing polytheistic and mythological gods in their area. The Jewish religion with their one omnipotent god was magnificent. Or at least as close to magnificent as something so devastatingly irrational, harmful, poisonous, and evil can be.

But all the foregoing, important history and interpretation needs to be established thru scholarship and historical research. It needs to be verified with original sources and careful citations.

And I’m a cultural analyst – not a scholar. So someone else needs to do it!