Letters | 8 May 2010

Unreasonable rationality

Sir: I fully agree with the blunt but accurate observations of Melanie Phillips in her piece ‘Welcome to the Age of Irrationality’ (1 May). It is a good measure of the Western mind’s fall into murky confusion, and witless denial, that words like ‘rational’ and ‘secular’ have become prone to a transformation of their authentic meaning. But two points made by Phillips trouble me.

Is it really reasonable to saddle ‘the left’ with ‘distortions, fabrications and bullying’ in the same breath as she lauds ‘the right’ for their ‘attempt to uphold truth, reality and liberty’? Two, is it not too far-fetched to claim that Britain was ‘first into the Enlightenment’ but is ‘now first out’? Maybe we are all falling into the subtle trap of allowing our own rationality to be not quite as reasonable as it should be.

Alfred P. Zarb
Australia



Sir: On reason and religion (Melanie Phillips, 1 May), this verse by Abraham Cowley might help. (By the ‘eighth sphere’, the poet means the night sky.)

The holy book, like the eighth sphere, does shine
With thousand lights of truth divine.
So numberless the stars, that to the eye,
It makes but all one galaxy.
Yet Reason must assist too, for in seas
So vast and treacherous as these,
Our course by stars above we cannot know
Without the compass too below.

Christopher Walker
London 

The great debates

Sir: Toby Young (Status anxiety, 24 April) is surely not seriously suggesting that before the televised debates, the Great British Public selected their leaders on the basis of their ‘grasp of issues… their judgment, their ability to keep their heads in a crisis’? Or that anybody actually bothered to read the parties’ political manifestos cover to cover and voted rationally as a result?

I agree with Mr Young that the TV debates are necessarily superficial and will probably leave no one very much the wiser about the key issues at stake.