Two minds.

• Author: Berry, Wendell

Conservationists, scientists, philosophers, and others are telling us daily and hourly that our species is now behaving with colossal irrationality and that we had better become more rational. I agree as to the dimensions and danger of our irrationality. As to the possibility of curing it by rationality, or at least by the rationality of the rationalists, I have some doubts.

The trouble is not just in the way we are thinking; it is also in the way we, or anyhow we in the affluent parts of the world, are living. And it is going to be hard to define anybody's living as a series of simple choices between irrationality and rationality. Moreover, this is supposedly an age of reason: We are encouraged to believe that the governments and corporations of the affluent parts of the world are run by rational people using rational processes to make rational decisions. The dominant faith of the world in our time is in rationality. That in an age of reason, the human race, or the most wealthy and powerful parts of it, should be behaving with colossal irrationality ought to make us wonder if reason alone can lead us to do what is right.

It is often proposed, nowadays, that if we would only get rid of religion and other leftovers from our primitive past and become enlightened by scientific rationalism, we could invent the new values and ethics that are needed to preserve the natural world. This proposal is perfectly reasonable, and perfectly doubtful. It supposes that we can empirically know and rationally understand everything involved, which is exactly the supposition that has underwritten our transgressions against the natural world in the first place.

Obviously we need to use our intelligence. But how much intelligence have we got? And what sort of intelligence is it that we have? And how, at its best, does human intelligence work?

In order to try to answer these questions I am going to suppose for a while that there are two different kinds of human mind: the Rational Mind and another which, for want of a better term, I will call the Sympathetic Mind. I will say now, and try to keep myself reminded, that these terms are going to appear to be allegorical, too neat and too separate--though I need to say also that their separation was not invented by me.

The Rational Mind, without being anywhere perfectly embodied, is the mind we all are supposed to be trying to have. It is the mind that the most powerful and influential people think they have. Our schools exist mainly to educate and propagate and authorize the Rational Mind. The Rational Mind is objective, analytical, and empirical; it makes itself up only by considering facts; it pursues truth by experimentation; it is uncorrupted by preconception, received authority, religious belief, or feeling. Its ideal products are the proven fact, the accurate prediction, and the "informed decision." It is, you might say, the official mind of science, industry, and government.

The Sympathetic Mind differs from the Rational Mind, not by being unreasonable, but by refusing to limit knowledge or reality to the scope of reason or factuality or experimentation, and by making reason the servant of things it considers precedent and higher.

The Rational Mind is motivated by the fear of being misled, of being wrong. Its purpose is to exclude everything that cannot empirically or experimentally be proven to be a fact.

The Sympathetic Mind is motivated by fear of error of a very different kind: the error of carelessness, of being unloving. Its purpose is to be considerate of whatever is present, to leave nothing out.

The Rational Mind is exclusive; the Sympathetic Mind, however failingly, wishes to be inclusive.

These two types certainly don't exhaust the taxonomy of minds. They are merely the two that the intellectual fashions of our age have most deliberately separated and thrown into opposition.

My purpose here is to argue in defense of the Sympathetic Mind. But my objection is not to the use of reason or to reasonability. I am objecting to the exclusiveness of the Rational Mind, which has limited itself to a selection of mental functions such as the empirical methodologies of analysis and experimentation and the attitudes of objectivity and realism. In order to go into business on its own, it has in effect withdrawn from all of human life that involves feeling, affection, familiarity, reverence, faith, and loyalty. The separability of the Rational Mind is not only the dominant fiction but also the master superstition of the modern age.

The Sympathetic Mind is under the influence of certain inborn or at least fundamental likes and dislikes. Its impulse is toward wholeness. It is moved by affection for its home place, the local topography, the local memories, and the local creatures. It hates estrangement, dismemberment, and disfigurement. The Rational Mind tolerates all these things "in pursuit of truth" or in pursuit of money--which, in modern practice, have become nearly the same pursuit.

I am objecting to the failure of the rationalist enterprise of "objective science" or "pure science" or "the disinterested pursuit of truth" to prevent massive damage both to nature and to human economy. The Rational Mind does not confess its complicity in the equation: knowledge=power=money=damage. Even so, the alliance of academic science, government, and the corporate economy--and their unifying pattern of sanctions and rewards--is obvious enough. We have resisted, so far, a state religion, but we are dangerously close to having both a corporate state and a state science, which some people, in both the sciences and the arts, would like to establish as a state religion.

The Rational Mind is the lowest common denominator of the government-corporation-university axis. It is the fiction that makes high intellectual ability the unquestioning servant of bad work and bad law.

Under the reign of the Rational Mind, there is no firewall between contemporary science and contemporary industry or economic development. It is entirely imaginable, for instance, that a young person might go into biology because of love for plants and animals. But such a young person had better be careful, for there is nothing to prevent knowledge gained for love of the creatures from being used to destroy them for the love of money.

Now some biologists, who have striven all their lives to embody perfectly the Rational Mind, have become concerned, even passionately concerned, about the loss of "biological diversity," and they are determined to do something about it. This is usually presented as a merely logical development from ignorance to realization to action. But so far it is only comedy. The Rational Mind, which has been destroying biological diversity by "figuring out" some things, now proposes to save what is left of biological diversity by "figuring out" some more things. It does what it has always done before: It defines the problem as a big problem calling for a big solution; it calls in world-class experts, and invokes large grants of money; it propagandizes and organizes and "gears up for a major effort." The comedy here is in the failure of these rationalists to see that as soon as they have become passionately concerned they have stepped outside the dry, objective, geometrical territory claimed by the Rational Mind, and have entered the still mysterious homeland of the Sympathetic Mind, watered by unpredictable rains and also by real sweat and real tears.

The Sympathetic Mind would not forget that so-called environmental problems have causes that are in part political, and that they therefore have remedies that are in part political. But it would not try to solve these problems merely by large-scale political protections of "the environment." It knows that they must be solved ultimately by correcting the way people use their home places and local landscapes. Politically, but also by local economic improvements, it would stop colonialism in all its forms...