Steven Pinker is an arch defender of Enlightenment ideals, reason in particular. He sees the contemporary drift towards conspiracy theories, skepticism towards science, and denial of progress as great examples of the irrationality that seems to have taken over the modern world. And yet, even Steven Pinker acknowledges that, sometimes, irrationality is the best strategy.

Must we always follow reason? Do I need a rational argument for why I should fall in love, cherish my children, enjoy the pleasures of life? Isn’t it sometimes OK to go crazy, to be silly, to stop making sense? If rationality is so great, why do we associate it with a dour joylessness? Was the philosophy professor in Tom Stoppard’s play Jumpers right in his response to the claim that “the Church is a monument to irrationality”?

The National Gallery is a monument to irrationality! Every concert hall is a monument to irrationality! And so is a nicely kept garden, or a lover’s favour, or a home for stray dogs! . . . If rationality were the criterion for things being allowed to exist, the world would be one gigantic field of soya beans! [1]

This article takes up the professor’s challenge and investigates whether irrationality has anything going for it. We will see that indeed, there can sometimes be a benefit to acting irrationally, though it’s a higher-order rationality that tells us when it can be rational to be irrational.

SUGGESTED READING Reason, the Enlightenment, and Post-Truth Politics By Peter Hacker

Rational Ignorance

While Odysseus had himself tied to the mast and rationally relinquished his option to act, his sailors plugged their ears with wax and rationally relinquished their option to know. At first this seems puzzling. One might think that knowledge is power, and you can never know too much. Just as it’s better to be rich than poor, because if you’re rich you can always give away your money and be poor, you might think it’s always better to know something, because you can always choose not to act on it. But in one of the paradoxes of rationality, that turns out not to be true. Sometimes it really is rational to plug your ears with wax [2]. Ignorance can be bliss, and sometimes what you don’t know can’t hurt you.

An obvious example is the spoiler alert. We take pleasure in watching a plot unfold, including the suspense, climax, and denouement, and may choose not to spoil it by knowing the ending in advance. Sports fans who cannot see a match in real time and plan to watch a recorded version later will sequester themselves from all media and even from fellow fans who might leak the outcome in a subtle tell. Many parents choose not to learn the sex of their unborn child to enhance the joy of the moment of birth. In these cases we rationally choose ignorance because we know how our own involuntary positive emotions work, and we arrange events to enhance the pleasure they give us.

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Sometimes we choose to be ignorant to prevent our rational faculties from being exploited by rational adversaries—to make sure they cannot make us an offer we can’t refuse

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