As he pens a critique of Richard Dawkin's recent book, A Devil[base ']s Chaplain, Ian Glendinning brings fundamental concerns to the table. The issue his entry surfaces, for me, is the dangers of entitling rational thought to be the sole producer and sole arbitrer of 'truth'.

In attacking all things that retain any element of mystery, for whatever reason, Dawkins is being hyper-rational. Where mystery and misunderstanding is born of scientific ignorance, then Dawkins does his duty in pointing it out [...]. Where the mystery is emergent from objective complexity and uncertainty, and worse still, in combination with the uncertainties of social science, then I believe in suspending disbelief of folk knowledge, captured in those metaphors and aphorisms we actually live by.

Ian's reference is to George Lakoff's Metaphors We Live By ( which I will add to my reading list). I'd like to add some related propositions that were proferred by Edward Goldsmith in The Way.

Man is cognitively adjusted to the environment in which he evolved.

Fundamental knowledge is inherited [--which I take together to mean, among other things, that human brains are so constructed, as it were, to be knowledge-makers, collaborators, competitors in a natural, ecological world-- just as human brains are, in Chomsky's Language Acquisition Device, preconstructed to learn ANY human language].

And,

Fundamental knowledge is ineffable and we mainly have access to it by intuition. [Consequence? Big holes in the inventory of "ideas we can live by" department if we trust only that which our rational arbitrer and creator of ideas can crank out].

Much more to be said and thought -- but the stakes are very high. The following from the appendices of the Way:

Modernism: A set of tenets held be our present industrial cultures. [Among tenets named by Goldsmith:]

To maximize all benefits, and hence our welfare and our wealth, we must maximize [and therefore] venerate economic development. (xiii).

All benefits, and therefore our welfare and our real wealth, are derived from the man-made world; this means in effect, that they are the product of science, technology and industry, and of the economic development that made those possible. (xiii)