{"id":303690,"date":"2025-09-29T12:00:42","date_gmt":"2025-09-29T11:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=303690"},"modified":"2025-09-24T07:28:45","modified_gmt":"2025-09-24T06:28:45","slug":"our-age-of-unreason","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2025\/09\/our-age-of-unreason\/","title":{"rendered":"Our Age of Unreason"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_303693\" style=\"width: 410px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/Science_Technology_Engineering-artificial-intelligence.jpg\" ><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-303693\" class=\"wp-image-303693\" src=\"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/Science_Technology_Engineering-artificial-intelligence.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"400\" height=\"283\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/Science_Technology_Engineering-artificial-intelligence.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/Science_Technology_Engineering-artificial-intelligence-300x212.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/Science_Technology_Engineering-artificial-intelligence-768x543.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 400px) 100vw, 400px\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-303693\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">(Geralt\/Wikimedia Commons)<\/p><\/div>\n<blockquote><p><em>We have lost that connection between reason and morality \u2026.\u00a0We have decisively lost our idea of the commonweal as the anchor from which reason will make its case.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><em>22 Sep 2025\u00a0<\/em>&#8211; I have titled my remarks this summer \u201cOur Age of Unreason,\u201d and I am aware this may seem a touch grandiose. If this is how my title strikes you I have chosen well, as I mean to imply precisely that we have entered a new age, as consequentially distinct from previous ages as those ages were in their time \u2014 the Golden Age of Athens, the Age of Reason, the Age of Materialism, the Atomic Age.<\/p>\n<p>There are many cases in point:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The Zionist state\u2019s genocide campaigns,<\/li>\n<li>The dismantling of democratic rights in the West in the name of defending democracy,<\/li>\n<li>Our purported leaders\u2019 brazen abandonment of law\u2014domestic and international\u2014in the name of upholding the law,<\/li>\n<li>Pseudo-seriousness diplomats and uniformed officers who advance patently nonsensical military strategies such as \u201cescalate to de-escalate.\u201d<\/li>\n<li>In everyday life, psychological operations and what we call cognitive warfare have so corrupted our public discourse that we are no longer be certain what is and is not true. Large proportions of the populations across the West are now incapable of understanding the world in which they live \u2014 this while remaining obstinately confident they do.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>We have taken the ground out from beneath our own feet.<\/p>\n<p>These are varied manifestations, among an infinite number, of our age of unreason. I choose these to mention because each also goes some way to explaining how we arrive in circumstances warranting that we name our age as I propose. Each case is suggestive of whose interests this new age serves.<\/p>\n<p><strong>What Is Enlightenment?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>My immediate reference, of course, is the Age of Reason, so named by Tom Paine, the American revolutionary, political philosopher, and pamphleteer. Paine\u2019s \u201cAge of Reason\u201d is otherwise known as \u201cthe Enlightenment.\u201d And it is well to spend a few minutes considering what Paine meant and what is meant by \u201cthe Enlightenment\u201d so that, as in a concave mirror, we recognize what our age, so far as I argue today, is not.<\/p>\n<p>My editor at Yale University Press told me years ago about a book he was editing but would never publish because the author had died before finishing the manuscript. The book was to be titled <em>The Endarkenment<\/em>. I have ever since thought what a pity it is the book will never come out. And here, in broad daylight, I am going to steal this succinct term as a useful companion to my \u201cAge of Unreason.\u201d At the horizon they come to the same thing.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_79635\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/consortiumnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/Statue_of_Thomas_Paine_parc_Montsouris_Paris.jpeg\" class=\"image-anchor\" ><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-large wp-image-79635\" src=\"https:\/\/consortiumnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/Statue_of_Thomas_Paine_parc_Montsouris_Paris-1000x563.jpeg\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 860px) 100vw, 860px\" srcset=\"https:\/\/consortiumnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/Statue_of_Thomas_Paine_parc_Montsouris_Paris-1000x563.jpeg 1000w, https:\/\/consortiumnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/Statue_of_Thomas_Paine_parc_Montsouris_Paris-500x281.jpeg 500w, https:\/\/consortiumnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/Statue_of_Thomas_Paine_parc_Montsouris_Paris-768x432.jpeg 768w, https:\/\/consortiumnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/Statue_of_Thomas_Paine_parc_Montsouris_Paris-160x90.jpeg 160w, https:\/\/consortiumnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/Statue_of_Thomas_Paine_parc_Montsouris_Paris.jpeg 1024w\" alt=\"\" width=\"860\" height=\"484\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-79635\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p id=\"caption-attachment-79635\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Thomas Paine by Gutzon Borglum, parc Montsouris, Paris. (couscouschocolat from Issy-Les-Moulineaux, France\/Wikimedia Commons)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>In <em>The Age of Reason<\/em>, the book that named his time, Tom Paine argued in favor of rationality as against revelation and other features of orthodox Christianity, the Christianity of the temporal church. His argument was in large part theological, so it is better we resort to Kant for a very basic understanding of the Enlightenment.<\/p>\n<p>In 1784 a German pastor named Johann Friedrich Z\u00f6llner asked publicly about the meaning of the term \u201cEnlightenment,\u201d which was by this time coming into common use.<\/p>\n<p>This was in a monthly journal called <em>Berlinische Monatsschrift<\/em>. Z\u00f6llner\u2019s curiosity seems to have prompted a lively debate in <em>Berlinische Monatsschrift<\/em>\u2019s pages. Kant responded in the journal\u2019s December 1784 edition with \u201cAn Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?\u201d and this is, of course, the reply that comes down to us in history.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cEnlightenment is man\u2019s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity,\u201d Kant wrote in his famous first sentence. \u201cImmaturity,\u201d he immediately explained, \u201cis the inability to use one\u2019s understanding without guidance from another.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Kant was very certain that the condition essential to the transcendence of humanity\u2019s state of immaturity is freedom. \u201cIf it is only allowed freedom,\u201d he wrote with reference to the public, \u201cenlightenment is almost inevitable.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Here I suggest we consider the term \u201cdiscernment\u201d according to the Jesuits\u2019 definition. In Jesuit education, \u201cdiscernment\u201d means one\u2019s capacity to make judgments, choices, plans of action, and so on as an autonomous individual, free of the interventions of others, or coercions, or other sorts of external influence.<\/p>\n<p>It means listening to oneself, in a phrase\u2014which implies a certain measure of confidence in oneself. What is more \u2014 a key point here \u2014 the discerning individual judges and chooses according to his or her moral values and with reference, always, to the commonweal, the greater good of humanity.<\/p>\n<p>Returning to Kant, \u201cWhat Is Enlightenment?\u201d is but seven pages in the English translation with which I work, and there is a very great deal of insight in it. \u201cSelf-imposed immaturity,\u201d an inability to understand anything without guidance from someone else: These are damning phrases to describe the unenlightened, I would say.<\/p>\n<p>What is more, Kant argued that most people prefer this unenlightened state\u2014this endarkenment. \u201cIf I have a book to serve as my understanding, a pastor to serve as my conscience, a physician to determine my diet for me,\u201d he wrote, \u201cI need not exert myself at all. I need not think: If only I can pay, others will readily undertake the irksome work for me.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Being a sympathetic sort, Kant attributed this tendency among the majority of people to \u201claziness and cowardice\u201d \u2014 Kant\u2019s precise words. He meant that listless state of conformity that is now all too familiar among us.<\/p>\n<p>But the new freedom announced by the Age of Reason, Kant asserted, will advance humankind beyond this condition such that he concluded his time deserved the name it had by then acquired.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cNothing is required for this enlightenment except freedom,\u201d he wrote. And, against the background of the <em>ancien r\u00e9gime<\/em>, Kant could credibly assume people\u2019s ardent desire for freedom. \u201cIf it is now asked,\u201d he wrote, \u201c\u2018Do we presently live in <em>an enlightened age<\/em>?\u2019 the answer is \u2018No, but we do live in an age of <em>enlightenment<\/em>.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Our reality is very different. We have no ground upon which to make assumptions as to the inevitability of progress, as Kant did. We are, indeed, profoundly mixed up on this point \u2014 mistaking as we habitually do technological progress, material progress, for genuine human progress.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Running From Freedom<\/strong><\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_135159\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\"><a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/consortiumnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/Immanuel_Kant_portrait_c1790.jpg\" class=\"image-anchor\" ><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-135159\" src=\"https:\/\/consortiumnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/Immanuel_Kant_portrait_c1790-449x500.jpg\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 449px) 100vw, 449px\" srcset=\"https:\/\/consortiumnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/Immanuel_Kant_portrait_c1790-449x500.jpg 449w, https:\/\/consortiumnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/Immanuel_Kant_portrait_c1790-897x1000.jpg 897w, https:\/\/consortiumnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/Immanuel_Kant_portrait_c1790-768x856.jpg 768w, https:\/\/consortiumnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/Immanuel_Kant_portrait_c1790-500x557.jpg 500w, https:\/\/consortiumnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/Immanuel_Kant_portrait_c1790-260x290.jpg 260w, https:\/\/consortiumnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/Immanuel_Kant_portrait_c1790-160x178.jpg 160w, https:\/\/consortiumnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/Immanuel_Kant_portrait_c1790.jpg 960w\" alt=\"\" width=\"449\" height=\"500\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-135159\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p id=\"caption-attachment-135159\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Kant. (Unknown, possibly Elisabeth von St\u00e4gemann \u2014 Anton Graff school)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>As [Erich] Fromm and others have persuasively argued, a fear of freedom is now prevalent in our societies. Most people are frightened to death of freedom, and when I say \u201cfrightened to death\u201d I mean this literally: They die to their lives, to their own sources of vitality, leading lives that amount to subsistence survival, or \u201cquiet desperation,\u201d as [\u00a0 ] Thoreau had it.<\/p>\n<p>The prevalence of ideologies in our societies seems to me a point requiring no elaboration. And the appeal of ideologies, of course, is that they require belief but not thought or judgment \u2014 or, indeed, reason. And so we find that state of self-imposed immaturity everywhere we look.<\/p>\n<p>Ideology, conformity: These are the shelters within which many people, and I would say most, indulge their fundamental fear of freedom. They both derive from what Kant called \u201cguidance from another,\u201d and this implies a certain kind of submission to one or another manifestation of power, as Kant surely meant to suggest.<\/p>\n<p>There is an infinite variety of these manifestations in our lives today, and how very, very dependent upon them are most of us. We are dependent, in other words, on authorities above us to know what to think\u2014\u201cthe irksome work\u201d\u2014and equally \u00a0what <em>not<\/em> to think and altogether how to live and <em>not<\/em> live.<\/p>\n<p>How deeply committed are we, to make my point another way, to our Age of Unreason. This age unburdens us of the responsibilities that come with freedom, with the capacity to discern, with the duty to exercise autonomous judgment.<\/p>\n<p>All that is taken care of by those forms of power that hover above and around us to such an extent we internalize them. In this state one need not think, as Kant wrote 241 years ago. We need not today change a syllable of this passage. And it is when we no longer think that power grows ever more independent from us, ever more sequestered and, so, ever more corrupt.<\/p>\n<p>So do we tumble ever more inevitably into our Age of Unreason.<\/p>\n<p>The Age of Reason was inspired by the scientific advances of the 16<sup>th<\/sup> and 17<sup>th<\/sup> centuries, and this raised a concern among Enlightenment thinkers such as Kant and, indeed, Paine, who was a Deist.<\/p>\n<p>If scientific laws governed our world, what would become of our morality, our defense of such values as justice, our commitment to, in my terms, the human cause? Where would reason, exercised by the individual, untethered by all [that] the Enlightenment would leave behind in the name of freedom, lead us?<\/p>\n<p>To unalloyed materialism, to indifference toward others, to narrowness of mind, to narcissism, to hedonism, to nihilism?<\/p>\n<p>Reason without morality: At the risk of reductive thinking this was a commonly shared anxiety.<\/p>\n<p>And how well we can see now that this concern was justified. Reason was intended to be the agent of human emancipation. In our time reason subjects us to a tyranny of systems, technologies, dehumanized scientific management procedures, and power elites that know no ethics, no morality (broadly defined), no anything other than their own imposition, enforcement, and reproduction.<\/p>\n<p>John Ralston Saul, a Canadian writer I hold in high regard, published a book on this phenomenon in 1992. He called it <em>Voltaire\u2019s Bastards<\/em>, which he subtitled <em>The Dictatorship of Reason in the West<\/em>. Ralston Saul argued that the whole of life in the West has been disfigured by the perversion of reason.<\/p>\n<p>Reason no longer has anything to do with human emancipation: It has become a device by way of which elites \u2014 political, economic, technocratic, cultural \u2014 exert surreptitious control over the fabric and direction of our societies, our public discourse \u2014 and, indeed, our ability even to see the world around us \u2014 and so our ability to reason.<\/p>\n<p>This is what I mean by our Age of Unreason. At the core of it we find what I took many years ago to calling \u201cthe irrationality of hyperrationality.\u201d To put my case I hope not too simply, everything makes sense if we take matters strictly on the terms of their internal frame of reference and remain in the eternal present within which the corruption of reason maroons us.<\/p>\n<p>If we manage to step outside this construct \u2014 if we find our way out by means of authentic reason, I mean to say \u2014 very little makes any sense at all. This is what I mean by the irrationality of hyperrationality.<\/p>\n<p>In <em>One\u2013Dimensional Man<\/em> [Herbert] Marcuse wrote of \u201ctechnological rationality.\u201d I think my \u201cirrationality of hyperrationality\u201d approximates Marcuse\u2019s thought, \u201cThe totalitarian universe of technological rationality,\u201d he wrote, \u201cis the latest transmutation of the idea of Reason.\u201d He wrote then of \u201cthe process by which logic became the logic of domination.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>This is another way of saying what I mean.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_135160\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/consortiumnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/Unnamed_herbert_marcuse.jpg\" class=\"image-anchor\" ><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-large wp-image-135160\" src=\"https:\/\/consortiumnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/Unnamed_herbert_marcuse-1000x713.jpg\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 860px) 100vw, 860px\" srcset=\"https:\/\/consortiumnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/Unnamed_herbert_marcuse-1000x713.jpg 1000w, https:\/\/consortiumnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/Unnamed_herbert_marcuse-500x356.jpg 500w, https:\/\/consortiumnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/Unnamed_herbert_marcuse-768x548.jpg 768w, https:\/\/consortiumnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/Unnamed_herbert_marcuse-260x185.jpg 260w, https:\/\/consortiumnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/Unnamed_herbert_marcuse-160x114.jpg 160w, https:\/\/consortiumnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/Unnamed_herbert_marcuse.jpg 1024w\" alt=\"\" width=\"860\" height=\"613\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-135160\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p id=\"caption-attachment-135160\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Herbert Marcuse giving a lecture in Berlin, 1967. (Isaactrius\/Wikimedia Commons)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><strong>Reason Before Belief<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I want now to historicize our Age of Unreason, and to do so I reference another book, one that has meant a lot to me over the course of many years.<\/p>\n<p>Max Horkheimer published <em>Eclipse of Reason<\/em> in 1947. In it he made the case that reason had been, by the time he brought out his book, \u201cinstrumentalized.\u201d This is to say reason is no longer a means of understanding the world around us but is instead applied to justifying and achieving one\u2019s objectives. Horkheimer called this \u201csubjective reason,\u201d as against objective reason.<\/p>\n<p>Going back to the Greeks, objective reason requires that thought be conducted without reference to the desirability or otherwise of its conclusions. Reason should determine belief and not the other way around, as Socrates taught us all:\u00a0 To allow belief to determine reason is the danger implicit in subjective reason. And, staying with Horkheimer\u2019s term, subjective reason lies at the very heart of our Age of Unreason.<\/p>\n<p>To illustrate the point in the most commonplace terms, what do we mean when we say, \u201cThat sounds reasonable,\u201d or \u201cThat stands to reason,\u201d or simply \u201cThat makes sense\u201d? We mean, one or another way, that for your reasoning to be valid it must serve you in the achievement of your objectives. It is not a big leap to recognize that it is Voltaire\u2019s illegitimate offspring who have instrumentalized reason in this way, just as Ralson Saul argued.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Cold War \u2018Certainty\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>We should pause to think about Horkheimer\u2019s publication date, two years after the 1945 victories.<\/p>\n<p>Big Science, as we now call it, had begun to rise in the 1930s, and with it came a preoccupation, especially evident in America, with total certainty and total security \u2014 neither of which is ever even remotely possible. If ever there was an agent more purely dedicated to the irrationality of hyperrationality than Big Science, I mean to say, I cannot think of what it may be.<\/p>\n<p>By the end of World War II this preoccupation with certainty and security more or less dictated American foreign and military policies. Nineteen forty-seven marked, of course, the start of the Cold War, and this turned what had been a preoccupation in scientific and policy circles \u2014 total certainty, total security, the elimination of all risk \u2014 into a national obsession.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Authoritarian Reason<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>To finish with Horkheimer, he associated the corruption of reason with the increasing seclusion of power and a tendency toward authoritarianism in the Western democracies. In response he argued that reason must again be exercised in the cause of fundamentally moral and just societies and altogether the cause of human emancipation.<\/p>\n<p>In Marcuse\u2019s terms this required of us what he termed a \u201cGreat Refusal,\u201d a rejection of the dehumanization of humanity by way of what he called \u201ctechnologies of pacification.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>It may be impossible, or mere folly, to assign a date as the beginning of our Age of Unreason, but I propose, with a view to all I have very sketchily described, the mid\u201320<sup>th<\/sup> century. It was then Big Science and the Cold War converged in the unhappiest of combinations to assign ideology, on one hand, and technology on the other, the primacy that will be evident now to all of us.<\/p>\n<p>Ideology and technology: Are these not our bane? Both have devastated our common capacities of discernment, judgment, and altogether our ability to think and reason, while encouraging \u2014 going back to Kant \u2014 our immature over-dependence on various forms of power and authority, which manifest ever more diffusely and remotely.<\/p>\n<p>What Horkheimer and others detected in the 1940s\u00a0 seems to me so entrenched, so woven into the fabric of our societies as to mark out our time as distinct from what preceded it. Seventy-eight years after Horkheimer published his book, what he saw as an eclipse seems to me the dark dawn of another age.<\/p>\n<p>We in the West have suffered a radical collapse of meaning in this age. We have lost, I think decisively, that connection between reason and morality the 18<sup>th<\/sup> century saw as essential. We have decisively lost our idea of the commonweal as the anchor from which reason will make its case.<\/p>\n<p>We have lost, in other words, any kind of larger notion of a shared <em>telos<\/em>, an ultimate object or aim. These are casualties of our lapse into hedonism and nihilism, and, among the power elites \u2014 to borrow again the phrase of C. Wright Mills \u2014 a preoccupation of power for the sake of power, power as the ultimate measure and vessel of value.<\/p>\n<p>As we gather here, and it is always a delight for me to be with you for exactly what I will now say, we are living, breathing proof that there is a way forward from our Age of Unreason, a thought I assume I do not have to explain.<\/p>\n<p>Ages come and expire, and so will this one. I may be stretching Marcuse\u2019s term, but I do not think by much, when I suggest we must consider the value of habitual refusal as a very important means of making our way in our age.<\/p>\n<p>I don\u2019t think we can proceed with <em>our reasoning<\/em> with any notion that the project is one of retrieval or restoration. There is no going back.<\/p>\n<p>New sensibilities and a new consciousness are in history preface to great change. And so we have to think in terms of a new consciousness such that, with our faculties of reason and judgment, we can see the problems and crises of our time as they are, and with no \u201cguidance from another,\u201d to go back to Kant once more, no reference to any higher or remote or powerful authority simply because such an authority is above us or remote from us or more powerful than we are, and with no presumption that what I call the \u201cwhat-is\u201d of our civilization is rational or sensible simply because it is the \u201cwhat-is\u201d we see out our windows.<\/p>\n<p>Equally, we have to find for ourselves a new language, reminding ourselves as we do that the primary function of language is not speech but thought. We will need this new language as we think anew \u2014 as we reattach reason to the human cause.<\/p>\n<p>The late Robert Parry was a journalist of impeccable integrity and founded, 30 years ago this year, <strong><em>Consortium News<\/em>,<\/strong> where I write regularly and whose editor, Joe Lauria, is among us this year. Bob once memorably remarked, on the occasion of accepting one of his numerous awards, \u201cI don\u2019t care what the truth is. I just care what the truth is.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>This is an argument \u2014 succinct and elegant all at once \u2014 for a return to the Socratic. It is an argument for objective reason, an argument against the blight of subjective reason as we are borrowing this term from Horkheimer.<\/p>\n<p>It is a protest. It is a great refusal, it is an argument against our Endarkenment.<\/p>\n<p>And this is the argument we need to make, just as we make it as we gather here.<\/p>\n<p><em><strong>______________________________________________<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>Remarks delivered in late August at the annual congress of <\/em>Mut zur Ethik<em>, which translates (a little awkwardly) as \u201cthe courage of one\u2019s ethics.\u201d This group gathers in Z\u00fcrich\u2019s environs each summer to hear a variety of speakers consider a selected theme. This year\u2019s theme was \u201cReason and Humanity.\u201d\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\"><em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/09\/Patrick-Lawrence.png\" ><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-219647\" src=\"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/09\/Patrick-Lawrence.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"100\" height=\"100\" \/><\/a> Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the <\/em>International Herald Tribune<em>, is a columnist, essayist, author and lecturer. His most recent book is\u00a0<\/em>Time No Longer: Americans after the American Century<em>.\u00a0His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been permanently censored.\u00a0His website: <\/em><a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.patricklawrence.us\/\" ><strong><em>Patrick\u00a0Lawrence<\/em><\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n<p><a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/consortiumnews.com\/2025\/09\/22\/patrick-lawrence-our-age-of-unreason\/\" >Go to Original \u2013 consortiumnews.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>22 Sep 2025\u00a0&#8211; We have lost that connection between reason and morality \u2026.\u00a0We have decisively lost our idea of the commonweal as the anchor from which reason will make its case.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":219647,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[1924,804,1934,730,2253,307,2637,802],"class_list":["post-303690","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-in-focus","tag-authoritarianism","tag-belief","tag-enlightenment","tag-ethics","tag-herbert-marcuse","tag-humanity","tag-intelligence","tag-morality"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303690","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=303690"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303690\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":303694,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303690\/revisions\/303694"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/219647"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=303690"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=303690"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=303690"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}