Correct Diagnosis, Questionable Prognosis

Back in 1980, Brand Blanshard wrote the following:

If the problems that now confront and divide Americans -- problems of race, sex, crime, the environment, overpopulation -- cannot be solved by rational methods, they cannot be solved at all. Only disciplined and reasonable minds can deal with them adequately, and then only with the support of a public that can recognize reasonableness when they see it. Yet reasonableness is a virtue that lacks public appeal. It is recognized as a virtue, but it remains to most men the dullest of the virtues. It quickens no pulses, as courage does, even wrongheaded courage. Is there any chance of its achieving the place it deserves in general recognition?

Probably not. The old Adam in man, the passions that make him behave irrationally, such as anger, cupidity, and fear, are far older in the race and more firmly embedded in human nature than the reflectiveness that might control them. But such control is a matter of degree, and it is helped or retarded as the image of the reasonable man rises or falls in the general estimation. Adam Smith shrewdly remarked that "the great secret of education is to direct vanity to proper objects," and if he is right, what is important here is that people should come to pin their self-respect to being reasonable. This relocation of pride does not seem to be an impossible dream.

Not impossible, surely; but possibilities are cheap.