Neurologi-kulturen

"...there are books on your brain and music, books on your brain and storytelling, books that tell you why your brain makes you want to join the Army, and books that explain why you wish that Bar Refaeli were in the barracks with you. The neurological turn has become what the “cultural” turn was a few decades ago: the all-purpose non-explanation explanation of everything. Thirty years ago, you could feel loftily significant by attaching the word “culture” to anything you wanted to inspect: we didn’t live in a violent country, we lived in a “culture of violence”; we didn’t have sharp political differences, we lived in a “culture of complaint”; and so on. In those days, Time, taking up the American pursuit of pleasure, praised Christopher Lasch’s “The Culture of Narcissism”; now Time has a cover story on happiness and asks whether we are “hardwired” to pursue it."

"Humanism not only has survived each of these sequential demystifications; they have made it stronger by demonstrating the power of rational inquiry on which humanism depends. Every time the world becomes less mysterious, nature becomes less frightening, and the power of the mind to grasp reality more sure. A constant reduction of mystery to matter, a belief that we can name natural rules we didn’t make—that isn’t scientism. That’s science."

Klarsynt artikel till förmån för den aldrig-avslutade-insikten-om-människan, och förbi alla självgoda förenklingar, neurologiska eller andra. Läs mer ur The New Yorker här. 
Och så har Håkan Lindgren gett sig på det besläktade ämnet rationalitet, i en artikel i GP.