Question

Please respond to the following article below:

The Edges of Reason - The New York Times

Answer 1

The Edges of reason -The New York Times : Here the imagination of a child is described in phases that the child lives in several worlds . He catageorises the world , The first world was the normal one where people had professional degrees & followed all the instructions strictly , as described the world has many faces of people ie the politicians who rule the world by a solid- seeming secular, liberal consensus thinking ,imagining that was certain& what was true.

The other group of people was of religious thinkers , who gave their thoughts & wisdom by the quotations of religious personalities, the words of Bible where people sought healing and spoke in tongues and prophesied, experiencing the divine as palpably as people in the secular world experienced,

The second was the world of medicine personalities who explored the world of alternative medicine and what was then still described, disparagingly, as “health food” — the shabby little pre-Whole ,the way to have medication & scientfic bases the world of alternative medicine a” The shabby little pre-Whole Foods stores selling organic vegetables and carob and tofu, the chiropractic offices smelling of essential oils, the vegetarian restaurants with New Ages

Then was the world of strangers --- which explored for reasons of chronic illness, religious interest and some of the roving curiosity that defined my parents’ generation at its best.

Another phase was of writters & educationist - The books written to defend Reason against its enemies — be they the populist right, the identity-politics ,Pinker blames for impeding civilization’s march toward ever-greater wealth and health and peace.

Next was the phase where his imagination took him to the world of the material progress modern science & commerce that have delivered & propagandistic treatment of the past. Pinker defends a selectively edited Enlightenment that conforms neatly to his style of liberal politics & absolves his idealized version of the modern project of all imperial , eugenic and centralizing cruelties, and all the genocides and persecutions justified in Reason’s name.

He explains the anti -emprical dark period where lies the oddity If these worlds are truely experience these worlds, & contrasted them with the normal world of high-minded liberal secularism, it was the charismatic-religious and “health food” regions where people were most empirical, & least inclined to meekly submit to authority, and most determined to reason independently & keep trying things until they worked.

The worlds’ inhabitants were a self-selected population who had either experienced something transformative or suffered something debilitating and been told by the official consensus,

Every human life is a science experiment, but the way we choose to react to the assumptions which are tested defines the real scope of our curiosity. If you refuse any non-F.D.A.-blessed treatment for chronic illness because there’s no controlled study proving that it works, or have a religious experience and pre-emptively dismiss it as an illusion without seeing what happens if you pray,

There is some quantum of unreason that needs an outlet when reason’s power grows.But when people & societies are genuinely curious about everything, including things happening in their bodies & their consciousness in more speculative realms.