Us humans think we're pretty damn smart. Ever since the enlightenment we've been convinced that unlike the animals, we're guided by some kind of precision tool in the search for The Truth - namely, 'reason'. In this high technology age it's a belief that's more engrained than ever. If you start telling people that their most dearly held ideas are, nine times out of ten, based on complete guff and nonsense they have a funny habit of getting upset.
Every child knows that by asking the question 'why?' five times in a row you can destroy any argument. This line of questioning inevitably ends up with the answer "Just because" - and usually a smacked bottom into the bargain. However, question your own most deeply held beliefs and you'll quickly find that they're pretty much irrational.
You think you're right on abortion/euthanasia/the Israeli-Palestine conflict? You're probably not. You don't believe in God? It's no doubt because you weren't brought up in a religious household/you're reacting against your own religious nutcase parents. Think you can prove that racism is clearly, categorically wrong? You've obviously not had enough discussions with that rare breed of racists who are actually capable of stringing a sentence together to defend their position. At base, racists simply believe that some races are intrinsically of less value than others. The rest of us (those of us with opposable thumbs, that is) believe that all humans are of equal worth.
There you have it. There are two sides to the argument - humans equal in value versus humans of different value. Rights of the unborn child versus rights of the mother. What determines which side we come down on depends on many things - how we were brought up, our formative experiences. Reason doesn't come into it. These issues simply can't be objectively proved either way.
Though not a religious person myself, I've nothing but admiration for real-life believers. At least they've got the decency to admit that their convictions can't stand up to sustained logical analysis. No one really believes that they can actually prove the existence of God, the resurrection of Jesus, or reincarnation. If you could, then the whole point of religion would be undermined. The thing that religions are based upon - faith - is the very thing that lends religions their power. Just like waking people up on a Sunday morning to 'tell them the good news about God,' it's based on irrationality. The great Scottish philosopher David Hume summed it up when he wrote that 'Reason is the slave of the passions.' Being a helpless hypochondriac himself, Hume knew what he was on about.
This being the football season, we're witnessing an explosion in terms of highly emotional displays of irrationality. It doesn't take much thinking about to realise that siding with one country instead of another is a fairly irrational thing to do. After all, no one ever asked me whether or not I wanted to be born English. I've no more reason to support 11 below-average intelligence Englishmen running round a field than I have to support the French.
In response, I've taken it upon myself to display my own fairly irrational ideas. Personally, I dislike football. If you look at the situation objectively, there's no reason for me to dislike football any more than any other equally pointless sport. There must be many other games played and enjoyed by gawping wife-beaters, utterly incapable of communicating with other members of their species without drinking ten pints of watery larger as a prelude to an orgy of barely-veiled homoeroticism; lobster-red, shaven-headed miscreants whose only blessing is a functional autism which prevents them from taking their own lives in an instinctive act of evolutionary kindness. Don't ask me why, but it's football that gets me.
I've even taken this irrationality to a new level by actively supporting the team that England happens to be playing against. I was overcome with a strange heart-warming glow when I found out that England had lost 2-1 to France. All I could think of was those thousands of England fans incapacitated by grief, barely able to wipe the lager-dribble from their own blubbery lips and quickly turning upon one another in a hyper-violent reenactment of Lord of the Flies - albeit one in which every man-child protagonist resembles the character Piggy.
I kid you not, this image will keep me warm at night for many, many weeks to come. Irrational, I know. But that's just the way we humans are.
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