Two Masks

I read two recent articles in the 'New Yorker,' that have been rattling around in my head; one about Max Weber and the Protestant Work Ethic, the other about Arthur Conan Doyle and his love/hate relationship with his creation: Sherlock Holmes. Weber studied the mad, alienating, mechanism we've unleashed on the world called capitalism. He tells us science and technology are 'instruments of disenchantment.' He makes the case that mindless accumulation of money, is the soul of the capitalist machine, and that Protestantism or Puritanism with it's belief in rewards in the here-after, made it all possible. 'Idle hands are the Devil's playground.' It became 'virtuous,' to accumulate money beyond what we need as human beings. We gave up our humanity to this mad, mindless mechanism that ultimately has no master, that will gobble up all the resources of the world in a mad quest for MORE. This 'rational' system of trading goods and services leads to supreme irrationality.

Conan Doyle created a character, Holmes, who was the supreme rationalist, the odd quirky human being (a drug addict, a musician), who could see details others couldn't, who could make the deductive leap, who could deduce 'what happened.' A man who could explain the the events of the world. Conan Doyle came to loath this character, (he tried to kill him off, but his fans demanded he bring him back) and ultimately Doyle himself recoiled from the reality of the world of the rational. Doyle thought that World War I was a 'rational,' war, but when the horror of the war became apparent, (his son was one of it's victims) he recoiled into a more mystical frame of mind. Ultimately, Doyle takes the road of rationality as far as he can go, and comes to the verdant land of the irrational.

It seems 'rationality,' is just another mask we wear, we can just as easily don the mask of 'irrationality.' Most likely we wear both. The 'world,' carries on within us and without us.