The name of my blog, \”passionate reason,\” has a strange, personal origin – and for that reason I hesitated to use it.
The phrase came about in July 2001, during the height of the Bush administration, right before I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. I wrote an emotional, rambling essay or \”manifesto,\” thinking I had made important discoveries about the meaning of life; I thought I was writing brilliantly.
I was actually having a severe manic episode, although I didn\’t know that at the time. I had had one before, in high school, and even been hospitalized, but no one had known what to call it.
I knew, when I was writing, that there was something wrong with me. I had not slept in days, my thoughts were racing, and I had lost my appetite. I couldn\’t concentrate to read or watch T.V.
But I was obsessed with an idea, which was this: Why are passion and reason always assumed to be mutually exclusive? There seemed to be many people who had passion, but no reason – but why were so few people passionate about reason? And why couldn\’t the two coexist?
About a month later, after I had recovered, I reread what I had written. It was awful – the rambling product of a mind falling apart. The irony that I would be writing about the importance of being reasonable when I had completely left reason behind was not lost on me.
Embarrassed, I set the notebook with the essay aside, to take out later only as a way to see just how mentally unraveled I had been, and how far I had come.
Eleven years later, I read it again. And despite the over-blown self-importance of the writing itself, the idea itself was not all bad – or even really new.
William Butler Yeats may have had this idea in mind when he wrote, “The best lack all conviction, but the worst are full of passionate intensity.” That certainly seemed to be true during the Bush administration, when torture was no longer unthinkable, and policy was dictated by “gut feelings” about the need to invade Iraq.
We have come a long way since then, but the observation by Yeats is still true. Right now, most Americans support gay marriage, but the people against it are so angry and driven, so passionate, that there appears to be more against it than there really are. The fervent opposition against health care reform that will help millions of people with preexisting conditions to get health care coverage is loud, fiery and fear driven.
It sometimes seems as if the more irrational an idea is, the more passion is needed to uphold it. The reason why “the best lack all conviction” is that the people with passionate intensity are so scary.
Eleven years later, I have made my peace with the idea of passionate reason. It may not be the meaning of life, as I had originally thought – but I do think a world in which passion and reason worked together, side by side, instead of competing, would be a better world.