Why are Americans and their business culture so irrational?

What I find so strange and frustrating about American customer service people in general is that they are sometimes helpful if they are well informed, but they don't actually think. What I mean by that is something like reasoning. What I mean by that is drawing conclusions that are inferences from other information, whether factual or hypothetical, in order to understand realities or possibilities that the factual data itself does not answer. Americans mostly do not know how to do this, because they never learned. Our schools do not teach it, and the information sources that most people access do not make any use of it. In a society that is in any sense democratic, there will be some use of rational thinking in discourses that take place in the 'public sphere', like in journalism, or even social media. There it is very useful, as it is in thinking clearly about anything, but its use is relatively rare, in fact, and is little remarked.

Our popular ideas of 'science' do not include it. 'Science' is supposed to be a kind of machine for producing knowledge in the form of true statements; they are 'known' to be true by authority. (Much the same as religious beliefs, and most political ones, though in these cases the authority references may be a set of ideas serving as principles rather than only persons exercising authority either because of institutional recognition thereof or some kind of charisma.). 'Science' is a machine for producing recognizably true statements purporting to give the 'facts' in a particular domain. Only that is not what is. Science is actually a practice of inquiry, and it produces not so much facts, like journalism, as theories and paradigms, which are ways of organizing the things in some domain in the world and interpreting what, how, and why they can be said to be as they are. But few people besides scientists know that. That American technological research is historically very tied up with military contracts certainly does not help in this regard. (In contrast, the French educational system is largely driven by the needs of public school teaching. Because of this, the world of ideas in France retains a strong at least theoretical connection to the tasks of citizens of living their lives and understanding and participating in the social world, and the requirement of high school graduation that one be able to read philosophical texts and make arguments about them in carefully-argued essays is linked to this.). The common way of thinking of science as knowledge-production treats information as a commodity that people want to ‘have’. Knowledge then is not so much produced through practices of inquiry found suitable for this purpose, as it is consumed, with its production process ‘hidden’ since this is a concern only of experts — in a society ruled by managers and professionals who are ‘experts’ in their special field, assigned the social authority to rule on what is ‘true’ in it. More popular inquiries are undertaken by artists in the arts, but despite the enormous popularity of the mass-reproduced arts of popular culture, the objects produced and consumed are mostly only enjoyed, not discussed.

The only institution in our society that normally values and insists on the use of rational discourse or any semblance thereof is the system of higher education. Yet even there it is not the highest or main value. In America, and rather uniquely, 'leadership' is the most important value promoted by our higher educational system; creativity the second most, and the only real norm of thinking. The purpose of that system is to reproduce the roles of professional and managerial labor, in which reason has a secondary role in guiding efforts to realize an organization's purposes (usually either making money for owners and shareholders, or satisfying the organization's stated 'mission', or even both).

Interestingly, I have found that the exclusion of the use of reason in conversations with American professionals is so total that it even applies, most often, when those professionals are themselves university employees, including as professors.

When I was a student at, and lived in, Berkeley, I noticed that people who obviously had been educated at the university or come there from one like it would, if they were exercising some kind of managerial authority, generally be able to give an intelligible reason for whatever they were doing, including a decision that I myself might feel adversely affected by and want to argue about. But you couldn't really argue with them, and in this they resembled most Americans.

I actually think that the problem here is partly a misconception of what the use of reason is and how it works (and not only what it is good for, which is to enhance the success and usefulness of anything that is done with any choice and deliberation). Most people think being rational is being able to give a reason for what you say or do. But actually it is more than that; there is a further step that must be taken. The reason given has to appear and be defensible as a good enough one, since that is how every audience thinking in terms of reasons will evaluate it. The reason given must therefore itself be part of the space of reasons. One could object that this leads only to an infinite regress, and therefore parents are right who tell their small kids harassing them by asking “why?”, finally, "because I say so." But actually the infinite regress is not the real problem.

What is, is that reasons depend on warrants. Considering warrants, which make some kinds of reasons acceptable as such (while ruling out others), is reasoning about the reasons people give. The practice of using reason to think turns on this. Hegel called this “Spirit”; some, modern, cultures, he thought, had begun to function in such a way that people understand that people not only can, or should, give explanations that (appear to) justify what they say and do, but these reasons themselves are up for grabs, and must themselves be justified. There are, then, rational persons and rational societies or communities, and these are those in which people understand that the justifications they give to explain why they think and do as they do, must themselves be justified. “Spirit” for Hegel is the culture of such thinking. Note that this cannot be limited to finding the best solutions to the particular problems faced by an individual or a business organization; such would be a restricted use of reason, which should be unrestricted. Not because people should be giving reasons for what they think all the time; that would be absurd, since people sleep, eat, make love, and do many things without engaging in rational thought. Thus, in many such domains, a ‘Buddhist’ approach to doing what one does makes perfect sense; this essentially either removes verbalized ‘thoughts’ from the perceptual field, which (as in Zen) is privileged as such, or treats them as perceptions that are particularly contingent and so might usefully be abandoned). No, the claim about reason is about those things that already appear or are presented as reasons for doing or saying something (the two kinds of things that can be explained or justified with reasons: this distinguishes action from behavior, and propositional claims from other uses of language, such as commands, which, interestingly, were given a central role in 20th century English-language philosophy). Rational people are those who treat the explanations people give to justify their statements and actions as themselves needing to be explained. Reason’s object is reasons themselves. Reasoning is not merely the art of giving plausible reasons (perhaps so that your five-year old daughter or employee will shut up, finally), but the practice of treating reasons rationally. The space of reasons is not an impossible space in which everything that exists or happens must be up for grabs, but a discursive space in which whatever is presented as a candidate belief (which is a claim that some statement or action is correct, meaning true or right) is or can be inquired about as to its rational justification.

Reasoning, like most practices, has rules of the game, without which the semblance of engaging in the activity fails to justify use of the concept; as in many practices, the rules are not arbitrary, but intrinsic to the activity, and can be seen to follow from an examination of what those who engage in the practice are trying to accomplish (that is, what kind of activity the name ‘reason’ names). The traditional name for the rules of rational discourse is ‘logic’; every logic is a set of rules of truth-preserving inferences, such that if you believe ‘p’ (where this is some statement or ‘proposition’) and you are rational, you will also believe ‘q’ because the truth of q ‘follows from’ that of p. The existence of logic depends on there being intrinsic consequential links between the meaning and possible truth of some objects of possible belief and others. It is ‘objective’ in the same sense that the rules of numerical counting are; we say that someone who ‘counts’ from 1 to 4 by ‘saying’ 1, 2, 9, and 4, as if this is a meaningful sequence, has not understood the meaning and use of the practice of ‘counting’, and one who placed numbers in that sequence and thought they were going on in the same way as someone who counts 1, 2, 3, 4, would be unable to use counting in the way we normally do, and so might say that there are 9 things of this kind when we know there are 3. Then we might say, “But then what do you mean?” and we would find that he means something other than what those or us who are counting correctly would mean. (I expect, as I am sure you do, especially if like me you live in New York City, that our current mayoral vote counters will count following the rules of counting and not some arbitrary semblance of or replacement for them. I expect that for the same reason that I expect poll workers to enforce rules that prevent voter fraud, but also for an additional reason: if they claim to be counting ballots, I want them to count in a way that follows the rules intrinsic to the concept of counting, because that practice, which was already in existence, is what we must expect to be followed in order to produce a fair result; here, fairness is so understood as to depend on the concept of counting, because that is a procedure that seems appropriate to, and indeed part of, our idea of democratic voting.)
Now, a rational person does not differ from an irrational person in doing mental deductions while riding in a bicycle race or having sex, but in the kind of answer he or she will give if asked (presumably later) why he does so. Even mathematicians (usually) sleep, eat, and engage in other aspects of everyday living much like you and I; we only fault badly argued mathematical demonstrations when that is the practice one is pretending to engage in. I say this because there is a common prejudice against ‘rationality’ that makes just this absurd assumption, thinking rationalists do not, for example, have faith in those they love. Even a theologian’s faith is rational if he replies with a seemingly good reason when asked why he maintains the faith he does; he is not an irrationalist if he sometimes does things people of faith do without thinking all the while, but only if he claims to hold a belief that he cannot or will not justify. Religious people often read poems that are used as prayers, and poetry generally is neither specifically rational nor anti-rational; but if he says “I pray to contact God even though I don’t believe that he in any sense exists,” that is something we can reproach him for. Thus, the only kind of behavior that can rightly be called ‘irrational’ is giving a bad reason, or no reason, when a reason is mentioned or called for. The mark of irrational people is that they either justify their conduct with reasons that are plainly irrelevant or bad ones (so that anyone can see that they do not justify the matter at hand, and so fail as reasons) or who refuse to justify it. People in the former category are poor at thinking; those in the latter are authoritarians. Thus the one problem is one of governance and good schools, or other institutions that are formative of the manner of thinking of the populace; while the other problem is a political one, and may call not for better schooling but revolution.

A warrant is a proposition that states (or would state but is implied, as is often the case) that a reason or piece of evidence given to justify another claim is the kind of reason or evidence that justifies claims of this kind. Arguments pursued rationally do not normally end in an impossible regress; this is because at some point the interlocutors will probably find that they agree about some principle given or implied as warrant. Then it will perhaps seem obvious. (This is the good news for parents of inquisitive five-year-olds, and it disproves the sense of a common legend.).

If this were not the case, no one could ever really persuade anyone of anything, but then too, it can easily be shown, the person making the claim would not really believe it; indeed, if he is rational, he would not even make the claim, because claims that cannot be supported by reasons that seem to justify them normally do not make good enough sense on their face. For there is often at least an intrinsic connection between the meaning of a statement and the possibility that it can be justified with evidence or arguments; it would be a funny kind of claim that could not be but that many of us would believe (to be true) even so, because our concept of truth depends on some kind of verifiability, and our concept of the meaning of statements is dependent in part on the possibility of their being true, because a statement of something that could not be true would not normally be phrased as a statement; statements to the effect that this is that, or that anything ‘is’ or ‘is the case’ are implicitly, if redundantly, also claim that this being that is ‘true’. If I said that ‘X is F’ but I did not mean by that that that statement is true, then I would be using the statement in an unusual way, like in a theater play perhaps, and not in order to state, or say, something. Part of all this proves is that when we think that something is or has a certain property or character, we are implicitly making a claim, and one we take ourselves to be wiling to back up with a reason, which is either a bit of evidence or another, perhaps more obviously true, claim. Anyone who ever says anything in the sense of something existing, or happening, or being in a certain way, or having a certain property, etc., is implicitly offering to give a reason for believing what he says is the case, and implicitly knows that such reasons may or may not prove to ‘work’. And that is why so many things can be discussed, and ‘Spirit’ in Hegel’s sense exists. It’s something we all do, but it can be done more or less well or badly, and most people, especially in America, do it badly.

We do not usually hold beliefs that are arbitrary in the sense of not being entailed by other beliefs that ground and warrant them. If such beliefs existed and were the norm, we could expect a society of people who understand this to be liberal but not democratic, because people would want only to be able to go on doing and believing as they like, but there would no meaningful way that any actions, statements, decisions or behaviors that could be thought about and so decided, could be discussed. People wouldn't even discuss them internally, in conversations held silently with themselves. They would just arbitrarily behave in certain ways, and their opinions and style of thinking about or elaborating them would only express the arbitrarily chosen, unjustifiable but not needing to be justified, mental state. So people do think rationally in fact, but most Americans do not know that they do, do not want to, and do not think about how to do this well, which they could only do if they thought it important.

The American professional world operates according to a certain image of the mind and its functions and capabilities. It can be productive and therefore creative. It can involve social competence and emotional intelligence, and consequently promote productivity in works groups and relationships with people, including consumers. In line with this latter, it is increasingly psychological, either genuinely or as a kind of rhetorical reflex ("I understand how frustrating you must find this; please be advised that I am 'owning' your problem and will try to help you as best I can, as we want our customers to be satisfied."). So our ways of working and thinking in the sense of using our cognitive and linguistic capacities to get things done (the universal object of business, whether capitalist, non-profit, cooperative, socialist, governmental-bureaucratic, or whatever else) are: creative (in problem-solving), responsible (leadership-oriented), accommodating (to people's affects and communicational styles, at least in theory), and ideally well-informed and competent. But they are not normally rational.

Active involvement in 'the space of reasons' by 'playing the game of giving and asking for reasons' is a way of using language in interpersonal contexts to get things done not only more efficiently and at the lowest cost, but also more effectively, with the highest satisfaction, is a way of going about things that are done socially, with others, that can be easily shown to be unavoidable. But it is not emphasized in American society and culture, people who speak of it seem ridiculous to most people (unless they are professors, who are 'subjects presumed to know' something or other so that they can give this knowledge to their students), and most people have no competence in it because they have never been taught it, and that is because our society and its economy, curiously, do not have much need of it. Of course, in some professions (law, medicine, business management, and others) it is indispensable, though almost always in a limited way (for instance, lawyers differ from philosophers in thinking on the basis of assumptions that they do not consider open to question, since the law is the law, and medicine and other professions are similar).

The social role that is missing here is the only one that ties every particular situation into a general framework, where the good (justice, happiness) can be pursued for its own sake, where there is no constraint external to the use of language to arrive at the most 'true' opinion or solution to a problem, and there are no concerns that are merely particular, so that one can meaningfully say, "This is how I think about the matter because I am a member of my profession or endeavor or faction, and I will therefore think no further about it." This social role is that of the citizen. Citizens are those subjects (of states and societies, with their 'power' and related dynamics) who are considered 'constitutive' of their polity (the community that the state claims to represent) and at the same time are also individuals with their own lives and the needs, desires, interests, purposes, etc. proper to them. Thus, the role of council member or shareholder is distinct from that of citizen.

Rational discourse is a way of mediating social relationships and solving problems that enables any concern or matter to be taken account of, and that enforces a consistency between what is considered and what is 'entailed' by it. Reason turns on a logic, which is a way of attending to inferences wherein one thing entails or implies another. This gives some consistency and predictability to what is done. And so it is a medium of reaching decisions about what is to be done. Reason lends itself to democracy, because reason and democracy have in common a certain generic character, such that what is relevant is what is there. They meet on the grounds of the Anyone and Anything.

It is the Anyone more than the Everyone, because the choice of what objects matter is arbitrary. Being arbitrary, it is always up for grabs.

There are other ways of making decisions that do not depend on reason. One would be a democracy of the Everyone, where those who count are asked what they want. Then the decision is made or legitimated by the sovereign character of the constitutive subjects, who choose their objects of concern based merely on the accidental character of the choice itself. Circularity reveals a foundation: Will wills what it wills. A vote that takes place after a discussion, but in which discussion the considerations are rhetorical (persuading others) rather than rational (attending to what other things are entailed by the things chosen as objects of concern, or what possibilities are entailed by them, and how) -- this would be democratic but not rational. The risk is that what people choose to want has entailments that they would not want, but which they are unable to prevent because they do not attend to thinking in terms of entailments. (A good example of this is global warming: it is not aimed at but results when other things are, or are in certain ways).

There is also the model of liberty, which also fits the sovereignty model. My liberty is the capacity to do what I want, or go in in it, without interference from you, a (perhaps patriarchal) governmental or other authority, or some other social or institutional force. A society that is highly concerned about liberty and little about much else will lend itself to irrational decision-making. Since liberty is exercise of will absent coercion from other persons or social forces pursuing their purposes, liberty and authority are not opposites but go together. In the dominant models, they are differentiated only spatially and through limits. These limits can be given as laws, and they can have sanctions that are used to enforce them. Then we might have a government of laws, but it would not necessarily be highly rational (or democratic.).

Democracy is a social form that needs and depends on a high degree of use of reason in social life. This in turn entails a certain quantity of discourse. These things can exist in forms that are distorted and semblant more than consequential and real.

The old idea that Reason was a name of God did not well survive the shift that took place in the twentieth century from the colonial European world to a postcolonial one that so far has been dominated at least culturally by the United States. That the world of thought in public affairs and other domains is not ruled by a body like the Académie Française (which in France officially defines correct uses of the language) is a fact that few mourn, and rightly. I don't want to over-state the advantage of European business people over our own in handling matters that require discussion. There are good things about American society and culture. I only wish it were less irrational.

I fear that it would be necessary to start by explaining what the idea of reason not only was but still is, and why, long after rejections of colonialism and patriarchy discredited its hypertrophic uses, from medieval Arabic and Latin philosophy to the early modern Inquisition and universities that train mostly business people or even soldiers, there are ways of understanding the idea of reason and its uses that we cannot sensibly want to do without. I think it would make our society in the long term more happy, just, and efficient.