A beloved friend of mine is currently reading a book that she recommended to me about the era at the beginning of the last millenium: 100 CE. The characters, in her book, deal with arguments between traditional Jewish learning and Greek rationality. The Stoics and Skeptics are also in the argument.
We are still struggling with this issue today. There is a small percentage of the world that deals with anything resembling Greek rationality. We find this form of rationality almost exclusively in technology and engineering where tables of data get translated into the physical world pretty much in terms of a syllogism. That is the rare form of Greek rationality.
The rest of the world has little to do with rationality. The person piloting the plane has training in rational decision-making, but the remaining hundreds onboard the plane have little to do with the rational world. The world of politics is one of calculation and arbitration but nothing to do rationality. Daily life occasionally has us encounter technology that requires a rational response, unless we throw our phone against the wall or kick the side of our car. Otherwise the daily requirements for rationality are limited.
My regular readers know my view of global warming and the dozen other environmental versions of the apocalypse. Rationality and reference to reliable data plays virtually no role in the way 98% of the world sees the world.
Over two millennia, since the subject of my friend’s book that deals with tradition and rationality, I see a modest increase in the proportion of the global population that relies on rationality.
The wonderfulness of our modern world arises because commerce does not depend on rationality or intelligence. Commerce is an empirical world. When people think of a political solution or bureaucratic solution they hope that there will be some intelligent people involved in the outcome. There never are.
With commerce we don't have to worry. People are seeking very simple, objective, measurable goals: to reduce costs, to increase sales and to reliably detect changes in the business that increase profitability. That commercial behavior is independent of IQ or charm.