Reason as a Foreign Language
By: Valentine Mac Léinn
Tags: Atheism, Satanism, Tst, Secularism, Religion

Image by Jr Korpa on Unsplash

In the past, I’ve worked as an English as a Second Language (ESL) teacher for adults from around the world. In addition, I spent some time working for an independent study abroad program that worked with American students taking courses overseas, and of course many of those programs were also focused on language studies. In both of those roles I heard and read many testimonials from language students about how they measured their relative proficiency with their discipline of study. There were many and varied personal formulae, of course, but one common throughline in these narratives seemed to be that a person knew they were becoming fluent in their new language when they began to dream in that language.

I began to study religion in earnest only recently. I have considered my entire adult life to be that of a person using the language of Reason to interact with ideas that other people might view through a lens of religion, spirituality, superstition, or mystery. It’s a smug attitude and one that an examination of religion is now leading me to disavow. I haven’t come to believe in the supernatural, or that anything exists beyond what Stephen Jay Gould called the Magisterium of Science. Instead, I have arrived at the realization that Reason is not my “L1,” as linguists refer to a person’s native language. Not only that, but I can’t even claim that I’m fluent in Reason, because I do not dream in Reason; I dream in Wonder.

Sure: I might wake from a dream and immediately go about the business of translating that dream to Reason. I often even feel, while I’m still asleep, the drive to retain all the details and nuance of my dream for later analysis. I want to be able to discuss my dreams without tripping up on all the nebulous woo, so as not to be embarrassed. How is this any different from a language learner taking furious notes in their L1 during a lesson, to assure that their later translation would be as accurate and refined as possible?

The methodology of the ESL program I taught was very focused on immersion: we were expected to discourage students from speaking and writing in their respective L1s, and even class notes were supposed to be taken only in English. A lot of educators, smarter and more scientific than I, attest to the results of such practices, but in my classroom I resisted acknowledging when I noticed Arabic or Cyrillic characters in students’ notebooks, and chose to ignore, rather than police, instances in which students interacted with each other in an L1 to try to crowdsource a shared understanding of any given concept. It can be argued that my resistance to the prescribed method is evidence of my own failure of Reason. Maybe it made me a bad teacher. In my anecdotal experience, though, with a sample size of about twenty-or-so students per class, students seemed to come away with a better and deeper understanding of English when I trusted these adults to discover their own learning processes.

If an L1 English speaker says to me “I knew I was a fluent French speaker when I began to dream in French,” my eventual rational landing place is that it’s unfalsifiable and therefore it doesn’t do me any good to speculate as to whether or not it’s accurate to that person’s actual experience. “Dreaming in French” is a lovely Wonderful concept, but I haven’t found any science that supports that it’s actually happening. Granted, I only have a very surface understanding of oneirology or neurology in general, but the more I try to read about it, the more it appears that the jury is still out on what is happening in the language centers of the brain when we dream. It’s honestly pretty unReasonable of me to try to base this post on such a concept in the first place.

That’s where my exercise of Reason concludes…but my starting point was “hey, I think this dreaming/language analogy is a little clever and I bet that if I write it down, some people will connect with what I’m trying to say.” If I see the word “dream,” my immediate cognitive response is poetic rather than mathematical, and I doubt I’m the only one, even among materially-minded nonbelievers. Trying to read scholarly articles on the neurology of dreams (beyond being an arduous task for an uneducated jamoke like me) sort of leads me to the conclusion that, even those for whom dream science is their life’s work, there’s not too much inclination to brutally demystify dreaming. I imagine oneirologists a bit like I imagine veterinarians: they may have quite a bit more sophisticated understanding of their field than the rest of us, but they probably weren’t drawn to that work by any cold, clinical motive but the same primal Wonder that attracts all of us.

So what does any of this have to do with Satanism? I found The Satanic Temple at a point in my life in which atheism and secular rhetoric were not giving me the equipment I wanted. Atheist certainty seemed as destructive to discourse as Evangelical certainty. I am evolving toward the idea that many of us nontheists are content to parrot the language of science, when it confirms our biases, without fully exploring it, and that is no more productive than quoting selective scripture out of context. Maybe that’s not out of intellectual laziness or even the logical fallacy of appealing to authority, but because we know that our fluency in the language of Reason is insufficient to properly convey our beliefs. I have to accept that when I try to speak Reason, anyone more fluent than I am will easily hear that it’s heavily accented by Wonder, and even a bit of a third language, Dogma, that I’ve picked up in in my travels. My degree is in the humanities, so I can only speculate, but I have to imagine that even many respected minds in STEM disciplines are speaking Reason as a foreign language, albeit at a much higher level of proficiency. If it turns out that one side of an argument is speaking L2 Reason to another side that doesn’t understand it, and the other side is speaking L2 Dogma to an opponent that doesn’t understand that, might it be strategically sound for both parties involved to try communicating in their native long, which is Wonder?

I believe that the tenets of TST point us in the direction of speaking the same language as those who disagree with us. In practice, that seems to be co-opting and repurposing the trappings of religious Dogma to get attention. I’m not sure that works any better than Flat Earth proponents clumsily stammering out their positions in a broken approximation of Reason. Might it be more expedient to acknowledge that there’s another root language we all inherently understand, a liminal language with words that don’t exist in either those of Reason or Dogma. How do we go about that? I sure don’t know. I think, really, we’re already doing it innately but that we’re resistant to it: maybe instead we might try leaning into that impulse. I believe that the real beauty of the Seven Tenets is that they contain words that I don’t know how to say in Reason or Dogma (compassion, struggle, respect, nobility, and wisdom spring to mind). Maybe the fact that some words can’t be neatly translated from Wonder is exactly why we shouldn’t stop speaking it.