Reason and Ideas

This excerpt from In the Way of Zen by Alan Watts was posted yesterday in The Dish, Andrew Sullivan’s blog.  It seems to make some of the world’s craziness just a little bit more understandable.  

 It was a basic Confucian principle that ‘it is man who makes truth great, not truth which makes man great.’ For this reason, ‘humanness’ or ‘human-heartedness’ was always felt to be superior to ‘righteousness’, since man himself is greater than any idea he may invent. There are times when men’s passions are much more trustworthy than their principles. Since opposed principles, or ideologies, are irreconcilable, wars fought over principle will be wars of mutual annihilation. But wars fought for simple greed will be far less destructive, because the aggressor will be careful not to destroy what he is fighting to capture.

Reasonable – that is, human – men will always be capable of compromise, but men who have dehumanized themselves by becoming the blind worshipers of an idea or an ideal are fanatics whose devotion to abstractions makes them the enemies of life.