Letters

摘要

From Wade Schuette Thank you for the excellent coverage of "Seven reasons why people hate reason" (26 July, p 41). As Immanuel Kant said, "Immaturity is the inability to use one's understanding without guidance from another" (p 42). If culture is akin to a person, what this describes is perhaps an 18-year-old young adult.rnWhat we are sorely lacking is the vision of advancing to the equivalent of marriage - or civilisation. A good marriage is one between two adults who are capable of living separately just fine, but who prefer to live together. Neither one dominates and both benefit.rnAmerican language has no word for this, since "adult" and "mature" have been taken over to mean "able to purchase cigarettes and pornography". This is extraordinarily relevant, since our civilisation is breaking down not because of a lack of independent reasoning, but of this re-linking step that forms a synthesised larger reasoning, perceiving and acting unit - a meta-person.