Life is a pendulum swing between 'balance' and 'unbalance', between stretching in different degrees towards one particular brand of extremism, before reaching a point of judgment where one decides that one has had enough of that, and then swinging back again towards the middle, if not past the middle point and out towards the opposite polarity. This pendulum process of life never stops.
This is the Hegelian (or post-Hegelian) 'life-cycle' of thesis, anti-thesis, and synthesis -- then start the whole process over again, ideally at a higher state of experience and wisdom but that is certainly not guaranteed because man has a high propensity for narcissism, greed, love, sex, jealousy, envy, hate, unilateralism, power, revenge, imperialism, 'tit for tat', destruction, and self-destruction. These factors inevitably undermine the 'Hegelian Absolute Ideal' element in this evolutionary life cycle, undermine the 'learning from history' factor -- and, indeed, add a very common 'tragic' element to the whole process -- life and death, evolution and regression, passion and despair, continually hanging in the balance of man's individual and/or collective, reason and/or stupidity.
And maybe I am even wrong to label all 'seemingly irrational' actions as being stupid. This is where Enlightenment Philosophy collapsed under its own 'reasonable weight'. Reason -- the pedistal and the pinnacle of Enlightenment Philosophy -- was also the seed of Enlightenment Philosophy's ultimate self-destruction, at least as it stood by itself.
Human life, human existence, is not all about reason and everything from the neck up. Romantic Philosophy became the 'anti-thesis' of Enlightenment Philosophy with DGB 'Enlightenment-Romantic' Philosophy aiming to mediate and synthesize the differences. In human existence, reason and logic cannot live without passion, love, lust and desire -- the 'wild cards' in human existence -- and visa versa.
Similarily, passion and despair seem to go hand in hand together, just as do life and death. You can't take the one without the other. You can't fully feel the one without having some sense -- if not a deep sense -- of the other.
So who am I to take a broad stroke of my pen (or more appropriately, I guess, a broad pounding of my keyboard) and be in any position to label any and/or all acts of 'seeming irrationality' as acts of stupidity. What may seem irrational and stupid to 'Apollo' may not seem at all so to 'Dionysus'. Perspective and context are both entirely relative.
With all of this in mind, there is no way of predicting whether man will learn -- and/or not learn -- individually and/or collectively -- from his or her earlier acts of ethical-moral transgression and/or his seeming narcissistic-passionate and/or righteous stupidity.
It may, for example, depend entirely on whether we are talking about a 'love affair gone wrong' (but it was great while it lasted).
Or America sending one too many fighter planes into Pakistan or Syria.
-- dgb, Nov. 9th, 2008, evening edition.
