"There is curiously little art concerning the efficacy of reason - perhaps simply because reason is not noticeably efficacious"
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Mosley’s line lands like a dry slap: we praise reason as civilization’s operating system, yet our culture produces far more art about passion, fate, addiction, and delusion than about clear thinking actually working. The joke is in the double turn of “curiously” and “perhaps simply.” He performs reason’s own mannerisms - cautious, qualifying, polite - only to use them to deflate reason’s reputation. If reason were truly “efficacious,” he implies, artists would have more to dramatize: the plot would end early, the marriage would be saved on page 12, the war would be avoided before the first chapter.
The subtext is less anti-intellectual than anti-myth. Mosley isn’t saying reasoning has no value; he’s saying its power is chronically overstated in public self-description. We like to imagine that evidence and argument drive history, but the lived experience of politics, love, and class is that people reverse-engineer logic to defend what they already want. Art, which feeds on conflict, tends to document that humiliating gap between what we can articulate and what actually moves us.
Context matters: Mosley writes out of a postwar British milieu where “reason” had been enlisted as both savior and accomplice - the rational planning that built welfare states also built bureaucracies, and the rationality that promised progress had marched Europe into mechanized slaughter. The sentence is a small, elegant indictment of modernity’s self-flattering story: that we are thinking animals first, and only occasionally messy. Mosley suggests the opposite, and he does it with a novelist’s weapon - a wry, fatalistic shrug.
The subtext is less anti-intellectual than anti-myth. Mosley isn’t saying reasoning has no value; he’s saying its power is chronically overstated in public self-description. We like to imagine that evidence and argument drive history, but the lived experience of politics, love, and class is that people reverse-engineer logic to defend what they already want. Art, which feeds on conflict, tends to document that humiliating gap between what we can articulate and what actually moves us.
Context matters: Mosley writes out of a postwar British milieu where “reason” had been enlisted as both savior and accomplice - the rational planning that built welfare states also built bureaucracies, and the rationality that promised progress had marched Europe into mechanized slaughter. The sentence is a small, elegant indictment of modernity’s self-flattering story: that we are thinking animals first, and only occasionally messy. Mosley suggests the opposite, and he does it with a novelist’s weapon - a wry, fatalistic shrug.
Quote Details
| Topic | Reason & Logic |
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