Reflections on ethics and reason

Abstract

The letter that this time we present to the readers of the Journal of the History of Latin American Education (RHELA), in its 43rd issue, aims to make a critical reflection on the meaning of rationality and the practice of ethical and political relations in the world today.
Dear readers, I would have liked to write these words from the same angle as other epistolary versions that this journal has presented. That is to say, from a less reckless and more hopeful version, but as you can appreciate, the world and the reality in crisis, shows us a different panorama that deserves a thorough reflection.
Although this is not the first forceful crisis that humanity has experienced, this is the one that crosses the stage of modernity, the limits of survival. I say this because every time the rational and the properly human turns against the very life of the beings that inhabit this planet, I would dare to affirm that the enlightenment based on reason and knowledge has failed. Although there have been social and economic crises, history shows us that this one, the one we are living today, is a crisis of ethics that crosses the dynamics and purposes of power and the market towards an exacerbated and forceful progress. There is nothing more absurd and contradictory than putting reason at the service of destruction.
It is a fact, we live on the brink of collapse and the massive destruction of peoples in the midst of which there are three fulminating triggers: climate change, wars that make lethal massive weapons available, and hunger. In each of these triggers, without a doubt, reason and its foundations have been present in a paradoxical way: scientific knowledge or the irrational act of ignorance, which makes the human conception become the main predator.