Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought

by Jonathan Rauch

fundamentalism, properly understood, is not about religion. It is about the inability to seriously entertain the possibility that one might be wrong.

The new sensitivity is the old authoritarianism in disguise, and it is just as noxious.

“Go ahead and conclude whatever you want; just remember that all of your conclusions, every single one of them, may need to be corrected.” This attitude does not require you to renounce knowledge. It requires you only to renounce certainty, which is not the same thing. In other words, your knowledge is always tentative and subject to correction. At the bottom of this kind of skepticism is a simple proposition: we must all take seriously the idea that any and all of us might, at any time, be wrong.

When people accept the notion that none of us is completely immune from error, they also implicitly accept that no person, no matter who he is or how strongly he believes, is above possible correction. If at any moment I can be wrong and you can be wrong and so can everybody else, all without being aware of it, then none of us can claim to have finally settled any dispute about the state of the external world. No one, therefore, is above critical scrutiny, nor is any belief.

The result is this: A society which has accepted skeptical principles will accept that sincere criticism is always legitimate. In other words, if any belief may be wrong, then no one can legitimately claim to have ended any discussion—ever. In other words: No one gets the final say.

Another conclusion also follows. If any person may be in error, then no one can legitimately claim to be above being checked by others—ever. Moreover, if anyone may be in error, no one can legitimately claim to have any unique or personal powers to decide who is ...

Nothing would be out of bounds for critical scrutiny. No one would be entitled to declare what was true knowledge and what was false opinion.

The skeptical rule is, No one gets the final say: you may claim that a statement is established as knowledge only if it can be debunked, in principle, and only insofar as it withstands attempts to debunk it.

The empirical rule is, No one has personal authority: you may claim that a statement has been established as knowledge only insofar as the method used to check it gives the same result regardless of the identity of the checker, and regardless of the source of the statement.

Game-playing is a good way to make touchy social decisions systematically. Suppose a group needs a leader. It could use a game with the following rules. Rule 1: each member of the group gets one vote in each round of vote-casting. Rule 2: whoever gets the least number of votes in each round of vote-casting is out of the game. Rule 3: the last remaining vote-getter is the group’s legitimate leader till the next vote. Thus the liberal game of voting. Suppose a group needs to decide which of several conflicting ideas is right. Again, a game. First, each school of thought places its opinion before the group. Second, friends and enemies of the ideas begin testing and criticizing, poking and prodding, checking and cross-checking. To check, players can do all kinds of things. Their tests can include real experiment, thought experiment, plausibility, simplicity, generality, utility, logical consistency, beauty—always understanding, however, that whatever test they use has to be a test that I or anyone else also can use, at least in principle (no personal authority). If, for you, a theory passes the test of experiment or beauty, then it must do the same for me and for others, or else the theory has not checked out conclusively. Third, everyone is entitled to modify one of the original ideas or to suggest a new one. Fourth, the opinion which emerges as the survivor is the winner—only, however, for as long as it continues to survive (no final say). Thus the liberal game of science.

Kant declared that an action can be right for one person only if it is right for any and all, and so codified the liberal standard of justice. The empiricists declared that a statement can be true for one person only if it is true for any and all, and so codified the liberal standard for knowledge.

Evolutionary epistemology holds that our knowledge comes to us not from revelation, as religious traditions maintain; nor from deep reflection by the wise, as in Plato; nor even from crisp experiments that unambiguously reveal nature’s secrets, as in the mechanistic view of science that prevailed until this century. Rather, our knowledge evolves—with all the haphazardness and improvisation that “evolving” implies.

however certain you may feel, however strongly you are convinced, you must check.

we all benefit enormously from living in a society which is rich with prejudices, because strong opinions, however biased or wrongheaded, energize debate. It is a positive good to have among us some racists and anti-Semites, some Christian-haters and some rabid fundamentalists. An enlightened, and efficient, intellectual regime lets a million prejudices bloom, including hateful ones. It avoids any attempt to stamp out prejudice, because stamping out prejudice inevitably means making everybody share the same prejudice, and thus killing science. Rather, it pits people’s prejudices against each other. Then it sits back and watches knowledge evolve.

the best way to think of liberal science is not as a consensus of opinion or a body of knowledge, but as a self-organizing swirl of disagreements.

The followers of Thomas say, finally: knowledge cannot be had except where criticism is unfettered and doubt is never rebuked. That is the modern liberal’s skeptical faith.

Fundamentalism—the intellectual style, not the religious movement—is the strong disinclination to take seriously the notion that you might be wrong.

to some extent we are all fundamentalists, each and every one of us. We are all true believers in something. What distinguishes the ethic of liberal science is not that liberals are undogmatic; it is that liberals believe they must check their beliefs, or submit them for checking, however sure they feel.

fundamentalist social rule: Those who know the truth should decide whose opinion is right. That rule is what is to be feared and fought.

the relationship between fundamentalism and intellectual authoritarianism (the Fundamentalist Principle) is close. Where you find one, you usually find the other.

This is the fundamentalist way: rule by the right-thinking, exclusion and (if necessary) elimination of the wrong-thinking.

the Fundamentalist Principle, whether empowered by zealous true believers or calculating elites, proceeds, once established, according to the remorseless logic of authoritarianism.

Faced with the constant threat that someone will begin arguing with authority or challenging the fixed text, an orthodox society typically has only two ways to respond: by cracking up or by cracking down.

to call the fundamentalists nutty or irrational does them a profound injustice. When fundamentalist communities rise in rage against heresy of whatever sort, when they shake their fists and draw their knives against the imperialism of liberal science, they are acting in genuine self-defense. They are acting to stave off social and political chaos. That is what makes them so dangerous.

To a skeptic, knowledge is elusive and mistakenness the inescapable human condition.

To a hard-core fundamentalist, there is one clear truth in the world and many liars. The other side is not merely wrong, it is lying.

Paul, who at first persecuted Jesus’s cause with as much zeal as he later championed it, was one of the most influential of all the fundamentalists. It was he who wrote this extraordinary statement of the fundamentalist creed: “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness of men who by their wickedness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.”

From holding that someone who disagrees with you cannot be of good sense or good conscience to holding that such a person deserves censure or punishment is a very short step.

To believe incorrectly is never a crime, but simply to believe is never to have knowledge.

liberal science does not restrict belief, but it does restrict knowledge. It absolutely protects freedom of belief and speech, but it absolutely denies freedom of knowledge: in liberal science, there is positively no right to have one’s opinions, however heartfelt, taken seriously as knowledge.

academic freedom consists in freedom to doubt, to inquire, to check, and to believe as you like. It does not consist in the freedom of one party or another to reset the rules for inquiry or checking.

When a state legislature or a curriculum committee or any other political body decrees that anything in particular is, or has equal claim to be, our knowledge, it wrests control over truth from the liberal community of checkers and places it in the hands of central political authorities. And that is illiberal. If the principle is ever established that political bodies can say what our knowledge is or is not, or which ideas are worth taking seriously, then watch out. Everyone with an opinion would be busy lobbying legislatures for equal-time laws, demanding that biology books describe prayer as an alternative treatment for cancer, picketing universities for astrology departments, suing journals for rebuttal space, demonstrating for proportionate representation in footnote citations. We would find ourselves in a world where knowledge was made by voting and agitating. Then we really would find ourselves living Bertrand Russell’s nightmare, where “the lunatic who believes that he is a poached egg is to be condemned solely on the ground that he is in the minority.” In that case, those of us who believe in science had better hope that we can persuade a majority and round up a quorum—and whether we can do so is not at all clear on issues like astrology.

One cannot overemphasize: intellectual liberalism is not intellectual majoritarianism or egalitarianism. You do not have a claim to knowledge either because 51 percent of the public agrees with you or because your “group” was historically left out; you have a claim to knowledge only to the extent that your opinion still stands up after prolonged exposure to withering public testing.

Except insofar as an opinion earns its stripes in the science game, it is entitled to no respect whatever.

Utopian systems premised on a world of loving harmony—communism, for instance—fail because in the attempt to obliterate conflict they obliterate freedom.

creating knowledge is painful, for the same reason that it can also be exhilarating. Knowledge does not come free to any of us; we have to suffer for it. We have to stand naked before the court of critical checkers and watch our most cherished beliefs come under fire. Sometimes we have to watch while our notion of evident truth gets tossed in the gutter. Sometimes we feel we are treated rudely, even viciously. As others prod and test and criticize our ideas, we feel angry, hurt, embarrassed.

It is not good to offend people, but it is necessary. A no-offense society is a no-knowledge society.

A liberal society stands on the proposition that we should all take seriously the idea that we might be wrong. That means we must place no one, including ourselves, beyond the reach of criticism (no final say); it means that we must allow people to err, even where the error offends and upsets, as it often will. But we also are not supposed to claim we have knowledge except where belief is checked by no one in particular (no personal authority). In other words, liberal science is built on two pillars. One is the right to offend in pursuit of truth. The other is the responsibility to check and be checked.

in a liberal society, to upset people is not, and must never be, the same thing as to be wrong.

when someone says he is offended, the standard reply should be: “I don’t have to like you, but I won’t shut you up or shout you down. However, I am not under the least obligation to take what you say seriously, or even to listen to you, unless you submit your claim to critical examination by me and others, and try to abide by the results.”

What do you do about people who have silly or offensive opinions and who haven’t bothered to submit to the rigors of public checking? Ignore them. Silence is science’s most effective weapon. Any writer or scientist will tell you that he would rather be attacked than ignored. When someone says that the Holocaust didn’t happen, why flatter him with attention? The world is always full of people who hold silly or obnoxious opinions and who have the means to broadcast them. That will never change. One of liberal science’s great discoveries is that, provided such people are for...

the establishment of a right not to be offended would lead not to a more civil culture but to a lot of shouting matches over who was being offensive to whom, and who could claim to be more offended. All we will do that way is to shut ourselves up.

Most of the universities—certainly the private ones—were within their legal rights to set standards for behavior on their campuses. But universities are neither churches nor finishing schools: their mission and moral charter, their reason for being, is not to convert errant minds or to teach good manners. Their mission is to advance knowledge by teaching and practicing public criticism. Alas, many of them are doing exactly what a university, of all institutions, should not do: defining offensive speech as quasi-violent behavior, and treating it accordingly.

how are restraints on offensive opinion justified? With arguments that are appealing on the surface but alarming down below. Trace their logic and you find that they all lead back to the same conclusion: freewheeling criticism (thus liberal science) is dangerous or hurtful and must be regulated by right-thinking people.

Whenever anyone says that bigoted or offensive or victimizing or oppressing or vicious opinions should be suppressed, all he is really saying is, “Opinions which I hate should be suppressed.” In other words, he is doing the same thing Plato did when he claimed that the philosopher (i.e., himself) should rule for the good of society: he is making a power grab. He wants to be the pope, the ayatollah, the philosopher-king.

if everyone has a right not to be upset, then all criticism, and therefore all scientific inquiry, is at best morally hazardous and at worst impossible. Even joking becomes impossible.

The trouble with the argument that real pain outweighs airy abstractions is that it leaves out one whole side of the equation: the pain is very real and very concrete for the “offensive” speaker who is sentenced by political authorities to prison, privation, or, as in Salman Rushdie’s case, death. The whole point of liberal science is that it substitutes criticism for force and violence. That is to say, it substitutes the power of critics to select worthy ideas verbally for the power of political authorities to select “worthy” ideas forcibly. The false choice presented by humanitarians is between wounding people with words and not wounding people with words. The real choice is between hurtful words and billy clubs, jail cells, or worse. If you think that the right to offend is a mere “abstraction,” ask Rushdie.

If you insist on an unhostile or nonoffensive environment, then you belong in a monastery, not a university.

The authorities’ role is not to get rid of prejudices but to protect criticism. The critical sorting system will do the rest.

The only reliable way to identify prejudice is through public critical exchange. If you want to think you’re unprejudiced, you must do something: science.