Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought

by Jonathan Rauch

The credo of liberal science imposes upon each of us two moral obligations: to allow everybody to err and criticize, even obnoxiously, and to submit everybody’s beliefs—including our own—to public checking before claiming that they deserve to be accepted as knowledge. Today, activists and moralists are assailing both halves of the creed. They are assailing the right to err and criticize, when the error seems outrageous or the criticism seems hurtful; they are assailing the requirement for public checking, when the result is to reject someone’s belief. They have a right to pursue their attack (nonviolently), but they, and we, should understand that they are enemies of science itself, and even, ultimately, of freedom of thought. And those of us who hold sacred the right to err and the duty to check need to understand that our defense of liberal science must preach not only toleration but discipline: the hard self-discipline which requires us to live with offense.