Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought

by Jonathan Rauch

If I believe that goods can have only one “fair” price, or that everyone is entitled to an equal amount of everything, then I will see no point in having a market.

Democracy never guarantees any particular outcome, Christian or otherwise. And neither does liberal science. Which is why fundamentalists are generally enemies of both.

One way or another, every community has to confront that signal problem—people disagree and you must have a way to decide who is right. Well, if you can’t fix the process, then fix the outcome.

The text isn’t the only way of settling disagreements and answering open questions, but it is the supreme way: it has the final say.

If you’re used to relying on an orthodoxy and it collapses, you’re likelier to go looking for a new orthodoxy than for mistakes.

The world outside the text is a dark upheaval of argument and ignorance, an uproar of hypotheses that the text cannot encompass and of disputes that the text cannot settle. And so the outside world is denied, and the text is assumed to answer all questions of any genuine importance.

if a list of doctrinal statements is big enough to contain the answers to all important questions, it is also big enough to contain ambiguities and contradictions.

And so at last we reach the fundamentalist social principle: Those who know the truth should decide who is right.

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

Khomeini the true believer really believed in the Koran, whereas Plato the sophisticate made no bones about building his regime on convenient lies and cradle-to-grave brainwashing.

Khomeini wanted to defend obvious truth, Plato to maintain social order and national strength. Yet the regime of Plato’s Republic wound up looking eerily like the regime of Khomeini’s Iran:

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

Once the authority is set up, it must be jealously defended. After all, if the authority falls, how are you to know truth from falsehood?

Liberal science tends to settle disagreements by trying to pull more players and more ideas into the game: maybe a new observation or idea or thinker will show the way around the impasse.

Since there is no higher appeal than of each to each, the critical society of liberal science is a beehive of shifting beliefs and arguments and alliances; it breaks up and rearranges itself a million times a day.

One strategy for avoiding socially dangerous disputes over fixed beliefs is to try to get rid of fixed beliefs. Generally speaking, that is liberal science’s approach.

The whole regime may collapse. In an orthodox community, the threat of social disintegration is never further away than the first dissenter. So the community joins together to stigmatize dissent.

But they didn’t have to read the book; their society was threatened by the very existence of such a challenge.

The more I get around, the more deeply I am impressed that the gardens of human belief flower more exotically than any in nature.

To a skeptic, knowledge is elusive and mistakenness the inescapable human condition. My world is a place buzzing with interpreters of an ornery reality which is always trying to trip them up. And to me the buzz is a joyful sound.

If there is a Being somewhere who is above error, before whom all reality is spread in static clarity, I feel sorry for Him. I believe God would want to have a mistake to hunt for.

For if truth is obvious, then if you don’t see it you must be crazy, stupid, or acting in bad faith.

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.

From a hard-core fundamentalist’s point of view, a dissenter is not just someone who endangers the social order; he is someone who does so in order to spread lies. And it is certainly immoral to protect liars.

This is the morality of the Fundamentalist Principle: he who would deny evident truth should be punished.

Letting colonels or commissars or cardinals decide which ideas are worthy is a bad way to stay in touch with reality.

As everyone knows by now, anti-critical societies tend to be narrow, rigid, and backward. They cannot easily get rid of old ideas, they cannot readily produce new ideas, and when they do produce new ideas they cannot efficiently check them. They use their intellectual resources counterproductively or clumsily or not at all.

they wind up settling differences of opinion by punishing weak people rather than weak ideas.

in an authoritarian intellectual regime the advantage goes to the people with the most troops, not the people with the keenest critical eyes. “Truth” is built on the ruined careers and broken bodies and enforced silence of the unorthodox.

In an imperfect world, the best insurance we have against truth’s being politicized is to put no one in particular in charge of it.

I believe that nothing is unconditionally true, and hence I am opposed to every statement of positive truth and every man who states it.”

The trouble with talking so much about the threat to liberal science from the Khomeinis and Communists of the world is that in some ways they are the least of our problems.

The greater threat lies in our letting down our guard against ourselves: in high-mindedly embracing authoritarianism in the name of fairness and compassion, as the Marxists did.

They don’t realize that there is a wide gulf between equal access to a knowledge-making system and equal results. Their misunderstanding has the potential for grave consequences.

The egalitarian line of thinking holds that, since any standard for truth is biased and political, no one’s standard should get special privileges, but rather all should be equal;

As is so often the case with egalitarian activists, they support equality for everybody, except people who don’t share their political agenda.

What about the charge that one person’s knowledge is another’s repression?

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.

in liberal science, there is positively no right to have one’s opinions, however heartfelt, taken seriously as knowledge.

liberal science is nothing other than a selection process whose mission is to test beliefs and reject the ones that fail.

if you want to believe the moon is made of green cheese, fine. But if you want your belief recognized as knowledge, there are things you must do. You must run your belief through the science game for checking. And if your bel...

In a liberal society, knowledge—not belief—is the rolling critical consensus of a decentralized community of checkers, and it is nothing else. That is so, not by the power of law, but...

if your belief is rejected by the critical consensus, you are free to reject the consensus and keep belie...

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.

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.

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.”

One cannot overemphasize: intellectual liberalism is not intellectual majoritarianism or egalitarianism.

People, yes, are entitled to a certain degree of basic respect by dint of being human. But to grant any such claim to ideas is to raid the treasury of science and throw its capital to the winds.

If you believe that a society is just only when it delivers more or less equal outcomes, you will think liberalism is unfair.