Kindly Inquisitors Quotes

“For not only is wiping out bias and hate impossible in principle, in practice eliminating prejudice through central authority means eliminating all but one prejudice—that of whoever is most politically powerful.”
― Jonathan Rauch, Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought

“the plural of “anecdote” is “data.”
― Jonathan Rauch, Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought

“In a conflict of opinion between Einstein and a fool, one wishes for Einstein to prevail. And in a conflict between Einstein and thousand fools or a million, one wishes all the more for Einstein to prevail.”
― Jonathan Rauch, Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought

“Fundamentalism—the intellectual style, not the religious movement—is the strong disinclination to take seriously the notion that you might be wrong.”
― Jonathan Rauch, Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought

“More specifically, this book will try to establish the following points. First, there are not two great liberal social and political systems but three. One is democracy—political liberalism—by which we decide who is entitled to use force; another is capitalism—economic liberalism—by which we decide how to allocate resources. The third is liberal science, by which we decide who is right. Second, the third system has been astoundingly successful, not merely as a producer of technology but also, far more important, as a peacemaker and builder of social bridges. Its great advantages as a social system for raising and settling differences of opinion are inherent, not incidental. However, its disadvantages—it causes pain and suffering, it creates legions of losers and outsiders, it is disorienting and unsettling, it allows and even thrives on prejudice and bias—are also inherent. And today it is once again under attack. Third, the attackers seek to undermine the two social rules which make liberal science possible. (I’ll outline them in the next chapter and elaborate them in the rest of the book.) For the system to function, people must try to follow those rules even if they would prefer not to. Unfortunately, many people are forgetting them, ignoring them, or carving out exemptions. That trend must be fought, because, fourth, the alternatives to liberal science lead straight to authoritarianism. And intellectual authoritarianism, although once the province of the religious and the political right in America, is now flourishing among the secular and the political left. Fifth, behind the new authoritarian push are three idealistic impulses: Fundamentalists want to protect the truth. Egalitarians want to help the oppressed and let in the excluded. Humanitarians want to stop verbal violence and the pain it causes. The three impulses are now working in concert. Sixth, fundamentalism, properly understood, is not about religion. It is about the inability to seriously entertain the possibility that one might be wrong. In individuals such fundamentalism is natural and, within reason, desirable. But when it becomes the foundation for an intellectual system, it is inherently a threat to freedom of thought. Seventh, there is no way to advance knowledge peacefully and productively by adhering to the principles advocated by egalitarians and humanitarians. Their principles are poisonous to liberal science and ultimately to peace and freedom. Eighth, no social principle in the world is more foolish and dangerous than the rapidly rising notion that hurtful words and ideas are a form of violence or torture (e.g., “harassment”) and that their perpetrators should be treated accordingly. That notion leads to the criminalization of criticism and the empowerment of authorities to regulate it. The new sensitivity is the old authoritarianism in disguise, and it is just as noxious.”
― Jonathan Rauch, Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought

“Anyone—pope, propagandist, anti-Communist, anti-racist—who wants to silence criticism or regulate an argument in order to keep wrong-thinking people out of power has no moral claim to be anything but ignored.”
― Jonathan Rauch, Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought

“In practice eliminating prejudice through central authority means eliminating all but one prejudice: that of whoever is most politically powerful.”
― Jonathan Rauch, Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought

“With the successful shaking of the established view of the world comes not a prison cell, but a Nobel prize.”
― Jonathan Rauch, Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought

“To ban books or words which cretins find exciting is to let the very lowest among us determine what we may read or hear.”
― Jonathan Rauch, Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought

“Persons who dismiss stories such as those of Keith John Sampson as merely “anecdotal” need to be reminded that the plural of “anecdote” is “data.”
― Jonathan Rauch, Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought

“A basic principle of science—of liberal social life—is that we kill our hypotheses rather than each other.”
― Jonathan Rauch, Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought

“The social system does not and never can exist which allows no harm to come to anybody. Conflict of impulse and desire is an inescapable fact of human existence, and where there is conflict there will always be losers and wounds. Utopian systems premised on a world of loving harmony—communism, for instance—fail because in the attempt to obliterate conflict they obliterate freedom. The chore of a social regime is not to obliterate conflict but to manage it, so as to put it to good use while causing a minimum of hurt and abuse. Liberal systems, although far from perfect, have at least two great advantages: they can channel conflict rather than obliterate it, and they give a certain degree of protection from centrally administered abuse. The liberal intellectual system is no exception. It causes pain to people whose views are criticized, still more to those whose views fail to check out and so are rejected. But there are two important consolations. First, no one gets to run the system to his own advantage or stay in charge for long. Whatever you can do to me, I can do to you. Those who are criticized may give as good as they get. Second, the books are never closed, and the game is never over. Sometimes rejected ideas (continental drift, for one) make sensational comebacks.”
― Jonathan Rauch, Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought

“[No] social principle in the world is more foolish and dangerous than the rapidly rising notion that hurtful words and ideas are a form of violence or torture (e.g., “harassment”) and that their perpetrators should be treated accordingly. That notion leads to the criminalization of criticism and the empowerment of authorities to regulate it. The new sensitivity is the old authoritarianism in disguise, and it is just as noxious.”
― Jonathan Rauch, Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought

“Impelled by the notions that science is oppression and criticism is violence, the central regulation of debate and inquiry is returning to respectability—this time in a humanitarian disguise.”
― Jonathan Rauch, Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought

“A very dangerous principle is now being established as a social right: Thou shalt not hurt others with words.”
― Jonathan Rauch, Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought

“Sixth, fundamentalism, properly understood, is not about religion. It is about the inability to seriously entertain the possibility that one might be wrong. In individuals such fundamentalism is natural and, within reason, desirable. But when it becomes the foundation for an intellectual system, it is inherently a threat to freedom of thought.”
― jonathan rauch, Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought

“People who like authoritarianism always picture themselves running the show. But no one stays on top for long.”
― Jonathan Rauch, Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought

“Some ideas actually are false, and at some point the process of checking establishes their falsehood so firmly that to proceed as if they might be true becomes ridiculous. For”
― Jonathan Rauch, Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought

“In the Museum of the Diaspora in Tel Aviv, written in large letters on the wall, I saw the answer: “A rabbi whose community does not disagree with him is not really a rabbi, and a rabbi who fears his community is not really a man.” The quotation is from Rabbi Israel Salanter, who died six years before Hitler was born; he flourished in Lithuania and Russia, so almost certainly some of his descendants died in the Nazis’ hell fires. I don’t know what he would say about Holocaust “revisionism” if he were alive today, but I do know that those words of his are displayed in the Museum of the Diaspora because the critical spirit they embody is the only spirit that can save the Jews, and the rest of us, from political meddling with history.”
― Jonathan Rauch, Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought

“liberal science is nothing other than a selection process whose mission is to test beliefs and reject the ones that fail.”
― Jonathan Rauch, Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought

“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. Having been at last rousted out of politics and economics by the disaster of communism, the authoritarian Rasputin has now come calling on liberal science, and he already has his foot in the door.”
― Jonathan Rauch, Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought

“The liberation of the human mind,” H. L. Mencken once wrote, “has been best furthered by gay fellows who heaved dead cats into sanctuaries and then went roistering down the highways of the world, proving to all men that doubt, after all, was safe—that the god in the sanctuary was a fraud. One horse-laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms.”
― Jonathan Rauch, Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought

“stamping out prejudice inevitably means making everybody share the same prejudice”
― Jonathan Rauch, Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought

“we all benefit enormously from living in a society which is rich with prejudices, because strong opinions, however biased or wrongheaded, energize debate.”
― Jonathan Rauch, Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought

“Locke preached the sermon which every generation learns with such difficulty and forgets with such ease: “We should do well to commiserate our mutual ignorance, and endeavor to remove it in all the gentle and fair ways of information, and not instantly treat others ill, as obstinate and perverse, because they will not renounce their own, and receive our opinions. . . . For where is the man that has incontestable evidence of the truth of all that he holds, or of the falsehood of all he condemns?”
― Jonathan Rauch, Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought

“There is nothing like absolute certainty in the whole field of our knowledge,” writes Popper.”
― Jonathan Rauch, Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought

“Those two rules define a decision-making system which people can agree to use to figure out whose opinions are worth believing. Under this system, you can do anything you wish to test a statement, as long as you follow the rules, which effectively say: • The system may not fix the outcome in advance or for good (no final say). • The system may not distinguish between participants (no personal authority).”
― Jonathan Rauch, Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought

“Second, the empirical rule. If people follow it in deciding who is right and who is wrong, then no one gets special say simply on the basis of who he happens to be. 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.”
― Jonathan Rauch, Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought

“This is, more or less, what the great twentieth-century philosopher of science Karl R. Popper and his followers have called the principle of falsifiability. Science is distinctive, not because it proves true statements, but because it seeks systematically to disprove (falsify) false ones.”
― Jonathan Rauch, Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought

“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.”
― Jonathan Rauch, Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought