[Marxism] De omnibus dubitandem

[Chris Brady <cdbrady@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

{Despite Marx?s favourite maxim, in the following musings on ?Reason
Over Passion? the author ignores Marx and Marxism, except perhaps in a
clichéic swipe at the USSR.  One of the outstanding US publications that
actually referred to the subject in its name, the socialist ?Appeal to
Reason? was likewise ignored.  But consider the source.}

 Reason and Faith, Eternally Bound

By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
New York Times, December 20, 2003
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/20/arts/20FAIT.html?th

One might have expected the forces of Reason to be a bit weary after a
generation of battling postmodernism and having its power and authority
under constant scrutiny. Reason?s battles, though, continue unabated.
Only now it finds its opposition in the more unyielding claims of
religious faith. This latest conflict is over seemingly incompatible
ways of knowing the world. It is a conflict between competing
certainties: between followers of Faith, who know because they believe,
and followers of Reason, who believe because they know.

This battle echoes others taking place between fundamentalist terror,
which claims the authority of Faith, and Western modernity, which claims
the authority of Reason. But some of Reason?s combatants ? as if reading
from the postmodernist strategy book ? are also challenging the heritage
of the West, arguing that it, too, has been riddled with absolutist
faith, that the reasoned achievements of the Enlightenment are still
under threat and that a new understanding of the past must take shape,
in which Reason?s martyrdom and trials take center stage.

One motivation for Reason?s latest salvos is political. A Gallup poll
last year said that about 40 percent of Americans considered themselves
evangelicals or born-again Christians. They include the president, the
attorney general, the speaker of the House and the House majority
leader.

Critics of the Bush administration?s policies sometimes cite such
beliefs as evidence of the administration?s potential fundamentalism and
intolerance. In the recent book ?A Devil?s Chaplain? (Houghton Mifflin,
$24), for example, Richard Dawkins, the Oxford University evolutionary
biologist, worries about American responses to the attacks of 9/11
because ?the United States is the most religiose country in Christendom,
and its born-again leader is eyeball to eyeball with the most religiose
people on Earth.?

Mr. Dawkins has long been a harsh critic of religion, which he considers
a form of infectious virus that readily replicates, spreading its
distortions. Last summer he lobbied in The Guardian for adopting
?bright? as a noun to mean atheist (as in ?I?m a bright. You?re a
bright?).

The philosopher Daniel C. Dennett echoed his urgings in an Op-Ed article
in The New York Times. Mr. Dawkins and Mr. Dennett argue that brights
are a beleaguered group confronting a growing religious right; they urge
brights to emerge from their closet and boldly proclaim their identity.

?So, what?s the opposite of a bright?? Mr. Dawkins imagines someone
asking, ?What would you call a religious person??

?What would you suggest?? he coyly responds.

There are of course approaches that are less blunt and more liberal
minded, but the sense of embattlement and polemic has become familiar.
In the recent book ?The Closing of the Western Mind? (Knopf, $30), for
example, Charles Freeman argues that Western history has to be retold.
Over the course of centuries, he points out, the ancient Greeks
recognized the importance of reason, giving birth to the techniques of
modern science and mathematics, and establishing the foundations of the
modern state. But then, he writes, came ?the closing of the Western
mind.?

In the fourth and fifth century, he writes, the Greek intellectual
tradition ?was destroyed by the political and religious forces which
made up the highly authoritarian government of the late Roman empire,?
particularly with the imposition of Christian orthodoxy. For a
millennium doctrine ruled. Reason became heresy.

It is precisely this sort of heresy that Jennifer Michael Hecht
celebrates in ?Doubt: A History? (HarperSanFrancisco, $27.95), which
outlines the views of those who rejected dominant doctrines of faith or
proclaimed disbelief in the existence of God. Her loosely defined roster
of doubters ranges from the ancient Greeks to Zen Buddhists, along with
such familiar figures as Galileo, Hobbes, Gibbon, Tom Paine and Thomas
Jefferson.

Ms. Hecht is more generous than Mr. Dawkins, noting that just as there
are believers who ?refuse to consider the reasonableness of doubt,? so,
too, there are nonbelievers who ?refuse to consider the feeling of
faith.? But her sympathies are committed to the doubters, including such
unusual figures as the Islamic philosopher and physician Abu Bakr
al-Razi (854-925) and Annie Besant, who wrote a ?Gospel of Atheism? in
1876, helped reform London schools with free meals and medical care, and
later in life became a theosophist and a translator of the
Bhagavad-Gita.

Ms. Hecht?s goal is to provide an affirmative history for doubters. ?To
be a doubter,? she writes, ?is a great old allegiance, deserving quiet
respect and open pride.?

What, though, is the nature of this doubt? Its demarcation from faith is
not as precise as these descriptions suggest. Doubt can become a rigid
orthodoxy in its own right. In contemporary life, as Ms. Hecht seems to
know, doubt has become almost axiomatic (as if it were a matter of
faith).

Meanwhile faith itself is riddled with doubt. As Ms. Hecht points out,
many religious texts (like Job or Augustine?s ?Confessions?) are also
accounts of doubt.

Yet in these arguments faith is often portrayed as monolithic, a host
for intolerance and inquisition. And while that has been part of many
religions? history ? and is, as Mr. Freeman shows, part of the history
of Christianity ? the nature of faith is far more complex.

In his recent book, ?The Transformation of American Religion? (Free
Press, $26) for example, the sociologist Alan Wolfe suggests that
evangelical Christians in the United States cannot be thought of as they
once were. Religion, he argues, has been transformed by American culture
to become therapeutic, individualistic and less interested in doctrine
than in faith.

Nor is faith always unreasonable. Religious beliefs were fundamental to
the abolition of slavery in the 19th century and to the civil rights
movement in the 20th. Faith may even be latent in some of science?s
triumphs, inspiring such figures as Newton and Kepler. The conviction
that there is an order to things, that the mind can comprehend that
order and that this order is not infinitely malleable, those scientific
beliefs may include elements of faith.

Reason also has its own problems. Isaiah Berlin argued that the
Enlightenment led to the belief that human beings could be reshaped
according to reason?s dictates. And out of that science of human
society, he argued, came such totalitarian dystopias as the Soviet
Union.

Reason then, has its limits. The philosopher Robert Fogelin?s new book,
?Walking the Tightrope of Reason? (Oxford, $22) is subtitled ?The
Precarious Life of a Rational Animal? because, he argues, reason?s own
processes negotiate a precipice. Mr. Fogelin quotes Kant, who described
a dove who ?cleaving the air in her free flight, and feeling its
resistance, might imagine that its flight would be still easier in empty
space.?

Failing to understand what keeps her aloft and taking a leap of faith,
the dove might set off in ?empty space? ? a vacuum ? and plummet. But
reason might lead to the same end: if something offers resistance then
logically can?t one proceed more easily if it is eliminated? So why not
try?

The problem is that the bird can never fully comprehend the medium
through which it experiences the world. In many ways, Kant argued,
neither could the mind. Reason is still the only tool available for
certain knowledge, but it also presents questions it is unable to answer
fully.

Some of those questions may remain even after contemporary battles
cease: how much faith is involved in the workings of reason and how much
reason lies in the assertions of faith?



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