The Objective Standard Blog

Wednesday, August 30, 2006

A Noteworthy Thrashing of Unreason

Posted by Christian Beenfeldt at 1:32 am

In a recent opinion piece in the Guardian, professor of philosophy Anthony Grayling offers a forthright attack on unreason. Mincing no words, he denounces “the spread of a…virulent cancer of unreason, which is affecting not just the mental culture of our own country but the fate of the world itself.” The unreason he has in mind is religious faith.

Grayling observes that appeals to faith are used to legitimize anything “from superstition to mass murder,” that people of faith are in constant and irresolvable conflict with each other, and that the faith-embracing mindset is “an essentially infantile attitude of acceptance of fairy-stories.” Unlike American conservatives, he understands that faith in Islam, in Christianity, in pagan mythology, and even in garden gnomes all belong in the same category: unreason. He even observes that Stalinism and Nazism are thus fundamentally similar to religion. The alternative to reining in religion, upholding intellectual rigor in education, and increasing enrollment in science, concludes Grayling, is a return to the Dark Ages.

This is all true.

Grayling’s view of reason, however, is critically compromised. To begin with, he offers no definition of reason, leaving the implication that reason is a woozy, contradictory mess that involves being “literate,” “numerate,” “broadly knowledgeable,” and “reflective”—while also being uncertain, tolerant, and pluralistic. But it is not rational to be certain of nothing, tolerant of anything, or accepting of everything.

Worse still, Grayling argues that the fundamental similarity uniting religion and totalitarianism is that they are “monolithic ideologies.” The implication here is that the rational man is a skeptic who makes no broad generalizations and holds no firm philosophical views. Yet, without a comprehensive, reality-based philosophy that defines and stalwartly defends reason, the remaining Enlightenment values in our culture—such as the respect for science and the protection of individual rights—will continue to be eroded by the torrent of skepticism and subjectivism pounding the West. And, without rational answers to the fundamental questions in life, the culture will turn evermore eagerly toward religion—because people need answers to such questions, and religion provides answers, dreadfully wrong though they are.

The solution to the problem of unreason is not a woozy half-skepticism, but a principled defense of rational philosophy. With this in mind, Grayling’s article is worth reading as an example of what the best minds in today’s cultural mainstream can and cannot offer in defense of reason.

Posted in: Philosophy, Religion