Read A Manual for Creating Atheists Online
Authors: Peter Boghossian
CHAPTER 8
FAITH AND THE ACADEMY
Colleges and universities could do far more to combat faith, poor thinking, epistemological relativism, and bad reasoning. In this chapter I explain why they don’t and what can be done to address these issues. I’ll also guide readers through the template I use to disabuse people of epistemological relativism (that is, any way to come to knowledge is just as good as any other).
Employing universities in the struggle against faith is a cornerstone in the larger strategy to combat faith, promote reason and rationality, and create skeptics. Many university graduates will become the next generation of leaders and policymakers. We need to train educators not just to teach students how to think critically, but also how to nudge attitudes about faith on their downward spiral.
This chapter, which contains three separate sections, is a clarion call to educational administrators, academicians, educators, and more importantly, student activists. The first section, “Contemporary Academic Leftism: How Criticizing Bad Thinking Became Immoral,” describes the problem; the second section, “Faith-Based Claims in the Classroom,” offers a specific solution to part of the problem; the third section, “Beyond Relativism,” offers a roadmap for educators and Street Epistemologists to disabuse people of epistemological relativism.
CONTEMPORARY ACADEMIC LEFTISM: HOW CRITICIZING BAD THINKING BECAME IMMORAL
“The confusion between ideas and people when it comes to tolerance creates an environment where reason and rationality cannot be used to differentiate between good and bad ideas. When we refuse to admit that our preferences don’t determine reality, we create an environment where reality cannot be improved.”
—Matt Thornton, community activist
In this section, I’ll explain how the dominant incarnation of (academic) liberalism—which I term “contemporary academic leftism”—turns epistemological critique into moral taboo. To make this argument, I begin with a brief genealogy of liberalism; segue with an explanation of parasitic values that have latched onto liberalism; continue with a discussion of Islam and Islamophobia; then end with the effect of the perversion of contemporary liberalism on feminism and faith.
Classical and Social Liberalism
Liberalism is a creation of the seventeenth century, fathered by British philosopher John Locke (1632–1704). For Locke, liberalism means limited government, the rule of law, due process, liberty, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, separation of church and state, and separation of government powers into branches that oversee each other’s authority.
Locke’s classical liberalism evolved over time and became social liberalism—a creation of the nineteenth century—whose father is another British thinker, Thomas Hill Green (1836–1882). Green wrote about positive freedom, described human beings as fundamentally good, and argued for a social and economic order devoted to promoting the common good.
In the twentieth century, social liberalism evolved further still, with its dominant strain becoming contemporary academic leftism.
1
This current manifestation of liberalism is a skeleton of former incarnations and is best described not by what it is, but by the parasitic ideologies that have given that skeleton its corrupted form: relativism, subjectivity, tolerance, diversity, multiculturalism, respect for difference, and inclusion.
2
These invasive values betray classical and social liberalism’s history of standing for basic freedoms and fighting all forms of tyranny.
Historically, there’s nothing intrinsic to liberalism that necessarily weds it to the ideologies currently piggybacking on it. The fact that there is no necessary connection between the classical forms of liberalism and the values that currently fall within the sphere of contemporary academic leftism is reason for hope—hope that contemporary academic leftism can be decoupled from these external, invasive values, which undermine the emancipatory hope offered by classical and social liberalism, to return liberalism to its historical and intended roots.
Invasive Values and Preferences
It’s difficult to tease out and differentiate the values and ideologies piggybacking on liberalism, but cultural relativism is one starting point.
Contemporary academic leftists have broadly adopted the mantle of cultural relativism and promote cultural relativism
as a value
. (I’ve yet to meet a conservative who’s a cultural relativist.) The basic idea behind cultural relativism is that because everyone is always judging a culture from their own particular, situated cultural viewpoint, it’s therefore impossible to make reliable judgments about other cultures and cultural practices. This means that cultures and cultural practices cannot be judged. For example, people in Brazil eat avocados with sugar and with sweet foods (like avocado smoothies) and in the United States we eat avocados with salt and with salty foods (like guacamole). These are cultural practices and thus neither correct nor incorrect.
The alleged inability to make reliable judgments about cultural practices has been illegitimately translated into a
moral
value. That is, the shift has been made from, “We
cannot
make judgments about cultural practices” to, “We
should
not make judgments about cultural practices.” Notice the spurious move here, from the impossibility of a rational critique of a cultural preference, to the
immorality
of making a judgment about a cultural preference.
Relativism and the immorality of critique were then extended from the cultural to the epistemic realm—that is, from an impossibility of making reliable judgments about cultural preferences, to an immorality in making reliable judgments about systems of knowing the world. And just as there’s no single, privileged cultural vantage point from which one can make objective judgments, by this reasoning, there’s also no privileged epistemic viewpoint from which one can make objective epistemic judgments.
Epistemic relativism is either coupled with the idea that any process one uses to form beliefs is either just as good as any other process—a kind of epistemic egalitarianism—or with the idea that processes cannot be judged because one process is always judged by another process. In the latter case, there would thus be no basis for a reliable epistemological comparison.
For example, let’s say people in society A prefer to use the Koran to come to knowledge and to understand reality, while people in society B prefer to use the scientific method. For the epistemological relativist these are just different ways to know the world. If a person uses the scientific method in an attempt to lawfully align his beliefs with reality, then he’d judge any other process—like using the Koran—to be not just inferior, but foolish. By extension, the same is true for the person who starts with the Koran. If one starts with the premises that the Koran is a perfect book and it is the best way to understand reality, then by this standard any other process will be judged to be inferior and misguided.
Epistemic relativism both led to, and was concurrent with, the turn toward subjectivity (also called the subjective turn).
3
That is, we went from thinking in terms of an objectively knowable world to a subjectively knowable world. In a subjectively knowable world, whatever is true for me is true. In an objectively knowable world, there actually exists something to which one can lawfully align one’s beliefs—some shared, stable reality, or to use philosophical parlance, a communal, fixed, mind-independent metaphysic (Boghossian, 2006b, 2012a). In other words, think of objectivity like this: if everyone—including you—were to disappear, the universe would continue to be what it is. What is, is, independent of your beliefs. But in a world in which subjectivity is given primacy, there are no objective truths—what’s true is just true for you.
Epistemic systems are thus reduced to preferences. That is, those people, in that culture, prefer to use process A to form beliefs (divination, astrology, consulting the sacred text), while others prefer to use process B (hypothesis and experiment, falsification, scientific method). Epistemic systems become like pizza toppings—matters of taste that are not subject to truth or falsity.
4
Multiculturalism
The idea that epistemic systems are subjective and merely preferences is connected to, and paved the way for, multiculturalism. Here’s where things get tricky and where we need to clarify terms.
“Multiculturalism” is a term frequently heard in academia. (Canadians started using the term in official policies in the 1970s.) The fundamental idea behind multiculturalism is that different cultures can and ought to peacefully coexist. Initially, multiculturalism was a strategic way of bringing people together into a larger, inclusive culture that consisted of many distinct groups. Multiculturalism—as the term is used in academia today—means something very different.
5
The umbrella of multiculturalism has been extended to cover other kinds of coexistence—like the coexistence of cognitive and epistemic systems. And just as different cultures and races can harmoniously coexist when they’re not, for example, attacked, so too can different epistemic systems harmoniously coexist when they’re not attacked.
Now we’re starting to see how classical liberalism has morphed into an ideology that undermines the emancipatory potential of critical rationality.
Contemporary academic leftism turned the rational analysis of criticizing a process one uses to know reality from an epistemological critique into a moral taboo
.
What I’m about to write may confound those inculcated in the academic zeitgeist: a criticism of a
process
(like the process of understanding the age of Earth through reading ancient texts), or a criticism of a cultural practice (like using the metric system or making women cover themselves), or a criticism of a religious text (like the Book of Mormon or The Urantia Book), is not the same as a criticism of a
person
.
6
Nor is it the same as criticism of a
race of people
. Multiculturalism contributed to this confusion by extending immutable properties of people—like race, gender, sexual orientation, religion—to all epistemic systems, cultural ways of knowing, faith traditions, local mythologies, etc.
Yet another tenet of contemporary academic leftism is the belief, the value, that
ideas have dignity
. When one believes dignity is a property of ideas and not just a property of people, then criticizing an idea becomes akin to criticizing a person. In other words, morally, just as one shouldn’t criticize physical attributes common among sub-Saharan Africans, or among Scandinavians, so too one should not criticize ideas, faith traditions, and so forth.
Granting ideas dignity has two consequences. The first consequence is that criticizing faith traditions becomes viewed as a form of hate speech—like saying the “N” word. This kind of political correctness further buttresses faith from dialectical criticism. Most people won’t criticize faith out of fear people will think not only that they’re bad people, but also that they’re mean-spirited, angry, bigoted, prejudiced, insensitive, hateful people.
The second consequence is the
medicalization
of individuals based on their criticisms. This is done by attaching the suffix “o-phobia” to someone who criticizes, for example, beliefs within the Islamic faithtradition. (Note the parallelism in the terms: Islamophobe, homophobe, faithophobe). The implicit message is that rational analysis and criticism are indicative of a mental disorder.
Labeling someone who criticizes ideas, in whatever domain, as driven by fear, or by some other pathological condition—in effect as mentally unbalanced—is a complete betrayal of the core ideas of classical and social liberalism, that is, of the right of every person to live by his own lights, be free, pursue happiness, and enjoy the right of self-expression. (There are people of different faiths and different races who experience genuine instances of discrimination and hatred. Conflating the categories of ideas and people, and medicalizing rational criticism, both demeans the experience of people who suffer from discrimination and simultaneously tosses away a root liberty: the freedom to rationally analyze and critique.)
Tolerance and Islam
Tolerance is another liberal value, and by the same line of thinking, has been perverted into another value that undermines reason.
7
Tolerance only works when there’s reciprocity. That is, tolerance doesn’t handle intolerance very well. When tolerance—and the protection offered by toleration—are extended from people and cantilevered out to ideas, we end up protecting intolerance, antiscience views, irrationality, and all other forms of rank bias. We see examples of this in old Europe, with liberal democracies neutered in dealing with Islamic radicals.
And then there’s social tolerance. Many societies that enshrine faith-based processes are truly, profoundly intolerant: intolerant of homosexuals, intolerant of women’s rights, intolerant of minority rights, intolerant of other faith traditions, intolerant of freedom of speech, intolerant of freedom of assembly, intolerant of freedom of religion, etc.
8
Leftism, and the values I’ve just discussed that piggyback on it, have extended the value of tolerance to social, cultural, and epistemic practices. For example, recently in Afghanistan there were mass protests and killings at the alleged desecration of the Koran (Partlow & Londono, 2011; Sieff, 2012), and in the wider Islamic world there were riots because of cartoons of the Muslim prophet Muhammad published by the Danish newspaper
Jyllands-Posten
.