By DOUG SHAVER
August 13, 2020
If this nation were as racist as the far left says it is, it would not have elected a black man to the presidency even once, let alone twice. If it were as sexist, no woman could have won the popular vote in a presidential election. And thus there is no way in hell it would tolerate a black woman's being a heartbeat away from the presidency. One would think it illogical, then, for the Democrats to run Kamala Harris as Joe Biden's running mate, given prevalent concerns about his health issues.
It has been over half a century since I read Eric Hoffer's The True Believer, but I know what I have observed among people like those he describes in the book. They don't much care about logic, though they will often say they care a great deal about it.
Some religious zealots will claim to perceive a distinction between human logic and divine logic. I have had a few occasions to ask them to explain the difference, but have never gotten an answer. I don't mean I've gotten an answer that I couldn't agree with; I mean my interlocutors would not answer the question. Secular leftists obviously don't have the option of passing the buck to God, but their usual tactic works almost as well, and that is to say that their adversaries are misusing logic. Logic has to lead to truth, but their adversaries affirm falsehoods, and so they are not using logic the way it is supposed to be used. It's a circular argument, but that isn't a problem for the True Believer, because according to the rules of the logical game, all circular arguments are valid. Whether they are epistemologically useful is beside the point, if the only point you want to make is that you're defending the truth. God is on your side, if you think God is real, and if you don't, well, he would be on your side if he were real.
An apparently new claim has surfaced in recent months, which is that reason, science, and all that follow from them—pretty much the whole of the Enlightenment—were created by the racist patriarchy as tools of oppression. But, it's not that new. Some apologists for Christian orthodoxy have been claiming this for years, except in their version, the Enlightenment was not a tool of oppression but an excuse for rebelling against God's authority.
(In fairness, these apologists don't reject logic as such. They combine the "excuse for rebelling" narrative with a claim that the Enlightenment thinkers perverted logic by questioning Aristotle's version of it. And Aristotle's version had to be the right one, of course, because Medieval Christian theologians were able to use it in defense of Christian orthodoxy.)
Now, reason and science can be and have been misused. Obviously. They are only tools, and any tool can be misused, with consequences ranging from trivially inconvenient to catastrophic. There are, too, plenty of contexts in which reasonable people can disagree over whether these tools have been properly used. But these disputes can never be resolved by reference to the conclusions that have been reached. That is the basis of their epistemological efficacy: They don't depend on any assumption that some people but not others have been uniquely gifted with an ability to know the truth. When that assumption shows up in any argument, then it is certain that reason is being misused.
The Medieval church made its peace with reason by affirming its divine origin while also affirming its recept of revelation. Since reason and revelation were both from God, they could never be conflict, and so whenever reason contradicted revelation, it was being misused. For the church, this was a very convenient truth.
The secular left has dispensed with infallible revelation and replaced it with infallible moral insight. Progressives just know evil when they see it, and they see it everywhere. They have always seen it in capitalism. Now they see it in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—just about the entire legacy of the Englightenment. They have thus succumbed to what Bret Weinstein calls a cultural autoimmune disorder. Our civilization has made great moral progress. We're nowhere near where we ought to be, but we're a lot closer than we used to be, and the Enlightenment is what has gotten us that much closer. And now progressives—or people calling themselves progressives—are attacking the Englightenment. If they have their way, the outcome won't be progress. It will be a new dark age.
Next: War by other means
(This page last updated on February 22, 2021.)