By DOUG SHAVER
December 31, 2021
In an earlier essay of this series, I mentioned my approval of Steven Pinker’s thesis in Enlightenment Now. All things considered, by several objectively measurable criteria, humanity is better off now than it was for most of its history, and this progress has occurred because of certain ideas promoted—though not invented or discovered—by the European Enlightenment. We may, as Pinker does, call those ideas the Enlightenment values. They are reason, science, and humanism. Whenever people have improved their lot in life, in whatever time or place they have done it, it has been because they applied one or more of them, whether they would have known it or not. Humans have been using reason for as long as they have existed. The hunter-gatherers who discovered agriculture were doing science, even if the concept itself had not yet been invented. And there have always been humanists among us, and we owe our moral progress to them.
But our progress has not been uniform (and notwithstanding certain of his critics, Pinker has never suggested otherwise). Neither is it guaranteed to continue (and Pinker has made this perfectly clear, too). Enlightenment values have made it happen, and when enough people abandon those values, it stops happening. A mere cessation of progress, though, is not a stable state. The only alternative to progress is regress. When we stop improving our situation, it will get worse.
If our progress hasn’t halted yet, it is slowing. The political class and our public intellectuals exhibit a reckless disregard for reason. Science suffers from a disrepute for which some of its own practitioners are at least partly to blame. The resurgent racism covertly advocated by critical race theory has undermined humanism as effectively as any religious revival could have hoped to. I don’t know how to turn this trend around, and so it’s fortunate that nobody is asking me to. But there are people with some good ideas. Not enough people are listening to them, but we have not run out of time yet.
Speaking of religion . . . it might be useful to think about why some folks have been saying that woke ideology is a religion. There is not a lot that every belief system usually called a religion has in common. For most of us westerners, though, the paradigmatic religion is Christianity. For many of us who don't happen to believe in it, there are a few things about it that we really don't like, and those things are conspicuous in the contemporary social justice movement.
There is not a lot that every belief system usually called a religion has in common. For most of us westerners, though, the paradigmatic religion is Christianity. For many of us who don't happen to believe in it, there are a few things about it that we really don't like, and those things are conspicuous in the contemporary social justice movement.
Chief among them is the notion that dissent cannot be due to principled reasoning but must be attributed to evil. According to some Christian apologists, there can be no rational objection to Christian teachings, and so the only real reason anyone can have for doubting them is an unwillingness to submit to God's authority. Likewise, we who believe that some inequalities could exist for reasons other than racism or sexism are, as Paul said about unbelievers in general, without excuse.
This is related to the Christian notion of Original Sin. This doctrine says we're all incorrigibly evil without hope of salvation except by submission to the divine will—as that will is revealed to certain ecclesiastical authorities. It's obviously not enough just to say "I submit to God." We have to prove our submission by our obedience to church authority. That means, among other things, believing what the authorities tell us to believe. You think the authorities have made a mistake? No, you've made the mistake, and you will burn in hell for it.
This offense of disagreeing with church doctrine is called heresy, and it has an interesting etymology. It's not about making a mistake. It's about making a choice—a wrong choice, of course, but choice, not error, is the key notion. In this worldview, then, if you don't believe the church's teachings, it can only be because you just don't want to believe the truth. And why would anyone not want to believe the truth about God, unless they don't want to do his will? Heretics, therefore, aren't just foolish. They are evil.
And it gets worse. Since they just might, if allowed to spread their ideas, persuade others to question the church's authority, they must be silenced if they will not recant. The authorities must be believed, because they have submitted to God's will. Doing God's will is how they make their living, after all. And because they have submitted, they must know the truth.
There is a bedrock assumption in all this that since good people always want to know the truth, then good people will know it when they hear it. It sort of follows, then, that if you believe the truth, then all who disagree with you must be bad people. And this explains a few things about the mainstream press's coverage of Kyle Rittenhouse.
The left has long made obvious its contempt for the presumption of innocence in criminal cases, so its reaction to the Rittenhouse verdict couldn’t have surprised anyone. But what are we to make of the press's continual reminder that, whatever he was doing in Kenosha, he had to cross a state line in order to do it? The initial reports said he carried his weapon across the state line. Most of the reporters stopped saying that after it was proved the rifle was never outside of Wisconsin, but they didn’t let up on mentioning that he crossed a state line in the process of doing whatever he did.
But, the left doesn’t even care about the nation’s borders. When did they start caring about any state’s borders?
Of course it isn’t the borders they care about. What they have cared about from Day One is making Kyle Rittenhouse look evil. If you cross a state line while committing a crime, then it’s a federal offense, and as we all know, federal offenses are the worst kind. They are so bad, our poor little state authorities can’t even deal with them.
Of course, Rittenhouse’s defenders will try to remind the press that he was committing no crime when he made the trip, on the day before the shooting, from his home in Illinois to Kenosha. Doesn’t matter, says the press, because he was planning to shoot some protesters. And we know that . . . how? Well, there’s this video where he says so.
Really? He said on a video that he planned on shooting some protesters?
Well, it depends on what constitutes protesting. The video was taken several weeks before the Kenosha incident, and it shows some people looting a pharmacy. There is a voice-over, apparently Rittenhouse’s, saying he wished he could shoot the looters. And that, the press would have us believe, is all the proof anyone should need to prove that Kyle Rittenhouse had made up his mind that black people protesting racial injustice ought to be shot. Some of us think there is a difference between pillaging and protesting, but the far left, which is now more or less in control of the mainstream press, begs to differ. If you pillage in order to protest racial injustice, then it is protesting, and is therefore protected by the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech.
If you don’t see it that way, then according to the woke left, you’re a racist, and this is not something about which reasonable people can disagree. Reasonable people are good people, good people want to know the truth, people who want to know the truth do know the truth, and there can be no reasonable disagreement with the truth.
And that is what makes this ideology, if not a religion, something so much like a religion that the distinction is hardly worth making.
Next: Wokeness, religion, and intuition
(This page last updated on February 20, 2024.)