Author’s Note: The following is a “faux” interview from when I was writing the Courier-Tribune column, which I have expanded and answered more fully, now that I’m no longer held back by the standards of the newspaper or the library. This was never published because I was asked to write something else, or I missed a week due to illness. Either way, I think it holds up and is timely, especially since I updated it! It is essentially a doubt essay, which reminds me of a little placard that was on my philosophy professor’s tiny office door: “Oh, Lord—if there is a Lord—save my soul—if there is a soul.” —Prayer of the Skeptic.
Why do you always write about credulity and ideology?
For a long time, I have written about (among much else) the problems of credulity, certainty, moral imbecility, and blind adherence to ideology especially when those ideologies are evil or maintain harmful requirements for participation. I’ve written about these things, whether they show up as belief in conspiracy theories, political affiliation, religious confession, or, as any idea taken to its most illogical point. To me, switching off the critical faculties, taking things at face value, and sacrificing reason and rationality to feel like one has all the answers is the moral equivalent of choosing to let someone else do my thinking for me. Doing this for some “brand” of belief, because it makes one feel like they belong, is repugnant to me, and is, I think, one of the worst aspects of modernity, though it is a very old problem.
Since I first took up my pen to write my library columns, back in 2015, I have set myself up against these types of behaviors, both in myself, but also I have been critical of them in the world. These ills are more dangerous to a free society than any other danger, except perhaps warfare from outside, however that might take shape.
Why are these things so important to you? What business of yours is it to tell people how they should think?
This is not a thorny question. The reason this is so important to me is multi-faceted, but the main supporting structure is fairly simple. People in my family, my friends, others I care about, and most often myself, have habitually decided that they didn’t need evidence to believe a thing, so long as it either gave them a sense of having special knowledge or confirmed some already held bias. Sometimes, both of these things come together. Harm then came from that belief. The most readily available example is my mother and her belief in a snake-oil salesperson, who convinced her that her leukemia was being caused by mercury in her fillings. She and my stepfather paid exorbitant amounts of money to have her teeth fixed, believing that this would solve her health issues. It caused her to lose precious time, which, had they had any faith in actual medicine, may have given her a few more years. It robbed them of precious funds that may have helped them afford better treatments. Even when she was finally forced to get real medical advice from actual physicians, she continued to see a “homeopath” and take sugar tablets for the common cold.
It wasn’t just this. She and my stepfather also participated in an eschatological “cult” of evangelicalism that professed a worldview that taught that the things of this world don’t matter; that the Lord was coming back any day, and all that mattered was to be ready for the end. They also believed that the earth was only 6,000 years old and that demons were everywhere. The more tense or uncomfortable life became (and often as a result of these beliefs), the more they doubled down. I was still quite young, but it was my first taste of a mindset that was stuck, stagnant, unable (or unwilling) to ask questions, to grow beyond a certain point, especially when those questions challenged their strongly-held beliefs. It cost my mother her life. I’m convinced that it ruined much of my adolescence. But, whether it was coming from the pulpit or from the office of a quack, they believed it, because they had never been taught to trust their critical faculties, to ask questions, to challenge ideas for evidence. It wasn’t their fault, because no one ever challenged them to do their own thinking. In their case, but also in so many others, it boiled down to a matter of life and death. What could be more important?
Isn’t this a Dave problem, then? What has it got to do with everyone else?
I know I cannot change every person I meet. I wouldn’t want to. And yet, I tend to put great weight on what Kant said: if you can help, then you must act as if it were your duty to help. In other terms, my words might not change anything for anyone, but there is a chance that they might, and as long as that is true, then I am duty-bound to try. There is a thing we say in our A.A. meeting at the end, which I have always liked. “Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but no one is entitled to be wrong in their facts.” I would simply add, echoing the economist Keynes, that when the facts change, one’s opinions ought to change, too.
This is not a natural inclination in most people. For some reason (at least to me), people will fight to the death rather than admit that they have been wrong. This is where I’m most likely to stumble, as well. But I know how to do it, even if I’m not inclined to do it. I would like to model that “eating crow” is not nearly the social taboo it has been set up to be; that it is far easier than it sometimes feels. Far more can be gained by admitting that we have been on the wrong road, and changing direction, than by digging in, putting our ears back, and sitting down. The ostrich and the donkey rightly come to mind as literary examples of these behaviors, and we have the right instinct to find them silly and childish, not to say dangerous and ignorant.
It’s one thing to talk about such things; what are the solutions you suggest?
In a word: enlightenment. I’ve been around for nearly half a century. In that time, I have seen one thing that proves enlightenment over and over. The most enlightened among us are those who eschew certainty, who admit when they don’t have the answers, who are interested in learning more. They do not pretend to be certain about things they have no real knowledge about. They don’t usually take things at face value. They have a firm mistrust of anything that seems too good to be true. They don’t fill in the gaps of life that don’t make sense, no matter how cruel, with soft lies. These are the principles usually attributed to Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics. They are the foundation of the scientific method. They are the essence of discovery, of learning, of exploration, and curiosity.
The principles of enlightenment, as the word suggests, bring light to us. The light of reason, of knowledge, of awareness; it sheds light on benighted thinking. The habits I have mentioned above—credulity, certainty, moral imbecility, blind adherence to ideology belong to the shadow realm of human thought. They prefer logical fallacies to logic. They expect immediate gratification, rather than unpleasant uncertainty. They prefer the suggested possibility rather than the mathematical probability. They seek comfort in place of knowledge, emotion rather than reason, scapegoating and fear in place of caution and thoughtful kindness. Every trait is intellectually and morally lazy. Enlightenment ends all of this by positing that only reason can provide real freedom. When we are scared, knowledge provides comfort. When we seek to blame, rationality provides a breath to consider our shared humanity. Reason allows us to forebear the tantrum, the emotional crisis, the spiritually destructive lies of certainty, and face the truth with a hopeful heart.
This all sounds preachy. Isn’t enlightenment just another false religion?
I'm not selling a new age self-help remedy. I’m not the first person nor the only person to suggest what I’m saying here. This isn’t another cult or con, but you don’t have to take my word for it. I’m not making any money from Big Enlightenment. Nothing bad will happen if you roll your eyes and decide that this just isn’t your cup of tea. In fact, you might decide that you wish to go in the opposite direction of enlightenment, and if so, you’d be in good company.
Hitchens said that he thought humanity was still at a point of intellectual adolescence. He pointed to the rampant fear of the dark, of storms, the need for superstition to explain the minds of the gods, death, heartbreak, and financial troubles. These are not new tendencies in the human species (I will not say “race”). For hundreds of thousands of years, people have lived under the yoke of these mental shackles, believing that boiling a goat’s head would cure the pox, or that a sheep’s guts would tell of true love or fortune or destiny. We no longer live in those times. Freedom dictates that a person could choose such behaviors, or any of thousands of others, to learn the mysteries of love, money, and their futures. But enlightenment has pierced the shadows of such thinking to the point where we either know they don’t work or that there are some things we cannot know. Why choose false certainty over truthful uncertainty? That is the primitive response of a backward mind.
You often write against religion and politics. What’s the harm in these?
Generally, there is no real harm from believing in some sort of meaning-giving structure, nor the spirited participation and discourse that arises from politics. Again, people are entitled to their opinions. Where the problem arises with them is the role they play in either helping or harming, and knowing the difference.
For religious faith, I take a very agnostic position when it comes to other people’s beliefs. I reserve the right to criticize any belief that (as I’ve said) encourages or requires the sublimation of the critical faculty. Still, faith may provide hope or comfort. It may give meaning to the arbitrariness of life and death. We seem to desire, at a foundational level, explanations for the brutality, cruelty, heartlessness of life. When we lose a child, a spouse, a parent, a dear friend, the world can feel cold and uncaring without the fellowship that comes from a consensus of belief. That these worldviews give comfort is one of their best qualities.
Where the problems begin is when people use religion to harm others by a scheme of roping in sad, hurting, or unbalanced people to fill pews and quotas, while deliberately using carefully worded emotional manipulation and coercion to keep them set. When religion lies about how the world (or reality) works, when it is used to scare children, or teach them dangerous ideas disguised as cute or sweet stories, then it becomes dangerous. There is a difference between having a strong personal faith and using that faith to bewilder people into following out of fear of eternal torture, or by making claims about literalist views of scripture. Some might claim that my real problem is with fundamentalist views of faith, but all faiths are quick to point to other beliefs as being fundamentalist, while ignoring the tendencies in their own frameworks.
For my whole life, I have watched people use religion as an excuse to treat other people badly for myriad reasons. Those reasons are as malleable as possible, allowing those who participate to switch their pet scapegoats from people of color to homosexuals to unwed mothers, to those who get abortions, to immigrants, using the same verse for each group, all while deftly navigating falling into the definition of genocidal speech, and still somehow getting tax exemption. There is a vast difference between this and personal, private faith.
But what about politics?
Politics functions as the same mechanism as religion, but in different terms. People still allow themselves to be convinced that their fears and feelings are more to be trusted than their critical faculties. Orwell said, “Political language—and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists—is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” I find it the complete antithesis of enlightenment to adhere to any political party or ideology without pushing it through our own filter of doubt and skepticism.
Politics also puts up heroes of the parties, would-be demi-deities who “embody” the parties' doctrines and dogmas to the fullest degree. Aside from being turned off by such individuals, recent history is scattered with the shells of worn-out old men who were once professed as heroes of the party, and then are left in junked up piles when they cease to be useful to the party. The polemicist H.L. Mencken said, “As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.” I'd call that prophecy fulfilled.
I have known people for whom their political adherence was more important to them than their last names. “I am a Republican,” said one man I knew whose name I can no longer remember. I’m sure he cared less about me knowing his name than about his party. Such is true for adherents to denominations, too. It doesn't matter at any given time what a party says it stands for. At one point in history, the values of the parties were completely reversed, and their adherents were no less convinced of their own rectitude and the other side’s incorrigible wrongness. The only thing worse than a “party person” is a party person who thinks that their faith justifies them to be right in their political affiliation and vice versa. What could be more reprehensible than a person who votes for a candidate, not because that person is of high moral standards, but because, despite how low their moral standards are, they vote for them anyway, because they're from “the party”? How much worse, when a person stands pat on the worst possible moral ideas, even when they know that they are horrible and wrong, just because they cannot be seen to abandon their party line? The vileness of both speaks for itself. The only thing worse than both is when they are combined to the detriment of all.
Doesn’t your position reek of fanaticism or radicalism?
Yes, and probably treason, too, at some point. Enlightenment, doubt, skepticism, uncertainty, non-conformity, intellectualism, reason, rationality, truth, fact, and scientific methodology are all very scary words to the predominant powers. It is a very radical position to say something like “They don’t want an informed electorate,” or “they want your outrage, not your righteous indignation.” David Brooks, with whom I disagree about 95% of the time, has said repeatedly that the last few generations have not given people the tools to develop their own moral standards. In this, I agree, especially because the very religious Mr. Brooks did not say that this moral standard had to be built upon the Bible. I agree with him.
Children are not taught to verify their claims or how to do proper research. Any lout can look up whether or not the earth is flat, but can they discern from the host of answers they will find, which ones are based in science? If I prefer that a human thinks for itself, is unchained from coercive thinking, lies, tyranny in the form of religion or politics or self-deception, fear and would rather seek for truth than certainty, and this makes me a fanatic, a radical, or is the equivalent of committing treason from the ideologies, dogmas and doctrines of our time, then I guess that’s what I am.
Quoting Socrates, all I know for certain is that I know nothing for certain. Even when I forget and demand something is true, I try to show my dedication to enlightenment ideals by being able to admit when I’m wrong, and continuing to seek knowledge wherever it may be found. If this makes me a heretic, an apostate, a ‘free thinker’, a nonconformist, or a man without a country, then so be it. I will face the consequences of those attributions, if I must, especially if it means I get to keep thinking for myself. It’s that simple.
And while I have breath to voice my concerns about my society, for which I care deeply, and my fellow mammals, for whom I have a much stronger affinity than they often deserve, I will try to carry this message and live it in all my affairs to the best of my ability. I may be unpopular, considered a crank or a fanatic, but it is worth it to me if that means I get to keep my mind free of chains and continuously ratify my opinions.
