Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought, Expanded Edition by Rauch Jonathan

Author:Rauch, Jonathan [Rauch, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2013-10-01T00:00:00+00:00

5

The Humanitarian Threat

“The liberation of the human mind,” H. L. Mencken once wrote, “has been best furthered by gay fellows who heaved dead cats into sanctuaries and then went roistering down the highways of the world, proving to all men that doubt, after all, was safe—that the god in the sanctuary was a fraud. One horse-laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms.”

When I think of the towering Plato and the brooding Paul, with their horror of error and their burning brilliance, I like to think next of Mencken—Mencken the rambunctious heaver of dead cats, the horse-laugher, the irrepressible American skeptic. Mencken stood in a great American tradition: a tradition of doubt and inquiry and rowdy reformulation of truth. “All of my work hangs together, once the main ideas under it are discerned,” he said. “These ideas are chiefly of a skeptical character. I believe that nothing is unconditionally true, and hence I am opposed to every statement of positive truth and every man who states it.” No final say—that was Mencken, down to the soles of his feet.

But there is another America, too—an America of herdthink, of intolerance. Even in this country of sharp-eyed mistrust of authority, the pressure on liberal inquiry is constant and can never be ignored. One must press back continually—and especially recently.

The trouble with talking so much about the threat to liberal science from the Khomeinis and Communists of the world is that in some ways they are the least of our problems. Americans have enough Menckenian instinct in their guts to be frightened by overt intellectual authoritarianism, even if they don’t always precisely understand the nature of the threat. It is true that the response to Khomeini’s attack on Rushdie was tepid and incoherent. But it is also true that Americans hated what Khomeini’s regime stood for. That, in itself, was a pretty good backstop against the worst kind of retreat. Americans typically have no intellectually elegant answer to the challenge from hard-core religious fundamentalists in the Islamic countries or here at home, but they do feel that in religious fundamentalism lurks a kind of dangerous alienness. They know viscerally that hard-core fundamentalism is a different kind of animal from garden-variety Episcopalianism. They can sniff the authoritarian goods inside the spiritual wrapping. That may not always be good enough, but when push comes to shove it is something.

Old-fashioned religious fundamentalism is a real and important threat to intellectual liberalism in America. Here, as I have been at such great pains to show, the nature of the danger is not religious; it is fundamentalist. However, I don’t think the old-fashioned religious brand of intellectual authoritarianism is worth losing sleep over in this country right now. The war whoops of Khomeini and his raging supporters have awakened many snoozing Westerners to the fact that tens or hundreds of millions of people really do detest liberalism; we can thank the Islamic fundamentalists for the reminder that totalitarianism never leaves us alone. At home, religious fundamentalism is a minority interest,

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