Freethinkers and Such

While reading Susan Jacoby's Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism, I came across an interesting sentence: "Men like [the Reverend William] Bentley believed as deeply in freedom of thought and of speech as they did in freedom of conscience; at the core of their religion lay not an unquestioning faith but a deep reverence for the power of the human mind and the value of human doubt" (p. 52).

Jacoby is describing one of what today would be called the "opinion leaders" of post-Revolutionary America, a Unitarian minister named William Bentley whose liberal Protestant denomination was considered by religious conservatives — whose star was in the ascendant around 1790-1800 and into the middle of the 19th century — "just another species of infidelity" (p. 51). Along with atheists and deists, Unitarians, Universalists, and certain other liberal Christians of the day were among the freethinkers about whom Jacoby writes. To the extent they had religious leanings at all, they elevated reason over blind faith.

What intrigued me about the above-cited passage is that it links reason ("the power of the human mind") with doubt. I find that curious and surprising, because (or so it would seem to me) reason holds itself forth as a strategy for dispelling doubt.

Particularly when it is yoked to scientific empiricism, reason would seem to claim the mantle of being our only legitimate method for doubt's eradication. Faith, reason's opposite, is by pure reason's light a way of ignoring or enshrining doubt, not eliminating it.

The men whom Jacoby calls freethinkers were all in love with the notion that by replacing blind faith with reason, men could master themselves and their world. Only in so doing would they be able to escape the heel of the despot. So, from the point of view of men like Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and others, it was imperative at the time to make sure the newly minted United States of America was not slave to anyone's blind faith.

Many of these Early American freethinkers believed religion to be a tool of tyranny — as in the newly disputed claim of the "divine right" of kings. Revolutionary hero Thomas Paine snarkily wrote (see p. 59), "One of the strongest natural proofs of the folly of hereditary right in kings is that nature disapproves it, otherwise she would not so frequently turn it into ridicule, by giving mankind an ass for a lion."

He also wrote in The Age of Reason that the word mystery

... cannot be applied to moral truth, any more than obscurity can be applied to light. The God in whom we believe is a God of moral truth, and not a God of mystery and obscurity. Mystery ... is a fog of human invention, that ... represents itself in distortion. Truth never envelops itself in mystery, and the mystery in which it is at any time enveloped is the work of its antagonist.

I personally doubt that truth never envelops itself in mystery. As I've laid out in this post in my Tai Chi Journal blog, I take a Taoist approach to the idea of truth. As such, it contrasts with the Platonism we all tend to be heir to in the West.

In the quote above, Paine was being a good Platonist. He posits what amounts to a Platonic Form of Truth which is pure and unadulterated by Mystery. Paine implies that it is Reason which, in dispelling Doubt and Mystery, allows us to ascertain the Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing but the Truth.

But Taoism affirms that the Way which lies behind all that exists cannot be spoken of, and is accordingly nameless. As such, Taoism is a philosophy resigned to the ineffability of reality and the limits of reason.

But neither does Taoist wisdom accept the dogmatic authoritarianism of mainstream Western religious orthodoxy, which would have pleased Paine.

So it seems to this observer that Paine's dichotomy between faith and reason was a false one. It is not necessary to put all of one's eggs in the basket of Reason to be free. One can embrace Liberty and Mystery at one and the same time.

Which is my fancy way of saying, "A plague on both their houses." Neither religious zealotry nor anti-religious zealotry empowers us to lead fulfilled lives, which is what it's really all about. Neither insistence on the existence of an insubstantial Supreme Authority who is powerful yet mysterious, nor refusal to believe in same, covers all of human experience and all of human need.

Why can't we stop fighting over God? Some people need God in their lives, and others don't. But why do those on either side of the question have to impose their views on the rest of us?

If you're conservative about religion, fine. If you're not, also fine. But if you turn your personal theology into an ideology with which to make war on competing ideologies, not so fine.

Ideological warfare — as in today's so-called "culture wars" — is not about what works. It's about what ought to work, given the presuppositions of the ideology in question. But ideological presuppositions tend to be wrong — or, at least, to become wrong when the culture which gave rise to them morphs into a culture in which they are maladaptive liabilities.

What this blogger doubts, when he talks of "a world of doubt," is ideological presuppositions. And not just religious ones. Political ones as well. For example, opinion columnist Clarence Page writes in a recent column, "Blacks hearing a new gospel from GOP," of the difficulty the Democratic Party is having keeping African Americans such as Page solidly in their column.

One reason is today's heightened ideological partisanship, a case in point being the left-right bickering over President Bush's so-called "faith-based initiatives." Page writes:

Out in America's real neighborhoods, citizens don't appear to care as much as the folks in Washington do about who's liberal or who's conservative; they just care about what works.

Ideological partisanship, religious or secular, is what we need a whole lot less of today. Let's get on with the project of figuring out what works in the cultural conditions which prevail today to empower individuals to "be all that they can be."