The Truth Hurts: The Humanitarian Threat to Free Inquiry

Jonathan Rauch from the April 1993 issue

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–The Radical Egalitarian Principle: Like the simple egalitarian principle, but the beliefs of persons in historically oppressed classes or groups get special consideration.

–The Humanitarian Principle: Any of the above, but with the condition that the first priority be to cause no hurt.

–The Liberal Principle: Checking of each by each through public criticism is the only legitimate way to decide who is right.

The last principle is the only one that is acceptable, but it is now losing ground to the others. Impelled by the notions that science is oppression and criticism is violence, the central regulation of debate and inquiry is returning to respectability–this time in a humanitarian disguise. The old principle of the Inquisition is being revived: People who hold wrong and hurtful opinions should be punished for the good of society. To see why, you have to look at fundamentals.

We have standard labels for the liberal political and economic systems–democracy and capitalism. Oddly, however, we have no name for the liberal intellectual system, whose activities range from physics to history to journalism. I use the term "liberal science." The very need to invent a label for our public idea-sorting system speaks volumes about the system's success. Establishing the two basic rules on which liberal science is based required a social revolution; yet so effective have those rules been, and so beneficent, that most of us take them for granted. Put them into effect, and you have laid the groundwork for a knowledge-producing and dispute-resolving system that beats all competitors hands down. They are the basis of liberal inquiry and of science.

First, the skeptical rule: No one gets the final say. No idea, however wise and insightful its proponent, can ever have any claim to be exempt from criticism by anyone, no matter how stupid and grubby-minded the critic. A statement is established as knowledge only if it can be debunked, in principle, and only insofar as it withstands attempts to debunk it.

This is, more or less, what the great 20th-century philosopher of science Karl R. Popper and his followers have called the principle of falsifiability. Science is distinctive not because it proves true statements but because it seeks systematically to disprove false ones. In practice, of course, it is sometimes hard, if not impossible, to say whether a given statement is falsifiable or not. But what counts is the way the rule directs us to try to act. If you do not try to check ideas by trying to debunk them, then you are not practicing science.

Second, the empirical rule: No one has personal authority. No one gets special say simply on the basis of who he happens to be. A statement is established as knowledge only if the method used to check it gives the same result regardless of the identity of the checker and regardless of the source of the statement. Who you are doesn't count; the rules apply to everybody, regardless of identity.

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."

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.

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. 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. At home, religious fundamentalism is a minority interest, not very powerful–weak enough, in fact, to be treated with arrogance and contempt by the intellectual establishment when it is worthy instead of respectful enmity.

Where religious true believers are concerned, we are pretty vigilant. The greater threat is embracing authoritarianism in the name of fairness and compassion. Having been at last rousted out of politics and economics by the disaster of communism, the authoritarian Rasputin has now come calling on liberal science, and he already has his foot in the door.

To begin with, I should be clear about what I mean by intellectual egalitarianism. In one sense, liberal science is as egalitarian as any system could be. Where the game of science is properly played, no one is granted personal authority simply because of who he happens to be–period. The rules apply to everybody. It is quite true that for most of history (and not just in the West) women, blacks, and others were denied equal access to the intellectual and scientific establishment, as they were denied equal access to so much else. But that represents not the failure of liberalism but the failure to embrace it. To renounce liberal science because the society in which it was embedded tended to shut out women is as silly as it would have been to renounce democracy in 1910 because women were not allowed to vote.

Science, when it works the way it is supposed to, is an equal-opportunity knowledge maker. But that is very different–radically, fundamentally different–from being an equal-results knowledge maker. Some people who understand the difference clamor for equal results–for instance, people on the political left who demand an equal place in the canon of knowledge for minority groups’ points of view. Many more people, however, simply misunderstand. They don't realize that there is a wide gulf between equal access to a knowledge-making system and equal results. Their misunderstanding has the potential for grave consequences.

One of the most troubling examples of such misunderstanding is Edwards v. Aguillard, whose attack on intellectual liberalism was subscribed to by two justices of the U.S. Supreme Court. The state of Louisiana had passed a statute (the Balanced Treatment for Creation-Science and Evolution Science in Public School Instruction Act) requiring that wherever in public schools the theory of evolution was taught, "scientific creationism" was to be taught along with it. The act did not require that either one be taught; only that if one was, so must be the other. The bill's sponsors felt that students were being indoctrinated with one (disputed) view of how humanity came to be. They thus demanded that the evidence on both sides be presented if the subject were to be broached. One state senator stressed that to teach religion in disguise was not his intent: "My intent is to see to it that our textbooks are not censored."