The Truth Hurts: The Humanitarian Threat to Free Inquiry

Jonathan Rauch from the April 1993 issue

(Page 3 of 5)

In 1987 the Supreme Court struck down the law as unconstitutional. But Justice Antonin Scalia, one of the brightest judges on the American bench, strongly dissented; he was joined by the chief justice, William Rehnquist. Scalia's dissent aimed straight at what liberal intellectual standards are all about. And it is a mark of the egalitarian fallacy's seductiveness that the conservative Scalia and the still more conservative Rehnquist tumbled right into bed with the left-wing people who say that to insist on science is to oppress minority traditions. The question of constitutionality was central to the Court, but not to the egalitarian attack. What was central there was the background view of knowledge that informed Scalia's dissent: that the Louisiana legislature was seeking to ensure academic freedom, and that academic freedom could be advanced by requiring that evidence for all beliefs, or at least more than one, be presented. It is important to see that you could apply that argument to secular beliefs just as easily as to religious ones. If states began passing laws requiring equal time for astrology–and it's a wonder they haven't–Scalia's egalitarian view of knowledge would say they were doing the fair thing. Scalia said that the evidence for evolution was not conclusive, and that the law's supporters had presented testimony that creationism had scientific support. Therefore throwing out a state's attempt to give both sides a hearing, he said, was "illiberal." "In this case," he said, "it seems to me the Court's position is the repressive one."

That, of course, is just what the complaints from the left assert: The Western view of objective knowledge and the scientific order built upon it are both "repressive." The egalitarian line of thinking holds that since any standard for truth is biased and political, no one's standard should get special privileges, but rather all should be equal.

For instance, "The monocultural perspective of traditional American education restricts the scope of knowledge" (my italics). That is from the report by New York State's 1989 task force on minorities and education. The report continues, "It acts as a constraint on the critical thinking of African American, Asian American, Native American, and Puerto Rican/Latino youth because of its hidden assumptions of 'white supremacy' and 'white nationalism.' "

Only the particulars are left-wing. The charge itself–that "the monocultural perspective of traditional American education restricts the scope of knowledge"–could just as easily have come from the creationist right. The bill of particulars might just as easily have read, "It acts as a constraint on the critical thinking of American youth because of its hidden assumptions of 'Darwinist supremacy' and 'secular humanism.'" Either way, the argument is the same: The establishment's view of what the "facts" are and how to find them has excluded someone, and the way to ensure intellectual freedom (broaden "the scope of knowledge") is to rewrite the texts so as to let that someone in. That the left-wing and right-wing intellectual egalitarians have so far failed to make common cause is a function merely of expediency, not principle.

On its face Scalia's argument is plausible, especially since it appeals to one of Americans' most laudable principles, namely the principle of political equality. There is no doubt that the argument is impelled by decency. But in fact it is very dangerous. It cuts out, with a surgeon's precision, the heart of a peculiar and subtle distinction on which all of Western intellectual life–I do not exaggerate–depends. That distinction is as follows: To believe incorrectly is never a crime, but simply to believe is never to have knowledge.

In liberal science, there is positively no right to have one's opinions, however heartfelt, taken seriously as knowledge. Just the contrary: Liberal science is nothing other than a selection process whose mission is to test beliefs and reject the ones that fail. A liberal intellectual regime says that if you want to believe the moon is made of green cheese, fine. But if you want your belief recognized as knowledge, there are things you must do. You must run your belief through the science game for checking. And if your belief is a loser, it will not be included in the science texts. It probably won't even be taken seriously by most respectable intellectuals. In a liberal society, knowledge is the rolling critical consensus of a decentralized community of checkers. That is so not by the power of law but by the deeper power of a common liberal morality.

And who decides what the critical consensus actually is? The critical society does, arguing about itself. That is why scholars spend so much time and energy "surveying the literature" (i.e., assessing the consensus so far). Then they argue about their assessments. The process is long and arduous, but there you are. Academic freedom would be trampled instead of advanced by, say, requiring that state-financed universities put creationists on their biology faculties or give Afrocentrists rebuttal space in their journals. When a state legislature or a curriculum committee or any other political body decrees that anything in particular is, or has equal claim to be, our knowledge, it wrests control over truth from the liberal community of checkers and places it in the hands of central political authorities. And that is illiberal.

Intellectual liberalism is not intellectual majoritarianism or egalitarianism. You do not have a claim to knowledge either because 51 percent of the public agrees with you or because your "group" was historically left out; you have a claim to knowledge only to the extent that your opinion still stands up after prolonged exposure to withering public testing. Now, it is true that when we talk about knowledge being a scientific consensus we are talking about a majority of scientists. But we are not talking about a mere majority. For a theory to go into a textbook as knowledge, it does not need the unanimity of checkers' assert, but it does need far more than a bare majority's. It should be generally recognized as having stood up better than any competitor to most of the tests that various critical debunkers have tried.

Today it is possible that a majority of climatologists believe that global warming is a fact (one can't say for sure, since scientists don't vote on these things), but global warming is far from well enough established to be presented as fact in textbooks. The point extends beyond natural science. The critical consensus of historians is that many minority groups did not make much of a contribution to the writing of the Constitution. Attempts to find a role for them and install them in the textbooks may make some people feel better. But it would betray the community of critical checkers. It would also lead to factional warfare as other political groups took up the cry and demanded their share.

For various minorities, the answer is to do just what many black and feminist historians are doing, namely to propose new hypotheses about the role of, say, blacks and women in American history. But only after those hypotheses have stood up to extensive checking, only after each has convinced each, is it time to rewrite the texts.

Further, only after an idea has survived checking is it deserving of respect. Not long ago, I heard an activist say at a public meeting that her opinion deserved at least respect. The audience gave her a big round of applause. But she and they had it backwards. Respect was the most, not the least, that she could have demanded for her opinion. Except insofar as an opinion earns its stripes in the science game, it is entitled to no respect whatever. This point matters, because respectability is the coin in which liberal science rewards ideas that are duly put up for checking and pass the test. That is why it is so important that creationists and alien-watchers and radical Afrocentrists and white supremacists be granted every entitlement to speak but no entitlement to have their opinions respected.

Liberal science cannot exert discipline if it cannot drive unsupported or bogus beliefs from the agenda by marginalizing them. When you pass laws requiring equal time for somebody's excluded belief, you effectively make marginalization illegal. You say, "In our society, a belief is respectable–and will be taught and treated respectfully–if the politically powerful say it is."

Once you have said that, you face a very stark choice. You can open the textbooks only to those "oppressed" beliefs whose proponents have political pull. Or you can take the principled egalitarian position, and open the books and the schools to all sincere beliefs. If you do the former, then you have replaced science with power politics. If you do the latter, then you have no principled choice but to teach, for example, "Holocaust revisionism" as an "alternative theory" held by an "excluded minority"–which means, in practice, not teaching 20th-century history at all. Either way, you have taken in hand silly and even execrable opinions and ushered them from the fringes of debate to the very center. At a single stroke, you have disabled liberal society's mechanism for marginalizing foolish ideas, and you have sent those ideas straight to the top of the social agenda with a safe-conduct pass.

As knowledge-making regimes go, nothing is as successful or as respectful of diversity or as humane as liberal science. The trouble is that liberal science often does not look very humane. It uses sticks as well as carrots. The carrots are the respectability, frequent use, and public credit that it bestows on the opinions that it validates; the sticks are the disrespect and the silent treatment that it inflicts on the opinions that fail. Those sticks are nonviolent, true. But it is unconscionable not to acknowledge that denying respectability is a very serious matter indeed. It causes pain and outrage–outrage to which Scalia's humane impulses reached out in Edwards v. Aguillard. Here is where the door opens to the most formidable attack on liberal science–the humanitarian attack.

"Well," goes the argument, "we must, it appears, have intellectual standards. But what should our standards be? Obviously it is desirable to have standards that minimize pain. And a lot of beliefs cause pain. Racist beliefs cause pain. Anti-Semitic and sexist and homophobic beliefs cause pain. So do anti-American and anti-religious beliefs. If we're going to have a social system for weeding out beliefs, it should start by weeding out beliefs that cause pain. Intellectuals should be like doctors. They should first do no harm."