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November 3, 2006
A good article on reason by Soumaya Ghannoushi in The Guardian. It starts thus:
We are witnessing the rise of an arrogant secularist rhetoric founded on belief in the supremacy of reason and absolute faith in science and progress, dogmas which arouse ridicule in serious academic and intellectual circles nowadays. Hearing its proponents defend their rigid notions, you would be forgiven for thinking you were in the presence of the fathers of positivism: Auguste Comte, Diderot, or Condorcet, or that you were back in the Victorian and Napoleonic eras with their high hopes of remaking the world and human destiny in light of the utopias of reason and progress.
It is the return of a fundamentalist Enlightenment--a right wing hard edged positivism tied to free markets and big technology. Ghannoushi then says :
These high priests of rationality, who in Britain include in their ranks such names as Richard Dawkins and Anthony Grayling have erected a world of dichotomies, borders and fences: secular v religious, rationality v superstition, progress v backwardness, public v private. This simplistic worldview fails to take account of the complexity of cultural and historical processes, or of intellectual and human phenomena.
It's a secularist dogmatism.
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