Enlightened spirit of inquiry
Janet Albrechtsen
SITTING on a stage at the Sydney Opera House on Monday evening, her hair swept up, a cream scarf wrapped around her shoulders, a beautiful young black woman tells the audience she is often accused of being a puppet of white middle-aged men. With a twinkle in her eye, Somalian-born Ayaan Hirsi Ali flashes a wry smile as she looks down the table at the four older white men who have been brought together by the Centre for Independent Studies to discuss why the ideas of the Enlightenment need a 21st-century revival. Puppet? Not a chance.
Anyone who knows Hirsi Ali's story knows she is no one's pawn. As a girl she suffered genital mutilation; then, as a young woman, escaped an arranged marriage, incurring the wrath of Islam by rejecting her faith. Last time she was in Sydney, huge crowds listened to her journey, where she crossed back and forth between the superstitions, tribal taboos and conspiracy theories of her people to the world of inquiry and measured, rational discourse in the West. It was evident to her that one system was better than the other. People are equal but ideas and values are not. The crowds have come again on another wintry Sydney night. But this time Hirsi Ali is more interested in our story. She says we in the West, who have inherited the values of the Enlightenment, have developed contempt for values that drive progress and freedom.
There is no doubt the West is suffering from a dangerous moral disorientation. It is not clear that we value the very idea of the West any more. Enlightenment values such as genuine inquiry and reason, which ought to flow like blood delivering a vibrant pulse to the Western project, have been dislodged by the noxious intruders of unreason and fear. If talk about the Enlightenment sounds like some quaint historical curiosity debated by poseurs in the ethereal world of academe, think again. The determination to quash inquiry and reason infiltrates just about every aspect of our lives.
Hirsi Ali knows something about this. Shadowed by a security detail, she lives with death threats because she has chosen to debate Islam. Sweet-sounding words such as multiculturalism and tolerance are used to repress open debate. She has no problem with people who worship the prophet Mohammed. "But I want to be able to say that Mohammed had some reprehensible qualities without being thrown in jail, without being demonised," she says. This must be allowed in a society committed to Enlightenment values of inquiry and reason because people progress by using reason to challenge ideas.
Panel member Frank Furedi also knows something about our pusillanimous surrender of Enlightenment values. Debate is closed down by claiming that words, ideas and arguments cause offence to people, sometimes censored by the strong arm of the state or, more often, regulated by informal gatekeepers and our own timidity. Furedi, a professor of sociology from Britain and a prolific author of books about modern culture, was advised by a publisher recently that the term mentally ill was inappropriate. Instead, he should say "mental health service user". He was warned against the word civilisation because it presupposes that there are uncivilised people. His young son was told recently not to use the word retard because it had offensive connotations. His son knew that, which is why he used the term. "But words are now viewed as psychological weapons," Furedi said.
And it is the modern world's notion of human beings that explains why we have become so fearful of words. The conception of freedom that fuelled the Enlightenment was based on a radical view of humans as autonomous, resilient beings with the capacity to exercise their power in a rational, reasoned manner. Rational, reasoned human beings deserved the widest freedoms.
This very positive rendition of human beings has been replaced in the 21st century with a notion that people are weak (the buzzword is vulnerable) or destructive. Hence, freedoms that underpinned the Enlightenment period have been curtailed. Furedi notes that the phrase "human impact" would have been celebrated during the Enlightenment. Today, it is a negative term because humans are viewed as destructive; so destructive, we obsess about our carbon footprint to the point where, he says, "the best thing people can do is stay at home and never get out of bed". A modern world has lost confidence in what it means to be human and therefore lost confidence in basic values of freedom, such as free speech.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the embrace of global warming, where anyone who questions the orthodoxy is labelled a denier, a heretic who should not be heard. Genuine inquiry is not encouraged; it is jettisoned. Arthur Herman, another panel member, predicts that in five years there will be a spate of books and articles wondering how politicians, the media and the people were all so comprehensively conned by global warming alarmism.
But Herman, a historian, is not surprised. History tells us there will always be fanatics who peddle invisible fears and doomsday scenarios and, equally, there will always be people drawn to a priestly class - think Al Gore - who claim to know the answers.
And so springs up a modern-day theology given over to supplications and modern sacrifices such as banning the innocuous plastic bag.
The debate over global warming stopped being a scientific debate long ago, Herman says. Scientific consensus, not dispassionate inquiry, is the name of the game. And governments and politicians have long since stopped bothering with the evolving science. Here again, Herman says, we need to revive the Enlightenment values of scepticism, inquiry and reason. He quotes pre-eminent English scientist and experimentalist Michael Faraday, who said that one should hold theories in one's fingertips so that the least breeze of fact might blow them away.
Yet, in so many areas, inquiry and reason have been abandoned, drowned out by group-think orthodoxies. I see the lack of inquiry in a Year 8 geography curriculum that tells students that globalisation is a bogyman to be feared. It is in the mindset of many indigenous leaders still wedded to policies that produced 30 years of dysfunction. As Hirsi Ali told the audience on Monday evening, we ought to be confident enough about the values of the Enlightenment to defend them and use them. After all, we sharpen our minds and bring clarity to ideas through open, reasoned debate.
A man in the audience asks her how she responds to accusations by some of her critics that she is an Enlightenment fundamentalist. "I think it's cute," she says with a laugh. "It's just so absurd to put the two words together. The Enlightenment is all about asking questions." Her departing advice is that we confront, through robust debate, those who would threaten our most cherished values, whether the threat comes from our own complacency, or the malevolent anti-Westernism of moral relativists or the Islamic fanatics.