By Paul DeHart, June 16, 2009 in Uncategorized
I've recently been reading David Bentley Hart monumental Atheist Delusions. The work is the sort of rare achievement that takes up residence in the mind after one has read the book. From the title of the work, one might deduce that Bentley's book is a critique of the at best third-rate works by Dawkins and Hitchens. But it is more. Bentley's accomplishment is the decimation of the Enlightenment Myth concerning the advent and development of Christianity, concerning faith and reason, and concerning the Enlightenment itself. It is an Enlightenment chauvinism (and a paradigmatic instance of chronological snobbery) that the "Enlightenment" was the age of reason--an age preceded by the dark age of faith. I'm not going to recapitulate Hart's argument. I'll leave it for the reader to engage Hart for himself. What I find interesting is this--a certain story that the Enlightenment and it's children told about itself, a story that modernity more generally about itself, has turned out to be a rather false narrative. But this false narrative underlies a good deal of late modern thinking. Indeed, postmodernity actually begins with an acceptance of the basic narrative--and then opts against reason. One finds the now thoroughly debunked mythology in text books for the social sciences and for the humanities and for other disciplines as well. These books include accounts concerning the advent and nature of modernity, accounts that serious scholars now know is contrary to the evidence. So an interesting question emerges. What happens when the narrative about modernity changes? Does it, for instance, change the what it means to be a political scientist? How does it change the teaching of say an introductory politics course? For four or five years now I have told students to ignore the description in the intro book of the world before the advent of liberalism, industrialism, and modernity. I have told them that the description of the world that was is at best a caricature with considerable hyperbole and at worst false in almost every respect. But I am now more than just tired with this approach. I am exasperated by it. For the stories we tell ourselves about where we have been and where we are and who we are matter a great deal for how live in the world. They also matter a great deal for how we study the world. I have also become exasperated with scholars in political science, who frame everything in religion and politics as if it was a matter of faith versus reason--accepting, unthinkingly, the Enlightenment's way of framing the matter (or, rather, the way some Enlightenment thinkers framed the matter). But, of course, this is a historically and philosophically irresponsible way of framing things. When students of politics accept this way of thinking, they cannot appreciate those, who as they see it, think quite otherwise. But we should allow the possibility that some might think otherwise and that they might, as a result, live and act in the world differently than those committed to the Enlightenment's dichotomy--indeed, that those who see it differently might see the world more accurately and might live better in the world. We should at least allow that this is possible as the day begins and not start with a framework that dismisses the possibility a priori.
