UPDATE below.

Robert Mathiesen makes a very important point in his comment on my Fundamentalism and Irrationality post, one this blog
might have failed to emphasize adequately because it’s complex and because the ‘Christian’ Right is louder right now.  This mini-essay is an attempt to do the subject justice. 

The decline of confidence in reason and evidence as sources
for eliminating error and approaching more reliable knowledge has not simply been
among the religious right, though it is more visible there and more immediately
threatening.   It is a core
feature of secular modernity.  It is NOT confind to the religious right.  And it is coming to a worrisome fruition from many directions.

 

Beginning in the late 19^th century some schools
of Marxism with their concept of “class consciousness” along with other
collectivist philosophies with their views of racial or ethnic or national
consciousness also began subordinating reason and evidence to ideological
agendas.  According to them the
Enlightenment confidence in reason and evidence simply obscured power relations
by which a dominant class, ethnic group, race, or nation ruled over
others.  In the late 60s there was
a resurgence of this stuff among some Black writers.  More recently, “post-modern” (actually hyper-modern)
scholarship has also sought to subordinate reason and evidence to the governing
criteria of power.      

All these
examples point to a long term decline in the standards of reason and evidence
even among secular moderns.  The
rise of the right has shunted these folks to the shadows, but should we be
blessed to defeat them, they will quickly emerge to prominence in the
universities where they are still found. 
The problem is not simply Fundamentalist irrationality – the secular
world has serious problems of its own.     

For at least a century a core
assumption about the nature of knowledge, one shared by most secular moderns
and a great many Christians, has been slowly undermining the moral and rational
foundations for a free society. 
This is the view that knowledge is power.  It’s most recent historical roots are in the work of Sir
Francis Bacon, a major influence on the development of modern science.      

Scientific knowledge requires us to
exercise power over what we study if we can.  Measurement, prediction, and most especially, experiment,
either facilitate power or are its exercise.  And many secularists say science is our only source of
knowledge.      

For a long time the full implications of this view were moderated by
Western liberalism.  Liberals shared the
modern view of knowledge – indeed early liberals contributed mightily to it – but
liberals exempted people from that standard because people were different – we
had moral standing.  We had human
rights.  We should not be subjected
to the power of others, such as being ruled against our will or being experimented
upon without our consent.      

But the liberal argument that
people are somehow exempted from the rest of nature has fallen on hard
times.  As it has weakened, bit by
bit the moral constraints on exercising power over people have withered.      

First in
educated and often philosophical circles and by now down to the man and woman
on the street, the power of moral reasoning as a check on power has withered – hence our national discussion of torture and a politics that no
longer recognizes the rule of law.  It is considered meaningless when applied to the
powerful.  This intellectual and
moral rot has riddled many traditional secular institutions.  Winning is the only thing, winning by
any means possible.       

As this
attitude has spread, there was a fascinating shift in many academic circles
from reason and evidence being used to create power to power being used to
determine what counts as reason and evidence.  Starting with collectivists, who held that class, race, or
some other collectivity determined our ability to understand the truth, with
post moderns there is no truth, nor any evidence or reason that can compel us
to abandon a position, only what can be enforced by power.     

Coming via a
different route, secular modernity generated the same irrationality we see
among Fundamentalists.  A high
ranking official in the Bush administration said to Ron Suskind 
      

. . . that guys like me were ‘in what we call
the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that
solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ I nodded
and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me
off. ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re
an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re
studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again, creating
other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort
out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just
study what we do.’      

We see here the coming
together of academic post modernist and Fundamentalist triumph of the
will.  I can not tell from which
direction this aide came to this conclusion, only that it fits perfectly with
both.  He could have been a student at Brown, where Robert Matheisen taught, or he could have gone to Regent University, academic home of so many Bushies.    

Academia
has contributed  disproportionately to
this process, although it’s mischief has been overshadowed by the lunacies
beginning with the Bush years.  The
so-called “science wars” began in the 70s, and were played as much by the left
and academia as the right.  Science
simply represented those with power at the moment.  Theories won out for political reasons, not the idealistic
reasons we had been led to believe made science different.  A wonderful account of all this is in
Steven Goldman’s audiobook Science Wars: What Scientists Know and How the Know
It.

(It’s pricey, worth it, but a much cheaper used copy is currently available on Amazon.  
When I checked, there was only one.)    

Not
only did knowledge serve power, power generated knowledge, whether it be
secular power studied by post-modernists or a God of power worshipped by the
religious right.  Either way,
reason and evidence were subordinated. 
Either way, Power and Will triumphed over reason and evidence.       

One reason that Pagan religion
may contribute much that is good to our future in ways vastly more important
than reflected in our numbers is that we and other spiritual traditions
emphasizing divine immanence, that the Sacred permeates the world, offer an
alternative to the growing nihilism by left and right, secular and ‘religious’
alike.  I am a Pagan for quite
different reasons, but if the US is to ever get its soul back, I think we will
have an important part to play.      

I’ve just completed a book
manuscript whose working title is “American Armageddeon: the Sixties, the
Culture War, and the return of the Divine Feminine that goes into all this in
depth.  Naturally I’ll announce
when it’s published.       

I’ll pick
up this theme in another post shortly, on conservatism and irrationality.  Then probably another on liberalism and
irrationality.  The problem is
pervasive in our world.

UPDATE:
Charlene Spretnak’s Resurgence of the Real is good on post modernism, and very Pagan friendly.