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PAR.TISAN R.EVIEW
principle" - "all sincere persons' beliefs have equal claims to respect" -
and most alarmingly, to "the humanitarian principle" - "all sincere
persons' beliefs have a claim to respect, with the first priority being that
no one be hurt." The fundamentalist, whether Islamic or Christian or
Marxist or whatever, would block the way of inquiry by making
"wrong thinking" a sin or a crime; the egalitarian and the humanitarian,
whether multiculturalist or Afrocentrist or feminist or whatever, would
block the way of inquiry by banning ideas which cause offense .
An academic epistemologist or philosopher of science might be un–
easy with Rauch's description of liberal science as a "game"; might feel
that questions about expertise and authority in the sciences have been a
bit skimped; and might complain that Rauch has not resolved the diffi–
cult technical issues about falsification and confirmation which lurk be–
hind his notion of "checking," nor tackled the hard questions about re–
alism and objectivity which lurk behind his thesis that liberal science is
the best system of deciding what is really knowledge and what only
opinion. Such complaints, though valid enough, would be unfair. For
Rauch has succeeded remarkably well at what he set out to do.
He is illuminating: he pulls together what might seem like very dif–
ferent phenomena - Ayatollah Khomeini's sentence of death on Salman
Rushdie, advocacy of equal time for "creation science," laws or speech
codes to punish or silence Holocaust revisionists or sexists or racists or
homophobes - and makes one see how they are alike and how alike are
the ways in which they threaten inquiry. (And sometimes, as when he
compares Khomeini's Iran to Plato's
Republic,
he illuminates the philo–
sophical past as well as the political present.) He is shrewd: explaining his
use of the term "fundamentalism," he identifies with striking accuracy the
kind of intellectual style that stands in the way of genuine inquiry, "the
strong disinclination to take seriously the notion that you might be
wrong." He is honest: he acknowledges the sincerity of the fundamen–
talists and the good intentions of the humanitarians (hence, "kindly in–
quisitors"); he does not deny that freedom of inquiry carries a price, but
argues that it is worth the price it carries.
And he is admirably tough-minded, as well as admirably pithy:
"except insofar as an opinion earns its stripes. . it is entitled to no re–
spect whatever"; "although allowing mistakes is risky, suppressing them is
much riskier"; "a no-offense society is a no-knowledge society"; "as soon
as people learn they can get something if they raise Cain about being
offended, they go into the business of professional offendedness";
"knowing a man's color or descent tells you nothing whatever about his
'perspective' ... To insist on including people of various races as repre–
sentatives of their 'racial perspective' is to flirt with the irrationalism of
