The Threat to Reason: How the Enlightenment Was Hijacked and How We Can Reclaim it [Paperback]

Reason and faith operate in different spheres. Reason incorporates logic, proof, and judgment based on evidence, rationality, and experience. Faith largely ignores these things, and its adherents thrive on hope, symbolism, and interpretations. One cannot reason with a person who claims that there is no need to define his god and offers no proof of what he believes to be true save his sincere and intense belief that his god is true and his faith is strong. Those who cannot accept such blurry ideas will turn away. People who have religious beliefs will deny that their belief requires them to suspend reason. They prefer to call it matters that only god knows, and he (or she) will reveal all in good time. Where or how that will occur does not matter. It is this sort of imprecision that bothers those who uphold reason against faith.

Dan Hind tried to salvage something for the religious. He appeared to sense the danger of extreme religious views, but he seemed more perturbed by Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris who champion reason more aggressively than many others. They have been successful and they have opened many eyes. For that they are being villified by virtually all who have religious leanings. Hind thinks that reason can itself be a threat to reason. Really? One might make a wrong assessment of evidence, or reason wrongly, but reason cannot be a threat to reason. If that were true, one might as well waste no time or effort thinking. That is precisely what religious leaders want their congregation to do - forsake critical thinking and obey by "blind faith". Whenever challenged and forced into a corner, the religious man will declare that he is convinced that he is right because of his blind faith. If he has no wish to think critically and examine the possibility of his being wrong there is no room for reason work.

Hind has written an interesting book that he hopes might salvage the religious from Dawkins and Harris. He used the idea of a lost or "hijacked" enlightenment as the means of persuading his readers to believe that Dawkins, Harris, reason, and corporations are as dangerous as the jihadists and the plotters of the 9/11 attack in New York. Hind thus bundles all extreme positions together, the extreme fundamentalists, the extreme corporate cheats, and (what he thought to be) the extreme rationalists. The thesis he advances in this book is that the "Enlightenment" as he understood it and wishes us to embrace too, is the spirit in search of knowledge and that spirit cannot travel with reason as its only companion. It needs (moderate) religious faith. It's up to the reader to think if that is possible; or, whether, just as there is no such thing as reason in extreme, there can be no religious faith that is moderate. A religious moderate is often a euphemism for a religious coward or hypocrite. You might be persuaded by Hind, or you might not. Nonetheless, the book was well written and provocative, and although I do not accept his main thesis, I would recommend the book as a stimulating work.

This isn't a particularly profound book, but Hind has a valid point to make: Rationality and Enlightenment have been hijacked by big business and liberal imperialism to justify treating human beings as means to accomplish their goals rather than as ends in themselves. Hind doesn't think religions accurately describe the way the universe is at all, but on the other hand instrumental rationality can't give us an ethical code with any purchase, because you can't derive an ought from an is. Moreover, to paint religions, relativism, alternative medicine, postmodernism, environmentalists, and the like as the enemies of civilization is a gross misrepresentation of the more urgent and damaging challenges facing humanity, challenges that are frequently concealed or brushed under the carpet by our "rational" and "enlightened" leaders.

Not a hugely controversial point, and probably not as sensational as Dawkins, Harris et al.'s polemics. Just a call for a reason. Which is probably why it will go unnoticed. Now there's irony for you.