Excerpt from Berger's article:
In the course of my career as a sociologist of religion I made one big mistake and had one big insight (arguably not such a bad record). The big mistake, which I shared with almost everyone who worked in this area in the 1950s and '60s, was to believe that modernity necessarily leads to a decline in religion. The big insight was that pluralism undermines the taken-for-grantedness of beliefs and values. It took me some time to relate the insight to the mistake. And it has only been very recently that I understood the implications for the position of Protestantism in the contemporary world.
Modernity, as has become increasingly clear, is not necessarily linked to secularization. It is so in a few areas of the world, notably in Western Europe, and in some internationally visible groups, notably the humanistically educated intelligentsia. Most of the world today is as religious as it ever was and, in a good many locales, more religious than ever. The reasons for the above-mentioned exceptions are intriguing, but cannot concern us here.
Pluralism, for our purposes, can simply be defined as the coexistence and social interaction of people with very different beliefs, values and lifestyles. This state of affairs is indeed generally associated with modernity, but it does not necessarily lead to secularization, as is most clearly shown by America, a "lead society" (to use Talcott Parsons's term) both for modernity and for pluralism. Rather, the effects of pluralism are more subtle, but nonetheless of great importance: pluralism influences not so much what people believe as how they believe.
Throughout most of history human beings have lived in situations in which there was general consensus on the nature of reality and on the norms by which one should lead one's life. This consensus was almost everywhere grounded in religion and it was taken for granted. The pluralistic situation necessarily changes this, for reasons that are not at all mysterious. They have to do with the basic fact that we are social beings and that our view of reality is shaped by socialization, first in childhood and later in the relationships of adult life. Where socialization processes are uniform, this view of reality is held with a high degree of taken-for-granted certainty. Pluralism ensures that socialization processes are not uniform and, consequently, that the view of reality is much less firmly held.
Put differently, certainty is now much harder to come by. People may still hold the same beliefs and values that were held by their predecessors in more uniform situations, but they will hold them in a different manner: what before was given through the accident of birth now becomes a matter of choice. Pluralism brings on an era of many choices and, by the same token, an era of uncertainty.
Historically, of course, Protestantism was itself an important factor in bringing about this situation, and not only in America. It was the Protestant Reformation that undermined once and for all the unity of Western Christendom. Its principle of individual conscience carried within it from the beginning the potential for an ever-expanding variety of Christian groupings. This development was not at all intended by the Reformers, but history is always the arena of unintended consequences.
As to America, the combination of its immigrant population and its regime of religious liberty necessarily made it into the most pluralistic society in the modern world. Eventually every religious tradition, however reluctantly, was profoundly affected by the simple fact that it no longer controlled a captive population of adherents, that the latter now had the choice of staying on or going somewhere else. Protestantism, especially American Protestantism, had to come to terms with this situation first. It is still faced with its very great challenge.
There are individuals who thrive on a situation in which nothing can be taken for granted, in which they are faced with a multitude of choices. Perhaps they could be called the virtuosi of pluralism. But for most people the situation makes for a great deal of unease. This response may derive from profound aspects of human nature. There is what John Dewey has called "the quest for certainty" - certainty at least when it comes to the most important questions of life. The clash between the built-in uncertainty of the pluralistic situation and the urge for at least a measure of certainty helps explain a rather curious phenomenon in contemporary culture - the alternation of relativism and absolutist claims to truth.
To say that nothing can be taken for granted any longer means that all claims to truth are relativized. In the extreme case this leads to a kind of nihilism which asserts that not only can one not be certain of anything but that the very idea of truth is illusory. A number of so-called postmodernist theories have legitimated this idea, but it can also be found among people who have never heard of currently fashionable French philosophers. In this view, everyone has the right to his own opinion and the only remaining virtue is an all-embracing tolerance. At first such relativism is experienced as a great liberation, especially for individuals coming out of some narrow provincial milieu.
After a while, though, the liberation itself is experienced as a burden, precisely because of the aforementioned yearning for certainty. At that point the allegedly liberated individuals become susceptible to any offer of renewed certainty. This susceptibility leads to a potential for conversion to any doctrine that comes along with an absolute claim to truth. The convert now embraces a pose of unshakable certainty. Not to put too fine a point to it, he becomes a fanatic.
This movement has often been observed among converts to this or that "fundamentalist" sect, whose doctrine may be religious but could just as well be secular. The recipe on offer by all such groups is always the same: Come and join us, and we will give you the certainty for which you yearn. Then the nihilist becomes a fanatic. However, the tightly knit community into which the convert has been initiated may once more be felt to be constraining, as much or more so than the old provincial or traditional milieu. Then a new alleged liberation may occur, and so one moves back again into the relativizing dynamic of the pluralistic situation.
The dialectic between relativism and the competing claims to absolute truth is ongoing. In every nihilist there is a fanatic screaming to get out, and conversely every fanatic is a potential nihilist. Most people, of course, are neither fanatics nor nihilists; for them, the dialectic plays itself out in less extreme forms. But they too are caught in the dilemma of reconciling their nostalgia for certainty with a social reality in which such certainty is very hard to come by.
And an exceprt from Jonathan Rauch's article:
The war on prejudice is now, in all likelihood, the most uncontroversial social movement in America. Opposition to "hate speech," formerly identified with the liberal left, has become a bipartisan piety. In the past year, groups and factions that agree on nothing else have agreed that the public expression of any and all prejudices must be forbidden. On the left, protesters and editorialists have insisted that Francis L. Lawrence resign as president of Rutgers University for describing blacks as "a disadvantaged population that doesn't have that genetic, hereditary background to have a higher average." On the other side of the ideological divide, Ralph Reed, the executive director of the Christian Coalition, responded to criticism of the religious right by calling a press conference to denounce a supposed outbreak of "namecalling, scapegoating, and religious bigotry." Craig Rogers, an evangelical Christian student at California State University, recently filed a $2.5 million sexual-harassment suit against a lesbian professor of psychology, claiming that anti-male bias in one of her lectures violated campus rules and left him feeling "raped and trapped."
In universities and on Capitol Hill, in workplaces and newsrooms, authorities are declaring that there is no place for racism, sexism, homophobia, Christian-bashing, and other forms of prejudice in public debate or even in private thought. "Only when racism and other forms of prejudice are expunged," say the crusaders for sweetness and light, "can minorities be safe and society be fair." So sweet, this dream of a world without prejudice. But the very last thing society should do is seek to utterly eradicate racism and other forms of prejudice.
I supposeI should say, in the customary I-hope-I-don't-sound-too-defensive tone, that I am not a racist and that this is not an article favoring racism or any other particular prejudice. It is an article favoring intellectual pluralism, which permits the expression of various forms of bigotry and always will. Although we like to hope that a time will come when no one will believe that people come in types and that each type belongs with its own kind, I doubt such a day will ever arrive. By all indications, Homo sapiens is a tribal species for whom "us versus them" comes naturally and must be continually pushed back. Where there is genuine freedom of expression, there will be racist expression. There will also be people who believe that homosexuals are sick or threaten children or--especially among teenagers--are rightful targets of manly savagery. Homosexuality will always be incomprehensible to most people, and what is incomprehensible is feared. As for anti-Semitism, it appears to be a hardier virus than influenza. If you want pluralism, then you get racism and sexism and homophobia, and communism and fascism and xenophobia and tribalism, and that is just for a start. If you want to believe in intellectual freedom and the progress of knowledge and the advancement of science and all those other good things, then you must swallow hard and accept this: for as thickheaded and wayward an animal as us, the realistic question is how to make the best of prejudice, not how to eradicate it.
Indeed, "eradicating prejudice" is so vague a proposition as to be meaningless. Distinguishing prejudice reliably and nonpolitically from non-prejudice, or even defining it crisply, is quite hopeless. We all feel we know prejudice when we see it. But do we? At the University of Michigan, a student said in a classroom discussion that he considered homosexuality a disease treatable with therapy. He was summoned to a formal disciplinary hearing for violating the school's policy against speech that "victimizes" people based on "sexual orientation." Now, the evidence is abundant that this particular hypothesis is wrong, and any American homosexual can attest to the harm that the student's hypothesis has inflicted on many real people. But was it a statement of prejudice or of misguided belief? Hate speech or hypothesis? Many Americans who do not regard themselves as bigots or haters believe that homosexuality is a treatable disease. They may be wrong, but are they all bigots? I am unwilling to say so, and if you are willing, beware. The line between a prejudiced belief and a merely controversial one is elusive, and the harder you look the more elusive it becomes. "God hates homosexuals" is a statement of fact, not of bias, to those who believe it; "American criminals are disproportionately black" is a statement of bias, not of fact, to those who disbelieve it.
Who is right? You may decide, and so may others, and there is no need to agree. That is the great innovation of intellectual pluralism (which is to say, of post-Enlightenment science, broadly defined). We cannot know in advance or for sure which belief is prejudice and which is truth, but to advance knowledge we don't need to know. The genius of intellectual pluralism lies not in doing away with prejudices and dogmas but in channeling them--making them socially productive by pitting prejudice against prejudice and dogma against dogma, exposing all to withering public criticism. What survives at the end of the day is our base of knowledge.
What they told us in high school about this process is very largely a lie. The Enlightenment tradition taught us that science is orderly, antiseptic, rational, the province of detached experimenters and high-minded logicians. In the popular view, science stands for reason against prejudice, open-mindedness against dogma, calm consideration against passionate attachment--all personified by pop-science icons like the magisterially deductive Sherlock Holmes, the coolly analytic Mr. Spock, the genially authoritative Mr. Science (from our junior-high science films). Yet one of science's dirty secrets is that although science as a whole is as unbiased as anything human can be, scientists are just as biased as anyone else, sometimes more so. "One of the strengths of science," writes the philosopher of science David L. Hull, "is that it does not require that scientists be unbiased, only that different scientists have different biases." Another dirty secret is that, no less than the rest of us, scientists can be dogmatic and pigheaded. "Although this pigheadedness often damages the careers of individual scientists," says Hull, "it is beneficial for the manifest goal of science," which relies on people to invest years in their ideas and defend them passionately. And the dirtiest secret of all, if you believe in the antiseptic popular view of science, is that this most ostensibly rational of enterprises depends on the most irrational of motives--ambition, narcissism, animus, even revenge. "Scientists acknowledge that among their motivations are natural curiosity, the love of truth, and the desire to help humanity, but other inducements exist as well, and one of them is to 'get that son of a bitch,'" says Hull. "Time and again, scientists whom I interviewed described the powerful spur that 'showing that son of a bitch' supplied to their own research."
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