Modern Dogma and the Open Mind

"The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid." - C.K. Chesterton

"There is nothing more dreadful than the habit of doubt. Doubt separates people." - Buddha

As I noted previously, one of the best books I read last year was Wayne Booth's Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent. While Booth criticizes many modern dogmas throughout the book, the one he refutes most frequently is the dogma that "the job of thought is to doubt whatever can be doubted."

Booth argues that since the time of Descartes (who promoted unrelenting doubt with his claim "I think, therefore I am"), it has become increasingly fashionable to doubt everything.

We see this dogma today. It's frequently behind the now-hackneyed slogans "be true to yourself," "open your mind," "think for yourself," "question everything," "don't be so close-minded" and "stick it to The Man."

In Modern Dogma Booth doesn't argue that we should never doubt, never dissent, or never promote individualism, but he does question the limits of doubt. He asks us to consider when we should assent rather than doubt. Booth claims that to fall wholesale to this modern dogma (i.e. "doubt everything") is fantastically damaging to human communities and, in turn, to human beings.

He responds directly to the individualistic hippie thinking that was alive and well the year he wrote the book (1974). Booth says that he never hears such groups "admit to what a puny thing, what an imaginably subhuman thing one's precious self would be if one had not been surrounded by, embedded in, made through other selves in social institutions." He says

"we [Americans] all believe, passionately, in the right of every person to assert and defend his values; about such matters as freedom and equality and justice. We are indeed moral absolutists, even those of us who will in the same breath chant, 'There are no absolutes.' The whole country cries 'Freedom now!'—meaning my freedom now." (132)

In other words, modern dogma, or our attempt to stick it to The Man, has often led us from communal to self-centered thinking. (It's the story of James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as Young Man.)

That is why Booth thought the rhetoric of assent was such a key idea. The rhetoric of assent requires individuals to recognize that the best way to live life is in communities. Therefore, while the rhetoric of assent works against the indomitable faith and traditional thinking of religious fundamentalists, it also works against the indomitable doubt and "open-mindedness" of modern dogmatists, people who reject traditional communities simply because they find that those communities hold dubious beliefs.

What these dogmatists seldom admit is that there are no communities that are free of dubious beliefs. Because every community is made up of half-witted and measly-hearted humans, belonging to any community requires each individual within that community to put some doubts on hold, to practice hypocrisy upwards. No community, good or bad, ecumenical or exclusive, can withstand unrelenting doubt.

To illustrate, look at Roger Williams, founder of the first Baptist church in America. At one point in his life, according to a Williams biography by Emeritus Yale professor Edmund Morgan, Williams doubted every one of the local religious communities so strongly that he believed his version of Christianity was the only true version. The problem was that only he and possibly his wife agreed exactly with his version of Christianity. That's a lonely church.

This isn't to say that all doubt is damaging, or even that most of it is: Descartes's proclivity towards doubt has rid the modern world of myriad lame superstitions. Nor is it to say that individuals should never break from communities, since it cannot be true, as cultural relativists assert, that all communities are equally true and false. (Just compare the fruits of Jonestown to the fruits of the United Way.)

Booth's claim is merely that all communities require give and take. They require assent. They require us to play the believing game. Booth asks that rather than set out alone to discover "our truth," we set out to discover truth communally through mutual inquiry.

In sum, this is why the rhetoric of assent, or rhetorology, is so powerful: by requiring us to cooperate peaceably and humbly in and between communities, it simultaneously critiques traditional religious dogma and modern individualistic dogma. Rhetorology requires us to commit to some community somewhere rather than to remain alone. It requires us to open our minds and then, after we can articulate a more solid truth, to close them.

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