"The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are filled with passionate intensity." In our time, rife as it is with the din of competing and seemingly irreconcilable dogmas, Yeats's lament would have been a fitting epigraph for this challenging encomium to the virtues of passionate uncertainty. Eminent sociologist Peter Berger (The Social Construction of Reality) and his Dutch colleague, sociologist and philosopher Anton Zijderveld, have constructed a methodical if somewhat understated argument in support of the proposition that rational doubt, which some might call it skepticism, is a healthy antidote to the twin evils of modern political and cultural life--fundamentalism and relativism.
Berger and Zijderveld first deal with the ideology of relativism, an undeniable byproduct of the process of modernity. They demonstrate how the seemingly benign relativist point of view that "there's no single, universally valid ethical system" has morphed into what they assert is the philosophical and moral rigidity of post-modernism. Similarly, they hold no brief for fundamentalism's "attempt to restore the taken-for-grantedness of a tradition, typically understood as a return to a (real or imagined) pristine past of the tradition."
In contradistinction to these extremes that they characterize as, in fact, two sides of the same coin, the authors cast their lot with an ethic of doubt founded upon the principle of the fundamental dignity of all human beings. In all too brief examples, they demonstrate how that ethic can be applied to deal intelligently and thoughtfully with such contemporary dilemmas as abortion, capital punishment and the rights of immigrants. Contending that the environment of Western liberal democracy is the only one in which the values they cherish can flourish, they are vocally skeptical about the prospects of what they call "democratism"--the process of extending democracy's trappings, such as free elections, to societies without the underlying values to make them successful.
Readers are well-advised to pause for a moment before picking up this volume for a casual read, as Berger and Zijderveld invoke thinkers like Max Weber and Jacques Derrida in a way that presupposes at least a passing familiarity with their writings. And contrary to its somewhat flip subtitle, it won't serve especially well as a manual to help settle the argument between the advocates of Biblical creationism and the defenders of Darwin. What these thinkers do promote with at least a reasonable degree of success is a mode of thought that, if practiced more widely, might serve to inoculate us against the ideological pandemics of our day.--Harvey Freedenberg
Shelf Talker: Two scholars offer a brief in support of the notion that an outlook on the world founded upon thoughtful doubt offers an antidote to the evils of extremist ideologies.