Back to Previous Page

Download this Article

by Edward Jayne
July 25, 1993

Dispassionate knowledge provides a reservoir of useful but often inessential facts. Our knowledge, for example, of tides and hurricanes might be entirely true; then again, it might turn out to be false, but without posing any threat to our sense of personal worth. Whatever new hypotheses crop up to supercede our current thinking, as they probably shall, we can accept the modified explanation without any sense of loss, and without being under any personal threat because what we thought we knew turns out to be wrong.

On the other hand, belief belongs to the category of desirable truths--for example, most obviously, the belief (or faith) in God. If somebody challenges our belief in God, much more is at stake than disinterested truth, for it is not our knowledge that is in jeopardy, but, as Chekhov maintained, our sense of identity, of personal worth and self esteem. This is because belief (or faith) constitutes a wished truth, a truth we are eager to impose at the expense of harsher possible truths we do not want to confront, not even as possibilities to be tentatively accepted for the sake of argument. The belief of small children in Santa Claus affords a relatively obvious example of this substitution strategy. Because Santa Claus very definitely exists for small children--he can be seen and possesses a bountiful and obviously tangible identity--it seems obvious that the world that matters is in the hands of a marvelous benefactor who very generously rewards all those who can behave themselves and await their payoff on Christmas day. Essentially the same principle applies for those who believe in a personal God that frequently intervenes to help them with their problems, sometimes on almost a daily basis ("Dear God, please help me to solve this problem," etc.) These individuals are confident of their direct personal relationship with God, and they have learned to disregard awkward potential discrepancies between knowledge and their most cherished beliefs.

Whenever we invest our sense of personal worth in the ideas we espouse, belief is involved. If we become angry because our ideas are challenged, almost certainly these ideas possess the status of belief. Add up all our beliefs, and lo, as Chekhov insisted, that's us--this is who we are, what we amount to in life. Lots of belief--lots of confidence mixed with self-esteem, whether or not the truths we believe happen to be true. Hard truths impervious to human need seem unimportant as compared to these soft and generous truths we depend on to bind together the world we live in--the truths in which we can invest belief--indeed, faith. As a result, contrary to Quine's definition, belief is more an act or performance than a simple perception, and usually the act of belief links behavior and perception through its fixation on friendly truths in order to deny the possibility of hard truths. An epistemological dialectic takes place by which the active pursuit of agreeable conceptualizations cancels and denies potentially unpleasant conceptualizations we do not want to acknowledge. What we believe in shines as a marvelous idealization deserving of our full support, but its lustrous foregrounding is also enhanced by its penumbra of rejected alternatives. It stands out that they might recede from the mind's eye.

As a relatively harmless example, the belief in Santa Claus already cited helps to reject less desirable potential truths, including, for example, the resentment of parental authority and the more inclusive sense of deprivation and powerlessness in an indifferent world. Likewise, the belief in an afterlife denies the possibility of total extinction upon one's death, the belief in a righteous God denies the possibility that we might live in an unfair world, and the belief in our nation's singular destiny denies the rampant social and political shortcomings everywhere to be seen as well as our sense of inadequacy except as patriotic citizens willing to make sacrifices for our country. Avoidances thus play an important role in belief formation, but with the positive gain of confirming our confidence in ourselves and our mutually supportive relationship with others in our families, sects, communities, and group relationships, inclusive of our nation as a whole. To the extent that we can share beliefs with others (and the taboos implied), we guarantee that we belong, as perhaps best illustrated by the powerful sense of group identity among spectators at sports events.

As a general rule, then, we pursue one set of truths to retreat from another. The first might seem valid and believable because of its intrinsic worth, but its appeal also derives from its function as a substitute that denies other, more disturbing alternatives. Any use of desirable truths for this purpose I have elsewhere described as the AFFIRMATIVE FALLACY, since its act of displacement constitutes a lie, or prevarication, rooted in the avoidance of knowledge one finds unacceptable. One does not just entertain good thoughts--one actually uses them to veto less pleasant considerations. This flight/pursuit dialectic emphasizes the the good to dispense with the unpleasant and possibly even the dangerous, worse yet the bad, and it thus maximizes our repose, our sense that we live in a relatively harmonious world. Belief serves up its many truths easy to accept on their own merits, but, even more important, it deploys these truths to sweep from our minds other truths we would rather not think about.

Now and again religious doubt has challenged belief, as has the occasional conflict among competitive beliefs, for example regarding the existence of hell and the all-consuming benevolence of God. But what seems to have been belief's most dangerous enemy has been the doctrine of skepticism, a programmatic philosophical commitment to doubt that can be traced back to the unique influence of ancient Greece. In no other ancient society has skepticism played much of a role, and in fact only the most nascent stirrings of skepticism may be detected in the Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Biblical traditions--the latter, most notably, in Ecclesiastes, very likely reflecting the influence of Greek philosophers during the Hellenistic period. Elsewhere in the history of primitive, ancient, and non-western societies, disbelief has been rare, and raw credulousness has utterly predominated. In fact, the most extravagant beliefs suffused the ancient world, for everybody believed exactly what they were supposed to based on cultural tradition. Why? Because belief was then, as now, the most useful instrument of social cohesion, both harnessing human intelligence toward this end and guaranteeing one's productive role in society. For to believe was always an easier task than to know or to seek to know, and it sealed one's bond with others who shared one's beliefs, often with an intensity commensurate to the absurdity of these beliefs, as first suggested by the Christian theologian Tertullian. That effort was needed to hold a belief demonstrated one's determination to make this effort. The more foolish one's belief, the more vigorous one's commitment to its shared acceptance, and the greater its value in separating true believers from outsiders seen as infidels. With the doctrine of skepticism, however, ancient Greek philosophers found the words and concepts to challenge the truth value of belief, and this accomplishment turns out to have been a major step in the cumulative advancement of civilization at the expense of collective harmony.

The first major contribution to the skeptical tradition was very likely Heraclitus's theory that the world is in such flux that there is no truth we can fully accept at its face value. Cratylus extended this principle to all acts of communication; Xenophanes generalized that there is no sure way to differentiate true knowledge from the false; and Protagoras, the first of the Sophists, reduced this dilemma to the axiom that mankind is the measure of all things, suggesting that everything we perceive and judge in the world about us is necessarily the product of our own consciousness. He also suggested that there are no easy answers regarding the truth of religion. Socrates likewise challenged received knowledge with his simple mantra that he was wiser than others simply because he was aware of his ignorance. But of course he was followed by his disciple, Plato, who proposed a higher world of ideal forms in which we can once again invest our beliefs. In the fourth century, B.C., Pyrrho purified and systematized the theory of skepticism based on the principle that knowledge obtained from the senses is necessarily self-contradictory. As a result, he argued, we should emphasize peace of mind (ataraxia) at the expense of knowledge, if necessary by accepting the orthodox beliefs of others around oneself. Arcesilaus instead refined the concept of suspended judgment (epoche) to emphasize the final importance of the reasonable (i.e., common sense--eulogon), and Carneades emphasized probability as the best and most valid "truth" available to us on both a systematic and unsystematic basis. Though early writings in skepticism are now lost, such authors as Cicero, Sextus Empiricus, and Diogenes Laertius preserved their ideas for posterity. Beginning with Bacon and Sanchez at the turn of the seventeenth century, skepticism has provided the basis of scientific empiricism, and such figures as Bayle, Voltaire, Hume, William James, Wittgenstein, and, today, Sellars, Davidson, Quine, and Rorty, have time and again returned to the wellspring of skepticism to replenish philosophy by a renewed attack on orthodox knowledge, and thus our belief in what we know, or think we know, on the epistemological grounds that nothing is altogether certain. Knowledge may be only provisionally accepted, so the belief in any particular theory of life--religion included--may likewise be only provisionally accepted. As explained by John Dewey, the best that may be adduced to justify one's commitment to any particular belief is its "warranted assertibility"--i.e., its provisional likelihood as a truth until other truths are found that turn out to be more credible based on their systematic empirical investigation. Belief accordingly comprises only a portion of our personal identity for those of us with an adequate education in the western tradition; its complement, if but the tiniest catalyst, comprises the doubts and uncertainties whose first theoretical distillation may be credited to the skeptical philosophers of ancient Greece.

However, mankind's universal addiction to belief has been too resilient to capitulate to skeptical doubts, and in fact Christian theology has very effectively coopted skepticism by having cast doubt on empirical truths in order to justify renewed belief in an unseen spiritual world. By demonstrating that what one perceives here on earth is almost inevitably wrong or inconclusive, they have justified the pursuit of a more profound and harmonious truth invested in the mysterious authority of God. Simple belief has thus been ejected at the front portal doors in the cathedral of received opinion, but only to make its entry again, and with lustrous certitude, through the rose window behind the altar. The dialectic at the core of the Affirmative Fallacy has been refined to begin with enough skepticism to deny secular answers because of their empirical and epistemological contradictions, followed by the quest for superior answers through a renewed faith in God.

Plato's use of Socrates's skepticism to advocate a theory of ideal forms first established the basis for this approach, and its interpretation by Plotinus set the stage for its incorporation into Christian doctrine. St. Augustine experienced a period of skepticism preceding his conversion, and skepticism later became popular in the sixteenth century as a "fideistic" strategy of Catholic theologians such as Pico della Mirandola for combatting the fundamentalist Protestant interpretation of scriptures translated into modern languages by such figures as Luther, Tyndale, and Coverdale. Nothing accessible to the senses was certain, fideists argued, not even scriptures, so the individual was left with pure faith alone as interpreted by the teachings of the established church. Montaigne apparently used skepticism with this in mind, as did Pascal, Sir Thomas Browne, Berkeley, and, in the nineteenth century, Kierkegaard. In each instance doubts about the truths of the physical world justified a more transcendent belief in the power and authority of God.

Much of the subsequent history of western philosophy may be grasped as an extended dialogue based on the merits of this strategy, and this dialogue has played a major role in differentiating Eurocentric civilization from alternative cultures whose ignorance of skepticism has supported a relatively basic level of belief. Challenged by skepticism, Christianity responded by evolving from simple belief to theology, then metaphysics, and finally a fideistic use of epistemology to justify total faith in God, completing the circle once again to simple belief. If Descartes superceded Montaigne's skepticism by deducing a mathematical theory of the universe to establish God's existence, Pascal could invoke a purer skepticism, reaching even closer to godhead by rejecting Descartes' system as well. Likewise, if Berkeley and Hume's skepticism (the first fideistic, the second essentially agnostic) helped to launch the metaphysics of Kant and Hegel later rejected by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, Kierkegaard could resurrect Pascal's fideistic strategy through agonizing introspective meditation. For Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, skepticism very effectively dismantled metaphysics, and for Hume, Mill, Bertrand Russell, and the logical positivists who dominated the first half of the twentieth century, empirical skepticism provided the methodological basis for scientific discovery rooted in probability theory not too different from the concept of probability first proposed by Carneades. For Berkeley, Kant, Hegel, and Kierkegaard, on the other hand, skepticism served as a fideistic rejection of secular knowledge in favor of religious belief. Once the enemy of belief, skepticism became its most useful tool--doubt about this (raw secular knowledge that was immediate and phenomenal) to confirm one's belief in that (spiritual truth). The more skeptical here, the purer and more compelling one's belief there. Preliminary uncertainty thus set the stage for the Affirmative Fallacy--the pursuit of a sufficiently inclusive positive alternative--Godhead itself--to lay this uncertainty to rest.

Much the same displacement strategy seems to be happening right now on a presumably secular basis in the field of philosophy, most obviously in Richard Rorty's neopragmatist theory of antifoundationalism. Typical of purist skeptical theory, Rorty challenges the validity of all "truths" about the universe, science and religion included. Truth, he claims, "is just the name of a property which all true statements share," and any effort to isolate particular truths as the Truth with a capital T is probably a waste of time. "True sentences are not true because they correspond to reality," he declares, but primarily, as argued by William James, because they enable us to cope, because they happen to be useful. Summarizing James's theory (shades of Protagoras), Rorty argues, "Most of the world is as it is whatever we think about it," but without anything additional "out there" --i.e., beyond our perception--whose accurate description might be accepted as "the truth about the world." Indeterminacy prevails, Rorty argues, so no absolute system (or "ground") may be confirmed to possess the truth. Indeed, this seems a valid premise--no less valid than when first advanced by the pre-Socratic philosophers. But once again a kind of fideism emerges, this time in a more inclusive formulation--both secular and religious --that if nothing is exactly true, anything goes. Anything one wants to believe is pretty much in the same ballpark as anything else--contrary to Arcesilaus's emphasis on common sense and Carneades's emphasis on probability.

What seems obvious today is the extent to which this skeptical relativism plays into the hands of both secular opportunists and religious fanatics. If no theory is entirely true, and, as a corollary, if no morality is entirely moral, it becomes almost too easy to promote any and all belief systems by ignoring or distorting the logic and information that might discourage their acceptance. Skeptics themselves might not resort to this strategy, but the use of their arguments for this purpose by others puts their contribution in this category. Corruption and opportunism can be justified on this basis, as can the many causes and belief systems at both ends of the political spectrum, as can the current resurgence of fundamentalist religion, the burgeoning ethnic and religious wars abroad, and what seems a plague of prejudice and intolerance throughout the world, often the most aggressively exerted by those who are the most indignant of the intolerance they feel they endure at the hands of others. A host of undesirable tendencies--bigotry, brutality, venality, public cynicism, and sheer stupidity--are granted their due as presumably healthy expressions of diversity by philosophy's retreat to the purest of intellectual citadels, the strictly epistemological certitude that nothing is absolutely certain. Right now, for example, our planet is erupting into ethno-religious conflagration from one end to the other, but our skeptical philosophers sit high and dry, indifferent to the issues that really matter. Even if they care, there is not much they can say that would be of any value. They might be appalled by what is happening and disagree with the propaganda that justifies it, but they also agree to disagree on the assumption that nobody is exactly right, nobody exactly wrong. If all is mythology, how can the validity of one mythology be given clear-cut preference to that of another.

Such enlightened latter-day fideists put themselves in the awkward position of tolerating, hence encouraging, the true believers who adhere to one holy cause or another--for example, angry zealots linked with the Jewish Defense League, or the fundamentalist Moslem sects, or the Irish Republican Army, or Serb or Croat patriotic groups, or the Hindu and Moslem factions in India, or those who bomb and barricade abortion centers, or the militant black nationalists and lesbian separationists, or the patriotic hard-liners who have persistently advocated an aggressive foreign policy as if it were God's will. For benighted warrior chauvinists, the ignorant mish-mash of prejudices and superstitions they believe in completely makes sense. And how can enlightened skeptics disagree? They might doubt their facts and logic, but how can they admit that in the final analysis their beliefs are any worse than any other beliefs?

Imagine the kind of intergenerational dialogue that is now beginning to take place in the presumably civilized world--between, for example, an individual we can describe as Uncle Bill, a skeptical college professor who completed his education four decades ago, and his nephew Gil, decidedly a product of the eighties, who possesses vague ideas pertaining to most issues but prides himself about his devotion to a particular ethno-cultural holy cause, whatever that might consist of:

GIL: Don't you understand, Uncle Bill, we're in a terrible battle for our survival--either we win or we lose, so we gotta fight, we gotta do whatever is necessary to win. Sure we do things you might not like at times, but don't kid yourself, what we're up against is worse. What's important is what we gotta make happen.

BILL: My problem is that I'm not entirely convinced by your cause. I doubt your religion, and your nationalist rhetoric does not seem particularly useful to me. I cannot accept the idea that your priorities are so important that you should be taking the measures that you do.

GIL: But you don't know for sure, do you? You're doubtful that I'm right, but you're also doubtful that your doubts are justified. You understand the dilemma, but you don't want to participate. If you can't join us, Uncle Bill, at least you can remain silent--right?

BILL: It's all very difficult. As a skeptic, I'm very skeptical, indeed. But who knows, you might be right. I'll do (or undo) what I can.

Imagine a slightly different conversation with Uncle Phil, also a skeptical college professor, but one who aggressively rejects demonstrably erroneous belief systems based on common sense and a refined sense of probability. Aware of the final uncertainty of all knowledge, he is also more willing to make the inductive leap and to accept the consequences of having done so:

GIL: Don't you understand, Uncle Phil, we're in a terrible battle for our survival--either we win or we lose, so we gotta fight, we gotta do whatever is necessary to win. Sure we do things you might not like at times, but don't kid yourself, what we're up against is worse. What's important is what we gotta make happen.

PHIL: Frankly, what you are doing appalls me! Your notions about religion and ethnic destiny are utterly myth-ridden, and your twisted view of politics seems no less misguided than any other chauvinistic ravings I can think of. That your belief in this kind of ideology permits you to do what you are doing disgusts me. You're right on the brink of fascism.

GIL (taken aback): Then you're not with us?

PHIL: Not with you? What a laugh! Your tactics can only reduce your misguided holy cause to its despicable caricature. Let me assure you, your particular god doesn't exist, but if it did, it would be utterly ashamed of what you are doing in its name. You never were very bright, nephew Gil--why don't you find yourself a decent job and raise a family?

These are harsh words, but honest too, and sufficient warning to Gil that his presumably valid "cause"--cuz who can say what's valid and what's not--can be offensive to educated opinion. On the other hand, Uncle Bill's fideistic version of skepticism relieves Gil of his doubts, all the more encouraging him to pursue his intentions full of passionate intensity. Gil's beliefs might be right, might be wrong--but his wholehearted commitment to his beliefs makes him right at least as far as he himself is concerned, and Uncle Bill is handcuffed by his knee-jerk vision of skepticism and can hardly disagree.

Once again, the Affirmative Fallacy applies, this time with what might be described as a neo-fideistic secularization. The skeptical disengagement of our moral and intellectual leadership supposedly affords sufficient grounds for the pursuit of whatever goals one pleases, as long as these seem right and appropriate to those who pursue them regardless of how ignorant they might be of the issues involved. By subjecting to skeptical inquiry the empirical standards by which a patently idiotic ideology might be attacked, the neo-fideistic use of skepticism justifies this ideology, whether intended or not, on the relativistic principle that it is no more vulnerable to skeptical doubts than its critique, no matter what evidence may be adduced to justify such an critique. Nothing is certain--ergo anything goes. One's emotional commitment to one's beliefs can therefore take precedence over their rational assessment.

This is most obvious with the topic of religion. Rorty, for example, specifies that his version of secularism is "not saying that God does not exist, exactly," but that it "just doubt[s] that the vocabulary of theology is one we ought to be using." It's all a matter of doubting one's words, he implies, beyond which one's beliefs are presumably just as good (or bad) as another's. At the very beginning of his first published book, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Rorty also criticizes the "desperation" of Russell and Husserl at the beginning of our century, because "the triumph of the secular over the claims of religion was almost complete," suggesting that much of their interest in philosophy had been narrowly inspired by their rejection of orthodox religion. Rorty's argument here is partially correct, to the credit of both Russell and Husserl, but his implication that philosophy was ever on the brink of total success in its struggle against orthodox religion is patently false, as demonstrated, for example, by Russell's frequent manifestoes attacking religion throughout his entire career--to be found, for example, in his many collections of popular essays, including Sceptical Essays (1928), Mysticism and Logic (1929), Religion and Science (1935), In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays (1935), Unpopular Essays (1950), The Will to Doubt (1958), and of course Why I Am Not a Christian: And Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects (1957). If orthodox religion were dead, Russell would have let it lie. But it wasn't, and he didn't. In fact, his steady critique, additional to those of Marx, Huxley, Nietzsche, Freud, Einstein, Mencken, Sartre, Fromm, and many hundreds of others, helped to keep religion comatose, almost moribund, for most of the educated classes of the civilized world at least into the nineteen-seventies. But now that Russell and his peers are themselves dead and buried and fashionable philosophy has fallen into the hands of the neo-pragmatists, voila, religious belief has risen from its ashes in its most virulent manifestation. Richard Rorty, meet David Karesh, meet Jim Jones, meet Khomeini, meet all the rest of your unwelcome companions in arms. Not that the essentially secular doctrine of neo-pragmatism has animated them in their pursuit of their beliefs, but it has indirectly served their cause by having contributed to a public mood that has discouraged the rejection of these beliefs. How many of the residents of Waco, Texas, ridiculed Karesh's beliefs? How many of our pundits and journalists warned of Khomeini's fanaticism when he came to power? Russell's empirical skepticism might have had its epistemological limitations, but it helped to curtail the most extravagant flights of religious, patriotic and cultural extremism by setting an example in attacking this tendency, and based on premises that neo-pragmatists would entirely accept in any casual encounter--say, over drinks at a dinner party.

What I am suggesting here is that by supplanting the common-sense empirical skepticism of Russell with a finer and more rigorous version of skepticism that also includes empiricism itself in its line of fire, neo-pragmatism has helped to resuscitate in the public mind the age-old fideistic strategy that can be traced back to the sixteenth century, back even to Socrates, Plato, and Pyrrho. This is not to blame neo-pragmatists for everything that has happened--that would be absurd. But their skepticism has contributed to an intellectual climate that has brought another renaissance (or "awakening") of fundamentalist religious belief. Once again, as in earlier centuries (when, for example, Hume and Wesley were contemporaries), religious extremism and rigorous philosophical doubt coexist though each might seem to appeal to an entirely different audience. As a result, philosophy seems worse off than when Russell dominated it--less adequate as an instrument of knowledge, especially as judged, paradoxically, by pragmatic standards of effectiveness. Russell had a useful public role to play in his devotion to empirical skepticism, and he played it well; neo-pragmatists don't, and they haven't--not yet, at least. Imagine a sophisticated real-life neo-pragmatist engaged in public debate upon the merits of skepticism with the ghost of Lord Russell, a co-author of Principia Mathematica who served six months in prison for having opposed Britain's role in World War I. Who would win? How would our modern commoner peel himself from the floor under the podium? Whither would Satan slither?

2. An Iconoclastic Antidote

So what is to be done? How can true skepticism be salvaged once again from the Affirmative Fallacy? How can it be revitalized to apply to not just the most abstract principles of epistemology--making all beliefs equally true, equally untrue--but also the wide diversity of religious, cultural, and intellectual belief systems that have played such a retrogressive role in current history? How can philosophy once again address itself to the task of assessing the relative merits of all these belief systems? Appropriately, I think, by returning to the skepticism of Arcesilaus and Carneades best represented today by Dewey's theory of warranted assertability as the provisional acceptance of truths until they are proven otherwise. Rorty has effusively praised Dewey's principle here, but without acknowledging its emphasis upon making an inductive leap based on the probable (not absolute) truth of everything we think we know. Such a leap sooner or later needs to be made, and the skepticism we should cultivate--empirical skepticism at its very best--would guide it in the most effective direction, all the while conceding that alternative truths might in time turn out to be better. Granted, the ideas provisionally accepted are not necessarily a final judgment, but for now they seem preferable based on the weight of evidence that can be gathered by scientists and philosophers--and by moralists and essayists, teachers and intellectuals.

The preference for one theory over another is strictly a matter of probabilities, but these probabilities can and should be weighed against each other on a comparative basis--those theories that are highly probable, for example, as opposed to those that are highly improbable, or that are only relatively improbable, or just a shade less probable. No truth is entirely guaranteed to be true, but some particular "truths" (for example the Mesopotamian myth that Marduk killed and bisected his great-great grandmother, Tiamat, to produce heaven and earth) happen to be so improbable as to be utterly absurd. On the other hand, modern theories of cosmology that necessarily remain hypothetical until demonstrated by empirical verification deserve serious respect. The comparative approach to knowledge they illustrate has guided the scientific movement for the last four centuries, and with extraordinary success. What do we stand to gain from its abandonment?

What seems needed at this point is an honest and systematic use of the inductive leap to curtail, if not eliminate, the pervasive appetite for unwarranted beliefs, and for this purpose I want to propose the resurrection of iconoclasm as a militant dedication to skepticism more or less equivalent to faith's militant dedication to belief. As opposed to faith, however, iconoclasm expresses a faith in lack of faith except when drawing conclusions obviously supported by hard probabilities. The etymological derivation of the word iconoclasm derives from the breaking of images, as opposed to the relatively harmless etymological derivation of the word skepticism from the two more prudent dispositions of doubt and looking carefully. Of course the original iconoclast was a religious zealot who smashed idols to protect the god(s) from heretical misrepresentation; but the more inclusive definition I am using here is of one who attacks all idols, both plastic and conceptual, including the very idea of god. Iconoclasm thus both doubts and criticizes, and its primary purpose to challenge false beliefs precludes unduly concerning oneself with the epistemological limitations of human experience--limitations that might in fact be directly or indirectly used by fideists and neo-fideists to justify these false beliefs. Certainly iconoclasts are willing to submit knowledge itself to skeptical inquiry, but this does not prevent them from challenging beliefs that so completely stretch credibility as to be absurd. If empirical knowledge is vulnerable to skeptical doubt, belief as desirable knowledge (i.e., the ideas people want to be true) is exponentially even more vulnerable, and the task for iconoclasts is to make this plain. Given half a chance, unexamined belief totally infests human discourse, so the iconoclast cannot shirk the task of exposing its limitations. The skeptical use of epistemology may be granted its due, but a tentative inductive leap must also be made, and iconoclasts should do this courageously--not with mincing half strides. Educated readers must come away from an iconoclastic text aware that their most gnawing suspicions have been amply confirmed.

Lucidity is also a virtue. Iconoclasts know they are trying to change people's minds, so they cannot resort to the facile obfuscations that might tempt the ordinary fideistic or neo-fideistic skeptic. At times the ideas of an iconoclast might be unclear to the reader, but not through lack of effort. Readers must be able to smile to themselves and say, "Yes--exactly right!" Not, "Huh?" or "My, isn't this articulate, though," but "Yes--exactly right!" Those critics and philosophers who involute and dissipate their ideas are not genuine iconoclasts and should be ejected from the roster. One assumes they are the victims of insecurity--possibly through childhood trauma or the professional anxiety that what they are saying might implode or crumble into shards if exposed to the light of day. Braced by arrogance, they lack the courage to be understood, as opposed to iconoclasts who insist upon the importance of making themselves absolutely clear. Then again, iconoclasts cannot sacrifice intellectual sufficiency to the need to be understood. They must be able to elucidate their ideas, but they must also be capable of dealing with the more intricate lines of argument proposed by their opponents, especially those of the fideistic and neo-fideistic persuasions. Benefitting from the examples of Hume, Mill, and Russell at the peaks of their careers, iconoclasts must adjust their discourse to the level needed to confute the rationalizations used to justify false beliefs.

Also important is topical flexibility. Additional to the rejection of religion, patriotism, and ethnic pride--the triple tyrants of the ordinary mind--skeptics should be able and willing to take on any chauvinism or misguided loyalty, any public fad, any frailty, folly or absurdity that might bear harmful consequences to the public at large. For this purpose, genuine intellectual independence is needed, so iconoclasts best fulfill themselves as loners. Anybody who is a committed Trotskyist, liberal Democrat, conservative Republican, or member of the ACLU, NRA, NAS, or any fashionable clique or claque cannot by definition be much of an iconoclast. Nor can anybody who entirely enlists himself in a more exclusive category (iconoclasm itself included). For virtually every group, every organization, every recognizable collective fad and opinion literally sags under its burden of misconceptions, and one's felt obligation as an iconoclast is necessarily to explode these misconceptions.

Of course it is useful for iconoclasts to have once belonged to partisan groups, and perhaps to have supported their goals enthusiastically, but it is also important to have emerged from the experience chastened by the intellectual compromise at the core of their doctrine. Inevitably, good ideas are accompanied by the bad, and almost as inevitably, compelled by something equivalent to Gresham's Law, the bad come to predominate, partly because they are more distinctive, partly because of their value in separating true believers from outsiders. The exact location of iconoclasts on the political spectrum--from left to right--is probably less important than their abandonment of other positions on this spectrum, and the farther from their present stance the better. With a healthy dose of apostasy under their belts, they can best cope with today's cornucopia of erroneous beliefs.

Some individuals whose skepticism might have been sufficient for them to be described as iconoclasts in earlier times--say, during the sixteenth century--might not have made the list for later times--say, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The battlefield has shifted from one epoch to the next, and the rejection of orthodoxy has advanced accordingly. But if the iconoclastic urge, or disposition, may be identified by any single issue, it would probably be its rejection of orthodox religious belief. For iconoclasm seems to have begun and attained its mature growth as a critique of religion, and, in fact, the treatment of religion seems probably the most useful watershed for dividing true iconoclasts from ordinary skeptics. Early iconoclasts tended to be deists when others still believed in a personal god, then agnostics when others shifted to deism, and finally atheists when others fell in with agnosticism. As a rule, genuine iconoclasts cannot help themselves--like dogs chasing cats, and cats birds, they still make an issue of religious orthodoxy. In contrast, our prudent and cautious skeptics find no reason to go out of their way to antagonize friends, neighbors, and, often, their very closest relatives. As a result, they maintain their silence on the issue, as opposed to iconoclasts with whom they might entirely agree in private conversations.

Next unto religion as an issue for iconoclasts have been government and patriotism, then all the observable frailties of our culture, institutions, and social and public activities--today, for example, the media, the swarm of entrepeneurs and lobbyists who infest Washington, the myriad phony causes, and the fickle ignorance of public opinion. Genuine iconoclasts must be able to focus their attention on particular issues, but they must also possess enough judgment to be able to ascertain the relative importance of errors and fallacies linked with human folly. Robert Ingersoll and Annie Besant, for example, did not entirely fit the description of iconoclasts because they limited their attack to religion; nor did I.F. Stone, the muckrakers at the turn of the century, and the Marxist critics of the thirties because they limited their attack to politics. All of these dealt with their idols effectively, but within relatively circumscribed limits.

There is no problem in establishing the founder and patron saint of our iconoclastic tradition--Protagoras alone. Protagoras was older than Socrates, and, as already indicated, it was Protagoras who proposed the deceptively simple principle that man is the measure of all things. Also, it was Protagoras who anticipated Locke by arguing that the soul is nothing apart from its perceptions, who distinguished between physis (freedom) and nomos (traditional usage), who first proposed a primitive phenomenology based on the intriguing assumption that all appearances are true and that nothing exists beyond them, and whose "Antilogic" first established dialectics as a double-entry methodology for weighing the relative merits and liabilities of any idea. On strictly a positive note, Protagoras initiated the study of grammar and at the request of Pericles helped to write the Constitution for the colony of Thurii. And Protagoras finally wrote the infamous treatise, "On the Gods," which challenged the existence of the ancient Greek gods well enough for all its copies to have been publicly burned. Because of his treatise, Protagoras was also exiled from Athens and martyred (some would argue punished by the gods) when the ship taking him to Sicily sank during a storm, apparently killing all aboard. Everything Protagoras wrote has been lost--much of it probably from having been destroyed--but his influence has been indelible.

After Protagoras, the history of iconoclasm has usually been located in the intermediate grey zone between philosophy, literature, and journalism. Hobbes's iconoclasm derived from physics, Hume and Schopenhauer's from psychology, and Nietzsche's from the theory of evolution. For Hobbes it was best expressed in incidental passages of his major works, for Hume and Schopenhauer in their essays as well, and for Nietzsche in his published collections of aphoristic fragments. Russell's best iconoclastic writings were his essays rather than his systematic works of philosophy, while the iconoclastic viewpoint of his contemporary, George Bernard Shaw, was as effectively expressed in his Prefaces and political primers as in his plays. In general, iconoclasm has thrived in an essayistic tradition, if for no other reason than the circumstance that books expounding bigger and more inclusive systems of knowledge cannot be incessantly on the attack. As soon as theory degenerates into a theoretical system (for example those of Spinoza, Marx, and Freud), it, too, becomes fair game for iconoclastic challenge. It may be used to attack orthodoxy, but to the extent that it lapses into an orthodoxy of its own, it ceases to be iconoclastic. At his best Emerson was iconoclastic, but essayists such as Addison, Johnson, Hazlitt, and Arnold can be excluded from the iconoclastic tradition, since they did not persistently seek to challenge orthodox beliefs of one sort or another. Often, indeed, their credentials as essayists--particularly for Johnson and Arnold--derived from their status as defenders of orthodoxy. Nevertheless, an essayistic tone should be felt in iconoclastic prose, for it should be shaped by the effort to obtain at least partial agreement. It should be expository in conveying ample knowledge of the issue being discussed, but it should also be argumentative, condensing and focusing its information well enough to maximize its effectiveness in changing minds.

Authors in the British tradition with obvious iconoclastic tendencies relative to their times primarily include Bacon, Hobbes, Hume, Paine, Mill, Russell, Shaw, and Orwell. Authors in the French tradition primarily include Bayle, Meslier, Voltaire, Diderot, d'Holbach, Rousseau, Comte, and Le Bon---also Sartre in such texts as What is Literature and Search for a Method. Authors in the German tradition include Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Brecht, and authors in the German-Jewish tradition (if such may be specified) include Marx and Freud--at least those portions of their works that challenge received assumptions, as opposed to those portions that elaborate their own systems. Marx's early writings secure his inclusion, as do the many papers and passages of Freud's books and articles that explore all the evasive displacement strategies for coping with modern civilization. Also in the German-Jewish tradition may be counted authors who effectively synthesized Marx and Freud, most notably Reich, Fromm, and Marcuse. Norman O. Brown may also be included as an American who likewise brought Marx and Freud into a synthesis, and of course Ibsen may be included as an earlier iconoclast in the Scandinavian tradition.

Besides Paine in the American tradition, we may include Emerson, Twain as he grew older, Mencken, Lewis in his novels, perhaps Edmund Wilson, Arthur Miller, Mailer during his angry years, and Vidal in his published essays. William James, Santayana, and Dewey also tested the possibilities of iconoclasm, though James and Santayana seem to have lapsed into neo-fideism, and Dewey's controversial tendencies were mitigated by his laborious prose style. Not to forget Henry Adams, who was entirely a skeptic. If our nation has been gifted with a succession of iconoclastic laureates, its primary line of descent would have been the unbroken sequence among Emerson, Twain, and Mencken, followed, perhaps, by Mailer and Vidal, both of whom are now growing old--Vidal still in possession of his iconoclastic edge, Mailer unfortunately not. Twain wrote "Advice to Youth" and "On the Decay of the Art of Lying," in 1882, the year Emerson died; Mencken co-authored Men Versus the Man in 1910, the year Twain died; and Mailer wrote "The White Negro" in 1957, the year after Mencken died. What rough beast is beginning to stir its joints today? Possibly somebody like Camille Paglia if she can salvage herself from her public relations persona, or Alexander Cockburn if he can expand his political vision to include broader issues of culture and religion. If our nation can be expected to endure as a civilization (and I'm not sure it can), I anticipate a new and perhaps unpredictable iconoclasm to emerge, though not altogether deviating from the pattern described above.