Stuart Sim sees the writing on the wall for belief

It is my contention that scepticism should be more of a factor in public life. Unquestioning belief is currently pervading global culture, and unless we set about countering its advance there’s a very real danger of drifting into an age of dogma where belief-systems dictate what we should think and how we should live. Doubt is a positive phenomenon, because applying a criterion such as reasonable doubt to our beliefs, particularly our religious beliefs, rarely generates absolute certainty.

I would have to admit that scepticism is not the obvious place to go for a political theory. As a philosophical method scepticism has always been at its strongest when being negative; demonstrating to theories and belief systems where they lacked proof for their claims, where they rested on unsubstantiated assumptions that would not stand up to detailed scrutiny. And ideas surely must always be up for debate and scrutiny. Scepticism has a long-running history as an internal critique of ideas within Western philosophy, from the Pyrrhonist tradition of classical times onwards, and its value is well attested in that respect. But in what sense can it become a basis for politics? An engaged scepticism, as it were.

One incentive to bring scepticism into politics is that religious systems are becoming politically far more active across the globe. The close links between religious belief and politics call for analysis to see what a sceptical politics is required to confront. Scepticism in its classical form was directed mainly against belief – such as belief in myths, or the innate superiority of one’s culture and customs over all others - with Sextus Empiricus (active 2nd century A.D.), the heir of a tradition of Pyrrhonist thought going back for centuries, recommending a suspension of judgement about such matters. Beliefs were more to do with opinion or desire than truth or knowledge, although believers would not accept that, being convinced that their culture’s myths (as in its creation myth) were actually true. Sextus pointed out that such reasoning started with a hypothesis rather than a proved proposition, and that was an illicit philosophical move. There was no standard against which to judge hypotheses, which were merely assumptions, and if challenged they collapsed into an infinite regress: if the world was created by a divinity, what created that divinity in turn (and so on)?

For Sextus the conclusion to be drawn was that, as the eminent historian of scepticism Richard H. Popkin has summarised it, “there was insufficient and inadequate evidence to determine if any knowledge was possible, and hence one ought to suspend judgment on all questions concerning knowledge”. This was particularly so if one were claiming “knowledge” of divinity and its objectives for humanity, and refusing to countenance other viewpoints - such certainty being the mark of dogmatists everywhere. Monotheisms have proved only too ready to adopt that latter strategy, and to engage in campaigns of repression against non-believers. All too often as well, this has turned into a political ideology - as it is doing again in our own time, from evangelical Christianity’s championship of creationism and intelligent design in America to Islam’s cultivation of theocracies throughout the Middle East and Asia. We might have thought in the West that the Enlightenment had freed us from such a cultural fate, but the current world order offers much evidence to the contrary.

Proceeding from a hypothesis is not necessarily as bad as it sounds: we could judge it by other criteria, such as whether following the dictates of the belief-system has positive consequences (a Utilitarian approach). That does not make the hypothesis true, but it does give us a standard against which to assess its effects. As far as hard-core dogmatists are concerned, however, they are not proceeding from a hypothesis but from a truth; a truth whose certainty lies beyond all possible doubt. Neither is it is just religions that espouse such attitudes: political theories do too - think of Marxism and its founding belief in a dialectic working through history, a dialectic based on the notion of class struggle. Classical Marxists do not believe the dialectic is merely an interesting hypothesis, but an eternal truth; just as the religious do not think that belief in their own particular divinity is a matter for intellectual speculation. We could apply Utilitarian criteria to either of the latter, but that would be heretical in the opinion of both camps.

Sextus tells us how to suspend judgements, but not how to create them - and the pressures of the political realm demand such judgements. To oppose a political position is at the very least to be making implicit judgements about what is acceptable or unacceptable ideologically speaking. How can we turn scepticism to account politically? The theory of agonistic pluralism put forward by the post-Marxist theorist Chantal Mouffe, building on the work of the American political scientist William E. Connnolly, provides some interesting ideas in this context. The major objection that Mouffe has to democratic politics as usually practised in the West is that it lacks real oppositional content, being based instead on a system of collusion between the main parties involved in any given country (usually two, with the UK and the US as prime examples of that model). These parties are seen to have more in common than not, and the result is a politics based on compromise and consensus. Ideological differences become blurred, with the political system being dedicated to protecting itself from challenge and keeping real dissent at bay. The “broad church” form of political party (Labour or Conservative; Democratic or Republican) simply serves to narrow the range of acceptable views.

Mouffe’s answer to the politics of compromise is the politics of agonistic pluralism, which she claims would guarantee us an adversarial politics more suited to democracy’s ideals. Agonistic pluralism involves “confrontation between democratic political positions” and “real debate about possible alternatives”, rather than the easier option of compromise, where power circulates amongst an elite. For Mouffe, agonistic pluralism provides a solid basis for breaking the elite’s monopoly on formal political life. Her emphasis is on confrontation rather than the glossing over of difference, with the objective of disrupting any move towards consensus. The political system is to be kept in a permanent state of tension to undermine its inbuilt tendency towards elitism.

Being in a permanent state of tension does not mean for Mouffe that antagonism reigns. Spirited debate is the objective, with each side trying to convert the other, but with the assumption that even when such conversions do occur there will be a plurality of positions remaining, all contesting whatever accommodation the new combination has reached. There is what Mouffe describes as “a shared adhesion” to the broad principles of liberal democracy, with the adversarial approach a critical aspect of this. It is assumed that allegiances would keep shifting around, without ever settling into the deadening kind of consensus that marks out democratic politics in most of the West. Mouffe’s vision of politics, on the other hand, suggests something more like the notion of “the edge of chaos”, with the system being deemed to be at its most vital when kept under constant pressure by a range of truly competitive views.

The practicality of what Mouffe is advocating is, it has to be conceded, very open to question. How governments could ever be formed in such a system is not at all clear, never mind how they could operate for any length of time if they ever were formed. But unless we have this kind of “contestation” then there will always be what Mouffe calls a “democratic deficit”, in which large sections of the population feel excluded from the formal political process. In Mouffe’s view, this is what lies behind the rise of fundamentalism across global culture, with special interest groups feeling forced into making extreme gestures (such as terrorism) just to keep themselves in the public eye.

Mouffe’s discrimination between “politics” and the “political” - that is, politics in its formal and informal guise - is worth bearing in mind when considering how to develop sceptical attitudes in public life. The political is everything that lies outside the realm of formal politics, and it is where the majority of us spend our lives, professional politicians being very much a minority in any society. But professional politicians have to pay attention to what happens in the political, that being where their votes come from. Keeping sceptical attitudes in high profile in the political can pay dividends, in that those in politics have to be very sensitive to prevailing climates of opinion. The political is also the home of the many protest movements that Mouffe and her erstwhile writing partner Ernest Laclau looked to as agents of social change in their seminal work of post-Marxism, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. They regarded the emergence of such groups as a healthy sign, representing a challenge to the tired orthodoxies of formal politics.

The political can help to foster scepticism in other ways - through the arts and the media, for example. Satire has traditionally been a means of spreading scepticism about authority, particularly about the ruling class, with eighteenth-century British culture providing a host of examples from poetry and lampoons through to the vicious caricatures of James Gillray. We need as much of that irreverence as we can get nowadays. It is no accident that authoritarian regimes generally close down sources of satire in order to deny such ideas public circulation. No accident either that religions campaign against satire when it is directed against them; hence the demonstrations against such theatre works as Jerry Springer: The Opera, with its aspersions about Jesus’s sexuality, and Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti’s Behzti, with its biting attack on an inward-looking Sikh culture in England. Such reactions provide all the more incentive to continue encouraging scepticism about religion: blasphemy is all too easily invoked in such instances to protect the power of the dogmatists. Granted, religions must be permitted to argue their case and seek converts, but only in a context of pluralism, where the right not to believe, and to campaign vigorously on that score too, is enshrined. Ideologies cannot be allowed to proscribe scrutiny of their fundamental beliefs, and satire is one of the most effective ways of maintaining a climate of scepticism within societies.

We can also draw on postmodern theory to build up a campaign for scepticism. Postmodernism has been an excellent source of sceptical attitudes in the adversarial stance it adopts towards authority in general. It can be defined as a particularly radical form of scepticism which demands that we worry away at authority, constantly questioning its credentials and the metanarrative underpinning these. That metanarrative is to be kept under constant surveillance to prevent it from suppressing dissent, which it is in the nature of metanarratives to do. It is only a pity that this radicalism has led many postmodernist theorists to overstate the case against the “Enlightenment project”, since the Enlightenment still has something to teach us about developing scepticism within a repressive culture. The postmodernist line has generally been that the Enlightenment has turned into an empire in its own right and must be dismantled. Yet it would make more sense to call for a reinterpretation of the Enlightenment’s legacy rather than a wholesale rejection of it. We need to combine the best of Enlightenment and postmodern thought, what I have elsewhere referred to as “Enlightenment plus”. I think we share the same enemies as the major Enlightenment sceptics, even if things have moved on in the interim, leaving them a bit exposed on certain issues such as women’s rights and race. At their best, however, those figures are staunchly anti-authoritarian.

One of the things we have to do if we are promoting the growth of scepticism in public life is to point out where its name is taken in vain. There are many so-called scepticisms around at present which do not deserve our support. Scepticism is not really scepticism when it is in the service of an authoritarian cause - and that is the case when we consider such phenomena as Euroscepticism, global warming scepticism, and the scepticism toward modern science that goes under the heading of intelligent design. Euroscepticism, as the press have dubbed it, is in reality a defence of a very traditional form of national sovereignty (most often of the “little Englander” type), and cannot qualify as the kind of open-minded critique I’m asking for in public life. Equally, global warming scepticism is all too often the product of think-tanks funded by the multinational oil companies, for whom any sharp drop in the use of fossil-based fuel would equal a dramatic drop in profits. Then the scepticism toward physics and evolution that is expressed by intelligent design proponents often has behind it a totally uncritical belief in the Bible, whether the believer in question is a Young Earth or Old Earth Creationist. Genesis is simply taken as read in both approaches: either the Earth was created in seven days 8-10,000 years ago (Young Earth), or created in seven days several billion years ago (Old Earth). It is possible to believe in intelligent design without espousing Christianity (that something generated the Big Bang, for example, does not mean it has to be God), but it does seem to have a particularly strong appeal to the more fundamentalist-minded of Christians.

Scepticism is not just a rarefied form of philosophical discourse, therefore, primarily concerned to undermine philosophical pretension, but a method for combating authoritarianism in daily life. There’s far too much unquestioning belief and just sheer certainty around, and far too little scepticism and just plain honest doubt. Without scepticism and doubt it is difficult to keep a sense of proportion, and that’s precisely what religious dogmatists in the main lack. They know what is best for us - but of course they don’t, and couldn’t, really know, and that is reason enough to campaign for scepticism. Certainty is the enemy of everything positive that modern society stands for. There’s always far more reason to doubt your beliefs than to be certain about them, and the more you doubt them the less likely you are to feel compelled to force them onto others. Simultaneously, however, you should be doing your best to inculcate doubt in others. Suspension of certainty when it comes to belief should be the minimum we require of both ourselves and our peers. Unfortunately, politics increasingly is becoming colonised by the dogmatists, for whom “there is no alternative”. But there’s always an alternative - that is the creed of an engaged scepticism.

I can’t imagine the formation of the Sceptical Political Party, but I can imagine a climate of opinion more receptive to scepticism. Sceptical attitudes have to be encouraged within both politics and the political, and the dogmatists have to be continually confronted. Developing a sceptical temperament is in fact a political act, and one that we need much more of in the current geopolitical setup. Sceptics tend not to found empires, nor to engage in holy wars - surely they’re worth our support?

Stuart Sim’s Empires of Belief: Why We Need More Scepticism and Doubt in the Twenty-First Century is published by Edinburgh University Press.