Anti-Dogmatism

Invincible Ignorance

Dogma gets a bad rap these days.  One of the most cutting slurs available is to call your opponent "dogmatic" or his views "dogma".  As with all slurs, the thrust is twofold: if you call out your opponent for being dogmatic, the immediate assumption is that you, on the other hand, must be reasonable, pragmatic, and open-minded.  By casting the aspersion at another you paint yourself in a noble light. 

Economist, John Kenneth Galbraith scorned dogma in true dogmatic fashion: "When people are the least sure, they are often the most dogmatic."  This is ad hominem at its most sublime: my opponent is firm in his views, but the very firmness betrays his underlying doubt and uncertainty.  Wow.  Who would have seen that coming. 

Evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould also dogmatically warned of the dangers of dogmatism:
"Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic world view--nothing more constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive to openness to novelty."  A classic in the genre of the pot calling the kettle black.

When politicians rail against dogmas and dogmatism, know for sure that we are face to face with an ideologue.  President Obama has often been called one of the most ideological of recent presidents; he is also one of the most vehement against dogma, and hide-bound ideological opponents.  At his first inauguration he called for the end of politics as usual.  His administration would be marked by an "end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas, that for far too long have strangled our politics."  Yet public recrimination of his political opponents has been a hallmark of the Obama presidency.

All human beings are dogmatic--even if their dogmatism is to be against dogmas.  To oppose someone on the grounds of being dogmatic, rather than on the grounds of their particular dogmas, is not just intellectual laziness.  It is deceitful. 

Jonah Goldberg asserts that G. K. Chesterton was the greatest defender of dogma (properly understood) in the English language.  He quotes Chesterton as follows:

Man can be defined as an animal that makes dogmas.  As he piles doctrine on doctrine and conclusion on conclusion in the formation of some tremendous scheme of philosophy  and religion, he is, in the only legitimate sense . . . becoming more human.

When [man] drops one doctrine after another in a refined scepticism, when he declines  to tie himself to a system, when he says that he has outgrown definitions, when he says that he disbelieves in finality, when, in his own imagination, he sits as God, holding no form of creed but contemplating all, then he is by that very process sinking slowly backwards into the vagueness of the vagrant animals and the unconsciousness of the grass.  Trees have no dogmas.  Turnips are singularly broad-minded.  [Cited in Jonah Goldberg: The Tyranny of Cliches (New York: Sentinel/Penguin, 2012), p. 68.]

Ouch.