Our ability to be driven by norms and emotions through judgements on how people ought to act (what we call morality) is best interpreted as a series of biological adaptations

When scientists look at morality purely from an empirical perspective and wonder why is it that we have this capacity for normative guidance or why we possess emotional dispositions such as empathy or a sense of fairness, the best explanation seems to be an evolutionary one: our ability to be driven by norms and emotions through judgements on how people ought to act (what we call morality) is best interpreted as a series of biological adaptations, i.e., attributes that evolved through natural selection due to the advantages they confer towards greater reproductive success. As Joshua Greene puts it succinctly in his book Moral Tribes “morality is a set of psychological adaptations that allow otherwise selfish individuals to reap the benefits of cooperation.”

Viewed from this evolutionary perspective, the multitude of emotional automatic responses that accompany our basic moral intuitions can then be understood as nature’s evolutionary endowment to us hominids in order to facilitate cooperation — which in turn promotes the propagation of the genes of the cooperators. Even before we get into the business of evaluating rationally what is good and what is right, most of us display strong automatic sentiments that alert us that some things simply cannot be done and that other things simply ought to be done. Moreover, as Greene documents, there is also evidence that these automatic moral emotions arise in a different part of the brain than episodes of levelheaded moral reasoning. This topological finding at a brain level strengthens the view that irrespective of our efforts at autonomous moral thinking, we are already wired with certain moral emotive responses that fire automatically. If cooperating is good for strengthening our reproductive chances, then it is no surprise that adaptations that quickly do the job for us are now bundled into our nature. But are these emotive responses all there is to morality? Encouraged by experimental evidence, some evolutionary biologist — Jonathan Haidt being the leading voice in this respect — have even gone as far as to say that moral philosophy is nothing but an exercise of rationalization — i.e., an exercise in trying to furnish our moral intuitions with the semblance of rational justification. According to this ‘window-dressing’ view of reason, when it comes to morality, nature has already done most of the heavy lifting, and the instances of actual autonomous moral thinking leading us beyond our emotive responses are rare at best. Not everyone agrees with this extreme stance and a more modest and plausible view is that, although evidence does seem to indicate that evolutionary factors play a causal role in conditioning our moral sentiments, we still have enough latitude to exercise independent judgement to grasp moral truths or at least to form reflective commitments towards shared goals.

The important takeaway I want to stress is that psychological dispositions that promote advantageous cooperation do seem to have evolved blindly in our pre-historic past, when forming cohesive groups conferred biological advantages

The debate amongst evolutionary biologists as to how much of our moral nature is hardwired and how much room is left for reasoning seems to rehash a longstanding dispute in moral philosophy: is it the passions or is it the autonomous will guided by reason that dominate our moral judgement? While the roster of philosophers on each side of this debate is ample, it can be simplified as the battle between David Hume’s famous quip that reason is but the slave of the passions vs Immanuel Kant’s view that only a good will — one that acts according to the universal moral law — is intrinsically good. In an interesting way, the results of evolutionary biology seem to vindicate both views by clearly distinguishing, even at the level of the brain, between the emotions — as manifestations of our moral evolutionary baggage — from reason — as our autonomous thought process that puts us above the fray of evolutionarily-adapted automatic responses. A thought-provoking thesis has been advanced in this respect by Greene, who argues that deontological views of morality — which emphasize binding moral obligations — are tied to our evolutionary past, whereas utilitarian judgements — which emphasize the greater good — are driven by reason and are detached from sentimental impulses. Irrespective of the degree in which reason and philosophical reflexion end up influencing our moral lives at the expense of alarm-like emotive responses, the important takeaway I want to stress is that psychological dispositions that promote advantageous cooperation do seem to have evolved blindly in our pre-historic past, when forming cohesive groups conferred biological advantages.

Evolutionary biologists argue then that as social animals we have evolved a deep psychological structure that shapes our universal capacity for morality. This structure furnishes us with a variety of mental and emotional mechanisms that enhance social cohesion and cooperation amongst otherwise selfish individuals and promote our group’s interests when in competition with other groups. While the details on how exactly these psychological mechanisms evolved remain highly controversial, there is certainly a growing appreciation for how intergroup competition favors groups with strong cooperators where incentives for selfishness are suppressed. It is important to insist here that evolution does not promote cooperation for its own sake; it does so only insofar as it confers a biological advantage to help spread the genes of the cooperators. If groups of cooperating individuals manage to outcompete groups of free riders then, in time, the psychological traits that favor cooperation should come to dominate the gene pool.

The common propensity of moral codes to emphasize group identity, cohesion and loyalty and our obsession with reputation and social standing seem to have evolved as adaptations favoring beneficial group cooperation

Evidence suggests that over a long period of time, the dynamic of intergroup competition worked its magic to favor the psychological traits that turned us into ‘groupish’ beings, not withstanding our primordial selfish nature. As Jonathan Haidt puts it in his book The Righteous Mind, “When I say that human nature is selfish, I mean that our minds contain a variety of mental mechanisms that make us adept at promoting our own interests, in competition with our peers. When I say that human nature is also groupish, I mean that our minds contain a variety of mental mechanisms that make us adept at promoting our group’s interests, in competition with other groups.” In order to reap the reproductive benefits of cooperation we evolved a variety of reactive moral sentiments — such as guilt, resentment and shame — and developed psychological attitudes that promoted and enforced group loyalty and social cohesion. The advantages of group membership shaped our strong sense of duty and reinforced social compliance, since those who displayed such altruistic tendencies gained the reputation for being valuable coalition partners and team players. From this perspective then, the common propensity of moral codes to emphasize group identity, cohesion and loyalty and our obsession with reputation and social standing seem to have evolved as adaptations favoring beneficial group cooperation.

In sum, the very righteous genes that shape our moral nature prefigure our fundamentalist impulses. In a very real way, we are natural born fundamentalists

Yet here is the rub: our moral psychology did not evolve to facilitate widespread cooperation. Quite the contrary, it evolved as adaptations for successful intragroup synergism. Cooperation strengthened by moral sentiments and adherence to normative guidance is fantastic for building the ultimate super-groups. But when super-groups are pitted against each other our fundamental allegiances take control. Borrowing from Greene again, “Our social impulses take us out of the frying pan of personal conflict and into the fire of tribal conflict.” The tighter we knit ourselves together to our group, the more successful our group will be but the more difficult it becomes to cooperate with alien groups. In the words of Haidt, “morality binds and blinds”. In sum, the very righteous genes that shape our moral nature prefigure our fundamentalist impulses. In a very real way, we are natural born fundamentalists.

The echoes of our groupish nature have also been recently highlighted by the work of behavioral economists detailing our widespread cognitive biases. Of these biases, ‘ingroup bias’ — the tendency to favor members of one’s group and develop hostility towards out-group members — and ‘confirmation bias’ — the propensity to look for and interpret new evidence in ways that confirm your existing beliefs — are the most relevant for the present discussion. As Cass Sunstein has argued throughout his recent work, “when people find themselves in groups of like-minded types, they are especially likely to move to extremes.” So it seems that we are not only wired to strongly knit ourselves together to our groups: we also proactively seek confirmation of our own group’s beliefs — disregarding contrarian evidence — and when surrounded by like-minded individuals cheering for the same ideas we tend to turn up the ante of our initial beliefs.

Our groupish, biased and extremist-prone nature is for the most part beneficial for parochial cooperation, but it is also one of the key factors behind the current rise of fundamentalism at a global scale

That we are experiencing an unprecedented clash of conflicting belief precisely in this new digitally-interconnected era is not a bug, it’s a feature of our new reality. Our groupish, biased and extremist-prone nature is for the most part beneficial for parochial cooperation, but as I anticipated early on, it is also one of the key factors behind the current rise of fundamentalism at a global scale. While in principle the internet provides a trove of plural beliefs that should foster everyone’s exposure to diversity, in reality what happens is that we end up encasing ourselves inside digital “information cocoons” or “echo chambers” that provide confirmation to the beliefs we already hold. And once we find our band of like-minded netizens, heightened interaction with congenial fellows pushes us to epistemological extremes.

Believing has this peculiar asymmetry by which in order to believe or disbelieve something we want to believe we just need a tiny bit of evidence to feel justified, but on the contrary, we need plenty of evidence to disprove something we already hold or to convince us of something new. In this respect, the internet is a confirmatory machine: We rarely go online to challenge ourselves; we connect to surround ourselves with like-minded ‘friends’, to see what is new with those we ‘follow’ and to google for stories on what we already ‘like’. Our internet experience gets quickly downsized by algorithms and by our own curating habits into a tailored experience that fits our worldview like a pair of new skinny jeans.

Moreover, the internet, and in particular social media, facilitate the formation and proliferation of groups of like-minded individuals at a global scale. And as Sunstein’s research work shows, “members of a deliberating group usually end up at a more extreme position in the same general direction as their inclinations before the deliberation began.” We live in a world that enables the creation of interconnected global super-groups of congenial individuals while at the same time facilitates a constant clash with incompatible outsiders. Our digital world has taken something that was a peripheral phenomenon for the longest part of the evolution of our species and turned it into our everyday condition: the constant encounter with radical alterity. Unsurprisingly, our emotional moral compasses are reacting quickly by pointing inwards while our biases send us online probing for allies and confirmatory ideas.

I am not implying that is only a matter of time before we all take arms and become radicalized fundamentalists. But I do want to highlight that this growing sense of moral balkanization, rising tempers and incapacity to converse with those that we regard as outsiders is in a crucial manner explained by the hazardous mix between our tribalistic nature and our digitally-interlinked reality. An honest look at the vast gulf between the type of beings that we were shaped to be and the type of beings that our global society requires is a good place to start if we are to move beyond the current tragedy of rising fundamentalism.

Natural Born Fundamentalists was originally published in Postmodern Perspective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The fact that our secular sociopolitical setting takes freedom of belief as a cardinal element of what it means to be autonomous has contributed to the neglect of a more serious engagement with the behavioral consequences of our commitments

If the link between belief and action is so vividly exposed by atrocious episodes as the bloodbath in Paris, why is there not a generalized effort to take belief more seriously? Given the clear and essential role that belief plays in the way we conduct ourselves in the world, it is rather surprising that the connection between belief and action is not more habitually stressed by philosophers or public intellectuals. This omission is actually no mere coincidence. The fact that our secular sociopolitical setting takes freedom of belief as a cardinal element of what it means to be autonomous has contributed to the neglect of a more serious engagement with the behavioral consequences of our commitments. If beliefs are a private matter then poking around on their connection to conduct seems transgressive at worst and paternalistic at best. The problem, as I have discussed in the previous post is that talking about private beliefs in an instantaneously interlinked world like ours is becoming increasingly untenable — with the sad consequences of credulity now affecting us all.

If we want to start redressing our generalized neglect of the link between belief and behavior we need a bit of help from philosophy; and there is probably no better place to start than with the ideas of William Kingdon Clifford. You probably have never heard of Clifford, but no philosopher has made a more exhilarating case about the connection between believing and acting than this victorian Englishman. As I will try to show in what follows, we need to rediscover and take his lessons seriously. In his riveting essay The Ethics of Belief, Clifford takes what seems to be an unusual route in the topic of belief — or epistemology in philosophical lingo: he uses an ethical argument to defend a specific approach on how we ought to acquire beliefs. Specifically, he provides an ethical defense of of what philosophers call ‘evidentialism’ — the view that a belief is justified only if evidence supports it and that the degree of conviction in one’s beliefs should be proportional to their evidence. While defending evidentialism was nothing philosophically revolutionary — others before Clifford such as Hume and Locke did so — what was truly innovative in Clifford’s essay was that the whole ethical force of the argument hinged on the tight connection between believing and acting. As he clearly puts it in his essay, “belief belongs to man, an to the guidance of human affairs: no belief is real unless it guide our actions”. As a man of science in an era still dominated by religious belief and by a powerful institutionalized clergy, Clifford had a unique vantage point to develop his acute awareness of the direct connection between belief and behavior. Contrary to the generalized opinion of his contemporaries that a crisis of faith was leading to the destruction of the moral fabric of society, Clifford was convinced that breaking free from unwarranted belief would lead to unprecedented social progress and ethical betterment. He even wrote another essay titled The Influence Upon Morality of a Decline in Religious Belief where he made the eloquent case that what many saw as an impending social debacle was in fact a precious opportunity to liberate morality from “popular theology” and reboot it as a social instinct informing “the union of men in a common effort for a common object”. It is with this normative project of social improvement in mind that Clifford takes on the topic of belief.

Every single belief we hold is then constitutive of our character — of our general disposition — which inevitably shapes the way we conduct ourselves in the world

As Clifford starts to lay out his ethical argument against unwarranted belief on The Ethics of Belief, he points out early on that “no real belief, however trifling and fragmentary it may seem, is ever truly insignificant; it prepares us to receive more of its like, confirms those which resembled it before, and weakens others; and so gradually it lays a stealthy train in our inmost thoughts, which may some day explode into overt action, and leave its stamp upon our character for ever.” For Clifford, every single belief we hold is then constitutive of our character — of our general disposition — which inevitably shapes the way we conduct ourselves in the world. A web of belief suffuses who we are and conditions our behavior both consciously when we attend to the belief in guiding our action or unconsciously through the rippling effects that any truth-claim has on our wider web of belief. As Clifford insists, “if a belief is not realized immediately in open deeds, it is stored up for the guidance of the future” and the addition of any new belief “is so organized and compacted together that no part of it can be isolated from the rest, but every new addition modifies the structure of the whole.” Later on he insists: “This great fabric is for the guidance of our thoughts, and through them of our actions, both in the moral and in the material world.”

Now, if we follow Clifford up to here — and concede that every single belief affects our character to some degree — then our beliefs acquire a social dimension as they guide the way in which we behave in the world and our conduct inevitably affects our fellow humans. Hence Clifford warns us: “We all suffer severely enough from the maintenance and support of false beliefs and the fatally wrong actions which they lead to, and the evil born when one such belief is entertained is great and wide.” For Clifford then, no single belief is a private matter that concerns the believer alone. Belief, through its inextricable connection to behavior and its communicative essence, is inherently public. Clifford completes the argument then: since “no belief held by one man, however seemingly trivial the belief, and however obscure the believer, is ever actually insignificant or without its effect on the fate of mankind, we have no choice but to extend our judgment to all cases of belief whatever.” In short, once we understand the public nature of belief, we become aware of our radical responsibility to keep our epistemological practices to the highest standards.

If this sounds familiar is precisely because we are in a situation in which credulity has indeed taken hold and savagery is all around us.

Clifford’s exhortation to apportion our beliefs to their evidence is then an ethical argument in the sense that it is wrong not to do so given the social dimension of belief through its impact on action and communication. In other words, we have a social responsibility to attend to the evidence grounding our beliefs and it is unethical not to do so. In an alarming tone — yet prophetic once we consider the present day brutality of radicals — Clifford warns us that if we leave ourselves believe anything on insufficient evidence, credulity will take hold and our society will “lose the habit of testing things and inquiring into them” sinking us “back into savagery”. If this sounds familiar is precisely because we are in a situation in which credulity has indeed taken hold and savagery is all around us.

Given the social dimension of belief — the way in which it molds our character and the manner in which it directs our conduct — caring for the way in which we acquire beliefs was for Clifford our most cardinal duty and credulity our most contemptible sin. His point was so radical that he warns us that even if our beliefs were true, that would not absolve us from the responsibility of dutifully inquiring again and again into their soundness. In his own words, “Inquiry into the evidence of a doctrine is not to be made once for all, and then taken as finally settled.” A person that turns a blind eye on his or her epistemic responsibilities “to stifle his own doubts, or to hamper the inquiry of others, is guilty of a sacrilege which centuries shall never be able to blot”. Nowhere in his essay he commends or criticizes specific beliefs but only the manner in which we come to acquire them. This point is of radical importance for understanding the uniqueness of Clifford’s proposition: his ethics of belief is epistemological through and through and precedes any subsequent moral judgement about the content of a belief. But of course his hope was that if one dutifully inquires into one’s beliefs, one will come to believe the true moral and practical beliefs. “It is in this way that the result becomes common property, a right object of belief, which is a social affair and matter of public business.” In other words, if one takes care of the way in which one acquires beliefs, the content will take care of itself.

In dark times like today, we should take Clifford’s advise to heart and stop pointing fingers at specific beliefs while launching instead an unprecedented reassessment about the way in which we acquire them. We all need a degree of soul-searching to acknowledge the ways in which we have misused our hard-won freedom of belief by letting irrational epistemic practices roam free. If we want to defeat fundamentalism we need to cast a new light into the complacent ways we have allowed ourselves to form beliefs. Only then we will reclaim the moral high ground necessary to overcome the barbarity that accompanies credulity. Only then we will have a common stronghold to reply to all of those that accuse us of evil for not following the commands of their gods that the evil is on them for taking us down the road of savagery with their credulity.

Beliefs Matter was originally published in Postmodern Perspective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In plain english, when a private undertaking has side effects for third parties it ceases to be private and becomes a public issue — with the public in question being all of those involved and affected.

From Private Individuals to Public Netizens:
The American philosopher John Dewey once argued that a ‘public’ emerges when individual actions have unintended consequences on the well-being of others. In his own words, “The public consists of all those who are affected by the indirect consequences of transactions to such an extent that it is deemed necessary to have those consequences systematically cared for.”* In plain english, when a private undertaking has side effects for third parties it ceases to be private and becomes a public issue — with the public in question being all of those involved and affected. Dewey saw glimpses in his own day and age of how new technologies were connecting anonymous people in ways that turned formerly private matters into public affairs. Emerging technologies in production and commerce in distant lands were conditioning the lives of local communities elsewhere. The machine age was enormously expanding, intensifying and complicating the scope of the indirect consequences of private activities, turning them increasingly into public matters that needed caring and control. Dewey understood the radical importance of being able to identify an emerging public as a prerequisite for caring and regulating its consequences on individuals. But if the interconnection brought about by the machine age had deep consequences for the demarcation between private undertakings and public issues, the advent of the digitally interwoven global village has accelerated that process in ways that we are only beginning to appreciate.

As Jonathan Sachs recently argued in his book Not in God’s name, “when there is a change in the way we record and transmit information, the repercussions are systemic, transforming institutions, cultures and even the way people think. (…) What printing was to the Reformation, the Internet is to radical political Islam, turning it into a global force capable of inciting terror and winning recruits throughout the world.” The example of the evil pairing between the internet and radical political Islam is indeed the most salient illustration of how what many of us consider to be private undertakings — such as religious belief and practices — has become a public issue affecting us all at a global scale. If any belief can be instantaneously disseminated to all corners of the world — directly impacting the behavior of those who accept its truthfulness — can we in any realistic manner still distinguish between private and public beliefs? Can we still argue with a straight face that our choice of moral and religious outcomes remains a strictly private matter as required by our secular culture? When the Victorian philosopher and mathematician William Kingdon Clifford argued a century and a half ago that “no belief held by one man, however seemingly trivial the belief, and however obscure the believer, is ever actually insignificant or without its effect on the fate of mankind”** it really felt as a case of philosophical hyperbole. But is this still the case in our digitally-interwoven day and age? Reality, it seems to me, as caught up with the Cliffordian vision where every single belief is, in fact, common property. This fact, as I will argue, is a game changer affecting everyone’s epistemic responsibility.

Today, the far reaching impact that private beliefs are having on our public well-being — as they flow instantaneously through the digital pumps of the latest generation of ICTs — makes it very clear that a new global public has indeed emerged. In this brand new reality, a set of tweets in the Levante can mobilize disenfranchised youngsters in Europe to join the Caliphate, a viral video or hashtag can rally millions around specific distant struggles, a misinformed celebrity can challenge established scientific facts on vaccines or a single blog post unearthed on Google can lend credence to one’s prejudices. We are now witnessing a new era in which private belief, digitally broadcasted, can come to influence the actions of vast portions of humanity in a matter of instants. If, going back to Dewey, the line of demarcation between private and public depends on the extent and scope of consequences which are so important as to need restraining, then what we are experiencing today is in fact the greatest deprivatization of belief in the history of humanity. We are now, to give it a name, in a ‘Cliffordian age’ in which claiming that “no one man’s belief is in any case a private matter which concerns himself alone” is no longer hyperbole.

The social impact of beliefs and to what extent some should be considered private while some should be cared for has always been a delicate political subject. Finding the right balance between individual autonomy and justified political coercion has been precisely Liberalism’s core project from the get go. But the scope and consequences of belief in an age that has made global dissemination of truth-claims an effortless activity are unprecedented. Beliefs have always mattered, but today, the formerly private beliefs of citizens have become the public cache of netizens. Taking an optimist longview, we can say that this phenomenon of deprivatization of belief offers enormous promise as in time it should foster an amplified sense of empathy by expanding our awareness of alien worldviews and sharpening our capacity to appreciate our shared humanity — in spite of our multiple doxastic horizons. If empathy is a human aptitude fostered by proximity and ongoing exchange, then a globalized and interconnected epistemic public should be ideal for empathy’s development. But as I will argue over the coming posts, despite its promising potential, the short term drawbacks of the deprivatization of belief are enormous and ultimately threaten the survival of our secular sociopolitical organization.

* John Dewey, The Public and its Problems
** William K. Clifford, The Ethics of Belief

The Deprivatization of Belief and its Consequences was originally published in Postmodern Perspective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Problem with Moral Conflict:
As inhabitants of a liberal secular society, it is no mere coincidence that we feel queasy when thrown into the arena of moral conflict. The history of Western liberalism — which underpins our current secular political structures — is, if anything, a story of gradual moral privatization and steady retreat from moral conflict. So it comes as no surprise that we do not really know how to respond to the rise of global fundamentalism with its impetus to moralize the public sphere. We are ill prepared to defend our own moral intuitions precisely because we live in societies where moral conflict was, until recently, minimized by design.

The philosophical reasons why we avoid moral conflict were clearly articulated by Alasdair Macintyre in his classic book ‘After Virtue’. In a nutshell, once we discarded the Aristotelian teleological program and embarked in the Enlightenment’s project of providing a rational justification for an objective morality, we entered a slippery slope that led to capitulation and to what Macintyre describes as an ‘emotivist’ society: one which takes moral conflict as irresolvable. His argument is rather simple but powerful: from the analysis of what the world is we failed to derive what it should be. We have been at it since Descartes but without a predefined human nature that postulates our essence we simply cannot seem to derive what we ought to do. In Aristotle, we had humans-as-they-are-in-fact on one side and humans-as-they-would-be if they achieved their essential nature on the other. Ethics was the factual enterprise of connecting both sides of the equation. Morality was all about figuring out the rules that would satisfy this project. But once you embrace the Enlightenment and dismiss the idea of a human nature you are left with the pure individual trying to discover the rules of morality looking solely at what is with no ought posited in advance. It is basically like building a bridge to nowhere.

Philosophical debate about the status of morality is ongoing but in practice we have given up on moral conflict long ago; and when faced with it, we shun it as a pointless and irresolvable clash of opinions.

Logical Positivism took this project to its ultimate consequences: In A.J. Ayer’s version, moral propositions are meaningless because they cannot be verified, i.e., they purport to state facts but these facts are not empirically verifiable. Morality doesn’t “hook” to anything in the world; hence it is vacuous, unverifiable and meaningless. Think what you like about Logical Positivism’s extreme argument but the reality is that morality never really recovered. Philosophical debate about the status of morality is ongoing but in practice we have given up on moral conflict long ago; and when faced with it, we shun it as a pointless and irresolvable clash of opinions.

Liberalism to the Rescue:
The development of political liberalism can be understood precisely as an attempt to deal with this capitulation on moral conflict. I would even argue that liberalism is above all a brilliant political answer to what originally was an epistemological problem: If we have no philosophical way to adjudicate among competing and irreconcilable moralities, is there any way in which we can still carry on with our lives in a peaceful manner? Answering this question is the fundamental task of liberalism. From day one, liberalism’s laudable goal was to craft a system where free and equal individuals could, despite their diverging moral beliefs, agree on a set of political rules that respect their freedom while guaranteeing a just and stable society. In other words, liberalism did not only want a solution to the drama of irresolvable moral conflict, it wanted a solution that protected our individual liberty. True to its Christian roots yet with a secular twist, at the core of liberalism resides the powerful idea that human beings should be equally free to live their lives according to their own beliefs. Liberalism’s central emphasis is then, as the name foreshadows, on liberty. To be free, according to the liberal tradition, is to be autonomous: to be able to self-direct one’s own life according to one’s own beliefs.

Afflicted by intractable moral conflict, the brilliance of liberalism was to identify the one thing we could all agree with — despite our seemingly irreconcilable beliefs — and build from there. This one thing we could all agree with was, of course, that we are all free and equal — in the sense of not being naturally subject to others’ moral and political authority and being equally placed in reference to such liberty. Note that it is no coincidence that we could all agree on this point: this was made possible by our shared Christian tradition, a crucial fact that I will stress in the final part of this essay. By introducing the concept of autonomy, liberalism avoided the pitfall of trying to justify political arrangements in reference to any of the contested worldviews that characterize a plural society. From now on, state coercion had to be justifiable to all; otherwise it would run against our stated individual freedom and equality. The dilemma of moral conflict then dissolved as we were finally in possession of a set of commonly agreed rules that cut through our substantive disagreements. The first step to launch this bold justificatory enterprise was to roll back and privatize those contested moral beliefs we have been talking about and focus on the one thing we all shared: our very idea of individual liberty or ‘autonomy’.

For us Westerners, to be reasonable is precisely to understand and accept the fact of pluralism, the fact of irreconcilable moral conflict.

From a liberal perspective, the core objective of political association became then the protection of individual liberty, which means that political discourse needed to abstain from favoring any particular moral or religious view — hence the overriding insistence on state neutrality in regards to moral debates. Coercing everyone into a unified moral outcome became impossible, as the point of departure is the presumption of our autonomy — our inalienable right to autonomously elect our worldview. Liberalism’s stroke of genius was to take moral and religious diversity precisely as the normal outcome of letting individuals exercise their autonomy. Suddenly, the fact that we disagree about moral beliefs — the fact of pluralism — ceased to be viewed as a corrosive phenomenon that needed to be resisted in the name of a single moral and religious worldview. Instead, pluralism became the mark of freedom, the manifestation of our liberty in action. The philosophical capitulation on moral conflict that I explained earlier suddenly became a virtue rather than a problem. Under a liberal system, refraining from trumpeting our morality to others is the ultimate mark of reasonableness. For us Westerners, to be reasonable is precisely to understand and accept the fact of pluralism, the fact of irreconcilable moral conflict.

Liberalism and the Rise of Fundamentalism

If we take moral autonomy and irresolvable pluralism as given, is there anything we can do against those that lever their autonomy to pursue a fundamental agenda? In a society that has grown to embrace pluralism and equates moral conflict with unreasonable squabbling, is there anything we can do to stop fundamentalism? Liberalism rightly highlights that to conceive of others as free and equal requires us to respect their moral jurisdiction and to refrain from demanding that they endorse beliefs that they do not have reasons to support — even when their beliefs seem repugnant to us. Full autonomy in our choice of moral outcomes is constitutive of what it means to be free and liberalism is correct in mobilizing to protect it. But here is where the paradox of liberalism comes into focus: wouldn’t it then be tantamount to coercion to impose our moral outcome on fundamentalists? After all, if fundamentalists have their own reasons to support certain beliefs, isn’t it a violation of their autonomy to force them out of them? And more worrisome even, isn’t it a violation of state neutrality to turn these moral discussions into public affairs, with the state siding with a particular view? And finally, even if we were to put these considerations aside and engage in moral debate, wouldn’t it be pointless as we take moral conflict to be irresolvable to begin with?

Many would rightly point out that liberal autonomy and state neutrality do not mean absolute quietism with regards to others’ beliefs. As J.S Mill famously articulated, we are free to pursue our own good in our own way, as long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs. When fundamentalists cross the boundaries of others’ moral autonomy as they often do, both civil society and the state are fully justified in responding either through overt criticism or coercive force — depending on the gravity of the matter. But the question is: do we really need to wait for fundamentalism to foster unreasonable behavior or violent manifestations before we are prompted to engage in moral conflict? The danger is that liberalism’s well intended conviction that the moral autonomy of others is to be respected, coupled with our position that moral conflict is irresolvable, leads to an unwillingness to engage in moral debate that gives fundamentalists enough room to strengthen. In the powerful words of Michael J. Sandel “fundamentalists rush in where liberals fear to tread”. The liberal paradox is now fully evident: the very moral freedom we have fostered and the plural world it has created are giving fundamentalists both room and apparent reason to come after us.

Escaping the Paradox:

If we are to be able to respond to the growing threat of fundamentalism, we need to escape the paradox of liberalism and figure out a way in which we can proactively defend our Western values and assert our moral outcome without violating others’ autonomy. In what follows I offer three ideas to help mount our comeback.

First and foremost, we need to reconnect with the moral content of liberalism. We cannot successfully defend our way of life if we do not understand the roots of its moral authority. We have become victims of our own success in carving out a private sphere for moral autonomy to flourish. We have wrongly come to associate our freedom to self-elect our worldview with crass individualism and fail to recognize the moral dimension behind the liberal conception of individual freedom and equality. In his recent book “Inventing the Individual”, Larry Siedentop provides us with plenty of ammunition to revert this historical neglect. In his illuminating account, Siedentop shows us how Christian moral intuitions played a crucial role in shaping the discourse that gave rise to modern liberalism and secularism. Siedentop helps us understand that liberalism and secularism are not just institutional arrangements that simply happened to us: they have a rich history which firmly grounds their moral authority. We are individuals precisely because we are united in a shared moral tradition that prefigures our individuality. Understanding the profound moral content behind what we now take to be the secular premises of a modern society helps us regain a fertile ground from where we can mount a defense of our way of life against those who seek to undermine it.

But grasping the profound moral content of our liberal tradition won’t be sufficient if we do not manage to reengage in moral conflict with fundamentalists of all sorts. A pure philosophical grounding of our morality might escape us, as I explained with the help of Macintyre, but we still have a powerful route to take in our effort to reshape the moral conversation: we can and should proactively argue for the practical consequences of our beliefs. We should steer moral conflict away from the antagonistic discussions on whose moral beliefs are purer, more legitimate and better grounded. For moral conflict to lead somewhere we need to turn it into a factual conversation about the practical effects that a life of freedom and equality has on our well-being versus those of a life of fundamental dogmatism. This is our turf and here is where we are more likely to take the upper hand: we need to show our opponents the appalling consequences of their beliefs and the countless lives it destroys and opportunities it forecloses. This is the only road to moral victory and its effectiveness is well documented in the very liberation struggles of our own Western world where oppressive beliefs have been defeated time and again by those who dare to show the hideous consequences of some deeply held convictions.

Besides reconnecting with the moral content of liberalism and encouraging debate around the practical consequences of the beliefs it entails, we need a final step to fully escape our paradox: We need an amplified concept of autonomy that allows us to engage in moral conflict without contradicting ourselves. The capacity to live our life according to our self-elected moral beliefs should come to be seen as only the first step in achieving full autonomy. An amplified autonomy ought to demand that we subject our private moral outcomes to open-ended moral debate before we can consider ourselves truly autonomous. A freedom that deserves the name should seek to enlarge itself through a process of ongoing social debate and moral conflict. Moral autonomy that is not held accountable socially leaves us at the mercy of our own self-enslavement and corrodes our capacity to defend our way of life. We need to shame fundamentalists into a life of freedom by insisting how a dogmatic, even if self-selected morality, falls short. This concept of amplified autonomy as socially constituted is the final step in escaping the liberal paradox, allowing us to engage in a proactive and liberating defense against fundamentalism. If there is any silver-lining to our dark times is that the struggle against fundamentalism will in the end strengthen our own freedom.

The Paradox of Liberalism and the Rise of Fundamentalism was originally published in Postmodern Perspective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

From the enlightenment through the declaration of human rights, philosophy played a central role in shaping the intellectual landscape that birthed the modern version of concepts such as religious toleration, freedom of conscience and freedom of expression.

Back then, the revolutionary ideas of people like John Locke, Immanuel Kant and John Stuart Mill helped us redefine our understanding of freedom, rationality and rights amongst many other concepts in a way that re-educated us away from our intolerant and bigoted past. It was thanks to their ideas that we managed to move on from the bloody wars of religion that followed the Reformation and that we succeeded in building sustainable institutional arrangements and peaceful civil societies in places previously afflicted by deadly sectarianism.

The tragedy of Charlie Hebdo is the latest episode in the saddening saga of the rise of fundamentalism in our globally interconnected society. It is palpable to all of us that fundamentalism is rising but it is extremely difficult to understand why it is so and what can be done about it amidst the cacophony of views and opinions populating the web. If there is anything clear to me is that philosophy should speak louder and lead this debate. Philosophy is an incredibly valuable resource to help us identify the conceptual deficiencies leading to our contentious situation and to propose bold new concepts and vocabularies that could once again rescue us from the grip of fundamentalism. The case study on how liberal philosophical ideas helped defeating religious intolerance is a good place to start. But we also need to recognize that the 300 year old solution we gave to the problem of religious fundamentalism in the West might not apply today and might even be backfiring in our novel interconnected circumstances.

The question on how a morally diverse yet interconnected world can establish a peaceful social organization that minimizes fundamentalism is without a doubt the most pressing question of our generation. This is above all a philosophical question and we should be throwing our best philosophical minds at the problem right now. One could argue that this is the question that the liberal tradition has been grappling with since the days of Locke but as I have tried to explain in several posts in this blog, the interconnected nature of the world that has emerged over the last 20 years changes everything and renders liberalism’s intellectual effort obsolete. The hazardous mismatch between the private and unaccountable ways in which we grew accustomed to form moral and religious beliefs and the immediacy and global-reaching ways in which these can now be trumpeted is the primary force behind our day and age fundamentalism.

Liberalism rescued us from fundamentalism once by privatizing morality and religious belief, but as the private world dissolves into global interconnection, deeply opposing worldviews find themselves again in direct confrontation. A prerequisite for the liberal solution to work against fundamentalism is that social actors accept that the rational thing to do is to keep morality out of politics. The very definition of ‘reasonable’ under liberalism is the capacity to grasp the coercive nature of trying to impose one’s moral beliefs on others hence voluntarily stepping them back into the private. This is the very heart of a sustainable secular society. Yet I am afraid that this solution will not work under our interconnected conditions.

Why would radicalized actors voluntarily step back into private pastures when they have the technological means to holler their views to a global audience

Why would radicalized actors voluntarily step back into private pastures when they have the technological means to holler their views to a global audience? And even more worrisome, aren’t we all radicalized actors when it comes to discussing moral or religious beliefs? It is true that the vast majority of us are not recurring to physical violence to assert our beliefs but it is also true that we regard these beliefs as private matters and that when forced to discuss them in public we are at pains trying to keep our cool. That temperatures rise quickly when we discuss moral and religious beliefs is an evident symptom of the mismatch between the way in which we have acquired these beliefs and the way in which they are now being exposed and challenged.

So the solution to fundamentalism today is not harder-better-faster secularism. We need a deeper solution that re-conceptualizes the way in which we acquire moral and religious beliefs. We need bold ideas and concepts to convince each other that our moral and religious beliefs are not complete unless these have been constituted through ongoing open social conversation. Just as innovative philosophical concepts convinced us over 300 years that toleration and mutual respect were the key to liberty, we now need new and imaginative ways to convince each other that we are not free if our deepest beliefs remain unaccountable. We need to take our moralities out of the closet and learn to live with them in the open.

We need bold ideas and concepts to convince each other that our moral and religious beliefs are not complete unless these have been constituted through ongoing open social conversation.

If stepping back into the private is unfeasible in a globally interlinked reality we need philosophy to come up with ways in which the re-socialization of morality and religion we are now experiencing can proceed peacefully. This task will require a heavy conceptual enterprise of redefining the way in which we acquire beliefs, the way in which we define what is reasonable and the way in which we understand what it means to be free to name the most pressing issues. This is the task ahead for our generation of philosophers. Let us hope there are Lockes and Kants and Mills amongst us.

Philosophy and the Battle against Fundamentalism was originally published in Postmodern Perspective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

If the above sounds familiar is because this is exactly the condition where we find ourselves today. Moral conflict has clearly permeated our public discourse and the only options we seem to have against this perilous situation is either to kiss liberalism good bye and embark on a full-throttle fundamental defense of our own world view or try to salvage liberalism by desperately attempting to roll back morality to private lands. The way I see it, the former strategy leads to unacceptable fundamentalism while the latter one is unattainable. Is that it then? In a world where liberalism is impracticable and moral conflict is unavoidable is fundamentalism really the only game in town?

Of course not. There is indeed another way for us to embrace moral conflict without sacrificing our freedom or falling victims of fundamentalism. But here is where we need to part ways with liberalism. Let me explain.

Liberalism is absolutely correct in identifying moral conflict as a threat to one’s autonomy. Liberals rightly highlight that to conceive of others as free and equal requires us to respect their moral jurisdiction and to refrain from demanding that they endorse beliefs that they do not have reasons to support. Full autonomy in our choice of moral outcomes is constitutive of what it means to be free and liberalism is correct in mobilizing to protect it. Now, it is the way in which liberalism goes about protecting our autonomy that is problematic — particularly in our current interlinked environment — as the wall erected to keep our moral autonomy in a conflict-free private sphere has crumbled. What liberalism failed to see is that moral conflict, when rightly channeled, has the potential to be autonomy’s greatest ally instead of its natural adversary.

In order to position my central argument that moral conflict and autonomy can in fact go hand in hand I first need you to see that liberalism’s idea of autonomy is quite limited: our cherished capacity to privately select our moral beliefs is, I will argue, an incomplete form of autonomy. To protect our moral jurisdiction from the inquisitive power of others is certainly a step in the right direction, but is it sufficient to consider ourselves truly autonomous? I do not think so. As the young Karl Marx brilliantly foresaw[1], liberalism enables political freedom but fails to unshackle the individual from its own fundamental — and now privatized — beliefs. In our liberal societies we might have indeed acquired freedom from external moral coercion, but we remain hostage to our own beliefs. As such, where we thought we had actualized autonomy, we only carved out ourselves a sphere where our own unaccountable beliefs enslave us. In Marx’s words, we gain political emancipation but fall short of “human emancipation”. Now, although I agree with Marx’s diagnostic, I disagree with his eventual solution (i.e., communism). The revolution that we need is in the mind: we need to revolutionize the way in which we set moral beliefs in order to achieve a degree of autonomy that deserves the name. And here is where moral conflict enters the picture.

Moral conflict is usually seen as a zero sum confrontation amongst irreconcilable doctrines that is to be avoided in the name of autonomy. As we are painfully experiencing today, clashing moralities lead to radicalization and fundamentalism as each one tries to impose its evaluative standards in a war of all against all. Now, what I want you to notice is that this is the case precisely because we have mistaken the capacity to privately select our moral beliefs with autonomy. In our current moral practices, we have sacrificed the social quest for truth — the sound practice of exchanging reasons to justify our beliefs — in the name of autonomy. What we need to see — and the internet is playing a crucial role here — is that our privately held core values are but one amongst a multitude of ways in which we humans answer the question on how should one live. If we were to embrace this question as a collective effort on how to continuously meliorate the human condition, we could transform moral conflict from the zero sum game it is today into a fruitful ongoing social conversation on how should one live.

In short, moral conflict leads to fundamentalism precisely because we remain incapable of conceiving morality as responsive to reasons, as a pragmatic truth-seeking enterprise. We grew accustomed to the practice of collecting moral beliefs in the unaccountable world of the private, and as the wall crumbles and the internet reconnects our private beliefs into a new public moral space, we seem incapable to engage in proper, consensus-building, reasoned exchange. To be able to dismantle fundamentalism’s key driving force, we first need to accept that liberalism’s ring-fencing of morality in the name of personal autonomy is an outdated strategy, a strategy for a disconnected world. Once that is done, we need to reconstruct the way in which we acquire and hold moral beliefs, unpinning them from our private “butterfly collection” and reinserting them in the open field of deliberative and accountable reasoned exchange.

From the perspective I offer, moral conflict should become an open and ever-going social quest for better ways to live together in mutually beneficial and cooperative social orders. Moral conflict in the public arena should not be viewed as a war of irreconcilable standards trying to conquer and coerce each other, but as a forum for morality to constitute itself, as a forum that generates accountable moral beliefs through an open and ongoing dialogue. Skeptics will argue that what I propose is wishful-thinking and that we lack proper incentives to renounce the privilege of privately setting our own moral beliefs in exchange for a world where morality becomes an open and collective deliberative enterprise. But as I pointed out already, what most have failed to see is that by doing so, we replace an egoistic and self-centered view of autonomy for a responsive, socially constituted and accountable one that expands our freedom. And who does not want to be freer? Understanding the limited access to freedom that we have under the privatized world of liberal autonomy should be the key driving force pushing us to harness the liberating power of moral conflict. Properly constituted moral conflict allows us to go beyond the complacency of private autonomy that Marx deplored by regarding ourselves as free individuals only when our beliefs have been appropriated through social discussion — when they are viewed as cleansed from fundamentalism through reasoned exchange.

Summing up, my key proposition is that in an interconnected world like ours, moral autonomy can and should be constituted socially. Neither concealing our deep commitments as liberalism recommends nor trumpeting our own unyielding beliefs as fundamentalism mandates will bring a sustainable solution to the problem of interconnected pluralism. Only an amplified idea of autonomy as constituted through ever-going social discussion can truly reap the benefits of our new interlinked reality. If we are all committed to keeping the conversation open, we can allow moral conflict to bloom and fundamentalists will eventually learn the liberating benefits of listening to dissenting views.

Let me finish by going back to the original question I mentioned in Part 1 and offer my own contrasting solution: How can one come together with people that do not share one’s values, agree on a set of rules that would seem to coerce one’s liberty yet remain free when all has been set and done? As I explained previously, Kant’s solution (which became liberalism’s backbone) was that if we act as our own legislators and if the laws we give ourselves are universal we will all end up agreeing on common rules. Kant recommended that if we abstract from our moral divisions and legislate as universal beings we will all coincide in a “realm of ends” where we all keep our freedom while subjecting to each other. In contrast, what I propose is an idea of freedom conceived as a “realm of aims”: to be free is to continuously aim at a moral order where my reasons are constituted through an open social conversation. What makes us free is not the right to hold on to a set of unmovable beliefs but the continuous and never-ending quest for truth. Once we stop aiming for better beliefs, we lose our freedom and become prisoners of our own static and unaccountable dogma.

[1] Marx, Karl; On the Jewish Question; 1844

Liberalism and Moral Conflict (Part 2) was originally published in Postmodern Perspective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The main argument I want to present now is that our liberal political organization (and I will expand on what I mean by that in a second) has become ineffective at performing the central task it was set up to do: to reconcile freedom with moral order in a plural society. Before I plunge into explaining why liberalism has become inefficacious, let me sketch what liberalism was conceived for to begin with.

From day one, liberalism’s laudable goal has been to craft a system of free and equal individuals that, despite their diverging conceptions of the good, agree on a set of political rules that respect their freedom while guaranteeing a just and stable society. One should note that this is a monumental task, both philosophically and practically: How can one come together with people that do not share one’s values, agree on a set of rules that would seem to coerce one’s liberty yet remain free when all has been set and done? Kant proposed the most elegant solution to this quandary: if we act as our own legislators and if the laws we give ourselves are universal we will all end up agreeing on common rules. If we abstract from our moral divisions and legislate as universal beings we will all coincide in a “realm of ends”. And in this realm of ends, the rules we give each other reflect our freedom, rather than coerce it. Those rules we agree upon will be my rules — so my freedom has not been compromised — yet they will also be your rules, since they are universal and from that vantage point we cannot but agree. Whatever it is that you believe in private will be checked at the door when you enter the realm of universal laws; there, your personal values will give way to the all encompassing realm of ends where we are all bound to agree.

In the late twentieth century, the american philosopher John Rawls took Kant’s ideas and presented the most compelling version of how to put this all into political practice. Rawls updated Kant’s ideas and in his lexicon, the lofty “realm of ends” became the worldly “public reason”, the place where, just as with Kant, we check our private doctrines at the door and agree on political principles that can only be justified from an impartial vantage point. These public reasons respect my freedom (just as Kant’s universal laws) because they are to be justified politically i.e., without reference to my own private set of values.

The key thing to notice is that in both Kant’s and Rawls’, or in any other liberalism for that matter, the political consensus is agreed by abstracting our own personal values and establishing a sanitized public sphere. In practice, liberalism depends crucially on this separation between the private realm — where our dissonant moralities are kept — and the public sphere — where we argue impartially. This separation between private and public reasoning which was the genius of liberalism has become, as I will argue, its greatest flaw. The fundamental problem is that under a liberal system we lack, by design, a proper mechanism to solve moral disputes. Liberalism vacates morality to the private arena and purely relies on politics to control the stable and free society it went on to build. But the stability and freedom we gained are only as strong as the wall separating our private and public reasons. And it turns out that the rise of new global interlinking technologies is eroding this barrier between our private and public personas, which is leading us into an era of over-politicization of moral issues and heightened fundamentalism. By construction, we are unable to solve the moral disputes that now flood our political agenda. The internet and the rise of instantaneous global communications have suddenly birthed liberalism’s bête noire: a public medium for morality. Liberalism’s sanitized public sphere has all of the sudden got ‘contaminated’ with strident and clashing moralities that laid dormant in our private realm for centuries, leading to the recent rise of fundamentalism. The way I see this, there is no way to put the genie of morality back in the bottle of the private. That liberalism will succumb to unchecked moral conflict is to me a matter of when, not a matter of how.

The rise of the internet and global communication channels is indeed lifting the ‘veil of ignorance’ (to use Rawls famous expression) that kept our private moralities secluded and allowed for an impartial political arena to thrive. What we are experiencing now is the crisis that follows as liberalism looses its grip on freedom and order and fundamentalism arises. As Kant’s and Rawls’ solution becomes impracticable — since our private moralities can no longer be left out of the public discourse — we have no option but to look for new solutions for the old problem on how to reconcile freedom with moral order in a plural society.

How can we appease the rise of moral of conflict in this digitally interconnected society without compromising our freedom? If liberalism is no longer the answer, what can be? These are the two questions I will develop in the next post.

Liberalism and Moral Conflict (Part 1) was originally published in Postmodern Perspective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

While most westerns feel that privatizing morality and sterilizing the State is a worthy price to pay for individual freedom, eastern cultures (but also increasingly the religious right in the US for instance) tend to disagree and prefer to pay the price of coercion in order to have a fully-fledged and meaningful political live. Of course in reality most people sit somewhere in the middle between the two solutions and many believe that a pragmatic compromise can and will be achieved. Allow me to spoil the party: in an era of interconnected global communications and instant dissemination of ideas, the strident confrontation between secularism and religiously-based politics is only going to get worse. As I have argued elsewhere, we are experiencing an era of rapid de-privatization of morality as the wall of separation that secularism successfully built between the public and the private crumbles under a new hyper-connected social reality. In a world in which we are all instantly interconnected, beliefs can easily be socialized and public debate on deep held commitments reignites. The genie is out of the bottle and secularism won’t be able to bottle it back. Any concerted effort to push beliefs back into the private will only lead to a violent response by those who feel oppressed by the State. (Just ask the Muslim Brotherhood how they are feeling right now.)

As the “privatize and tolerate” solution of secularism crumbles with the re-socialization of religion and morality, are we condemned to a new era of inevitable sectarian violence between the plurality of deep commitments that characterize modern societies? To many, this power struggle or “clash of civilizations” is an inevitable outcome of our current condition. What astonishes me is that everyone is splitting hairs asking how we should organize ourselves politically in a plural world — so that our deeply held commitments don’t lead us into self-destruction — but no one takes a step back and questions the necessity of having deep commitments to begin with or their accuracy. The fact that secularism never really liberated men from their entrenched deep beliefs — but quite the contrary allowed these beliefs to grow in the unaccountable world of the private — is the real root of the problem. Secularism was a brilliant short-cut to civilized coexistence but it never truly dealt with the uncomfortable fact that men remained pathetically enslaved by their own privately held deep commitments. So let us be frank: the real problem is our unyielding attitude towards our deep commitments, not our lack of imagination in devising a sustainable political arrangement (news flash: there isn’t one). Secularists are wrong for trying to hide the problem and fundamentalists are wrong for pretending to have the one true solution.

In the dire situation where we find ourselves today, only a radical re-imagining of how human beings come to believe what we believe in can truly solve our predicament. If the problem is that we all have accumulated a non-negotiable array of moral and religious beliefs then the very practices that lead to this mess need to be revamped. Our very idea of freedom as the inalienable right to privately choose our most fundamental beliefs is, to me, the right place to start our revamping enterprise. The liberal idea of freedom as an autonomous process of ‘belief self-imposition’ is certainly a vital step in achieving freedom but it falls short of real autonomy as the gains we made by liberating ourselves from external coercion are counterbalanced by the loss of belief-accountability that ensues when beliefs are privatized. We freed ourselves from others only to end up self-enslaved. To be truly autonomous we need to move beyond the mere capacity to privately select our own beliefs and insert them in an ongoing process of open public deliberation. To be free is not only to have the capacity to choose our beliefs, but to choose beliefs that can be tested socially.

As the world grows interconnected, we need to go beyond the complacency of private autonomy and regard ourselves as free individuals only when our beliefs have been appropriated through social discussion — when they are viewed as cleansed from fundamentalism. In an interconnected world, a freedom that deserves the name has to be socially constituted. Neither concealing our deep commitments as secularism recommends nor trumpeting our own unyielding beliefs as fundamentalism mandates will bring a sustainable solution to the problem of pluralism. Only an amplified idea of freedom as constituted through ever-going social discussion can truly reap the benefits of our new interconnected reality. If we are all committed to keeping the conversation open, secularists can allow religion and morality back into the conversation and fundamentalists will eventually learn the liberating benefits of listening to dissenting views.

Secularists and Fundamentalists are Both Wrong was originally published in Postmodern Perspective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Unfortunately, the reality seems to be quite the opposite: the rise of global interconnectivity is not only failing to promote a sense of global empathy, it is promoting empathy’s evil twin: global fundamentalism. It turns out that greater chances to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes do not necessarily mean that we will expand our capacity to empathize: we might as well hate those shoes and the actual experience of having to constantly try them on can in fact fuel our hostility. It seems that in a world where otherness was reasonably isolated it was easy to be tolerant — as the annoyance of having to deal with others’ beliefs was in reality quite minimal. But in a globally wired world, coping with otherness has become a central feature of our daily life raising the stakes of our ability to tolerate. As such, what looked like a suitable environment for enhanced empathy is turning out to be fertile ground for the rise of a new breed of super-charged fundamentalism.

That fundamentalism has taken the upper hand in an era that seemed ideal for fostering global empathy is the greatest tragedy of our time. But we cannot reverse course and unlock the empathic potential of our era if we fail to grasp the real reason why fundamentalism is ahead. Exposing what I believe to be the central reason behind the rise of fundamentalism is precisely one of the core objectives of this blog.

As I have argued elsewhere, it is our cherished idea of freedom as moral autonomy — and the political and social system that has spawned to protect it — that are responsible for our incapacity to reap the benefits of an interconnected society and for leaving us vulnerable to rising fundamentalism. My thesis is simple yet profoundly disrupting: growing fundamentalism is the inevitable byproduct of an increasingly interconnected plural society that refuses to outgrow the classic liberal idea that our individual worldviews should be held and justified privately. To put it bluntly, the widespread conviction that we all have the right to believe whatever we want in private is a time bomb in a world where privacy itself is being dismantled. We need to wake up to the fact that if privacy collapses, we can no longer hoard beliefs in the same secluded way we used to; we have no choice but to change the way in which we believe whatever it is that we believe in. As the dogmatic baggage that we have all been carrying privately since the Reformation gets reconnected into global social and information networks, we find ourselves ill prepared to justify one another our deep-rooted convictions and we quickly slide into fundamentalist tendencies of varying degrees–which in turn tend to be directly proportional to the non-negotiability of our convictions.

It is important to emphasize that I am not attempting to pass metaphysical judgment on our liberal idea of freedom as moral autonomy — I personally see the liberal tradition as the greatest legacy of the Enlightenment and one we should all celebrate and protect. My take here is wholly pragmatic: I just want to point out the practical difficulties and counterproductive consequences of our liberal idea of freedom when viewed through the prism of our globalized and interlinked times. To me, the successful implementation of the liberal ideal of autonomy can only be achieved in an environment where a clear distinction between a private and a public realm can be secured. Such a division — which indeed existed from the reformation until recently — is rapidly disintegrating in the era of social networks, the blogosphere and the twitterverse. The emergence of the hyper-public “Netizen” is rendering liberalism obsolete and exposing its dark side: the fact that in reality we are nothing more than dormant autonomous fundamentalists poorly prepared to defend our most cherished beliefs publicly. The current rise of fundamentalism is the most vivid symptom that liberalism, despite all its good intentions, has run its course.

Any serious attempt at ending fundamentalism and giving empathy a chance will need to offer a novel way of understanding our autonomy that is consistent with a world where keeping our beliefs private and quietly tolerating each other is no longer practicable. Providing such a novel take on autonomy that should put fundamentalism to rest is a great task for our generation. To be autonomous today we need to move beyond the liberal dictum of being able to privately select our own worldview — we require more than that as privately justified moral and religious beliefs are nothing but fuel for fundamentalism in an era of growing interlinkages. To be autonomous today we need to subject our formerly private worldviews to an ongoing process of open public deliberation. As the world grows interconnected, we need to go beyond the complacency of liberal private autonomy and regard ourselves as free individuals only when our beliefs have been appropriated through social discussion — when they are viewed as cleansed from fundamentalism. In an interconnected world, a freedom that deserves the name has to be socially constituted.

The Autonomous Fundamentalists was originally published in Postmodern Perspective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

To go straight to the point, my argument is that critical rationalism is the only epistemological attitude that allows us to truly meet the greatest challenge of our age: the rise of fundamentalism. In a world completely interwoven by digital technologies but in which a wide range of diverging worldviews overlap, I see no other alternative to fundamentalism than to embrace critical rationalism. Let me put it the other way around: if we do not adopt a critical rationalist attitude towards our beliefs in an interlinked and plural world like ours, we will inevitably fall prey of fundamentalism. Any attempt at fixing our beliefs in an un-revisable manner is inexorably an exercise of conceptual violence in a plural and interconnected era like ours. In spite of the genuinely good intentions we might have when we throw ourselves in the quest for truth, if we convince ourselves that we have found it and that the search is now over, we cannot help but relapse into fundamentalism.

In practical terms, adopting a critical rationalist approach to one’s beliefs has two profound consequences: it redefines our very idea of rationality and it shakes the core of political liberalism’s presuppositions. Let me begin by exploring the former. In a world in which we consider all of our beliefs to be potentially revisable the emphasis of rational argumentation moves from the actual content of our beliefs and how they grasp what the world really is into the way in which we hold our beliefs. How we believe becomes more important than what we believe in. Sound epistemological practices, degree of openness of the conversation and intersubjective processes to validate (and falsify) beliefs become more central to our idea of rationality than the actual truthfulness of our beliefs. Truth remains the central goal, but keeping the road open as we search for it is essential. For us critical rationalists truth is an aspiration, and it should always be so.

But perhaps the most profound consequence that adopting a critical rationalist position has in a world like ours is that it pushes into obsolescence liberalism’s dictum of keeping our worldviews private and depoliticized as the state remains neutral among conflicting versions of the good. The great privatization of beliefs that started since the early days of liberalism was prompted by our fundamental reluctance to consider our own worldviews as potentially revisable. Keeping out of the political what one is unable to discuss was and continues to be liberalism’s stroke of genius. But as I have argued in other posts, the rise of the internet and instant global communication tools is dragging our private beliefs back into the social. Faced with this new reality we have but two options: coping with a growing and hazardous fundamentalism as formerly private beliefs find themselves face to face in the new digital global village, or adopting a softer stance towards our own beliefs as endorsed by critical rationalism. As I see it, only the second option offers a truly sustainable way to dismantle fundamentalism and while at it pushes forward the long march of freedom as we emancipate ourselves from the tyranny of our own fundamental beliefs.

A Pragmatic Defense of Critical Rationalism was originally published in Postmodern Perspective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.