Why Truth Matters reviewed in New Humanist Newsletter

Columnist Madeleine Bunting recently left the Guardian to take up a directorship of the think-tank Demos. In her parting address she said, I want to do more than describe and comment – I want to shape debates.' She has certainly provoked her share of debate. In October Bunting conducted a favourable interview with Islamic scholar Dr Qaradawi, who endorses suicide bombings and domestic violence. She is a believer in the healing powers of religion, and even attacked the Enlightenment movement after attending a new Humanist seminar on its legacy: 'Why do people think that a sense of rationality that is over 200 years old is useful now?' (It seems not to have crossed Bunting's mind that a holy text that is over 2000 years old would be of any more use).

Still, good question. It's true that the principles of the boring old Enlightenment – freedom of speech, democratic government, reason over faith, church-state separation, objective truth – are out of fashion with not only the usual suspects but those who should know better. They are under attack by postmodernists, relativists, and fundamentalists and moderates of all religions. This book is a defence of rationality and objective truth. The title is banal, but as John Lloyd said of the Euston Manifesto, its banality is needed.

Benson and Stangroom are sympathetic; they agree that truth is not always beautiful, not always what we want to hear. Sometimes life gets so bad that there's no choice but to delude yourself. When the priest or the king tells you what to think, this can be comfortable as well as oppressive: it 'liberated people from responsibility and the hard work of thinking.' The philosophers understand why intelligent people shy away from the idea of objective truth. It feels kind of elitist. Isn't it wrong to say that our idea of truth is the only one? Good old liberal guilt whispers in our ear. We feel bad when we say that a belief system that advocates female circumcision and honour killings is worse than one that doesn't. We mumble and equivocate. How many times have you heard that the invasion in Iraq was wrong because 'we shouldn't force 'our' culture upon people?'

And as Benson and Stangroom reveal, the wonders of science have been exploited by the political right for decades. Darwinism was used by academics and politicians to justify the slashing of welfare programmes, race segregation, and even eugenics. It is no wonder people want to feel a little more spiritual these days. But the long wave of postmodernist thinkers threw the baby out with the bathwater. They believed, as dogmatically as any cleric, that:There is no truth save social acceptance; no system of belief is constrained by reason or reality, and no system of belief is privileged; there shall be no asymmetries in explanation of truth or falsehood, society or nature; and honour must always be given to the actors' categories.

Basically, everything is a construct: science, rationality, law, art, all are chimeras and illusions perpetrated by various competing interests. It's possible to have great fun with this, as the physicist Alan Sokal proved when he submitted a hoax article to a postmodernist magazine that claimed that physical reality itself was a social and linguistic construct. (I'm not surprised the editors were fooled; phrases like 'post-Enlightenment hegemony' are straight out of a Madeleine Bunting article. My favourite piece of mockery, though, has to be the Onion's three-word obituary of Jacques Derrida. It read: 'Jacques Derrida 'Dies').

Yet there is a sinister side to all this, a reason why Benson and Stangroom have done scholarship such a great service with this clear, courageous and passionate book. They quote the historian Richard Evans: If we don't believe it's possible to distinguish between truth and falsehood, then we have no means of exposing racism, antisemitism, and neo-fascism … we have no real means of discrediting them at all.

Exactly. If you believe anything is anything and that all points of view are equally valid, then a fascist can walk up to you, explain why atheists and black people and gays and Jews should be put into camps, explain why you should be put into a camp if you disagree, and you will have nothing to say to him.

If this vital book has a flaw, it is in the lack of examination it gives to the present danger upon objective truth: that of organised faith and its adherents. As Salman Rushdie says in the opening pages, 'I was taught a laudable method of argument: you never personalise, but you have absolutely no respect for people's opinions.' When it comes to faith, we turn Rushdie's dictum on its head: we attack religious extremists like Christian Voice and Al-Qaeda, but the belief systems that motivates them remains ring-fenced, scared, out of bounds. I call this 'spiritual correctness.'

Nevertheless, Why Truth Matters is a beautiful, essential book: as essential to the mind and spirit as water and air are to the body. The Counter-Enlightenment stops here.

.-Max Dunbar, 11 July 2006, New Humanist Newsletter

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