Minds Wide Shut: How the New Fundamentalisms Divide Us by Gary Saul Morson and Morton Schapiro

Abstract

Reviewed by: Minds Wide Shut: How the New Fundamentalisms Divide Us by Gary Saul Morson and Morton Schapiro Rudolphus Teeuwen Gary Saul Morson and Morton Schapiro. Minds Wide Shut: How the New Fundamentalisms Divide Us. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2021. xix + 307 pp. "Fundamentalisms" in the title of this book is the plural of a word we more often encounter in the singular, but it is the contention of Morson and Schapiro that there are two types of fundamentalism (in different varieties) and that they are at loggerheads. One kind of fundamentalism asserts truth with absolute certainty; the other denies it with just as much certainty. This means that there are two forms of folly that drown out chances for wisdom, and this brings real dangers to a democracy such as the United States. The authors want to chart a way of getting from folly to wisdom and the success of this undertaking depends in large part on readers' willingness to live and think outside of the three criteria that define fundamentalism, whether of the positive or negative kind. These criteria are "Certainty," the "Perspicuity of Truth," and adherence to a "Foundational Text or Revelation." The three criteria have a theological ring to them: the inerrant foundational text offering absolute certainty of the truth revealed in it—this suggests the positive fundamentalism of forms of Christianity or Islam (by no means the only form religions can take). But there is a secular variety of this positive fundamentalism as well: if works by Marx, Stalin, Lenin, Mao, or Kim Il Sung are read, as they demand to be, as inerrant foundational texts, forms of truth and certainty emerge that have baleful consequences for human lives. And Freud, in his claim of scientific inerrancy, knows absolutely but implausibly that there is no such thing as chance in the workings of the human mind. Apart from such positive fundamentalisms, there is the negative kind. Negative fundamentalists too believe that knowledge, to be worthwhile, must be based on something equivalent in certainty to physics or mathematics. But they also believe that such certainty, even in physics or mathematics, is ultimately unattainable and that therefore the entire project of truth must be relativized by an awareness of a purely cultural construction of knowledge. Relativists are absolutists by another name: with truth conceived of as an all or nothing proposition, they choose "nothing" where positive fundamentalists choose "all." Morson and Schapiro try to shepherd us toward a non-absolute sense of relativity: a skepticism that admits doubt, a taking on board that our convictions are shaped to an extent by cultural prejudices and happenstance and we will never know to what extent exactly. This is Morson and Schapiro as analyzers of the pass we have come to in democratic societies in general, and the United States in particular. Fundamentalists are on speaking terms only with fellow-fundamentalists of the same stripe and only sharpen the way they think and express themselves, so minds end up wide shut, and the closing of the American mind becomes irrevocable. [End Page 761] Well, nearly irrevocable. This book becomes imaginative in the remedy it suggests. Stephen Toulmin, in his 1990 book Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity, sees modernity, in its embrace of the rationalism of seventeenth-century philosophers as Descartes and Leibniz, as having discarded the earlier humanism of writers of the sixteenth century—Erasmus, Montaigne, and Shakespeare among them. It is this humanist tradition we need to return to in matters of ethics, public policy, and the practicalities of living our lives. This means that we should not rely on deductive reasoning but on practical case-based reasoning. In this way we can turn from folly to wisdom. In chapters on politics, economics, religion, and literature, Morson and Schapiro work out how such a switch can be made and what it would mean for ethical and practical decision-making in democratic societies divided by fundamentalisms. If case-based reasoning is the way forward, it is realist novels we should turn to. It is in the realist novel that casuistry is preserved while philosophy led us astray toward the logic of rationalism. Ethics in the realist novel is a matter...