Ruadhán Jones
While some studies associate religiosity with conspiracy theories, organised religion is a bulwark for reason, writes Ruadhán Jones
The continuing prevalence of, even rise in, belief in conspiracy theories causes some incredulity in the intellectual elite and scientific communities. How could it be, that the age of reason has given way to an age of unreason? In trying to answer why, studies have been conducted and the evidence interpreted.
One of the conclusions reached is that belief in conspiracy theories – a belief that some covert, malign, but influential agency is responsible for an unexplained event – correlates with a distrust of scientific reasoning and higher levels of religiosity or superstitious beliefs.
This is simply what the facts show, and they hint at the truth. Without faith in reason, and trust in our institutions, irrational beliefs are bound to flourish. What the facts don’t show, of course, is that the erosion of a belief in reason is a product of the attacks on organised religious faith, in particular Christianity, and the decline in true religiosity.
Historical period
We are living in a historical period that could still accurately be called the post-Enlightenment, or post-truth, era. It was in the age of Enlightenment that independent reason, atheistic and rationalistic, became the gold-standard for thinking men and women.
This standard set itself against religious or theological thought, in particular as found in organised religion. The Church was vilified – in the conspiracy theories of the day – for inhibiting ‘progress’, for living in the dark, for being a bastion of irrationality and unreason in the age of reason. The idea of an accumulated tradition was scorned, and the virtue of reasoning as a community was an incidental victim.
Innovations
As the physical sciences flourished, producing remarkable innovations that led to improvements in the daily life of billions of men and women, so did philosophical and moral thinking flounder. As Catholic philosopher and Notre Dame Prof. Alasdair MacIntyre has spent his career pointing out, the words we used remained the same, but they were evacuated of all meaning having lost the context for their use.
Appeals by the individual to objective reason were considered the only way to reach the truth, and yet no agreement could be reached as to what objective reason was or what it revealed. Decline followed as the fields of philosophy and morality became increasingly fractured and marginalised, especially today, with no way to resolve disagreement.
What rose to replace the appeal to objective reason was the primacy of the individual above all else. Certain institutions maintained a strong presence – the rise of the state or nation is one of the Enlightenment’s products – but, increasingly, self-determination and self-discovery became our highest ambition.
As it continued, this fantasy of self-actualisation contributed to a sharp decline in trust for previously respected institutions. The proliferation of knowledge regarding the scandals within churches and governments exacerbated this trend, to the point that laws and institutions are now seen as inhibiting or restricting our freedom to self-actualise our own fate.
The proliferation of conspiracy theories is an effect of this declining faith in reason and in institutional knowledge. Now, the same type of ‘conspiracy theories’ that originally attacked the Catholic Church are turned on the modern institutions of government and the scientific community. In a desire to rid the world of the Church’s reach, these same institutions have undermined their own basis for appeal; an institutionalised community that exists with a shared faith in universal reason.
At its best, religiosity is the expression of a desire to understand the world to the fullest extent, and at the highest level. It incorporates our strengths – these being our powers of reason, our love of beauty, and our desire for goodness –, and our weaknesses – our fear of death and suffering, our uncertainty and frailty, our propensity for evil. Our rational and pre-rational intuitions find their flourishing in faith.
Intuitions
In the West, these intuitions were furnished with a tradition founded on Christian Revelation, and advanced through collective reasoning across centuries. Christianity provided a language and an institutional context through which the mysteries of the world could be explored.
As this understanding of religion was denuded, the age of reason created for itself a powerful and imaginary enemy; the backward, manipulative institution, responsible for blocking the individual person’s path to true flourishing.
By failing to recognise the value of true religiosity and organised religion, the proponents of the age of reason attacked the foundation of reason as they knew it. And while the Church’s ability to declare certain strains of thought or communities ‘heretical’ is still considered a means of the powerful silencing the weak, the inability of modern elites to eradicate modern ‘heresies’ is one of the defining aspects of our age.
The institutional Church isn’t perfect, but its decline has robbed us of shared community by which we can explain the world collectively. And what we are left with are increasingly tribal communities who recognise no such thing as reason.