The Threat to Reason: How the Enlightenment Was Hijacked and How We Can Reclaim It
By Dan Hind
Verso £14.99, 184 pages
FT bookshop price: £11.99

One of the consequences of 9/11, subsequent attacks on the west and the so-called war on terror has been the rise of a militant atheism. This pits supposedly irrational religious fundamentalism and extremism against enlightened scientific reason. In this thoughtful polemic Dan Hind argues that we are being misled by a debased “Folk Enlightenment” which has little in common with the Enlightenment initiated by Bacon and championed by Voltaire, Hume and Kant.

The Folk Enlightenment comprises a raggle-taggle crew of journalists and academics led by the likes of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Frank Furedi. It differs from the “true” Enlightenment in key respects. Thinkers such as Hume and Voltaire were not militant atheists. They tended to scepticism and irony, not macho certitude. But the worst failing is that they fail to identify the truly serious threats and pick instead on paper tigers.

Certain forms of fundamentalist religion are certainly threatening, but to lump all religion together as a threat to reason is neither helpful nor enlightened. “To confuse the struggle for justice in the Middle East with the struggle against religion,” Hind argues, “is to give up any serious attempt to understand social and political reality.” Other paper tigers include alternative medicine, New Age beliefs and postmodern relativism. Alternative medicines may have elements of quackery, but, as Hind argues, they kill many fewer people than conventional drugs such as the painkiller Vioxx, whose potentially fatal side-effects were downplayed both by the drug company Merck and the US Food and Drug Administration. As for postmodern relativism, it contains a strong element of healthy scepticism about absolute truth claims which can itself be derived from the Enlightenment.

More profound threats are posed by secretive and unaccountable state and corporate power (think of the manipulation of public opinion before the Iraq war and the Enron scandal). They are aided by a largely compliant media and a safely sequestered academia. This is an argument elaborated by Noam Chomsky. Hind differs from him in his appreciation of the ambiguous and contestable nature of Enlightenment, and his willingness to admit he may not be absolutely right.

Against the threats to reason, Hind proposes a return to Kant’s still-provocative distinction between a private realm of salaried employment and work on behalf of institutions and what Kant called “the public use of one’s reason ... as a scholar before the reading public”. A multitude of such disinterested scholars, connected by the internet, may be the best hope we have of distinguishing the harmless hobgoblins from the enemies both without and within.