essay

What Happened to the Age of Reason?

Previously published in 2017 in The Sacramento Bee.

As a reminder, several of the authors in Sisyphus add hyperlinks to their research (real news!) and we invite you to follow relevant links for interesting articles or books.–Ed.

Last Thanksgiving our family, whose political opinions vary, agreed to avoid any conversation that might bring someone’s hackles to rise. Anytime anyone got close to entering that arena, my son-in-law piped up, “So what do you think of those Cubs?” It was our clue to change the subject. It seems most families have an Uncle Charlie, whose opinions the rest of the family agree closely approximate those of Attila the Hun. After the last election, friends who have known each other for over fifty years report they are now no longer speaking. So why has politics become so divisive? What happened to the voice of reason as part of a narrative addressing these issues?

Social scientists point to confirmation bias as a primary cause of our alienation from those whose views do not match our own. Simply put, confirmation bias is the term used for data-fitting information that conforms to our own worldview, while ignoring evidence to the contrary. Rather than making fact-based decisions, cognitive psychologists have learned that people look for and find confirming evidence in support of their positions, and ignore any dis-confirming evidence, according to cognitive phsychologists.

In the February 27^th issue of The New Yorker, author Elizabeth Kolbert quotes Jack Gorman and his daughter Sara Gorman, authors of Denying to the Grave: Why We Ignore the Facts That Will Save Us. The Gormans, a psychiatrist and a public-health specialist, contend that confirmation bias has a physiological component. “They cite research suggesting that people experience genuine pleasure—a rush of dopamine—when processing information that supports their beliefs.” Even when that information is incorrect.

Two cognitive scientists, Steven Sloman and Philip Ferbach, agree. “As a rule,” they say, “strong feelings about issues do not emerge from deep understanding.”

Few are immune. Confirmation bias strikes all sides of the political spectrum. So how does a thoughtful person protect against the emotional power of siding with one side, while ignoring evidence-based reasoning?

It requires time to educate oneself about the issues, though most certainly the obligation is there. If one reads The American Spectator, then also read The Nation. If one reads The New Republic, then read The National Review. And know that one’s argument is only as strong as one’s refutation, the acknowledgment of the opposition’s view.

In this day of ‘false facts’–an oxymoron if there ever was one–online sites such as Snopes.com or Factcheck.org offer the truth of the claim. Likewise, it behooves internet users to investigate the source of online material. A Google search quickly reveals how to learn the source of a website. Who is the originator of the site and what is his/her agenda?

Let’s say you believe forest pixies are the source of the dew on your lawn in the morning; the visualization of tiny creatures with mini watering cans overrides your interest in the science of the matter. With over 875 million internet sites available, it’s possible you’ll even find someone who shares this opinion, though you’d be hard pressed to find a consensus of expert opinion to validate this view.

Sadly, with confirmation bias firmly in place, the facts are irrelevant. When one’s views are threatened, instead of a rational discussion of the matters at hand, the end result is often name calling, vitriolic attacks and occasionally even violence.

We can do better. Rational discourse requires a willingness to truly listen without letting our preconceived notions interfere. It requires a willingness to remain open-minded. It requires a respect for facts, whether or not we like what those facts tell us about ourselves.

And it requires a respect for other human beings; a democracy demands no less.

Our Perfect Wild

by Kaylene Johnson-Sullivan

Before Alaska villages started falling into the ocean, this couple saw change coming

Ray Bane sat quietly on the bank of the Koyukuk River, a winding ribbon of blue so clear that the slant of sun on its pebble-strewn floor bounced back a million shards of light. The river meandered down and along the south flank of the Arctic’s continental divide through the heart of Alaska’s central Brooks Range. Hidden in a grove of willows, Bane breathed in the scent of Alaska’s slender summer. The river murmured in endless, fluid conversation as it tumbled over rocks along the narrow gravel bar.

Bane had not been sitting long when he saw movement along the edge of the willows about thirty yards away. A female gray wolf stepped into sight. Tufts of loose winter fur still clung to her coat. Bane could see by her sagging and shriveled belly that she had recently weaned a litter of wolf cubs. As she ambled toward the river, a pup rushed out of the willows. Four more pups followed, circling the female, chasing each other playfully.

The year was 1971, and Bane and his wife Barbara had come to Alaska a decade earlier as young school teachers to the Native villages of the far north.

While inside the village school Ray and Barbara taught science and math, outside the classroom they became the apprentices of their Native friends and neighbors. From people who lived close to the land, they learned about change through the rhythm of the seasons and the cycle of life. They learned the ways of the Elders, the ones who had been subsisting on this spare and hungry land for centuries.

Wainwright elder, Ekak, at fish camp on the Kuk River, 1966. (Bane Collection)

The Banes did not intend to become activists. But in the 1960s and 1970s, they saw looming changes to the Native way of life and the landscape itself as big oil companies looked to Alaska for domestic sources of oil. Between the advent of snowmobiles, that did away with the quiet pull of a dog team in winter, and the impacts of global warming, where a rising ocean would lap at the front door of Native coastal communities, the Banes saw that some of the last wild places on earth could potentially vanish in their lifetimes. Over their 37-year careers, they would live and work in half-a-dozen villages, mostly across the northern tier of the state.

Barbara Bane and school children of Wainright in 1963. Each fall, the North Star (background) carried supplies to villages along the coastline of northern Alaska. The Banes had to order everything they would need for themselves and for the school year several months before the ship arrived. (Bane Collection)

Shortly after their arrival in Alaska, Ray and Barbara went “bushy.” Many non-Native educators spent winters holed up in small quarters trying to cope with the astringent cold and endless dark. But instead of playing cards with teachers waiting for their next assignment out of the village, the Banes bought and borrowed dogs to assemble a dog team. Ray spent the winters behind his team, hunting seal and caribou with local villagers.

When the principal at the school in the village of Barrow learned that Bane was planning to make a 200-mile round trip trek to the neighboring village of Wainwright by dog team, he threatened to cancel Bane’s leave.

“He considered my activities running around by dog team and going out hunting and socializing with the Eskimos to be foolhardy and setting a poor example,” Bane said. “He was particularly critical of my attempts to learn the Eskimo language and use it in the classroom. He said my job was to help move the children away from their present life and prepare them to live in the modern (white man’s) world.”

Bane made his trip despite the threat and the couple transferred to Wainwright the following year. Wainwright was a smaller, more remote community of Inupiat Eskimos. The Banes always migrated toward living a little closer to the heart of the Arctic.

On that day of the wolf encounter, Bane had been told by villagers that a group of wolves had been sighted on a gravel bar about ten miles upstream on the river. His earlier sightings of wolves as he traveled across the snow-clad landscape with his team had kindled his interest in these elusive and mysterious animals. Bane knew that behind the shadowy myth of wolves was an animal as complex as it was intelligent.

Now as he watched, hidden and kneeling behind a thicket, the wolf pups played tag, ambushed each other, and tumbled in mock battle. One pup tried to run away with a willow stalk which was still rooted to the ground. Running in circles, the fearsome fellow was at times swung off his feet by centrifugal force. Bane observed through his binoculars, rapt by their antics. Then he heard a sound behind him, a twig breaking underfoot. The hair on the nape of his neck prickled. He slowly lowered his binoculars and turned to look.

On a slight rise behind him, standing in the willows just an arm’s length away, a male wolf peered down at him with yellow-rimmed eyes.

“Time seemed to momentarily freeze. The wolf met my eyes,” Bane remembers. “I felt no sense of threat, although I realized that I was not in control of my immediate future.”

The wolf lowered his head and quietly retreated. As Bane watched, he saw several more shapes moving back and forth in the surrounding brush.

Grey Wolf (Canis Lupus) — Ray and Barbara’s experiences with wolves led them to their involvement in the aerial wolf hunting controversy. In the 1970s the Banes helped found the Northern Alaska Environmental Center. (Courtesy Roy Corral)

Bane decided not to push his luck or further intrude on the pack’s activities. He folded up the camera tripod and stepped out of the willows onto the open bar.

The female wolf leapt to her feet. With lowered head, she angled away as Bane walked quietly in the opposite direction toward his airplane. Paying no attention to his movements, the pups continued their romp on the gravel bar. In the willow thicket, at least two gray shapes kept pace with Bane, escorting him upstream around the bend to where his airplane was tied. After untying the mooring line and pushing off into the river current, Bane let the plane float quietly back downstream toward the gravel bar. As the plane rounded the bend, again in sight of the pups, Bane tipped his head back and let out his approximation of a wolf howl.

“The entire willow grove seemed to explode into a wild chorus of howls that washed across the sky, filling the land and me with an indescribable sense of wildness,” he said. Even the pups lifted their muzzles and cried out a youthful version of their ancestors’ primordial call.

These were the kinds of experiences that sustained Bane when he found himself, just a few years later, a human lightning rod in the middle of a gathering storm – when even old friends would stand up in a crowd and shout to his face, “I hate your guts!”

The discovery of oil on the North Slope of Alaska in 1968 set off a fevered land rush as various stakeholders vied for the possibility of cashing in on enormous economic development. Oil companies wanted to build a pipeline; the State of Alaska had legal claim to a percentage of federally managed lands and was eager to cash in; and the federal government had yet to settle aboriginal claims to the public lands of the state. Millions of acres of Alaska’s untouched wilderness were about to change forever. What that change might look like became a heated economic, political and environmental crisis that would take a decade to resolve, and more than twenty years for the political maelstrom to settle.

Bane had no idea, sitting among wolves on that sunny afternoon, how he would become a flashpoint in the debate for creating National Parks and Preserves across Alaska. What Bane did know was that he and his wife Barbara loved their life in the Arctic. The landscape on which they lived tolerated no sentimental views of wilderness. The realities were stark and formidable, especially in winter, which left no room for mistakes. Yet the rewards, hard-earned as they were, more than made up for the work of chopping wood for fuel and melting ice for water, for the year-round efforts of harvesting sustenance from the land and ice-encrusted sea.

The wilderness was a harsh taskmaster, yet at times the nearly-sentient presence of the land itself left Bane wordless with awe. Where else on earth did caribou migrate by the thousands as they had for millennia, unfettered by human development? Where else did rivers remain as pristine as they had been since the dawn of time?

In 1974 Ray and Barbara planned a leave of absence from their teaching jobs to trek by dog team 1,400 miles across some of the most remote wilderness on earth. They had developed a team with a stellar lead dog, and over the course of the long winter, they built a freight sled piece by piece on the floor of their log cabin. They planned to leave in mid-February as daylight increased, and to stay ahead of the spring thaw as they traveled north along the Arctic coastline. Their plans caught the attention of Zorro Bradley, a coordinator for the National Park Service, who had been assigned to help the NPS and the U.S. Congress better understand the concerns of Alaska Natives who might be affected by the formation of new national parks. Bradley offered the Banes logistical support for their trek, if they agreed to maintain a record of Native winter trail use along their route. The Banes were happy to oblige.

Ray and Barbara wore Native-sewn skin parkas, boots, and mittens for portions of their 1200-mile trip. The sun barely broke the horizon and temperatures were well below zero. (Bob Bellous, Courtesy National Park Service)

Their trip started during what turned out to be a freakishly cold spring. In brutal temperatures that dipped to seventy below zero, they crossed the Koyukuk Valley and traveled westward toward Kotzebue on to the coast of the Bering Sea. From there, they turned north and paralleled the storm-whipped coastline, often traveling on the frozen sea ice. Along the way, they would visit the villages of Point Hope, Point Lay, Wainwright and finally end their trek at Barrow.

“The thing that sticks most in our memories is the amazing hospitality of the people we met along the way,” Bane remembers. “Without their encouragement and support the trip would have been far more difficult and not nearly as rewarding.”

In the three months it took to complete the trek, village residents offered the Banes a warm if incredulous welcome. The Banes were clearly not typical “Tunniks” (Caucasians) and their travels opened wide their credibility with a people who lived close to the natural rhythms of the land.

Bradley and the NPS took notice. The Banes were a couple who could act as a liaison with Native communities while plans for the establishment of new parks in Alaska took shape. These public lands would preserve for future generations the opportunity to experience wilderness in its rawest form. And nowhere would that be truer than in the Gates of the Arctic, where the Banes lived and worked much of their lives. Here, in the central Brooks Range, the impact of humans was nominal, and wilderness could be left as it had always been, free of modern human development. These new parks in Alaska would be different. Unlike Yellowstone and Yosemite, there would be no roads or facilities, no concessionaires or services to make visitors comfortable.

The Banes accepted the offer to work for the National Park Service. By air and dog-team, the couple explored the far reaches of the central Brooks Range as Ray researched subsistence patterns of Native cultures. As they traveled and worked in remote villages, Ray was careful to explain the purpose of his work. He also talked about the national lands proposals, explaining how legislators in Juneau and Washington were grappling with how to split the pie of the state’s vast public lands.

The Banes’ respect for people and their embrace of a subsistence lifestyle earned them many friends in the rural communities where they worked. But owning a piece of land, or laying claim to it, was a foreign notion to most Natives of Alaska. The people belonged to the land, not the other way around. Many of their friends shrugged and smiled, suggesting Ray ought to look for another line of work. Considering the contentious political climate, and with Alaska’s Congressional delegation strongly opposing these federal proposals, many assumed that the formation of these parks would never happen.

In Fairbanks, President Jimmy Carter was burned in effigy to protest the declaration of monuments in Alaska. (University of Alaska Fairbanks Archives, via PBS.org)

Then in 1978 President Jimmy Carter proclaimed seventeen national monuments, including the eight-million-acre Gates of the Arctic. Considered the single greatest act of conservation in U.S. history, Carter’s planset aside 56 million acres of Alaska land for future parks, preserves and refuges.

“Predictably, all hell broke loose in the hinterlands,” wrote author William E. Brown in his book, History of the Central Brooks Range: Gaunt Beauty, Tenuous Life. “Ray and Barbara Bane, still the only resident field representatives near the proposed northern parklands, received the full brunt of resentment in their community.”

The village store owner refused to serve them. Children threw stones. Their year’s supply of firewood to heat their home was stolen. Bane’s airplane was vandalized in a crime that may have been intended to cause a deadly accident. The NPS urged the Banes to move away to the safer offices of Fairbanks or Anchorage.

Many in Alaska saw the federal withdrawal of lands for conservation purposes as a betrayal and feared the state would come to economic ruin. (Bane Collection)

Bane refused to leave. He was convinced that hostility was simply a result of fear, and that the media and state’s rights activists were fanning those fears into an inferno of misinformation. Bane stepped into the fire. He invited rural residents, friends, and neighbors to meetings where, with the help of maps and other documents, he could explain what the monuments and the proposed National Parks meant.

“People had legitimate concerns, and I could understand their apprehension,” Bane said. “They just needed to know the facts.” Even after an NPS airplane was torched, Bane remained optimistic. He maintained that the acts of violence were the conduct of one or two hardened individuals. In time emotions would settle and people would come to understand why these lands needed stewardship.

“Having loved the north and its people, having heard for the first time the sound of trucks in the wilderness, (Bane) had joined the fight for what he believed in,” wrote John Kauffmann in his book Alaska’s Brooks Range: The Ultimate Mountains.

Bane sugar-coated nothing as he traveled from village to village explaining the new rules of these wilderness areas. For the most part, little would change to the Native traditional way of life. A big distinction from other national parks around the country, provisions in Alaska’s national parks assured that the Native subsistence culture would remain intact. Unlike other national parks, subsistence hunting, fishing, and trapping would still be allowed. The establishment of these monuments and National Parks meant that these lands would now be protected from a world growing ever thirstier for oil, coal, and mineral development.

Just as importantly, the wilderness would be held in trust as a legacy for future generations—not just a tourist’s semblance of wilderness—but the real deal, where life cycles played out, free from human encroachment.

“I’m a believer,” Bane has said time and again. And what he believes is that whatever changes are ahead, entire wilderness ecosystems need to be kept intact. He likens serving wilderness to protecting the Liberty Bell. “Whether or not I ever visit the Liberty Bell, I’ve inherited it and it’s my responsibility to help preserve it as a legacy of my Nation.”

It was a hard sell at times. Yet the moments like those on the gravel bar with the Koyukuk River wolves,were the moments that helped bolster the Banes’ fight to protect wild places for perpetuity. Enduring friendships, including those with the elders, also helped them weather the decades-long storm. Today, Bane is 80 years old, and his sky-blue eyes still flash with passion about the importance of preserving wilderness in the modern world. He has volumes of journals, stacks of newspaper articles, and hundreds of photos that document his and Barbara’s journey from idealistic young school teachers to strong and sometimes controversial voices for wilderness.

Amidst the memories and the mementos of that early struggle, he says, “Humans have spent more than ninety-eight percent of their history being molded by the forces of untamed Nature … There must be places where the heart of true wildness can continue to beat without technological and bureaucratic pacemakers that diminish wildness for the sake of human convenience. We should be willing to check human actions that ultimately destroy or diminish these last remaining wild places and treat Nature with respect and even reverence.”

Change may be inevitable, especially as the most recent administration unravels many of the protections that were put into place during that tumultuous period in Alaska and environmental history. Yet change can only be sustainable when it is placed in the context of respect for the land, a willingness to preserve our wilderness heritage, and a commitment to be forward-thinking stewards of the earth.

Kaylene Johnson-Sullivan is the author of Our Perfect Wild: Ray & Barbara Banes’ Journeys and the Fate of the Far North (University of Alaska Press, 2016) and other books. For more information visit www.kaylene.us

Intellectual Honesty

by Thomas Metzinger

“Intellectual honesty means simply not being willing to lie to oneself.” T.M.

I recently encountered Thomas Metzinger’s work in a podcast debate between the German philosopher and author Sam Harris (Waking Up) and became interested in his ideas. In finding out more about Metzinger, I ran across the essay excerpted below, which seems to be critical for understanding the nature of the current debates in the U.S. and world politics, e.g. the nature of truth, honesty, and spirituality; the debate raging around climate change and whether the human species will be able to grasp the nature of the problem soon enough to mitigate global catastrophe. Metzinger offers us some perspicacious insights and intellectual tools as a foundation for the problems and coming to grips with what the future holds, which, to my way of thinking, can help anyone who is interested in pursuing these matters (everyone should be pursuing these matters).—Ed.

Preliminary Remarks

We are currently undergoing the beginnings of a historical period of transition that will have a deep impact on our image of ourselves, and on many different levels at the same time. This accelerating development presents us with a profound challenge. A question of central importance is whether a “secularized spirituality” is possible (or even conceivable). Could a modern and spiritual self-conception do justice to this historical change in our image of ourselves and the desire (not just important to professional philosophers) for intellectual honesty at the same time?

In the external world, climate change poses a new and historically unique threat to humanity as a whole. As I write these words, this objective danger is barely perceptible. But today we already know for certain that even in a best-case scenario, it will last for several centuries. Conceived of as an intellectual challenge for humankind, the increasing threat arising from self-induced global warming clearly seems to exceed the present cognitive and emotional abilities of our species. This is the first truly global crisis, experienced by all human beings at the same time in a single media-space, and as we watch it unfold, it will also gradually change our image of ourselves, the conception humankind has of itself as a whole. I predict that during the next decades, we will increasingly experience ourselves as failing beings. We will experience ourselves as beings who collectively and stubbornly act against better knowledge, who even under great time-pressure are unable, for psychological reasons, to act jointly and efficiently and to put the necessary formation of political will into effect. The collective self-image of the species Homo sapiens will increasingly be one of a being caught in evolved mechanisms of self-deception to the point of becoming a victim of its own actions. It will be an image of a class of naturally evolved cognitive systems that, because of their own cognitive structure, are unable to react adequately to certain challenges—even when they are able to intellectually grasp the expected consequences, and even when, in addition, they consciously experience this very fact about themselves clearly and distinctly […]

Intellectual Honesty

Intellectual honesty means simply not being willing to lie to oneself. It is closely related to old-fashioned values such as propriety, integrity and sincerity, to a certain form of “inner decency”. Perhaps one could say that it is a very conservative way of being truly subversive. But intellectual honesty might at the same time also be exactly what representatives of organized religions and theologians of any type simply cannot have, even if they would like to make claims to the contrary. Intellectual honesty means not pretending to know or even to be able to know the unknowable while still having an unconditional will to truth and knowledge, even where self-knowledge is involved and even where self-knowledge is not accompanied by pleasant feelings or is not in accordance with the received doctrine.

Some philosophers conceptualize intellectual honesty as a virtue, as an “intellectual virtue” concerning one’s own thoughts and inner actions, as an ethical stance towards one’s thoughts and beliefs. Again, this involves moral integrity. It means that, as often as possible, one’s actions should be in accordance with the values one has adopted as one’s own—and it concerns the question of what one should believe in the first place. Adopting a belief as one’s own is itself an inner action, and one that it is possible from which to refrain. The spontaneous appearance of a belief is one thing, the active endorsement of this belief by holding on to it another. Aside from emotional self-regulation (the ability to purposefully influence one’s emotional state) and the ability to control the focus of attention, inner self-regulation also exists with respect to what one believes. Interestingly, infants only gradually learn to control their emotional states and the focus of their attention. But the kind of critical self-regulation involved in adopting beliefs as one’s own is something that even many adults are not proficient in and never fully master. Is it possible to enhance one’s autonomy, one’s inner freedom, by practicing and improving this particular type of self-control? This is exactly what is involved in intellectual honesty. And it is interesting to note that meditation aims to increase this very same kind of mental autonomy – namely, by cultivating a specific and effortless form of inner awareness. Meditation cultivates the mental conditions of possibility for rationality. It involves the inner ability to refrain from acting, the gentle but yet precise optimization of impulse control and the gradual development of an awareness of the automatic identification mechanisms on the level of conscious thought. Thinking is not about pleasant feelings. It is about the best-possible agreement between knowledge and opinion; and it is about having only evidence-based beliefs and about cognition not serving emotional needs. Have you noticed how the last two points suggest that all of this also involves abstinence, a special form of mental asceticism? And it reveals first points of contact to the spiritual stance. The central insight, however, is that the sincere pursuit of intellectual integrity is an important special case of the pursuit of moral integrity. More about this soon.

Whoever wants to become whole—a person of integrity—by gradually resolving all conflict between their actions and values must pursue this principle with their inner actions as well. This requirement is especially true for their “epistemic actions,” their action for the sake of knowledge. We act “epistemically” whenever we strive for insight, for knowledge or true belief, for sincerity and also for authentic self-knowledge. As all meditators know, there is more than one form of inner knowledge, and inner epistemic action cannot simply be reduced to the intellect or to thought. This seems to be a first bridge between spiritual practice and the ideal of reasonable, rational thought: both involve an ethics of inner action for the sake of knowledge. Moreover, in both cases the goal is a systematic enhancement of mental autonomy. It is interesting to note that spiritual practice is much deeper, more refined and better developed in Asia than in the West. Occidental cultures, in the spirit of the enlightenment, increasingly developed and focused on the ideal of intellectual honesty. Let us look at four stages in the Western history of ideas in order to see this inner connection more clearly.

For the British philosopher John Locke, the desire for knowledge itself was a religious duty towards God: “He that believes, without having any reason for believing, may be in love with his own fancies; but neither seeks truth as he ought, nor pays the obedience due to his maker, who would have him use those discerning faculties he has given him, to keep him out of mistake and error…” If God really is a person, and one with such distinctly human properties as “intentions”, then he cannot want us to simply believe in his existence. He must want us to try to know of his existence. This nicely illustrates the philosophical idea that at the very beginning, intellectual honesty and striving for knowledge themselves still are religious duties towards God. On the other hand, for Locke, this also always involved acknowledging clear awareness of the limits of our knowledge—trying to go beyond these limits (for instance by trying to answer questions about the immortality of the soul) goes beyond our God-given intellectual powers. At the very beginning, philosophical honesty involves modesty. This is what Immanuel Kant would have said about honesty in general: The strict duty of honest comportment is “reason translated into social practice,” because it first creates the preconditions for mutual trust between the members of a society and thereby forms the basis of public order. I think the same could be true for the inner stage, for the protagonists of my inner life (that, as we all know, often resembles a civil war and sometimes even a completely uncivilized natural state, a war of each against all). How could this barbarism in my own consciousness be ended in a peaceful manner? What exactly is required to attain mental civility, an “inner state of civilization”? Maybe we could say that it involves “commitment towards oneself”—the foundation of an inner order for one’s own mind. In 1793, in “Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason,” Immanuel Kant put this point in a completely different, but particularly beautiful manner. What is needed, he says, is the sincere intention of being honest towards oneself. The “sincerity” or “pureness” of the desire for honesty towards oneself is, I think, the central point. This point also provides the second bridge to spirituality: Now, at the very latest, you should begin to sense that a strict and altogether old-fashioned form of rationalism could have a lot to do with spirituality.

Kant even tells us that this form of intellectual honesty is the innermost core of morality in general. It is, as it were, the essence of the desire for ethical integrity. Here is how one put this in 1793: it is “the idea of the moral good in its absolute purity.” In the Metaphysics of Morals (1797), he put this point concisely and clearly: “. . . man’s duty to himself regarded merely as a moral being . . . is . . . truthfulness.” At this point, Kant can also explain what intellectual dishonesty is, namely a kind of “inner lie.” For Kant, dishonesty is simply a lack of conscientiousness. Lacking conscientiousness in the ethical sense of inner action is nothing other than a form of unconsciousness, a lack of awareness—a further, interesting connection not only to the spiritual stance, but also to the history of the concept of “consciousness” in the occidental tradition.

For Friedrich Nietzsche, intellectual honesty is the “conscience behind the conscience.” In 1883, he wrote in Zarathustra: “Where my honesty ceases I am blind and also want to be blind. But where I want to know, I also want to be honest, namely venomous, rigorous, vigorous, cruel and inexorable.” Nietzsche was one of the first philosophers to really write about intellectual honesty, about “conscientiousness of the mind” as an ethics of cognitive action more narrowly conceived. It is interesting to note that, once more, this involves a certain form of asceticism, of letting go. For Nietzsche, intellectual honesty is the “culmination and ‘last virtue’” of the Greco-Christian history of ideas, because it leads to the self-annihilation of the religious-moral interpretation of the will to truth. What exactly does this mean? In its highest form, the desire for truthfulness allows one to admit to oneself that there is no empirical evidence of God’s existence whatsoever, and that in more than four thousand years of the history of philosophy, no convincing argument for the existence of God has emerged. It allows us to relinquish our search for emotional security and pleasant feelings, which has been hard-wired into our minds and bodies in the course of evolution, and admit that we are radically mortal beings with a tendency towards systematic forms of self-deception. Truthfulness towards ourselves allows us to discover the delusional and systematic denial of finitude, as expressed in our own conscious self-model. More about this point soon.

The philosophical debate in Anglo-Saxon culture has been considerably more profound, and analytically more clear and substantial. Let us look at the fourth example form the history of the concept of “intellectual honesty.” Today, the technical debate is conducted under the title of “The Ethics of Belief”—and this already reveals one of its most important aspects: When is it permissive, from an ethical and moral perspective, to believe in something specific, or to adopt a certain belief “as one’s own”? The British philosopher and mathematician William Kingdon Clifford was one of the first thinkers to ask this question, and subsequently became the founding father of this discussion, which is central to the distinction between religion and spirituality. His two main principles are:

It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.
At any time, at any place, and for every person it is wrong to ignore or carelessly reject the relevant evidence for one’s own beliefs.

In academic philosophy, this position is simply called “evidentialism.” This means only believing things for which one actually has arguments and evidence. The philosophical counterpart is something we are all familiar with, namely dogmatism and fideism. Dogmatism is the thesis that “It is legitimate to hold on to a belief simply because one already has it.” In philosophy, fideism is the thesis that it is also completely legitimate to hold on to a belief when there are no good reasons or evidence in its favor, and even when faced with convincing counterarguments. Fideism is the standpoint of pure faith. For a fideist, it is legitimate to hold on to beliefs that not only lack any positive arguments or evidence in their favor, but even in the face of strong counterarguments and strong empirical evidence to the contrary. The interesting point now is that fideism can be described as the refusal to take any ethical stance on one’s inner actions whatsoever. It involves a lack of inner decency. And this is the classical standpoint of organized religion as opposed to spirituality. If one were to interpret these two epistemological positions from a purely psychological perspective, one could say that fideism involves deliberate self-deception, systematic wishful thinking or even paranoia; whereas the psychological goal of the ethics of belief consists in a certain form of mental health. I call this form of mental health “intellectual integrity.”

If you let yourself go and allow yourself to simply hold on to a certain belief in the complete absence of any positive theoretical or practical evidence, then you have already given up on the whole idea of an ethics for inner action. In doing so, you reject the project of intellectual honesty, and on the level of your own mind, you refuse not only rationality, but also morality. This not only changes your own opinions and beliefs, but causes you, the person as a whole, to lose your integrity. And this is what I meant at the beginning, when I said that intellectual honesty is what theologians and representatives of organized religions of any type simply cannot have. This sentence might have sounded like cheap polemics or deliberate provocation just for the sake of it. But it is really about a simple, clear, and objective point, namely the “principle of self-respect”—about how not to lose one’s dignity and mental autonomy. Importantly, this statement not only concerns traditional churches, but also a large part of the so-called “alternative spiritual culture.” Many of the movements that developed in recent decades in Europe and the United States have long lost their progressive impulse. Today, they merely stabilize or conserve the status quo and are characterized by an infantile complacency and crude forms of intellectual dishonesty. Anyone who is seriously interested in our question concerning the possibility of a secularized spirituality has to take all the relevant empirical data and all possible counterarguments into account. In 1877, the philosopher William Clifford claimed the following about anyone who is unwilling to do so by “purposely avoiding the reading of books and the company of men who call in question or discuss” their presuppositions: “The life of that man is one long sin against mankind.”

For the full annotated essay, “Spirituality and Intellectual Honesty,” following the link below:

http://www.blogs.uni-mainz.de/fb05philosophieengl/files/2013/07/Metzinger_SIR_2017_English.pdf