In Praise of Doubt by Peter Berger and Anton Zijderveld

In Praise of Doubt is an impassioned defense of the Western “Religio-Political” tradition by a pair of sociologists, Peter Berger and Anton Zijderveld. They want to argue that Western pluralist democracy?or something like it?is basically right, and that the greatest dangers to it are excessive relativism and postmodern ideals and fundamentalism. They argue that the way to avoid the pitfalls of both is with a healthy dose of doubt. Despite this rather simple premise, it is really difficult to see how this book holds together. Its insights are are often buried beneath far too much technical sociological apparatus that no point is complete without an allusion to some long dead philosopher, and the team written prose is kludgy at best.

Their primary insight is that fundamentalism and postmodernism are basically the same phenomenon. Not only are they a reaction to the diversity endemic in modernity, but that both come from the same impulse to find certainty within it. As well as the authors demonstrate that traditional certainty about belief can’t be taken for granted, the fact that the certainty of belief crumbles doesn’t by itself demonstrate an ought. Berger and Zijderveld observe that people come to accommodations with their neighbors with incompatible beliefs, and that the Catholic church now makes policy as if it were one option in a marketplace of ideas. But just because there is a (perhaps inevitable) drift away from certainty toward plurality doesn’t mean that we ought to embrace it. Fundamentalism, as they ably demonstrate, is a reaction against that tendency. In fact, both fundamentalism and relativism are strong moral reactions to pluralization, and that along with their promise of a kind of certainty, give them both a powerful draw.

Even though the authors do go on to address their moral stance, most of the book is devoted to setting the table for a sociological theory of plurality, one grounded on the idea of choice. It is as if to say the proliferation of available religious beliefs is akin to the proliferation of kinds of toothpaste. Certainly, they are right to point out that we speak of religious preference, but this leaves out the fact that choice is not how people experience religious choice. Nor is it a case of Satrean mauvaise foi for someone to say “I am Catholic because I was born into the church,” nor “I am a Muslim because there is only one true god”, nor “I am an atheist because there’s no such thing as god.” Religious conviction doesn’t become a matter of choice just because others believe differently?and that others’ beliefs present a challenge to one’s own deeply felt beliefs is certainly a greater source of anxiety than the availability of so many choices for belief.

While the authors make a convincing case that extreme forms of fundamentalism are totalitarianism writ small (and when imposed over a whole society, totalitarianism tout court), they don’t work to flesh out the subtle shading between that and liberal toleration where most religious belief stands. What pain modernity causes most believers isn’t that they could have chosen some other faith, but that their neighbors believe differently. Of course, some religious traditions deal better with plurality than others. There is, near the end of the book, a seven point manifesto of what should be considered the minimal conditions of being tolerant enough - of doubt and of other traditions. And here, while they explicitly eschew relativism, they hew rather close to relativism by requiring “the acceptance of choice not only as an empirical fact but as a morally desirable one.”

The way the authors deal with relativism is one of the least satisfying parts of the book. Their argument against relativism?that with relativism, anything goes, even Holocaust denial?amounts to little more than what Leo Strauss once termed reductio ad Hitlerum. Meanwhile, they don’t seem to realize how close to relativism their position comes. They distinguish made between relativization, which is a sociological phenomenon which simply exists, and relativism, which is the all-too-enthusiastic deification of the phenomenon. While they do give a short history of 20th century relativism, the closest they come to a diagnosis is the quip, “in every fundamentalist there’s a relativist waiting to be liberated, and in every relativist there’s a fundamentalist waiting to be reborn.”

What fundamentalists and relativists end up agreeing on is conversation is only possible with those who are already right. From this, it is easy why a healthy dose of doubt is necessary for a functioning liberal democracy. What is so sad about this book is how important and good it could easily have been. A robust defense of democracy and the western tradition of free inquiry against fundamentalists and relativists both would have been truly welcome. Unfortunately, the authors open arguments in all directions without ever quite tying them together into anything cohesive.

Reviewed by James Liu

In Praise of Doubt by Peter Berger and Anton Zijderveld
HarperOne, 2009
Cloth, 192 pp, $23.99
ISBN-10: 0061778168