A Salon.com article by social psychologist Frenk van Harreveld is entitled "In defense of doubt: Act of resistance in an age of bogus certainty." The article offers an "erring communities versus virtuous community" narrative that is extremely misleading because the supposedly virtuous community has all of the same problems as the erring communities described. In the article Harreveld shows a lack of social psychology insight about today's universities, portraying them as bastions of intellectual humility and epistemic caution when they are more like enclaves of intellectual hubris, dogmatism and extreme overconfidence, filled with authorities claiming to know deep important things that they do not know, and that are actually mysteries a hundred miles over their heads.
Harreveld starts out with a little sociological insight about some of the psychology benefits of joining a dogmatic belief community:
"Certainty serves a powerful social identity function. Declaring a clear position, especially a strong one, signals belonging. If you know exactly where you stand, you know who your people are. Certainty is rewarded not just with clarity, but with community. Ambivalence, by contrast, is lonely. Few movements rally around moderation. People don’t take to the streets with signs that read: 'It’s Complicated.'
Certainty becomes a badge of identity. It distinguishes 'us' from 'them.' And in this way, many public debates shift from reasoned exchange to tribal contest. Argument gives way to allegiance. The substance of a position matters less than the clarity with which it’s held...
The underlying mechanism is the same: In uncertain times, certainty sells — and it sells best when it comes with a sense of belonging."
Harreveld mentions how social media can reward dogmatism and overconfidence, and how social media can put people in filter bubbles and echo chambers in which they tend to get only opinions and articles and posts matching their own viewpoints. Harreveld then starts painting a glowing portrait of what he thinks is a virtuous-thinking community that has escaped such pitfalls: the academia community consisting of professors like himself. He states this:
"Higher education, at its best, trains people to tolerate ambiguity. It rewards provisional thinking, revises conclusions and accepts that knowledge is always unfinished. At its best, higher education doesn’t just tolerate uncertainty — it cultivates it. In the sciences, this ideal is embedded in the Popperian method: Theories must be falsifiable, and progress comes not through confirming our beliefs, but by trying to disprove them. In the humanities and philosophy, figures like Socrates remind us that knowledge begins with recognizing the limits of our understanding. 'I know that I know nothing,' he famously said — not as an admission of ignorance, but as a commitment to relentless questioning. This culture of intellectual humility — of testing, revising and learning — forms the core of what universities are meant to instill. That epistemic humility — the willingness to admit what we don’t know — is increasingly out of step with a public discourse that values performance over inquiry."
But today's universities and colleges are mostly the exact opposite of what is depicted above. Today's universities and colleges are ideological enclaves dominated by very old belief dogmas that are sacred cows that cannot be questioned. Among the main such dogmas are: (1) the groundless legend that biological origins are explained by the ideas of the 19th century thinker Charles Darwin; (2) the groundless but constantly repeated claim that human minds are caused by brains; (3) the equally groundless myth that memories are stored in brains and retrieved from brains.
There are very many good reasons for rejecting all such claims, discussed at my site here and posts such as my posts here, here, here and here. The human body has been found to contain mountainous levels of hierarchical organization, enormous amounts of fine-tuned functional information, and the most stratospheric abundance of component fine-tuning and systemic component interdependence. Such things help to show how groundless are all boasts that nineteenth century ideas such as so-called natural selection can explain human origins. Nothing but failure has resulted from all attempts to confirm ideas that brains store memories and that brains produce thinking and self-hood and 100 other wonders of the human mind. Microscopic examination of the human brain has failed to find the slightest trace of any learned knowledge in brain tissue. We know the type of things that allow the fast retrieval of information from physical systems: things such as sorting, addresses and indexes. The human brain has no such things. The study of the brain has shown that it is a place of gigantic signal noise, unreliable synaptic transmission, and rapid molecular turnover, thereby discrediting all claims that the human brain is the source of the human mind and the storage place of human memories that can last for 50 years.
But academia clings to the dogmas of materialism and Darwinism because colleges and universities have been enclaves of dogmatic, overconfident belief communities -- something the opposite of what Harreveld portrays. Preaching a kind of godless religion (a religion in all but name), the biology departments and psychology departments and philosophy departments of universities have become places like what is depicted in the visual below.
Embedding itself within universities and taking over key departments in such universities, dogmatic materialism between 1850 and 1950 developed an authoritarian hierarchical infrastructure with many similarities to the authoritarian hierarchical infrastructure of the Catholic Church. That infrastructure is depicted in the visual below:
The professors of this infrastructure engage in indoctrination as dogmatic and overconfident as the indoctrination that occurs in the Sunday schools of organized religions. And just as the exclusion of troubling observations has long been a part of organized religions, the exclusion of troubling observations is a central feature of academia.
This "ministry of materialism" extends far beyond the borders of academia, but colleges and universities are the core of this religion-in-all-but-name which aggressively pushes a discredited belief system, marketing it as "science" rather than the ideology that it is.
It is amusing to hear Harreveld claim that "higher education doesn’t just tolerate uncertainty — it cultivates it." To the contrary, anyone expressing doubt about the sacred dogmas of academia such as Darwinism and the "brains make minds" dogma is likely to be treated within academia as some heretic to be shunned, shamed or penalized. Harreveld's mention of a "Popperian method" centered upon trying to falsify existing tenets is laughable. In academia occasional lip-service is paid to such a method, but no such method is followed by neuroscientists or psychologists or evolutionary biologists. Instead, the general rule is: make sure you mostly spend time trying to gather evidence for the type of things you are expected to believe in, and please do not dare to gather or seriously study evidence for the type of things you are forbidden from believing in. So, for example, today's professors almost all senselessly refuse to seriously study two hundred years of written evidence for paranormal phenomena and paranormal abilities. Moreover, they fail to follow-up on hundreds of promising observational and experimental results, whenever such results conflict with their belief dogmas. Should some other scientist do such follow-up work and present new observations or analysis conflicting with prevailing academia dogmas, he is likely to have his work censored by the soft censorship of peer review denial of publication.
It is also very amusing to read Harreveld state this:
"In the humanities and philosophy, figures like Socrates remind us that knowledge begins with recognizing the limits of our understanding. 'I know that I know nothing,' he famously said — not as an admission of ignorance, but as a commitment to relentless questioning."
Socrates lived thousands of years ago, before there were any colleges or universities. A Socratic attitude of 'I know that I know nothing" is not taken by today's academic philosophers, who tend to be uncritical "hook, line and sinker" pushover consumers of the most groundless dogmas of biologists.It is also amusing to read Harreveld state this: "This culture of intellectual humility — of testing, revising and learning — forms the core of what universities are meant to instill." For well over 150 years there has prevailed in universities a kind of Culture of Hubris or Culture of Conceit that is the exact opposite of a "culture of intellectual humility." It is a culture in which everyone is expected to keep claiming they understand deep origins mysteries (such as the origin of man and the origin of human bodies and the origin of human minds) that are actually a hundred miles over the heads of humans.
A good social psychologist will tend to realize that humans in many different places and many different institutions tend to follow the same patterns of conduct in constructing and maintaining what I call ideological regimes. An ideological regime is some structure of belief and related social structures and habits that have become popular in a particular place. In a particular country there may exist more than one ideological regime, and multiple ideological regimes may contend with each other, each trying to become dominant or maintain its dominance. An ideological regime may be political, religious, or some kind of ideology such as Darwinist materialism that is a church-in-all-but name.
We see the same tendencies again and again wherever ideological regimes exist:
(1) The tendency to create a large class of authority figures who are made to look like some figures of superior mind or virtue.
(2) The tendency to kind of canonize a few authority figures who are put on some very high pedestal, and made to look like some figure of rare wisdom or insight.
(3) The tendency to create and propagate belief dogmas which typically are articles of faith that followers of the ideological regime are expected to adopt.
(4) The tendency to give work to a large lesser-status class of enablers and enforcers of the ideological regime, who have the job of drumming up support and maintaining support for the ideological regime and its belief dogmas.
(5) The tendency to deprecate, defame and penalize critics of the ideological regime and those who disbelieve in its dogmas.
(6) The tendency to control information so that it becomes harder for people to learn about facts and opinions conflicting with the dogmas of the ideological regime, which may take the form of either hard censorship or a less noticeable "soft censorship."
We see these tendencies every bit as strongly within the halls of academia as we see such tendencies in the political area, the ecclesiastical area and the social media area.
For a discussion of the common tendencies in excessively dogmatic academia, organized religion and political parties, read my post "The Sociological Dynamics of Ideological Regimes."
The table below lists the similarities between scientific academia and the Roman Catholic Church.
Scientific Academia | Roman Catholic Church | |
Physical Bases | University buildings, high schools, natural history museums | Churches, monasteries, convents, seminaries, Catholic schools |
Old Revered Texts | Books of Charles Darwin | The Bible and works of the Church Fathers (Augustine, Aquinas, etc.) |
Sacred Dogmas | Accidental origin of life, accidental origin of species by “natural selection,” brains as the source of minds, brains as storage places of memories | The Trinity, the resurrection of Jesus, the divine inspiration of the Bible, papal infallibility, dogmas about Mary, mother of Jesus |
Lower Prestige Workers | High school biology teachers, experimental subjects, paid lab workers | Nuns, deacons |
Middle Prestige Workers | PhD candidates, college instructors, assistant professors | Priests |
High Prestige Workers | Professors | Bishops |
Highest Prestige Persons | National Academy of Science members, Nobel Prize winners | Cardinals, the Pope |
Arcane Speech | Jargon-filled scientific papers | Jargon-filled theology papers, Holy Mass language |
Indoctrina-tion Meetings | Biology classes, psychology classes | Sunday sermons, Sunday school |
Financial Base | Countless billions in old university endowments, tuition, government funding, with $800 billion in US university endowments alone | Billions in old endowments, church property, Sunday donations, tithes |
Rituals | PhD dissertations, experiments (often poorly designed and implemented), science conferences, rituals of science paper writing, countless legend and dogma recitations | Sunday Mass, baptisms, weddings, First Communion, funerals |
Specula-tions | Abundant | Abundant |
Persecu--tion or Libeling of Heretics | Frequent (currently non-physical, including gaslighting, slander, libel, accusatory insinuations, stereotyping and discrimination) | Frequent in the past |
Censorship | Massive “soft” censorship and repression of undesired observations such as witnessing of paranormal phenomena and successful ESP experiments | Once very frequent, such as Legion of Decency |
Speech Taboos | Very many (including fair discussion of the paranormal or evidence for design in nature) | Very many |
Miracle Stories | Accidental origin of life, and accidental origin of billions of types of protein molecules in the animal kingdom, most having hundreds of well-arranged parts, requiring many miracles of accidental organization, like hundreds of falling logs forming into extensive log cabin hotels or a row of fifty tall sand castles forming from random wind and waves | Miracle stories involving Jesus, Catholic saints and the Virgin Mary (Fatima, Lourdes, etc.) |
Officials in Fancy Robes? | Yes (professors during graduation ceremonies) | Yes |
Despised Deviants | Witnesses of the paranormal, Darwinism critics, teleology theorists, those having spiritual experiences | In previous years, Protestants and gays |
Chanting? | Very much, such as “blind evolution explains it all” chant and “it's all just brain activity” chant | Very much, such as Hail Mary prayers and the chants of monks |
Art Forms | Materialist science fiction | Sculpture, painting, sacred music, sacred architecture |
Saints | Many science figures whose work is described reverently | Many canonized saints |
Catechisms | College textbooks and biased Wikipedia articles | Official catechisms teaching Catholic dogma |
Legends | Many “just so” legends such as the legend of trans-Atlantic rafting monkeys, and many achievement legends such as the legend Darwin explained biological origins | Many legends about saints and their miracles or legends about miraculous healings or the Virgin Mary |
Helper Workers | Unquestioning conformist science journalists | Laymen volunteers |
Icono-graphy | Sparse iconography including including "Bohr model" atom diagram, and endlessly repeated side-profile “Evolution of man” diagram with four or five figures facing right | Vast iconography |