Step one. Let me say, because it’s so, that I’m on the same side as A.C. Grayling in the division of things that he sets out here:
If one were asked to prescribe the fundamental condition for a good world, it would be: peace and freedom for all, where “freedom” means personal autonomy and mental liberation from prejudice, superstition, ignorance and fear. Cynics will no doubt think this a saccharine sentiment merely, if only on the grounds that it is unattainable and that one had better stick to the realities of a world in which the majority of people are trapped in economic and intellectual prisons made by history, perpetuated and promoted by demagogues and the greedy and powerful.
The cynics are of course right about the realities, but that does not mean one should shrug one’s shoulders and capitulate. There is something one can do to fight back, by taking part in the battle that underlies it all: the battle (to put it in Voltaire’s terms) between those who seek the truth and those who claim to have it.
On one side are those who inquire, examine, experiment, research, propose ideas and subject them to scrutiny, change their minds when shown to be wrong and live with uncertainty while placing reliance on the collective, self-critical, responsible and rigorous use of reason and observation to further the quest for knowledge.
On the other side are those who espouse a belief system or ideology which pre-packages all the answers, who have faith in it, who trust the authorities, priests and prophets, and who either think that the hows and whys of the universe are explained to satisfaction by their faith, or smugly embrace ignorance. Note that although the historical majority of these latter are the epigones of one or another religion, they also include the followers of such ideologies as Marxism and Stalinism – which are also all-embracing monolithic ownerships of the Great Truth to which everyone must sign up on pain of punishment, and on whose behalf their zealots are prepared to kill and die.
If anyone does not know how to pluck from history and the contemporary world examples of these opposing mindsets and their operation then he is either deaf, dumb, blind and illiterate – or he is one of the creatures of faith.
Step two. I’d like to exemplify my being on the same side as he is by pointing out, in supportive but simultaneously questioning spirit, the extent to which Grayling understates the difficulties in the way of ‘mental liberation from prejudice, superstition, ignorance and fear’. He does, it is true, allow that there are some difficulties. He does so by his talk of a need to ‘fight back’ in seeking the truth. Still, what he voices in his talk of liberation from prejudice, superstition and ignorance is rather demanding; and it needs to be distinguished from an ideal of eventual transparency, of a world populated by beings living solely in knowledge. Three points…
Could human beings ever be liberated from ignorance as a final state? It’s hard to see how unless they could become omniscient. But no one can know everything. So everyone has to be ignorant about something.
Grayling underestimates the problems of ignorance and prejudice by writing as if it is only religion and totalizing ideologies such as Marxism that close people’s minds against inquiry, experiment, the critical scrutiny of received ideas, and so on. The situation is much worse than this. He must surely have noticed how, right across the political spectrum, and right across the metaphysical spectrum, people can become dogmatically attached to their viewpoints, unwilling to be persuaded by contrary evidence, inflexible in changing their minds, locked in to certain combinations of belief which they share with their peer group. He doesn’t know any spouting, thoughtless liberals? (He doesn’t know, for that matter, any Marxists with questioning minds, or any Anglicans more ready to examine a counter-argument than some atheists are?) The virtues of open intellectual inquiry may not be spread evenly across human populations, but the vices of dogmatism and resistance to a change of mind are to be found far and wide. Hardly anyone is altogether free of them.
Mental liberation from prejudice, superstition and ignorance is a never-ending enterprise; it is a permanent process. It could never be comprehensive. One shouldn’t think of it as if it might constitute an ultimate state of affairs, beyond all error.