I just got invited into a fun gathering of a few hundred people which was spurred into being by
Lisa Miller's provocative
article for Newsweek that suggested that Harvard was profoundly anti-intellectual in its refusal to entertain the thought of a religious studies major. If there's anything to say, I'll tell you more about it next week. But let me give you a selection from Miller's article.
In dozens of phone calls and several trips to the Harvard campus, I tried to understand the faculty's anxiety about religion. The facile explanation is that more than a third of elite university professors are nonreligious, a dramatically higher percentage than the population at large. But both believing and nonbelieving scholars clearly can teach about religion in a secular setting without crossing the line into proselytizing. And wouldn't students benefit from having their assumptions challenged in a rigorous way? (Fluency in religious history and texts, in fact, is the sharpest weapon against fundamentalism, as Sam Harris demonstrates in his polemic The End of Faith.) "My colleagues fear that taking religion seriously would undermine everything a great university stands for," the Rev. Peter Gomes, Harvard's chaplain and a professor of Christian history, told me. "I think that's ungrounded, but there it is."
Steven Pinker says his main objection to the 2006 proposal that students be required to take a course in a Reason and Faith category was that it seemed to make reason and faith equal paths to truth. "I very, very, very much do not want to go on the record as suggesting that people should not know about religion," he told me. "But reason and faith are not yin and yang. Faith is a phenomenon. Reason is what the university should be in the business of fostering."
Pinker is a public intellectual, a celebrity on the Harvard campus, the kind of teacher who can draw 400 students into a lecture hall and who elicits star-struck stares in the Yard. His specialty is the evolution of language, but all his work, from The Language Instinct to The Blank Slate (a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), coheres under the broad notion that a scientific, rational world view is the highest achievement of the human mind.
As his wife, the novelist Rebecca Goldstein, put it to him on a day I visited them on Cape Cod, Mass., "All forms of irrationality irk you, but [religion] is the form of irrationality that irks you most." In Pinker's view, human progress is an evolution away from superstition, witchcraft, and idol worship—that is, religion—and toward something like a Scandinavian austerity and secularism. (Pinker is one of those intellectuals who speak frequently about how sensible things are in Europe; one suppresses the urge to remind him of the Muslim riots in the Paris and London suburbs.) A university education is our greatest weapon in the battle against our natural stupidity, he said in a recent speech. "We don't kill virgins on an altar, because we know that it would not, in fact, propitiate an angry god and alleviate misfortune on earth."
That insistence on the backwardness of religion is why, on a warm October afternoon in 2006, at a small faculty luncheon at a Cambridge, Mass., bistro called Sandrine's, Pinker launched his bomb. The topic of the meeting was curriculum reform, but Pinker homed in on religion, declaring that requiring students to take a course in a Reason and Faith category would be like requiring them to take a course in Astronomy and Astrology. "Faith," he said, "is believing in something without good reasons to do so. It has no place in anything but a religious institution, and our society has no shortage of these." His remarks that day ran in The Crimson and were picked up by the national press.
"For myself," remembers Derek Bok, who was Harvard's acting president at the time, "that was one of the less thoughtful remarks that I heard. This was a rhetorical flourish he threw in there. It caught people's attention—it did. He's very good at that."Clearly most of the commenters here would place themselves in the faith camp and are probably not yet ready to concede their fundamental irrationality. But what are your thoughts on Pinker's comments and Harvard's dilemma?
