The great deceit of the age: we hijack axioms and pretend they are theorems, then flatter ourselves on erecting a world that stands on our “reason” all the way to the bottom — as if such a thing were possible.
“If nothing is self-evident, nothing can be proved. Similarly if nothing is obligatory for its own sake, nothing is obligatory at all.”
– C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man
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It is true that every chain of inferences must have one end bolted to a dogmatic rock, but our need for dogmatic rocks does not make the fragments of all the dogmatic rocks we have exploded coalesce and cohere as new rocks. Like it or not, we are in the aftermath of comprehensive destructive criticism and we cannot wish the demolished foundations of our old world back into being.
That exaggerates our self-referential nihilism because most people say they know self-evident truths in the physical, moral, and spiritual realm. They just find themselves surrounded by people whose chains of inference are bolted to other dogmatic rocks of, to them, self-evident truth. So they are routinely challenged to examine their premises, or priors, while they say (or at least think) that their challenger should do the same.
Diversity of opinion polarizes society into Squishes and Fanatics. This is, at least, my opinion. A Squish has opinions but is not proud of those opinions, or angered when they are contradicted. The Fanatic hopes to recreate the old world of universal firm foundations by violence. Verbal violence if that suffices, but more muscular forms if necessary.
JMS,
Well, some of them, at least one big one, never really went anywhere; we just stopped believing in it, and replaced it with nothing solid at all.
The consequences have been such a disaster that many people (such as myself, over the past twenty years) have begun to reconsider what might and might not be the right place to stand.