Modernity, we have been told, is an acid to tradition and blind faith. Modernity is essentially a skeptical mindset. Prove it; show me; where's the evidence: these are the imperatives we are told to affirm, as proper moderns. The invisible legitimation of received authorities is as dubious as the passive voice which, we are assured, is the main device of their seduction of premoderns' assenting, supine minds.
There's something misguided about the over-oxygenated appeals to radical skepticism in that last paragraph. Thinkers have recognized the mistakes of so radical a skepticism for a long time; critiques of it go back at least to Augustine's contra academicos ("Against the Academic [skeptics]") and de utilitate credendi ("On the usefulness of belief"). And medievalists, for instance, make a lot of noise about the kinds of resistance, epistemic and otherwise, to received authorities that were present even in "an age of faith." (So, Steven Justice argues against Charles Taylor, in "Did the Middle Ages Believe in their Miracles?" (Representations 103 (2008):1-29); it's a great piece, I recommend it.)
But it is, I think, the case that "the modern condition" challenges received authorities to authenticate their legitimacy in new ways, whereas in earlier centuries, traditional culture might have been willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. In this way we live in an age of skepticism of authority.
On the flip side, however, we also live in an age of increased reliance on experts. The expansion and diversification of knowledge, competence, and skill has led to a super-specialized society. This is manifest in a million ways as sociologists are eager to tell you. (Indeed, the fact that sociologists know this, while other academics often ignore it, is itself a sign of the complexity of our expertise.)
And here's the problem: For these kinds of expertise to work, we require a kind of deference and acceptance in our relationship to experts that does not look very different from previous ages' obedience to authority. And we do--we do defer to expertise. We defer all across our lives, not just to doctors but to auto repair people, electricians, plumbers, shopkeepers, chefs and waiters, economists, teachers, even now "life coaches." Each of these positions, and many more, informs us of things that we more or less blindly accept. And we are wise to do so. The procedural legitimation that society has put in place for all these roles, and the structures of accountability to which their failures can be held to account, are larger reassurance structures for ourselves. But they all rely on the fact that, when someone presents themselves as an expert on something, we first and foremost trust them.
The difficulty comes in reconciling this tremendous practice of what amounts to fideism with the ideology of rational transparency and self-reliance that is at the heart of modernity.
(Here, by the way, at a deep level, is why someone like Michel Foucault was on to something in a way that drives a thinker like Jürgen Habermas crazy; for perhaps, as Amy Allen has argued, there needs to be some recognition on the part of rationalists like Habermas that their rationalism hangs on a pre-rational commitment that can not be, in this dispensation anyway, fully and finally redeemed. Not that this entails a descent into a normless irrationalism--Allen's project attempts to escape this problem by offering a synthesis of Habermas and Foucault, though in my view she mostly abuts them, without synthesis. But that's for another conversation. Still, I found her book tremendously valuable on this stuff.)
In a way we can see conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxxers, and the like not as recoiling into some kind of pre-modern, "primitive" suspicion, but rather as people who actually take the modern ideology to eleven, as it were. They never give up the ideology of skepticism and self-transparency. It leads them into situations of deep self-delusion, too.
But the question is: if we are not to end up conspiracy theorists, how do we manage to combine a recognition of autonomy and agency with a recognition of the realities of reliance on extra-subjective, thus potentially heteronomous, experts?
Anyway, all of these thoughts are prompted for me this morning by stumbling across a pretty light piece by an atheist about her rediscovering an appreciation for the comforts of religious ritual--not as a movement towards faith, but as a movement towards recognizing the value of faith:
The grip of a crisis demands we surrender control—and quite rightly—to forces bigger than us: the long arm of a newly-paternalistic state, the unknowable complexities of science. Why not faith, too? Find comfort where you can; we’re in this for the long-haul.
Just some thoughts sparked by my encounter with this piece, even if not found within it.