Post-truth rules

In November 2016, The Oxford Dictionaries chose as Word of the Year ‘post-truth’, an adjective which ‘relat[es] to or denot[es] circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief’ (Oxford Dictionaries 2016a).

What does post-truth mean? As I have anticipated in my Preface, it means that what is reputed important is the perception of the ‘truthiness’ of facts, something that appeals to one’s emotions just because it ‘feels’ right to believe (Oxford Dictionaries 2016b; Zimmer 2010; D’Ancona 2017: 31). Post-truth defines the very act of holding as true whatever it is that someone might believe in notwithstanding the lack of evidence - even in the face of contrary evidence. There is a clear echo of the most extreme trends of postmodern social constructionism, now helped by the overabundance of information typical of the digital age: it is ‘easy to caricature [any] torrent of indigestible data as no more than a series of arbitrary claims’ (D’Ancona 2017: 17). It is not difficult to imagine what the implications of this post-truth political and cultural environment might be for the comparative and historical study of religion(s).¹ I have already recalled that a similar cultural environment in Interwar Romania fuelled the growth and diffusion of the anti- scientific, anti-democratic, emic, fideistic phenomenological HoR, epitomized by Eliade’s works (see Chapter 5, §Eliade, 1920s-1980s).

A recent commentary provides us with an interesting perspective on the contemporary relationship between the post-truth cultural environment and the HoR.

The article in question is a book review written by historian of religions Bryan S. Rennie and published in the Los Angeles Review of Books in October 2016. The subject of the commentary is the recent translation and publication of the partly autobiographical Romanian novel written by Mircea Eliade when he was just 17 years old, entitled Diary of a Short-Sighted Adolescent. However, the novel is not the central theme of Rennie's piece, as the publication provides a pretext for Rennie to offer his musings on the current state of the HoR. His starting point is that three factors have coincided to diminish the alleged importance of the HoR in contemporary academia:

1. a specific set of self-critical disciplinary trends;

2. a strong judgemental approach as to the political aspects of Eliade's works and his political engagement;

3. a general academic culture oriented towards ‘hard' science.

In his review, in particular, Rennie focuses on the third point. He calls attention to the fact that

the real villain of the piece here may be the ongoing and exaggerated valorization of ‘science' in the Anglophone academy. Psychology and the social sciences have long coveted the glamour and standing (and grant-attracting prowess) of the ‘hard' sciences, but lately even the study of religion hankers for ‘scientific' status, with more and more resources being devoted to the cognitive science of religion.

Rennie 2016

Then, Rennie cites the birth of a subfield in medical sciences called ‘medical humanities',

i. e. a complementary field devoted to researching meaning and experience in cultural media related to medical fields, and he traces the following parallel: ‘if the arts and humanities are now deemed important in as practical and technical a field as the medical profession, how much longer can they be minimized, marginalized and neglected in such self-evidently humanistic realms as the study of religion?' (Rennie 2016).

It is not that science, as Rennie observes, will never be able to ‘formalize' the methodology and the kind of research heralded or pursued by Eliade (whose ‘revolutionary advances in understanding' are not specified), it is just that many researchers across the Humanities and social sciences have independently adopted it, tested it, and found it wanting. In epistemological terms, the Eliadean research programme has been falsified and discarded as a degenerating pseudoscience (Ambasciano 2018b). As Lakatos remarked, insisting on the academic endorsement and pursuit of such endeavour drains financial resources in vain (Lakatos 1989: 117). As to Rennie's rigid demarcation between science and the Humanities, with science depicted as a competitor to defeat in order to survive, the image itself is misguided at best, or a straw man at worst: science is neither a precise group of elitist, excluding disciplines, nor a unique set of methods (we will get to this point in a moment). Such antireductionism is a direct heritage of the Eliadean research programme, where reductionism appears to have been confused with eliminativism, as if an implicit goal of science would be the eradication of humanistic research (McCauley 2017: 1-24). To achieve the goal of delegitimizing the recourse to science within the Humanities, Rennie resorts to a distorted idea of what science is, exaggerating the most technical and fearful aspects of dehumanization in order to make its destruction acceptable to his readers.

Such attacks against science are not rare in these post-truth days. It is true that a general reorientation of academia as a whole towards science and technology after the economic crisis of 2008 has been translated by narrow-minded politicians and administrators into the reckless and grievous cancellation and disappearance of several courses, or even entire chairs, from the Humanities in universities worldwide (markedly in the US), mainly because it is claimed that such knowledge does not contribute to the overall technological and financial growth of post-industrial societies (Pigliucci 2015a; see Flexner 1939 for the brainlessness of such an approach). And yet, this contingent and recent development does not explain the whole story. There has always been more than that behind the whole ‘Humanities vs. science' confrontation. As cognitive literary scholar Jonathan Gottschall aptly remarked about the situation in contemporary literary studies,

the very idea of bringing science - with its sleek machines, its cold statistics, its unlovely jargon - into Neverland makes many people nervous. Fictions, fantasies, dreams - these are, to the humanistic imagination, a kind of sacred preserve. They are the last bastion of magic. They are the one place where science cannot - should not - penetrate, reducing ancient mysteries to electro-chemical storms in the brain or the timeless warfare among selfish genes.

Gottschall 2012: xv-xvi

Literary studies are not alone, and a case study could easily show that this anti­science feeling is widespread in humanistic academia.