By Gavin Ashenden, Catholic Herald.
Jordan Peterson made a helpful contribution to our understanding of the dynamics of the exchange of ideas, when he observed that, in the case of certain dogmatic progressives, it was not so much a case of people having ideas on certain subjects, but more that the ideas seem to have the people.
In fact, he went further and used the language of deliverance. He talked more specifically of people being possessed by certain ideas. Elon Musk offered a variation on the same theme, by describing certain ideas as analogous to a virus. In particular, he talked about people being infected by a “woke-mind” virus.
Both these approaches differ from what have been the normative assumptions about ideas in a culture that stretches back to the Enlightenment. But they do raise the question of whether people have ideas or ideas have people?
Why might this matter? It matters in the process of trying to exchange ideas with people. Do we live in a society where ideas are held freely, and can be compared, evaluated, modified and exchanged; or in an environment where people are held captive by ideas, and the ideas change and modify the people rather than the other way round?
Such an “epistemology of the idea” is at her heart of the way in which we communicate with each other.
One idea in particular seems to dominate the perspective of the progressives. It appears time and time again on social media. It is the insistence that human beings are born without sin or flaws, and consequently there are no barriers or limits to their improvement or perfectibility.
The Christian idea of original sin is deeply unpopular with some, and the cause of serious and intense antipathy. The vitriolic reaction against it, without any compelling evidence or analysis, is as unconvincing as it is odd.