Credos

Many years ago when I was an undergraduate, long before such things as Twitter mobs existed, the anthropology department at my university was teaching students that the human incest taboo was entirely a social construct.

This being the same university where DNA was discovered - indeed some of the conversations I had regarding this bit of claptrap were held in the very same PUB where DNA was discovered - it didn’t seem unreasonable to approach the matter with a modicum of scientific scepticism.

Yet when I did so, even those young anthropologists, who otherwise appeared politically unengaged, reacted with cultish hostility - in much the same way their modern equivalents today responded online to the female academic who dared to suggest that any skeletons unearthed by archaeologists are either male or female and that a ‘trans’ set of bones would be pinpointed according to the original sex of the individual. 'Gender' being invisible to archaeologists.

Meanwhile over in my own department historians had only just stopped giving any credence to the notion that the Black Death killed almost nobody given that the massive social changes that occurred in the century after 1348 could not possibly have occurred as a result of a pathogen....because Marxism says so.

If history does present one clear and obvious lesson it is that dogma tends to poison almost everything. This is largely because it starts by being factually-selective and gradually becomes more and more hostile to evidence that won’t prop up its key tenets.

I’m not so sure about that incest taboo hooey, but a good deal of dogma undoubtedly starts with the best of intentions.

Many of those who were around at the start of French and Russian revolutions were moved by the spirit of what today we would call ‘social justice’. And of course many of these same people were soon not around at all.

The anti-semitism that festers beneath the hard-left’s position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is there because of the venomous influence of dogma. An individual has a personal, emotional response to reported events - empathy for the plight of the Palestinians - but that individual acknowledgment is soon subsumed within a collective dogmatic position. Uncomfortable truths that don’t add to the sense of righteousness are deemed conspiratorial, absurdities that do, are cherished.

It’s truly hard to hold a sensible discourse with someone in the grip of dogma, because they will always refer you back to the echo of the original individual impulse, rather than the calcified set of convictions that now drive them.