A Reflection on the "Reality-Based Community"

It's distressing that so many persons of a certain ideological stripe claim for themselves the title of "the Reality-Based Community". I heard such claims most recently on news coverage of a rally for atheists in Washington, D.C., and in the reader comments following an article on The Harvard Crimson’s website. These people seem to be unaware of their failures to distinguish science from logic, and reason from empiricism. Convinced of their intellectual superiority, they fail to see the ironies of their position:

A position that simultaneously claims that everything about us is necessarily a predetermined outcome produced by blind chance, yet that the certainty they feel about the reliability of their own thought processes that led them to that conclusion is somehow…not.

A position that claims to be the only rational starting point from which to achieve a better society, while denying that there is any authoritative transcendent standard by which to judge “better” or “worse”.

A position that calls for beliefs to be justified by empirical evidence, but which fails to give empirical reasons for holding that position.

A position that claims to be enlightened, tolerant, and open-minded, while in a troubling number of instances calling for dissenters to be silenced and to undergo a forced re-education until their agreement is secured.

Perhaps you have encountered such people. Perhaps you would also agree with me that the Reality-Based Community seems excessive in its confidence. Without wishing be needlessly derogatory, this confidence seems, sadly, to be the result of an ignorance made more intractable by arrogance. Though hardly alone in having succumbed to the temptations of ideological puffery and blind faith, there is a difference between such people and the religious communities they so frequently charge with the identical crimes. Most religious people have a limiting principle –
the precepts of their faith – to ultimately curb whatever excesses they may be motivated to commit; while the “Reality-Based Community” has no inherent theoretical limit to its ambitions beyond the supposedly superior reasoning ability that, as I have argued, has already failed them.

All the more reason to be very cautious about granting the Reality-Based Community too much authority over our minds or our lives.