H10. ‘You take the wheel, I’m tired of driving; Jesus, show me the way’: doctrines, indoctrination, and the suppression of critical dispositions

Omschrijving

According to Ben Spiecker’s important account of it, indoctrination involves the inculcation of doctrines, which itself involves the suppression of critical dispositions, intellectual virtues, and rational emotions. All of these expressions require some explication. Doctrines, in Spiecker’s view, are “a special class of beliefs [which] relate to issues that are considered to be of the utmost importance to us, like the nature and ultimate destination of mankind and the way in which a just society is to be organized” (Spiecker, 1991:16). They “are those systems of belief that to a large extent determine the doings and dealings of the adherents” (idem:17). It is a sufficient condition of indoctrination that a doctrine be inculcated (idem:16). Such inculcation, and so indoctrination, “is always associated with the suppression of a critical attitude”, and with “the hampering of intellectual virtues and rational emotions” (ibidem). Doctrines are “screened […] from criticism, from questions about their validity”; they “persist by virtue of non-critical attitudes” (idem:17, emphasis in original). On Spiecker’s view, then, a victim of indoctrination has a non-critical attitude. The indoctrinator “willfully” (ibidem) suppresses the development of students’ critical attitudes and dispositions.
The suppression of a critical attitude and of critical dispositions is importantly connected by Spiecker (along with long-time collaborator Jan Steutel) to the suppression of intellectual virtues (open-mindedness, respect for evidence and for the considered arguments of others, impartiality, intellectual honesty, consistency, tolerance towards rival views, intellectual modesty, etc.) and rational emotions (love of truth, valuing of reasons and evidence, concern for accuracy, contempt for lying, evasion and distortion, etc.)