Challenging Dogmas, Not Policies

Some kinds of change are different than others. The same is true of calls for change. It's one thing to want something (in particular) to change, and another to want things (generally) to change. The latter type was the sort characteristic of the European Enlightenment. People were after a deeper, broader kind of change, change that involved radical shifts in thinking about the world, not just different decisions in managing their world. They sought changes that required overhauling or overthrowing the political, intellectual, or cultural authorities of their day. Enlightenment thinkers were challenging dogmas, not policies.

In asking my students to re-create the Enlightenment, to a degree, by challenging the status quo, I'm asking them to take on a dogma that's operative in our present day, and not just argue for a shift in policy. A dogma is a set of received beliefs that are part of the belief system of a given group. It's the party line. It's the set of principles that organize and constrain that group. Dogma is ideology: a set of ideas, and a logic that flows from them. Dogmas and ideologies provide a rationale for policies, but they are bigger value systems that underly policy.


Policy is just a set of practices--laws, rules, or agreed upon conventions. It's how we implement ideas upon which we already agree. Disagreeing with a policy, or even actively resisting it, does not mean one is challenging any underlying shared values. Yes, dogma is evident within given policies, but resisting a policy does not mean pushing back against an ideology.

Understanding the difference between these helps you grasp the radical nature of societal change in the Enlightenment. The French peasants may not have agreed with the taxation policies of Louis XVI, but they were more upset about the whole social hierarchy that put aristocrats on top and peasants on the bottom. The American revolutionaries started by opposing British policies like the Stamp Act, but there's a difference between objecting to a specific tax and objecting to a whole system of taxation (the kind without representation).

Sure, it's important to be able to oppose policies or advocate new ones; every time a law is proposed and debated this is what is happening. It's part of how society runs. But other kinds of change are required if the issue isn't running civilization -- but the fear of civilization running aground.

Changing Frames of Reference
I've taught my students that the changes that happened in the Enlightenment involved new frames of reference--recognizing that the map of the world needed to be redrawn in one way or another. Now, this can go two ways. Either a great change has happened in the world that exposes the need for change, or a great need for change calls for rethinking our worldview.

An example of the first might be the way the world changed when TV became widespread. It used to be that political debates were all about ideas communicated through eloquent speaking and arguing. But Richard Nixon found out in a hurry when debating with John F. Kennedy that in a society re-oriented to the visual, your words won't be listened to if you don't tend to your physical appearance. Right or wrong, the world became more visual when TV came, and this called for a new kind of politics. "We can't go on as we have been; the world has changed"

An example of the latter could be seen in terms of the agricultural revolution. There was a need to feed many more people in the world. The old systems of farming could not keep up. It turned out that just increasing the kind of farming that had been done wouldn't solve the problem. A larger change was needed. This led to the enclosure movement in which farming became more systematized and centralized. Farming had to be recalibrated to capitalism and to the efficiencies of scale made possible by mechanization and markets. "We can't go on as we have been; the old ways will not suit the new situation."

Many topics of the day relate to change, but not always to dogmas that maintain sway over our ways of thinking. So, if someone is eager to chime in on a popular topic, one must use care that this is looking at the bigger kinds of change. Want to challenge immigration in the United States? Don't just look at practical arguments. Find the ideas at the bottom of it. Do we need to change our concept of borders or of citizenship itself? Should we quit thinking in terms of separate countries in North America and instead think of ourselves more as common members of one continent? The issue -- if we are looking at this as those in the Enlightenment -- may have more to do with human rights than with national policy.

Remember that calls for radical change, or challenges to authority, need not equate with open rebellion, revolution, or violence. One can argue for change and against dogmas that are keeping an organization from moving forward, for example.

Critiquing Calls for Change
As my students examine one another's calls for change, I want them to think about whether the change being called for is more on the level of policy or more on the level of dogma. I want them to help one another aim for the real underlying issues, the broader values whose authority needs to be exposed and called into question.

An Example Post
If you'd like to read an example of a challenge to a current system, see my "Scholarly Communications Must Transform," in which I make a claim about how communication conditions have changed, and argue that the status quo for academic publishing is now working contrary to its original intent. This is a longer post than I'm asking of my students, but it is a model of the type of topics and approach I would like to see them attempt.