It is the fate of the vagabond scholar to be sacrificed on the altar of the ideal of disinterestedness. That is, in fact, our special calling. We are intellectual wanderers who demonstrate to others, by the kinds of questions that we ask, how it is possible to think the taboo--the otherwise unthinkable.
In thinking the otherwise unthinkable, we expand the universe of possible discourse. This is our service to humanity: we set ourselves the task of breaking silences where silences have been imposed in order to insure intellectual and (via the intellect) social conformity.
We are perpetual heretics, forever frustrating the peace of mind that orthodoxies promise. We are both the products of modernity and its facilitators--for modernity, as Peter Berger taught us long ago, "multiplies choices and concomitantly reduces the scope of what is experienced as destiny. In the matter of religion, as indeed in other areas of human life and thought, this means that the modern individual is faced not just with the opportunity but with the necessity to make choices as to his beliefs. This fact constitutes the heretical imperative in the contemporary situation. Thus heresy, once the occupation of marginal and eccentric types, has become a much more general condition; indeed, heresy has become universalized" [Berger, The Heretical Imperative (1979), 28].
Or so it appeared to sociologists of religion in the 1970's. We are a long way from the halcyon days of free thought and heresy has once again become the occupation of the marginal and eccentric. No matter. We follow our imam: Socrates.
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