Exclusivism & Secularism :Insights on the Political and Socio-Cultural Cornerstones of Truth

Exclusivism is the backbone of secularism. It is the tendency, which stamps not only the secular attitudes towards the involvement of religion in the management of the public affairs (politics), but also the ongoing disputes on the intellectual scene between even non-religious participants. It is the very meaning of narrow-mindedness, and it manifests a sort of bias and prejudice at different levels of thought and behaviour.

At the political level, for instance, Exclusivism means simply dictatorship; it is the rejection of power sharing against the majority of people within the same community. Truth under a dictatorship-based political system is dictated not discovered, imposed, but not proposed. Truth within such a system is the one which is mediated through mass-media (the forth power), advertised and popularised among the community of clients (the laymen). The process through which it is constructed is conscious, but it is overshadowed by the greed of an elite gearing to meet certain pragmatic interests by whatever means and costs.

Likewise, dictatorship can have roots at the socio-cultural level: every community, without exception, has got a system of interconnected beliefs, values, and behaviour. This system, which imposes implicit or explicit habits over the individuals, constitutes the deep structure of the word “Culture”. The impact of this system over the individuals varies in degree, but it is more and more exciting wherein homogenous societies. The reason can be attributed to the fact that, within homogeneous societies, diversity, which is crucial to truth discovery as well as self-recognition, is lessened to a lower degree. As a result, truth within such context becomes a matter of habit formation and taken-by-granted speculations.

These, needless to say, pave the way for more imitation of varied socio-cultural products. The only victim along these quantities of accumulated habits is truth; or rather the process of creativity along which truth is discovered or constructed. Yet, again, these socio-cultural nets are, from a certain angle of view, worthy in the sense that they serve for social belonging, identity construction, and solidarity reinforcement. It is at this point of view wherein truth has got a social function and gives the sense of what it means to be a part of a whole social existence.

Exclusivism, be it at the political or socio-cultural level, has got a very limited scope of cognition, and it therefore, hinders our understanding of the whole truth and forces us, along the perpetual debates between physics and meta-physics, to put aside religion though it has a got a considerable and challenging say in whatever branch of knowledge, including the empirical sciences, art and humanities.