Mike, I’d certainly agree that it is important to be skeptical about skepticism, lest it become a dogma in its own right. As to the rest of that First Things piece, however, I couldn’t really see where it was going – other, perhaps, than into a willfully blind alley – but maybe I missed something.

On your second point, I find it difficult to attribute the rise of twentieth-century totalitarianism (even in part) to the notion that the minds of those who might have pushed back against it had been somehow exhausted by excessive skepticism. If you look at the leaders of those movements, they were typically true believers, both in themselves and their cause — and they always had been. What’s more, the countries in which they prevailed (with any degree of consent on the part of the governed) were generally a long, long way behind on the skepticism curve. The problem was not there had been too much skepticism, but that there had been too little. Thus Imperial Russia was, outside some nooks and crannies of the intelligentsia and ruling class, a deeply religious and — sporadic jacqueries apart — generally deferential place. Pre-revolutionary China was a largely peasant society, as was the heartland of the Khmer Rouge. And so it goes on. Germany, of course, was a rather different case, but it’s a push to argue that intellectual exhaustion can in any way have been said to have paved the way for Hitler.