I’ve been a bit preoccupied over the last couple of days, so haven’t had the chance to post anything, but I have had a few thoughts I think might be worth sharing. Yesterday I came across a site called The Immanent Frame, with the subtitle “Secularism, Religion and the Public Sphere.” It’s published by the Social Science Reserach Council out of New York, and, according to the “About” link,
The Immanent Frame publishes interdisciplinary perspectives on secularism, religion, and the public sphere. TIF serves as a forum for ongoing exchanges among leading thinkers across the social sciences and humanities, featuring invited contributions and original essays that have not been previously published in print or online.
But it also, significantly, prides itself on being named a “favorite new religion site, egghead division” by The Revealer (a site which provides a “daily review of religion and the media”). And, while I haven’t read everything on offer, I did read a couple of articles — one by Regina Schwartz (“Secularism, Belief and Truth“), who is also the author of an interesting book on religion and violence — The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism — and an article referred to in Schwartz’s article, “Secularism: Its content and context,” by Akeel Bilgrami.
What is interesting about the two articles is that it gives a little indication of how religious believers are thinking about the role of religion in public space, and what I’ve read so far is disturbing. Of course, it’s no surprise to find that the religious feel that they occupy a central, even dominating role, in public space, but to have it put so bluntly is a bit surprising.
The first thing we need to remember when we’re discussing religion is that religions tend, on the whole, to have their minds already made up. This makes Regina Schwartz’s point a bit strained:
At the extreme edges of secular and religious thought, people deny that they hold beliefs—propositions that they embrace about what is true—and say instead that they have truth.
She adds to this by saying:
This can obtain in any religious thinker who claims that God or scripture or the church hierarchy has given them the truth and they have ready access to it—or in secular thought, where trust in empiricism, in scientific methods, or indeed in secular reason can be so extreme that the notion that we live with beliefs and hypotheses becomes supplanted by the certainty of truth. It seems to me that in the public sphere certainty is especially dangerous.
There’s a fundamental problem here. It may be true that non-religious thinkers — scientists, for example — basing themselves on empirical evidence, claim to know what is true. It is quite another thing for religious believers to claim to know the truth. Schwartz claims, a bit oddly, that `the values that prevailed in a dominantly religious world were not lost during the secularization processes.” But when she says this, she has in mind,
[f]or example, in Judaism, tzedekah (justice) embodies the biblical and rabbinic idea that Jews are obligated to pursue social and economic justice.
Is this a religious or a secular virtue?, she asks. And it is values like this that she has in mind when she speaks of values being preserved during the secularisation process. And while it is true that there is biblical witness for the pursuit of justice, there is also a strain of brutality and injustice that pervades the scriptures of Christians, Jews and Muslims, to go no further.
Schwartz obviously has in mind a fairly common contemporary characterisation of atheists when she speaks of the fringes of religious and secular movements. No one needs to search far to find an oversure religious extremist. But secular extremists are much harder to find. It takes a critical tradition to identify secular extremists. So, of course, Dawkins springs immediately to mind. And Harris, Hitchens and Dennett. Each of them has been accused of a kind of secular monomania. Even the titles of their books seems to bear out the accusation, Harris’s The End of Faith, Hitchens’ god is not Great. Even Jerry Coyne, if it comes to that, who entitled his book Why Evolution is True. And Dawkins calls his most recent book The Magic of Reality: How we know what’s really true. Often critics of the new atheists refer to Hitler, Stalin, Mao or Pol Pot, as though there is some resemblance between a these dictators and professors like Dennett, Coyne or Dawkins, or journalists and public intellectuals like Hitchens.
The more troubling thing is that Schwartz takes liberal freedoms as valuing diversity, as though there is something of special value in fostering and preserving diversity of belief for its own sake. Secularism, she says, where it has failed, has failed precisely to achieve secularism’s goal “of genuinely respecting diversity of belief, of values, of practices … among the people who hold them.” Indeed, she claims that it is “the goal of secularism to respect diversity.” She quotes from Milton’s Areopagitica, and she recognises that, while it begins as a tract against censorship, it “becomes a tract on liberty and in turn a rumination on the best process of truth-seeking.” But she doesn’t seem to recognise that the best process for achieving truth might in fact achieve it. Milton says that “opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making,” and Schwartz then adds:
I need not remind you that this eloquent spokesman for liberty of conscience, diversity, and free speech, was a deeply religious thinker.
As though this should privilege religious ways of thinking, even if they seem obviously no longer a credible way of achieving truth about the world, as well as providing seriously conflicting ideas of how human beings should live and relate to each other.
The problem with this is that it leads her to suggest that the process itself represents a mystery, the mystery of how to live together, which is, shes says, “not fully graspable, knowable, manipulable, after all, [and] that we need to approach the dialogue with the other with full respect — to listen, learn, and evaluate.” But if this is true, then Milton was wrong. Diversity is not, in itself, the best process for truth-seeking, for there is, she says, no truth to be found here, only mystery.
And that’s why the article by Akeel Bilgrami is extremely distressing, but not for the reasons that Schwartz finds it troubling. She says she is “uncomfortable when Bilgrami defines secularism over against religion.” However, she seems to misunderstand the difference between religion and secularism as world-views, as Weltanshauungen. Speaking of Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, she says:
… I agree with Taylor’s assessment that we are in an era of reflexivity regarding religion in which belief is always questionable and there are many different positions, that this is a good, the outcome of the Enlightenment and the romantic counter-Enlightenment, and surely, we need the same reflexivity in our secular beliefs.
The problem with this is that secular beliefs just are reflexive in this way, in so far as they use science and critical reason, but religious beliefs are not typically reflexive at all. The assumption that they are is clearly shown to be simply wrong by Bilgrami’s article, where he assumes, from the start, that it is impossible to look at human relationships dispassionately, without assuming a total world-view.
For instance, Bilgrami simply cannot understand John Rawls’ famous idea of the “original position”, where people make decisions about justice from the standpoint of not knowing what their actual social location or other beliefs might be. That of course does not mean that in a living society there would not be different beliefs and different values, so that, in fact, even a society constructed on the basis of the original position, while it would not be homogeneous, could be accurately described as having an overlapping consensus; and it would be overlapping because the principles by which relationships would be governed would have been chosen dispassionately, without consideration as to social standing or belief.
This, however, is simply something that Bilgrami cannot see, because he can only see the world from a religious standpoint, supposing that the only possible arrangement is one in which there is a diversity of non-overlapping world-views, each with as much right to express itself as any other, and each deserving as much respect as any other as well. Whereas Rawls, and, I think, even Schwartz, can see that such an arrangement would doom some people to live in unjust and even intolerable circumstances, Bilgrami thinks that there is no possibility of achieving even reasonable limits as to what can be considered just or unjust, morally right or wrong, good or bad, without the internal reasoning of a traditional (religious) community.
It seems to me that this is precisely what is so very dangerous about religion, and why it is so important that we retain some confidence in being able to reach the truth about what are better and what are worse ways for human beings to live together. And while they must always be subject to review and reconsideration, these are things which can be known, with a reasonable degree of certainty, to be true, or at least true within tolerable limits, and always subject to change. This is something, however, for which religion gives no ground at all.
Quite, and you may have seen it already but Julian Baggini shows he can deliver good stuff occasionally and writes along similar lines:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2011/oct/28/lust-for-uncertainty
Eric,
I haven’t read the referenced articles yet but I find that “deserving as much respect as any other” phrase to be quite problematic and probably disingenuous at best assuming that is a salient position of Bilgrami. It is one thing to be granting equal civil rights to everyone but to argue, if that is what he is doing, that that necessitates giving everyone’s opinions the same respect is an entirely different kettle of fish. As Carl Sagan put it:
The well-meaning contention that all ideas have equal merit seems to me little different from the disastrous contention that no ideas have any merit. [Broca’s Brain; pg xii]
What I like about Schwartz’s article (which I hope to read again more closely) is the self-examination aspect, a willingness to look at one’s own values and scrutinize them. Schwartz ‘feels’ some kind of crisis in secularism, intuitively I suppose, a contradiction arrived at subconsciously, a fear that secularism undermines itself.
The value ‘tolerance’ is not even mentioned in the article, but it appears that’s what Schwartz’s article is really about. Tolerance taken as an ideal or absolute contradicts itself, such that people begin to tolerate intolerance, and tolerance therefore becomes undermined. The same can be said of secularism.
This is the problem when values are thought of as beliefs, or concepts or ideals, when instead they should be thought of as judgments . We create values by our judgments, but it’s when we stop evaluating or thinking, and assume we’ve arrived at truth, that is the trap we can fall into.
Tolerance should not be about tolerating people’s beliefs (which I still insist are not propositional beliefs at all) but about tolerating their inability to make sensible judgments. In other words–tolerating their lack of morality, lack of reasoning, lack of judgment. That tolerance only goes so far, and on an individual basis, to the point that I judge their actions are overly harmful to me or to those I value.
That is why I think Schwartz feels a need for scepticism, but does not directly mention it. The best way to be a thinker, moralizer or activist, is to make judgments as an ongoing practical process, and not stop making judgments and arrive at some fixed Truth.
Which brings me to Baggini’s article that Mark Jones mentioned. Baggini seems to be criticizing the same idealistic form of tolerance, which ends up contradicting itself. It’s this ideal form of tolerance that is the problem–it becomes a dogma in of itself and stops our ability to make individual judgments about when to be tolerant and when not.
As Eric’s article is titled “thoughts in progress” that is why I think scepticism is so important–it’s an ongoing process or an ongoing investigation, it doesn’t stop. We can suspend judgment or make judgments, but they’re course corrections in a continued journey, and not moorings on docks. Once we think we’ve arrived at a Truth, then we stop thinking, we stop making judgments, and become the very thing we often fight against–dogmatists and authoritarians.
Religion is never more interesting than when it dynamites its own bridges. After centuries of squabbling between cults and denominations, religious believers are realising they have a common enemy and scrambling to try and find some common ground on which they can gather to defend themselves. There will be an awful lot of behind-the-scenes dickering of the form ‘You abandon that claim and we’ll abandon this one’, smoothed over for public consumption by articles like Schwartz’s. Whether the various congregations can be persuaded to abandon their ‘propositional beliefs’ and still keep supporting their churches and mosques with money and work remains to be seen, but it’s a fascinating process to watch.
Jon Jermey (#4),
In which regard, similar to the case of Hitler with the Jews this article suggests that the religious right, ably led by the Tea Party Republicans, seems to have selected atheists and secular humanists as the scapegoats of choice.
Not entirely sure how accurate that assessment is but it looks plausible, and somewhat disconcerting. Another voice raising the same issue is Sean Faircloth who has written a book titled Attack of the Theocrats which Dawkins’ site describes as follows:
Though I notice that the Amazon reviews of the book, while generally positive, had a few negative comments.
Thank you Mark Jones (#!) for the link to Baggini’s article. This is precisely what I had in mind, lumping all forms of thought together and then saying that we can never speak with greater or less confidence in the truth of what we say. This is a recipe for suspending judgement which would completely catastrophic if it were carried out. Indeed, given Milton’s conviction that an open society is the best way to achieve the truth, he was implicitly saying that the worst way is to follow the way of religious conviction, which is (i) based on no substantive ground, and (ii) unendingly confident in the conclusions already reached within the tradition. What Milton was suggesting was a society in which freedom of speech led to closer and closer approximations to the truth. If we don’t think that, and think that everything is a perpetual mystery, then we would go on forever simply talking past each other, rather than to each other. This seems to me the sort of society Schwartz thinks secular society should be, where the goal is to preserve disagreement for its own sake, but this would be a disaster, since not only would we never know better, for all our trying, but we would also be stuck with respecting viewpoints which are clearly wrong — as most religion quite plainly is. I’ll have to take another look at Baggini’s article, but from a first quick read it seems to me to be pointing in an uncompromisingly positivist direction, even though the positivism is modified, as positivism must be, with the possibility that one might be wrong. Self-consciousness about this, viz., the possibility of being wrong, is absolutely necessary in order to have a meaningful search for truth, but lack of confidence in being able to achieve the truth is merely destructive, and leaves all the divisions within society without any resolution, and people in a rather Hobbesian position of suspicion of each other, which would necessitate pre-emptive moves to make sure that one’s own interests were served. This kind of Hobbesian trap would make for the best society, but this is what would happen if we cannot have a situation where personal convictions, especially religious ones, took a back seat to concerns about justice and peaceable resolution to conflict. I have to be away today, but I will have a closer look at this when I get back.
Another thing that is odd about Schwartz’s article is that she lumps the Enlightenment and the counter-Enlightenment together as a single movement, in which reflexive self-doubt is primary. But this is surely just wrong about the counter-Enlightenment, since, in fact, the counter-Enlightenment is the source of some of the worst human catastrophes of the last two hundred years, including WW I and its continuation twenty years later in WW II, catatrophes founded on a refusal of self-doubt and a shameless confidence in old certainties dressed up in quasi-modern dress. It is extremely troubling to think that religious social thinkers are so historically naive as not to be able to distinguish between, say, a Voltaire, on the one hand, and a Pius IX on the other. Of course, this failure to make distinctions is just what can be expected from religion when it has its back against the wall. But it is not encouraging for the future, since it is so obviously based on a simple misreading of history.
It struck me reading the blog and the comments that religions claim to have the lock on values. They argue that science (and/or secularism, atheism etc.) cannot get from an ‘is’ to an ‘ought’. Usually the ‘is’ is a natural fact of some sort.
Now while we acknowledge that this is not a logical prohibition, but an observation that it has not been done yet, it seems to me that religions are also in this same bind, for they have yet to find a way of explaining how we get from their (many and various) ‘oughts’ to a factual ‘is’.
You could recast the whole apologetics industry as trying to show the logical progression from religious values (‘oughts’) to observed facts. Philosophers and politicians try to make their ‘oughts’ factual too.
Which leads us back to the toleration and diversity values. I think it is just as difficult to justify the worth of these values as any god-driven value. In the end I fall back on some sort of pragmatic utilitarianism – we make the best judgements (h/t Egbert) we can, knowing that we have an imperfect grasp of all the facts.
I find it interesting that theologians and apologists are constantly yammering on about “truth” without defining what — exactly and precisely — they count as something they hold to be “true”.
Any physics student, on the other hand, will tell you that F=m*a is true.
I think it behooves us to hold their feet to the fire on this issue. If religion and religious thought can define “truth”, then specifically what are those truths?
For the life of me, I can’t think of a single “truth” arrived at from a religious context that can’t also be arrived at from a secular one. Religious-only “truths” are nothing of the sort — they’re tenets, dogmas, precepts of a specific brand of a specific religion. Or they’re objectively flat-out lies. See William Lame Craig as the most egregious miscreant in this regard.
Specifically, what “truth” are you talking about. Remembering that for those of us in the secular world, a truth is a truth for the religious as well as for the religious. Religious truths can’t be truths if they only apply to a few adherents to a specific cult — or to merely a billion or two of the 7 billion people on the planet.
I think DiscoveredJ makes a good point about the non sequiturs between facts and values in religious arguments. Apologetics is notoriously unphilosophical, They’ve just been getting away for a long time with the assumption that God and morality go together.
On the subject of toleration, if you want your laugh of the day, go to Pharyngula where PZ has a link to a Terence Mckenna video.
We’re supposed to give equal weight to the idea that there are “Pro bono proctologists from other star systems”
Kevin, thanks for the reference to the Terrence McKenna piece. Do you know more about him? I ask because doing a quick search it seems like McKenna has some rather weird beliefs of his own.
Eric, I know next to nothing about him. I’ve heard his name many times but I’ve not looked too deeply into it. I’m not so sure that what he writes are his beliefs, it seems more to me that he’s just taking his imagination out for a spin.
I can call spirits from the vasty deeps and they come when I call but only to my imagination. I just don’t know about Mr Mckenna.
Maybe I posted too soon. From his wonkipaedia entry it would appear that the funny skeptical video that I found at Pharyngula may be a case of his heaping scorn on other peoples faeries.
Can’t say for sure. There are people who investigate altered states of consciousness from a materialist perspective for artistic or scientific purposes. Not everyone is Carlos Castaneda.
I had some experience in the sixties with disney pharmaceuticals but I just enjoyed the pretty colours. I had some friends though who were messed up by them because they believed that the chemicals were doors to alternate universes.