From: MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Thu Mar 25 2004 - 00:08:10 GMT
Hey Sam,
Sam said:
I think the following are true:
the ideology or value system referred to as 'secular humanism' is a static pattern of value; any static pattern of value, to preserve overall Quality, must be open to DQ innovation; it is at least _prima facie_ plausible that there will come a time when the Dynamic evolution of secular humanism requires a reconsideration of its basic tenets.
Is there any way in which you would be prepared to (in advance) concede the legitimacy of such a line of objection, ie one which requires a reconsideration of the basic tenets of secular humanism? And if so, do you have any thoughts about the sort of language such reconsideration might use?
Matt:
Well, the problem I have with conceding that "it is at least _prima facie_ plausible that there will come a time when the Dynamic evolution of secular humanism requires a reconsideration of its basic tenets" is a legitimate objection is that I don't see it as an objection. I simply agree with you and fail to see why I shouldn't be able to.
The heart of my redescription (which I'm still hoping provides the language for such a reconsideration) of secular humanism to break away all of the Enlightenment philosophy's talk of ahistoricity and foundations is Dewey's means/end continuum. Dewey thought that progress was a muddy push forward, Whitehead's "dim apprehension," where our goals are changed as we go along in pursuing them. That's what I would call Dynamic. I don't consider your objection to be an objection because I think secular humanism to be exactly the kind of ideology that allows such reconsideration.
To put it another way, in line with my response from before, I take secular humanism to be the "offical" "ideology" of liberal democracy. Unlike, say, Leninist/Maoist Communism, liberal democracy allows criticism of pretty much anything you'd like to criticize and a change in institution of pretty much any institution. That's, roughly, the doctrine of free speech and (in one American formulation) Constitutional Amendment. Take the Weimar Republic as an example: they voted themselves out of a democracy. Of course, once you do that, as the Germans found, you can't vote yourself back, which is the essential core of why Locke suggested that people have a "natural right" to life and liberty and that, contra Hobbes, these rights cannot be given away. Combine this "right to criticize" with Dewey's means/end continuum and you have a pretty good idea of what reformist democracy is about and why I think it encapsulates the political manifestation of Pirsig's suggestion that we ne
ed to keep a balance between static patterns and Dynamic Quality, that _only_ if all other things are equal does Dynamic Quality always have precedence. When you treat governments and ideologies as quasi-individuals, capable of responding to Dynamic Quality, I think what we should say is that liberal democracies are more capable of responding to Dynamic Quality then other ideologies so far imagined. Dropping the ideology/individual analogy, we can say that liberal democracies are better because they _allow_ people to respond to Dynamic Quality to a far greater extent then any other institutional government the world has yet seen. It may be true that we have a right to criticize Lockean rights to life and liberty, and they may change, but would we consider that a Dynamic advance? Maybe. Locke had three natural rights: life, liberty, and property. While the first two seem pretty set, the third has received intense criticism and revision over the past 300 years. The only
reason we may think that life and liberty are safe from change is that they seem to be prerequisites for change. But the Germans did it once, so it is possible....
To put it still another way, I was recently reading this silly little book by Ken Ham called The Lie: Evolution and almost thought for a moment that Ham was channeling Platt: he was leveling the same type of self-referential criticisms that Platt's been leveling at pragmatism from the beginning (which is essentially what the "liberal contradiction" is). Ham's point was that liberal democracies profess tolerance and yet are intolerant of people of his ilk (roughly, those who take Genesis literally). To put it more starkly then Ham does: liberal democracies profess tolerance and yet are intolerant of the intolerant. To put the issue the way Rorty does: liberals are anti-ethnocentrists, i.e. they would rather die than be ethnocentric. Yet, ethnocentrism is exactly the position you find yourself in when you would rather die than believe something. This is the type of paradox mongering that post-moderns seem to enjoy, but pragmatists think the paradox only arises when you pu
t Enlightenment philosophy together with Enlightenment politics. Enlightenment philosophy may have been useful in muddling through to the Enlightenment politics in the 18th century, but pragmatists think it is a ladder that is best forgotten. There is a paradox, but so much the worse for Enlightenment philosophy.
Ham's resolution of the paradox is to say that evolution and liberalism are as dogmatic as creationism and Christian fundamentalism. He puts the point just as Scott R used to put it during our metaphilosophical discussions: the question isn't about which tenet is dogma, and therefore should be rejected, the question is which dogma is better. I've always agreed to this point. The part where I and Ham (and myself and Scott on philosophical issues) disagree is the assessment of betterness. While its true that liberals seem to be pretty intolerant of something, i.e. intolerance, even after noting this it should still be quite apparent that the fundamatalists are intolerant of _more_ things than liberals. The question between the two still boils down to whether tolerance is a good thing to have or not, whether tolerance to the fullest extent possible is a moral virtue. Ham obfuscates the issue by simply emptying his pockets with the self-referential, paradox mongering, ther
eby suggesting that tolerance isn't possible and we should simply be deciding the matter on other grounds (e.g. what the Bible says, etc.). But as I see it, the issue is still about tolerance and what we should be tolerating. Rorty puts it this way: the fear of ethnocentrism is the fear that we will become a windowless little monad. But, Rorty argues, our ethnos is the kind of monad that is relatively well windowed and prides itself at taking out walls to make more windows.
So, in summary: it may be that what we might currently call "the basic tenets of secular humanism" may all eventually come to be replaced by Dynamic innovation. But it won't happen all at once. The truth of Sartre's saying that "if I should die tommorow and Fascism becomes the truth of man, then so much the worse for us" is that we, here and now, would not recognize Fascism as a Dynamic innovation. I think the reason for this is because we would not be able to tell a story about the way "we" became Fascists, a way of narrating our evolution from liberals to fascists that leaves intact our identification with the protagonist of the story. A story thus successfully narrated would show and give reasons for our dropping of tenets that we formerly thought were important. But a revolution of all the most basic tenents we hold dear is too radical for anybody to be able to narrate such a story and still keep our identification. If we take Weimar Germany as an example, the comm
on question people have is: how could the Germans have allowed Hitler to have taken power? Well, Hitler successfully narrated a story about the evolution of Germany, about its goals and ideals, that allowed him to abolish the very system that led to his election. Historians can also narrate a story about what events and conditions made such a story (which seem preposterous to our ears) successful.
Like I said before, I take this to be the political manifestation of Pirsig's balancing act, and also of Sellars saying that we can revise all of our beliefs--just not all at once. Cultural change is either bloody or slow, either a revolution or evolution. Mao chose bloody revolution, we anti-anti-ethnocentric, Western liberals should choose slow evolution.
Matt
p.s. It should be noted that my reference to Mao's bloody revolution is to his Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of 1966, not to the original Communist uprising. The reason I would make such a distinction is because I view the American Revolution as a necessary and good occurence. When gov'ts are oppressive and refuse to change, sometimes it may be neccessary to shed blood. People in such a position do not have the luxury of reform because reform is outlawed. However, once a system of reform is in place, resort to the kind of forced cultural change that the Communist regimes and Robespierre instituted should clearly raise our moral hackles. This is also why, despite the direct, supremely moral outcome, good liberals should be a little suspicious of the Civil War and Reconstruction. In certain lights and instances, it looks a little too close for comfort to the kind of cultural imperialism that 20th century liberals despise.
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