From: MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Thu Mar 25 2004 - 23:03:59 GMT
Sam,
Sam said:
What I really want you to explain is how you distinguish the sort of language which religious criticisms of secular humanism might use, from those sorts of language which are necessary for allowing the Dynamic evolution of secular humanism. It seems to me that they're the same sort of language. In other words, the sort of 'basic tenets' criticism of secular humanism is _of necessity_ something like religious speech. Different vocabularies between the different religions (or even the MoQ), but a distinct family resemblance - and it's that family resemblance which I'm getting at, which I think you have disallowed with your pragmatic boundaries. Or is your boundary more fine-grained than I'm appreciating?
Matt:
What your saying does make sense and I got the feeling of the direction you'd come back with as I was writing my first reply. "But Matt, didn't say a while back that religous, or even philosophical, discourse shouldn't be allowed in politics?" Like the problem I had in describing to people "non-reductive physicalism," the pragmatic part isn't the physicalism, it's the non-reductive part. The focus shouldn't be on physicalism and all its failings. Physicalism is just the current trend. Same thing with "secular humanism." The pragmatism in this case isn't really the secular part and that's not where the focus should be.
I don't really have any particular fondness for the term "secular humanism," and since it got Platt's panties in a bunch, I'd just as well get rid of it. Let's call it liberalism. The point of liberalism is that we want certain liberties, certain freedoms, i.e. we want some privacy. Well, as a matter of historical happenstance, one of the freedoms early Western societies wanted was a "freedom of religion." So religion became one of our liberties, we had the liberty to choose any religion we wanted, if at all. After this occurence, it becomes hard to talk about religion when discussing political matters because the person your talking to may have no frame of reference and it is entirely his choice whether to have that frame of reference or not.
This is the problem for religious discourse _in_ politics. I have yet to have one person explain to me that this isn't a problem. I have yet to have one person take the bull by the horn and tell me, "Matt, when I say I want religious discourse in politics, my point is that I want to debate God on the Senate floor." My only point is the opposite of this. If you aren't saying that you want to debate God on the Senate floor, then what are you saying? What is religious criticism of liberalism's basic tenets? _How_ are we to take it seriously if we aren't religious?
What gets people riled on this issue is because the only way for religiously inspired criticism of liberalism to reach liberal ears is criticism that is reformulated into secular terms. They don't want to have to reformulate. Yet the sword cuts both ways. If we wanted to debate religion we'd have to reformulate into your terms. Rorty's term for such insistence on your own terms is _sincerity_. It is not arbitrary that we choose one vocabulary over another, and its certainly not the case with liberalism. What liberals want to know is how they can be included in making policy decisions if they don't understand the vocabulary it is voiced in. And then they want to know why they should drop the secular vocabulary to employ another one.
The secular vocabulary is the one used in politics. Can we criticize that vocabulary from outside of politics? Sure we can. That happens all the time. Alasdair MacIntyre, I think, has formulated one of the most powerful critiques of liberalism in his After Virtue by sketching three liberal personality Archetypes, three different kinds of people that result from the liberal tradition. This is typically the best kind of critique and the one typically leveled by religious criticism: look at the type of people we are becoming. But what really causes a shift isn't critique, but concrete proposal. What vocabulary should we be using? What type of people should we become? And I still don't think a religious vocabulary is the way to go. If you say that people are becoming spiritually shallow because they don't take God seriously anymore, I would understand that as a specific religious criticism. Can you reformulate your point? Yeah, I think so. For instance, people are b
ecoming spiritually shallow because they watch too much TV. This is a point I can agree with you on and we can then try and think of ways that we can rectify this. If it doesn't matter what religion it is (as you've alluded to), then I begin to fail to see the difference between being "religious" and the typically more general "spiritual." If this is the case, then I would submit Literature as the new Religion of America, best exeplified by people like Rorty and Harold Bloom, and that it holds enough of the family resemblances with the other widely different, but officially declared, religions of the world. I agree with Eisenhower, America is based on a religious foundation, and it doesn't matter what religion it is.
Okay, enough of my reasons for thinking that a secular vocabulary is still the best vocabulary that we have at hand. As I mentioned before, that we are using a secular vocabulary is a sideshow to the Deweyan point that politics is primary. Politics functions by using a thin vocabulary that is moreorless shared by its participants. (People have denied this point. But, the question is then, how do you have a fuller vocabulary in the face of diversity? Madison sketched two answers: either get rid of liberty or give everyone the same opinions. And I think Madison's reply is still in point: the cure is worse than the disease.) This vocabulary can change over time. That's what I mean by the Dynamism of liberalism. Unlike Marxism, it doesn't freeze our vocabulary. The liberal political vocabulary is fuzzy, a changing thing, what Sartre called "metastable."
The point on which, then, I disagree with you is in thinking that Dynamic insight is necessarily religious insight, i.e. automatically in a religious vocabulary. I can't see that this is the case at all unless you stretch out religion to be synonymous with "insight" or "change." Can sociologists be Dynamic? If they can, are they then being religious? Was Einstein using religious criticism of Newtonian mechanics when he suggested that e=mc2? Were the Marxists being religious when they criticized the basic tenets of liberalism? I think you have to say that if you want to take Dynamic insight to be religious insight. It seems to me that Dynamic evolution generally occurs wherever it wants to. Sometimes it occurs from within, i.e. using the same vocabulary, sometimes it can occur from without, i.e. another vocabulary overlapping and saying something offkilter. The beauty of liberalism is that it allows, in fact desires, this.
Matt
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