------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Here's Rick Warren in a published Newsweek debate with well-publicized atheist Sam Harris:
WARREN:
I believe [The Bible] is inerrant in what it claims to be. The Bible does not claim to be a scientific book in many areas.
[snip]
I believe in both faith and reason. The more we learn about God, the more we understand how magnificent this universe is. There is no contradiction to it.
This seems to me as a fairly banal set of statements in the broader context of our modern political and cultural life. The intellectual move is to posit that reason tells us things that we can know and observe about the physical workings of our world, but that everything beyond this (morality, spirituality and other issues of a transcendent nature) is the purview of faith since truth claims in this domain cannot be readily determined via scientific inquiry.
Essentially, Warren depicts reason and faith are two different models of epistemology, but ones that are complementary rather than contradictory. Intellectually, it is a modern form of truce in the Scopes-monkey-trial wars for cultural supremacy.
However, in a very thought-provoking article from James Kalb (Reason and the Future of Conservatism), he clearly sees these two philosophical viewpoints as more naturally oppositional in nature.
He doesn't pose the question as a direct comparison (Faith vs. Reason), but rather in the context of debating the future of philosophical conservatism, he argues that it must necessarily have a religious foundation, since only faith has the capacity to oppose reason in defense of conservative tradition.
Now, it could be argued, from a close reading of Kalb, that the real problem is the attempt to apply scientific materialism to aspects of modern culture and society which do not lend themselves to empirical measurement in the same manner as physics or biology for example.
In other words, the issue could be framed as reason getting too big for its britches and overstepping its boundaries in claims to intellectual authority. But, interestingly, Kalb reaches for faith as the necessary mode of defense rather than arguing with reason on its own terms (i.e. by contradicting the political conclusions of reason, through alternative reasoned argumentation).
He starts by defining the current playing field:
In other words, in today's "polite society" the only arguments that are allowed to matter are ones that you can demonstrate through applied reason.
“Reason” is the way we come to reliable conclusions about what is real, what is admirable, and what we should do. That is to say, reason is the way in which we come to conclusions about the true, the beautiful, and the good.
Modern thought likes conclusions that are clear, demonstrable, and to-the-point. So it is drawn toward scientific materialism, which tells us that everything worth thinking about can be understood based on simple concepts and clear demonstrations, and which is closely bound to experience and action.
It’s hard to bring principles into public discussion that critically-minded participants are not willing to accept, so scientific materialism now functions as our public orthodoxy. [em: mine]
How does this impact our current socio-political environment?
Contemporary liberalism is the political perspective that develops the ethical implications of scientific materialism. So, correspondingly, it tells us that the point of politics and morality, like the point of rational action generally, is to get what we want.And, so where does this leave us?
[snip]
Thus, the standard for morality and politics must be maximum and equal preference satisfaction. Give everyone what he wants, as much and as equally as possible.
[snip]
Such reasoning has three important consequences for contemporary liberal politics.
First, experts and markets rule. They give clear and rational answers, through clear and rational procedures. In concept, expertise should trump markets, because it is more clearly rational, but in practice it is a bit of each and the balance shifts.
Second, nothing is sacred, except the ego and its desires. If the goal is getting what we want, then everything is a resource to be used to maximize satisfactions. Physical objects, social arrangements, moral understandings, even human nature and the human body have no essence that must be respected.
Third, informal, nonrationalized arrangements like historical community, particular culture, and the family, that mostly run themselves in their own way and cannot be supervised by neutral experts, cannot be allowed to affect social life.
They’re irrational and at odds with the system of universal equal freedom to which liberalism aspires.
The short answer is that it doesn’t work in the long run. You can’t formalize things to that degree.
Human life runs mostly by implicit knowledge (otherwise known as habit and prejudice). Similarly, social organization depends on informal ties that are irrational from the modern point of view.
If loyalty is treated as a personal taste, or as a means to an end, which is what now counts as rational motivation, it’s not loyalty anymore. Political modernity takes time to transform inherited ways, but as the process approaches completion society becomes less and less functional.
[snip]
From a liberal standpoint, pre-rational loyalty is simply irrational, and a rational agent can’t choose irrationality as his habitual way of supporting his own system of action.
What conservatism needs, then, is a non-modern understanding of reason—of what makes sense. Otherwise conservatives will always be playing defense, with no clear idea what the game is about.
In other words, attempts to defend conservative cultural traditions (gay marriage anyone?) cannot succeed if one confines oneself to merely arguing on a pure coldly rational basis, since the tradition itself did not come into existence on purely rational terms. It is a sort of category error in a sense.
But, it was his final move that struck me as interesting and possibly provocative:
Edmund Burke suggests traditionalism as the way to take hold of things that can’t otherwise be pinned down and made clear. In addition to what we can demonstrate right now, we can rely on the experience and perceptions of all the ages, as crystallized in the settled outlook of our own community.
Unfortunately, Burke’s suggestion taken simply is not enough. That approach depends on things being settled, and political modernity unsettles things. Taken straight, traditionalism reduces to the stand-pat view: stick with however things happen to be here and now.
We need a more definite reference point. So where do we get a reference point that’s sufficiently independent of the status quo and enables us to orient our actions toward transcendent goods, truths and essences that we can’t completely grasp?
Religion is the obvious source. You can pretty much define religion as a scheme of orientation toward goods and truths we can neither do without nor understand completely. The acceptance of such a scheme is called faith. The future of any conservatism worth bothering about must therefore have something to do with religion.
In essence, can one argue for the value of something that cannot be reduced to a quantitative cost/benefit trade-off without resorting to the God trump card? Kalb says no, or at least not successfully in our current cultural context.
Not being a philosophy student myself, I am not necessarily armed to contest his claim. In other words, I believe myself to be an ethical person (or at least strive to be so), but I am also certain that I could not rationally defend a withering attack on the value of all of the moral and political sentiments that I hold solely through appeals to logic and science alone either.
Maybe I just choose to call my own dogma by a different name.
Posts
8 comments:
Thanks for the comments. There's more on the topic here.
It seems to me that Warren's original statement that leads your post is a circular argument. Am I missing something?
I guess I disagree, dear Gingerman, with the suggestion that Kalb's discussion lends something provocative to the Big Question at issue here. Yes, perhaps he is correct in his claim that "current views of [reason] need to be expanded," as he writes in his response to your post. And yet his argument ends up rehearsing precisely the reductive, dyadic categories that habitually animate the attempt to turn religion into reason.
What troubles me first about his claims is that they set up a closed either-or paradigm: where scientific materialism fails, only religion can succeed; where empiricism cannot produce answers, only religion can. Kalb repeats this in his response to your post, in which he states, "As to God, it seems to me we can't make sense of our situation without Him." This argument may seem intuitive from a position that takes religious belief a priori as a set of truths, but from an extra-religious perspective it is little more than a rehearsal of the same dyadic structure that declares that atheists can have no moral foundation. If it is true, as it surely is, that human beings find moral guidance outside of the paradigms of either religious belief or self-serving political liberalism (another formulation of Kalb's that I would contest), then it must also be true that religion is not the sole locus of information about how we should live in the world.
I also find the claim that "You can pretty much define religion as a scheme of orientation toward goods and truths we can neither do without nor understand completely" somewhat disingenuous (though in the usual way that these arguments are). Perhaps this is in part what religion is, but it is surely other things as well, including a set of dogmatic claims about the physical and metaphysical worlds. Moreover, those claims are totalizing and absolute: God is or is not, and religion's answers to What Is informs more than simply morality. It informs basic metaphysics: Is there a being in the universe who can read my thoughts? When I die what happens to me? These are questions about the nature of capital-R Reality that religion purports to answer. And the answers it provides do more than enforce notions of the good and the true. They fantasize knowledge that no human epistemological system, scientific or otherwise, can responsibly provide.
Not surprisingly, I don't see the talk the way Alice does.
It's hard to give a whole theory of reason, knowledge, reality and the good, together with its complete justification, in 15 minutes. That's why at the beginning I said I was using bold strokes and at the end I said that my talk raised lots of questions that would have to be explored at great length.
With that in mind, I don't see where I narrow the possibilities arbitrarily. Not answering all questions immediately is not the same as claiming no questions are possible.
The basic thought seems fairly simple: if the attempt to make knowledge fully articulate and demonstrable fails, as it seems it inevitably does, then knowledge will have to involve "a scheme of orientation toward goods and truths we can neither do without nor understand completely."
But that seems equivalent to saying that our knowledge and therefore our whole way of life has to rely on faith in some sort of order of being and value that transcends us. I don't find it misleading, let alone disingenuous, to refer to that kind of faith as religious in nature.
In order for that faith to serve its function it must of course become more particular in what it says about the physical, moral and metaphysical worlds. Since it has to enable us to place ourselves in the world, what it says will be taken as a description of how the world is.
That's life. As someone said, we see through a glass darkly, and what we see we understand as the world itself. To deny the essential role of faith in how we understand things is I think to avoid issues that can't be avoided. I don't see dealing with our situation as best we can as a matter of irresponsible fantasy.
I follow Jim's argument here until the statement that "our knowledge and therefore our whole way of life has to rely on faith in some sort of order of being and value that transcends us." There is nothing inherently problematic about this. What's problematic is that religious belief does not merely inculcate an "order of being and value"; rather, it imagines a specific being, a consciousness, a divine subjectivity. This actual being--especially when "He" is anthropomorphized, capitalized, and ventriloquized--is rather a different thing than merely an "order of being," which even agnostics like myself can buy into. And it is this slippage from an abstract order into a specific divine Person--one who can only be constructed of imagined components--that is troubling.
Why is it troubling? Because of precisely the process Jim describes here: faith cannot function without becoming a totalizing system. If it isn't positivist and totalizing, it doesn't serve the needs of those who believe. But there's the rub: the originary impetus is the believer's needs, and as Jim suggests, religious systems of thought develop to serve those needs. He writes, "Since it has to enable us to place ourselves in the world, what it says will be taken as a description of how the world is." The key here is that the "it" that "enables" and the "it" that "says" does not lie outside ourselves. That "it"--religion--is a system of our devising, a structure through which we speak to ourselves. The system is therefore fundamentally circular and self-referential, always pointing back to what we want and need to believe (i.e., the imperative--the "has to"--of Jim's sentence). At the same time, it can have no efficacy as such and therefore must purport to refer to something else, something transcendent and outside ourselves. And yet we're the ones who invented it and who fill in its blanks with our own imaginings.
None of this would be particularly problematic if it were only true at the level of the individual believer. What do I care what someone else thinks about life after death? Again, however, religion's totalizing structure means that its fantasies become something we all have to contend with. When someone else's metaphysical notions force themselves into the public forum vis-a-vis policy-making, which they inevitably do, then we are all affected by religion's particular way of "dealing with the situation." And that way has no greater purchase on the truth than any other.
The simplest answer to Alice is tu quoque: welcome to the human condition.
Every human being has to live his own life. That means he's going to need--and all normally functional human beings will actually have--an understanding of the totality of his circumstances that he considers generally sufficient to tell him what beliefs and actions make sense. That understanding will tell him, for example, when to follow impulse, how to choose among several plausible courses of action, when to deny impulse for the sake of some higher good, what those higher goods are, and so on.
Beyond that, every society must have some sort of system of law backed by compulsion. That means there's going to be some authoritative understanding of the totality in which people live and move and have their being that justifies telling them what to do and what not to do, what they must sacrifice for what ends, and why it's right to back up such commands by force--including deadly force if need be.
In the case of a society with a system of law and compulsion that extends to the whole of life, like the modern Western state with its huge budgets, huge bureaucracies, and general responsibility for the well-being of all citizens and for that matter non-citizens, the authoritative common understanding is going to be quite comprehensive. It's going to have to tell us how children should be educated, what family relations should be like, how people should regard the historical and cultural connections that make them what they are, and so on.
With all that in mind, why is "religion" uniquely totalizing? Suppose a state or superstate, the EU for example, were set up based on equal freedom as the highest standard. If I walk down the street and look at someone funny, that helps construct the setting in which he is forced to live out his life. It violates his equal freedom. So if equal freedom is the highest standard, and there's no higher standard to limit it, the government is going to have to tell me how I should look at people--in other words, what my attitudes regarding human life in its various forms should be.
The highest standard always totalizes. The point of religion it to make the highest standard transcendent and put it in higher hands and therefore make it not fully knowable by us. Without religion the highest standard becomes something fully knowable that demands concrete practical enforcement. For that reason rejection of religion turns totalization, which is a necessary feature of human thought, to totalitarianism. That, I think, is the lesson of the 20th century.
Jim--I think the basic premises upon which much of your response here is founded invite interrogation.
First, it's not the case that the human condition compels us to totalize. It compels some people to totalize. An example: an evangelist of a local church shows up at my door and tries to engage me in a conversation about who I think created the universe. I respond, "I don't know." This person then insists that she does know and asks me if I wouldn't like to know too. I tell her that I don't believe this is something I can know and that my spiritual work is accepting that I do not and cannot know. This is agnosticism, and it is precisely an anti-totalizing impulse. The world is an incoherent place. We don't all always need to make it make sense. It can't be the case then that all human beings "need [...] an understanding of the totality of [their] circumstances" or that totalization is "a necessary feature of human thought."
Second, you suggest that governments--or perhaps more broadly, the philosophical foundations of government--are no less totalizing than religion. Government functions to organize human beings' relationships to one another in social and political space. It makes no attempt--except when muddled with religion--to organize interior space, to map the inner landscape of human experience. Religion tells us that even our thoughts are subject to scrutiny. Moreover, we are bound to its dictates and organizing principles before and after death--for eternity, in fact. And it's not just us but the whole universe. This is what it means to be totalizing. The modern Western state is not involved in this kind of business.
Which leads me to my final point: since it is religion and not secular government that seeks to organize every aspect of human experience--interior, exterior, physical, spiritual, pre-natal, post-mortem--I find your concluding point about secularism and totalitarianism nothing short of ironic. Was the Medieval Catholic Church not as totalitarian an institution as human civilization has ever seen? What about modern fundamentalist Islam? Or even Stalinism, which sacralized and transcendentalized the state, turning it into precisely the generator of meaning and purpose by which you define religion.
Perhaps we're using the terms "totalizing" and "totalitarian" differently. Totalitarianism is more than simply the hegemony of ideas that one doesn't like.
It's certainly important to explore basic premises, although "interrogate" sounds alarming. It makes it sound like some state security agency is going to do the exploration.
Anyway, here are some premises, definitions etc.:
Life demands that we make decisions, and when the decisions affect others we try to explain them by reference to general principles. It's antisocial and irrational not to do so. So in the course of living we think through issues, resolve conflicts, and end up with general principles explaining social life, obligations, the highest good, and so on.
More generally, to function competently as human beings we have to size up, categorize, and know how to deal with almost everything around us pretty much instantly. Our ability to do so lets us devote thought to the few situations out of the myriad connections in which we find ourselves at each moment that remain problematic. The point of thinking about such situations is normally to make them less problematic, so that they become part of the general run of situations we handle more or less automatically.
For such reasons thought tends toward comprehensive systematic coherence.
I referred to that as the totalizing tendency of human thought. The tendency goes pretty far I think. There's much more order and unity in how people go about things than meets the eye. Think about grammar--it's extremely orderly, and necessary for making sense of the spoken and written word, but not something people are normally aware of. The same applies to other aspects of how we make sense of things.
It may be that using "totalizing" to describe that situation is confusing. The word's derogatory, so it refers more often to something a bit different, to the practice of forcing a unity on things based on some specific concrete principle that's picked out and arbitrarily treated as ultimate. There's an implication that the favored principle isn't adequate, so the resulting order is tyrannical and rides roughshod over important considerations.
"Totalitarian" would then refer to an extreme of that process. That word emphasizes the use of force and the suppression of things that are humanly important. It also seems to emphasize rigid central control and fundamental irrationality. The basic principle and what it demands are totally controlled by some small group, what's demanded is radically at odds with how people normally act and look at things, and the whole scenario doesn't make much sense given human nature and the things people usually consider on reflection to be worth doing.
It seems to me that as so defined totalization and totalitarianism are specific features of the modern period. Modern thought emphasizes clarity, explicit rationality, and enthusiastic wielding of Occam's Razor. So it likes to try to extract all needed conclusions out of a very few limited and definite premises. That process results in insistence on treating inadequate premises as sufficient for all purposes.
(The modern age is not the only age that's done that. Totalization and totalitarianism also popped up during the Warring States period in China. Mohism and Legalism were much like socialism and fascism.)
So how do you keep the natural human tendency to see the world as a totality from sliding into totalization and totalitarianism?
It seems to me the way we keep from sliding into a bad totality it to view the highest principle as transcendent: to recognize it as something we depend on and doesn't depend on us, but we can't fully grasp or understand. If we view the highest principle that way though then any orderly way of dealing with it that's definite enough to serve the purposes of human life will involve faith and dogma, and will take on the features of religion.
So much for the autointerrogation. I've mostly repeated myself, so my answers are at least consistent. As to your particular objections:
1. Of course there are things you leave undecided or consider unknowable. That's true of everyone. Paul said that we see through a glass darkly. Aquinas said that we can't know God's essence in this life. The Fourth Lateran Council said that God is incomprehensible, and created things (analogy to which gives us our only positive knowledge of God) are more unlike God than like him. I should point out though, that in general liberal modernity doesn't consider the question of origins dispensable and so rejects alternate explanations.
2. The liberal claim that it limits its jurisdiction and leaves the inner self free doesn't make much sense. Man is social. A belief that has no effect on social and political space isn't much of a belief. And a government that takes on responsibility for education from childhood on, and feels called upon to adjust how people regard the constituents of their own identity (sex, family, religious ties and standards, ancestral and cultural connections and loyalties) isn't going to leave a lot untouched. Again, I repeat myself.
3. Medieval Christendom was far from totalitarian. Political and social authority were radically decentralized. Spiritual and political authority were distinguished, separated, and often practically opposed. Both were understood--by their holders as well as others--to be based on and limited by prior law that was publicly known. Church officials were mostly chosen locally and by locals, who were often secular bigwigs. It's true you could get prosecuted for blasphemy and heresy, but in effect the same is true in most of the West today due to laws against hate speech, holocaust denial, etc. The penalties are milder, as they are with respect to other crimes, but the regime of enforcement is much more comprehensive and fine-grained.
4. You can call Stalinism a religion if you want. I'm sympathetic to the usage, since it seems to me there's always something that functions as a religion. I'd call contemporary advanced liberalism a religion as well. As to Islam, I'd say it has problems. God's absolute transcendence means that our only way of knowing him is through a particular text in a human language, which seems to put the ultimate standard for things wholly in our hands. So you tend to end up with the same problems of self-contained self-referential absolutism that you find in secular modernity.
Post a Comment