From the Atlantic Monthly March 2003: Read this as follow up to all those
postings we�ve shared about the influence of religion on contemporary
geopolitics and the sociology that it represents. Note that Saddam Hussein
and Osama Bin Laden are mentioned by name more than once and that the author
refers to foreign policy not domestic. �
KWC
Ideas
Kicking
the Secularist Habit
A
six-step program
by
David Brooks
Like a lot of people these days, I'm a
recovering secularist. Until September 11 I accepted the notion that as the
world becomes richer and better educated, it becomes less religious.
Extrapolating from a tiny and unrepresentative sample of humanity (in Western
Europe and parts of North America), this theory holds that as history moves
forward, science displaces dogma and reason replaces unthinking obedience. A
region that has not yet had a reformation and an enlightenment, such as the
Arab world, sooner or later will.
It's now clear that the secularization
theory is untrue. The human race does not necessarily get less religious as it
grows richer and better educated. We are living through one of the great
periods of scientific progress and the creation of wealth. At the same time,
we are in the midst of a religious boom.
Islam is surging. Orthodox Judaism is
growing among young people, and Israel has gotten more religious as it has
become more affluent. The growth of Christianity surpasses that of all other
faiths. In 1942 this magazine published an essay called "Will the Christian Church
Survive?" Sixty years later there are two billion Christians
in the world; by 2050, according to some estimates, there will be three
billion. As Philip Jenkins, a Distinguished Professor of History and Religious
Studies at Pennsylvania State University, has observed, perhaps the most
successful social movement of our age is Pentecostalism (see "The Next
Christianity," October Atlantic). Having gotten its start in
Los Angeles about a century ago, it now embraces 400 million people�a number
that, according to Jenkins, could reach a billion or more by the half-century
mark.
Moreover, it is the denominations that
refuse to adapt to secularism that are growing the fastest, while those that
try to be "modern" and "relevant" are withering. Ecstatic forms of
Christianity and "anti-modern" Islam are thriving. The Christian population in
Africa, which was about 10 million in 1900 and is currently about 360 million,
is expected to grow to 633 million by 2025, with conservative, evangelical,
and syncretistic groups dominating. In Africa churches are becoming more
influential than many nations, with both good and bad effects.
Secularism is not the future; it is
yesterday's incorrect vision of the future. This realization sends us
recovering secularists to the bookstore or the library in a desperate attempt
to figure out what is going on in the world. I suspect I am not the only one
who since September 11 has found himself reading a paperback edition of the
Koran that was bought a few years ago in a fit of high-mindedness but was
never actually opened. I'm probably not the only one boning up on the
teachings of Ahmad ibn Taymiyya, Sayyid Qutb, and Muhammad ibn Abd
al-Wahhab.
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2003/03/brooks.htm
Then, consider this from the Spring 2002
Wilson Quarterly, John Rawls
and the Liberal Faith by Peter Berkowitz:
�Over
the centuries, however, the liberal tradition has also drawn strength from
religion. Locke viewed the law of reason�a moral law that he regarded as
universal and objective�as an _expression_ of God�s eternal order. He also
argued that religion, no less than reason, taught toleration. In the 19th
century, Alexis de Tocqueville argued that liberal democracy in America
depended on the vitality of the people�s religious faith. Hegel sought to show
that the liberal state is Christianity in secular and political form. Today,
even as the United States wages a worldwide war against religiously inspired
terrorism, religion remains a powerful force within America itself.
Yet
at the heart of the liberal idea a question remains: Is it reasonable for a
liberal to be religious? Can it be reasonable to claim to put freedom first
while also binding oneself to a system of theological notions about where we
come from, what we are, and how we ought to live? Such doubts have a
distinguished pedigree in the liberal tradition, and they have impelled many
contemporary liberals to regard religion with intense suspicion, if not
outright hostility.
In the old quarrel between liberalism and religion,
John Rawls, the preeminent academic moral philosopher of the last 50 years,
has often seemed to encourage the view that while liberals must tolerate
religious faith, it would be unreasonable for them to profess it. But with the
publication at the end of his career of his Lectures on the History of Moral
Philosophy (2000), Rawls�s most searching examination of liberalism�s
foundations, he provides reasons to believe that far from being the antithesis
of freedom, religious faith of a certain sort may be the basis of our respect
for freedom, the very thing that renders our respect
rational.
�
In an instructive phrase in the Lectures, Rawls says that Kant�s moral
philosophy aspires to the ideal of an "aristocracy of all." This calls to mind
John Stuart Mill�s vision of a society of sovereign individuals, as well as
the Protestant notion of a "priesthood of all believers." All
three notions are variations on a venerable modern theme: the harmonization of
a substantial human equality with a sweeping individual
freedom.
It is not hard to understand the aspiration to an aristocracy of all. But can
a person�s human desire for distinction be satisfied in a society in which
everybody is recognized as an aristocrat, sovereign, or priest? What are the
practical effects on our hearts and minds of the conviction that each person
is supreme? And what are the implications for moral psychology, or how the
moral life is actually lived, of a form of moral reasoning that authorizes all
individuals to conceive of themselves as laying down universal laws? These are
some of the intriguing questions�seldom raised by his colleagues and
students�that Rawls�s probing classroom lectures ought to provoke among those
who wish to assess the reasonableness of Rawlsian liberalism.
In the
universities, at a time when most philosophy professors were engaged in
dry-as-dust conceptual analysis, John Rawls gave new life to a certain
progressive interpretation of classical liberalism. His philosophical labors,
which were devoted to clarifying the structure of liberal thought, brought to
light, in some cases unwittingly, stresses and strains, fissures and flaws,
and ironic twists and turns in the liberal spirit. Nowhere was this more true
than in relation to liberalism�s foundations.
Rawls�s thinking
culminated with a series of books in which he defended the idea of a
"political conception of justice." This was supposed to be a
free-standing
liberalism,
a liberalism resting solely on Americans� shared intuitions about freedom and
equality. From
these shared intuitions, Rawls tried to derive fair terms of social
cooperation, the constitutional ground rules under which it would be
reasonable for free and equal citizens to choose to live. But is the intuition
that we are free and equal a freestanding truth of reason?
Or
is it a belief that is also nurtured by religious faith?
While many of Rawls�s followers regard it as bad manners (at best) to raise
such a question, we now know, thanks to his recently published lectures, that
Rawls himself raised the question and saw something serious at stake in how it
was answered.
In trying to come to grips with the foundations of
liberalism, Rawls offers conflicting ideas. On the one hand, he holds that the
founding moral intuitions are self-evident. On the other, he holds that they
rest on faith. Yet if good arguments can be made on behalf of both
propositions, then by definition the moral intuitions cannot be self-evident.
What is evident is the doubt about how precisely to understand liberalism�s
moral foundations. So at minimum it is reasonable to pursue the fecund thought
that Rawls�s freestanding liberalism actually stands on an act of faith.
Perhaps Rawls�s conflicting accounts can be reconciled, as in the Declaration
of Independence, through the idea that a certain faith impels us to hold as
self-evident the truth that all people are by nature free and equal.
No
one is saying that liberalism requires you to be religious or that religious
people are more amply endowed with the liberal spirit. But for those who care
about understanding liberalism, a more precise knowledge of its foundations
should be welcome. And as a practical matter, for those who care about freedom
and equality, knowledge of the foundations of the truths we have long held to
be self-evident can contribute to our ability to cultivate the conditions
under which we can keep our grip on them firm.�
(WQ requires a subscription. Contact me if
you want this in full Word doc � the FW filter declined to fwd it. Also, if you want the shorter Brooks
piece in Word doc.)
