LISTEN. Looking forward to the TPA this weekend, and specifically to the Saturday morning session (10 am, Furman 217: "Secularistic But Not Secular? An Analysis of the Philosophy of William Connolly" by William J. Meyer) where I'm supposed to have something to say about the distinction between secularity and secularism.
My first and probably over-hasty impulse is to say the distinction likely will strike most non-academics as scholastic in the worst sense, angels-on-pinheads scholastic... in other words, hair-splitting, trivializing, and (just a week after we feted the esteemed author of The Relevance of Philosophy to Life a literal stones-throw away) less than urgent at this particularly troublesome moment in the life of the nation and planet.
My conversation yesterday, during a pleasant noontime campus stroll with a former colleague who happens also to be a divinity student and who identifies as secular, persuaded me that there may be something vitally relevant at stake in the distinction. Nothing less than the possibility of sustaining democracy (if that's still on the American table, and if Rob Talisse has not yet trademarked that expression) may hinge on secularists getting the distinction right and then applying it widely in our civic discourse.
So that's what I'm working on today, understanding the distinction and trying to see why it might matter. Urgently.
I volunteered for this gig because of my own great interest in the general topic, if not yet necessarily in the 'ity/'ism distinction. Last semester in the Atheism and Philosophy course we read Andrew Copson's fine Secularism: A Very Short Introduction, as well as his Little Book of Humanism. The latter summarizes my own view pretty accurately:
Here’s a secret that more and more people are discovering: you don’t need religion to live a good life. The natural world is wonderful enough, without having to imagine a supernatural or divine dimension to it. And our natural human capacities for reason, kindness and love are all we need to live well and with meaning.
Throughout history there have been non-religious people who have believed that this life is the only life we have, that the universe is a natural phenomenon with no supernatural side, and that we can live ethical and fulfilling lives – using reason and humanity to guide us. These people have looked to scientific evidence and reason to understand the world. And they’ve placed human welfare and happiness – as well as the welfare of other sentient animals – at the heart of how they choose to live their life..
There are more humanists today than ever before, as the influence of religion wanes around the world. And many religious people are finding humanist ideas appealing – and religions themselves are changing as a result.
Humanism is a positive approach to life which has underpinned many of the humanitarian revolutions as well as the drive for equality over the last few centuries. That is something we should celebrate.
I do call myself a humanist, and because I also call myself a pragmatic pluralist and secularist I acknowledge that while I don't believe I need a religion to live a good life, others think they do. I respect their right to think so, and to express their thought in public.
What I don't respect or accept is my right or theirs to impose any particular variety of religion or irreligion on others. We can talk about it, of course. We can air our differences in public, we can speak and dine and dress differently etc. etc. It's still a free country, last time I checked.
But what we can't do, mustn't do in a free, diverse, and aspirantly-pluralistic democracy, is use the public sphere and its institutions, especially the public schools, to favor one variety of religion or irrelegion over all the others and try to coerce universal obeisance thereto. That's secularism as I have understood it.
Now my immediate TPA task is to see if my old understanding must yield to something in that ity/'ism distinction that matters for the fate of democracy in America. That's not scholastic or pinheady at all.
A confession: I'd never heard of William Connolly. Neither, apparently, had Andrew Copson or the editors of the big fat Oxford Handbook of Secularism (but contributor James Arthur does include Connolly's Why I Am Not a Secularist, 1999, in the bibliography of his "Secular Education and Religion").
So thanks, Bill, for introducing me.
Thursday, October 27, 2022
Secular, spiritual, AND transcendent
Anticipating the TPA this weekend, I went walking with an old BBC podcast episode from the Free Thinking program called Culture Wars: Secularism vs. Religion. Parts were illuminating and entertaining, notwithstanding the annoying habit of British intellectuals of talking rudely over each other and making it difficult for listeners who want to be edified by spirited dialogue to hear all of what was actually said. Do they teach that at Eton and Oxford? Seems like the radio presenter/moderators would know better. What's the point of an audio conversation that can't actually be adequately audited?
The lone American in the conversation, Dan Dennett, more than held his own. I share his view that commitment to secularism in a pluralistic democracy entails robust public dialogue but does not allow any "trump cards" to end or resolve discussion. Faith cards don't take the hand. Neither do No Faith cards. Matters of state and of public policy, though not of public dialogue, are rightly walled and separated from private and personal convictions. All can speak their views, none can properly impose or insist on them in a coercive way. President Obama was making this point when he said "the religiously motivated must translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific values. Their proposals must be subject to argument and reason, and should not be accorded any undue automatic respect." (Copson, 87) Same goes in reverse, of course. The irreligiously motivated must also translate their concerns.
Dennett affirms the non-oxymoronic reality of secular spirituality...
[T]o affirm the secular is to affirm the value of life in the world and to affirm a public discourse rooted in reason and experience rather than authority...[T]he term secularism (and its cognate secularistic) denotes a specific type of substantive worldview, namely one that affirms the meaning of existence as being wholly immanent within the world. Just as all 'isms tend to absolutize what they affirm, so too secularism absolutizes the secular’s affirmation of the value of life in the world into a full-blown philosophical absolute—one that posits that life in the world is its own ground of meaning and value. Differently stated, secularism denies any form of transcendence, including any form of theism; the ground of existence, it insists, lies wholly within the world itself. Consequently, secularism likewise has no place in public discourse for any theistic or metaphysical claims—as if the ground of existence could be anything other than the given world itself. As William Connolly puts it, “secularism strains metaphysics out of politics” (see, for example, Richard Rorty’s essay: “Religion as Conversation-stopper”). So, secularism seeks to affirm the value of life in the world by attempting to make life in the world its own basis and ground. By denying any notion of transcendence, one is inclined to say that secularism assumes that all existence is contingent—that there neither is nor can be any form of necessary existence.
That's from Meyer's TPA presentation last year, to which the session at hand will stand as sequel. The bold emphasis is mine, because I wish to challenge the claims that all 'isms necessarily "absolutize" and that secularism necessarily renounces transcendence.
Transcendence is a slippery term. Like James's tree-hugging squirrel, it eludes us until we pin it with a working definition. Mine begins with Peter Ackroyd's clever line in The Plato Papers: "transcendence or trans-end-dance: the ability to move beyond the end, otherwise called the dance of death." There's nothing more natural in the world than death, and nothing more restorative of life than the ability to come to terms with it.
My William James's "Springs of Delight": The Return to Life (VU Press, 2001) explicitly affirms the reality of a kind of naturalized transcendence that is available to the secular, pragmatic, naturalistic, and/or humanistic sensibility, and that enables the owners of such sensibilities to come to amicable terms with their mortality.
Transcendence may seem to be about God, or it may be sacredly secular and humanistic. Secular, humanistic, and sacred? Those who find "secular humanism" intrinsically profane will not grasp, as James did, the possibility of this triple yoking. Dewey also affirmed this possibility, as do many liberals, Unitarian Universalists, and other "progressive" minorities in our time. Habit and convention, not empirical perspicacity, decree that public-spirited and earth-centered secularists must disavow a spiritual life.
Transcendence may be cosmic or quotidian, reserved or refined, proselytizing or private. It may suggest supernaturalism, but it need not; indeed, one of my aims here is to strengthen the claims that, for a Jamesian, transcendence need not imply the supernatural and that strictly speaking, and in the spirit of James, it need not involve the transcendence of nature.
Transcendence may be strictly transient, momentary, and isolated, an experience discontinuous in each instance of its occurrence with the larger rhythms, patterns, and meanings of the lives it graces. Alternatively, it can compose the largest meaning in one's life, the pattern of a lifetime.
Transcendence may be a fruition, an experience of conclusion--"consummatory," in John Dewey's language--or it may be less punctuated and more persistently enduring. Dewey himself wrote a great deal about consummatory transcendence, but the latter sort, transcendence of a more stolid and stoical kind, suggests the consistent pattern and meaning of Dewey's long life's work (perhaps more than that of any other American philosopher). His gravestone paean to "the continuous human community in which we are a link" summarizes that pattern and meaning with simple but powerful eloquence.
Transcendence might strike like a bolt from the blue or be more like the almost imperceptibly accretive sands on a beach. It may be an event in life, small or staggering. It may be a dispositional attitude toward life that raises one's sea-level of happiness and the quality of experience in general, attuning the sensibilities to notice and appreciate a transcendent dimension of events that more somber natures miss. Or it may be the pessimist's prayer of salvation, his escape from an immanent existence he finds all too oppressively real.
--Springs
Against rationalism as a pretension and a method, pragmatism is fully armed and militant. But, at the outset, at least, it stands for no particular results. It has no dogmas, and no doctrines save its method. As the young Italian pragmatist Papini has well said, it lies in the midst of our theories, like a corridor in a hotel. Innumerable chambers open out of it. In one you may find a man writing an atheistic volume; in the next someone on his knees Praying for faith and strength; in a third a chemist investigating a body's properties. In a fourth a system of idealistic metaphysics is being excogitated; in a fifth the impossibility of metaphysics is being shown.
But they all own the corridor, and all must pass through it if they want a practicable way of getting into or out of their respective rooms.
No particular results then, so far, but only an attitude of orientation, is what the pragmatic method means. The attitude of looking away from first things, principles, 'categories,' supposed necessities; and of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts. Pragmatism, lecture 2
As for Rorty's conversation-stopping metaphysical strainer: yes, Rorty also has a room on the corridor. Maybe even a suite. But it's a long corridor, and we all must share it. Absolutists are among us, but they're clearly the worst tenants. And after reading and discussing his Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism in the Atheism class last winter, I'm persuaded that Rorty was not himself an absolutist with respect to secularity/'ism. Nor are most secular academics. We're far more likely to encounter absolutists among some of our students and (especially) their parents.
[W]e do our best to convince these students of the benefits of secularization. We assign first-person accounts of growing up homosexual to our homophobic students for the same reasons that German schoolteachers in the postwar period assigned The Diary of Anne Frank…The racist or fundamentalist parents of our students say that in a truly democratic society the students should not be forced to read books by such people—black people, Jewish people, homosexual people. They will protest that these books are being jammed down their children's throats. I cannot see how to reply to this charge without saying something like 'There are credentials for admission to our democratic society, credentials which we liberals have been making steadily more stringent by doing our best to excommunicate racists, male chauvinists, homophobes, and the like. You have to be educated in order to be a citizen of our society, a participant in our conversation, someone with whom we can envisage merging our horizons. So we are going to go right on trying to discredit you in the eyes of your children, trying to strip your fundamentalist religious community of dignity, trying to make your views seem silly rather than discussable. We are not so inclusivist as to tolerate intolerance such as yours.'
Is that absolutism? Or is it simply an acknowledgement that no sane polity can sustain itself when it turns a blind eye to the intolerant racists (etc.) in its midst. Yes, they'll speak their piece in the public square and in the corridor. If we value a free and open society, we'll answer them vigorously.
The corridor is here. It contains chambers whose occupants look to the heavens for transcendence, but just across the hall we find secular sinners and saints. Nature is global. In fact it's cosmic. Transcendent spirituality of every sort, including but not limited to the supernatural, is a natural expression of human aspiration.
We'll talk about it in the 2d floor corridor of Furman Hall (and room 217, at 10) Saturday morning. Like a good pragmatist, I am indeed looking forward.
Friday, October 28, 2022
While we're here
If a secularist criticizes secular discourse, must we then distinguish secular(ity) from secularism?
I'd have thought it might be more to the point simply to question and critique the particular instances of discourse that prompted the criticism. "Secularisms are in fact plural." (Copson, 80) But maybe that's as pedantic as the seeming scholasticism it aims to skirt. Philosophers love to draw distinctions in any event, so let's let a hundred distinctions bloom.
The political philosopher William Connolly rejects what he sees as the stridency of Bertrand Russell's atheism, and announces his rejection in Why I Am Not a Secularist. Perhaps he should have announced instead that he's not a Russellian secularist. But a rose is still a rose, etc.
I've indicated my concerns about denying secular spirituality and transcendence. Here I want mostly to indicate points of assent with Bill Meyer's analysis, which I think generally coheres with my own sense that pragmatists in the tradition of William James, John Dewey, and perhaps Richard Rorty can simultaneously stump for their own preferred visions of the secular/spiritual while also making space on the pragmatist corridor for other visions.
I do have to say, though, that I don't see a lot of daylight between Bill's initial characterization of the difference between "secular" and "secularism," except (as I've explained) for the repudiation of "any form of transcendence." To find the ground of existence wholly within the world seems to me a sensible secular view, with or without an 'ist attached.
...“secular” (and its cognate secularity) is defined by two main characteristics: (i) an affirmation of life in the world, and (ii) a modern commitment to using reason and common experience rather than appeals to authority as the basis for validating claims within public discourse. In contrast, the term secularism (and its cognate secularistic) denotes a specific type of substantive worldview, namely one that affirms the meaning of existence as being wholly immanent within the world. Secularism denies any metaphysical form of transcendence, including any form of theism. The ground of existence, it insists, lies wholly within the world itself.
Perhaps my failure to detect a significant difference attests to my own form of affirmation. Life in the world, guided by reason and common experience, is the very immanence of what William James called "the earth of things" I seek and value most. I do not "deny theism" for others, I simply reject it for myself. I do not deny metaphysical transcendence, but for myself I affirm naturalized transcendence. My friends across the corridor affirm differently. I accept that. We'll all still roam the same corridor, we'll discuss our differences, we'll agree to disagree. We may even agree that we're each right to affirm what we respectively and differently affirm.
Has modern secular discourse tilted too far towards reason, to the neglect of "the visceral register" of religious forms of experience (among others)? Might "An Ethos of Engagement" right the balance and "foster a generous pluralism"? That all sounds fine. "Existential yoga" sounds a little less familiar, though "stretching and reimagining [ourselves]" can't hurt. But I for one am unprepared to stretch in the direction of pathological liars, election deniers, and fascists. That's the world some of us are trying hard not to live in right now, the "post-fact, post-truth world of the 21st century." I agree with Bill, "what is needed is a broader rational tent, not a retreat from reason to the realm of the visceral..."
Returning to the theme of transcendence, I appreciate Connolly's "Deweyan-like" openness to novelty and everyday experience (etc.); but Dewey himself would not agree that this is un-metaphysical in a worrisome way. His "continuous human community" [U@d] is "an evolving all-inclusive whole" that approximates a reconstructed conception of the divine as it closes the gap between the actual and the ideal. The "passing ephemeral experience of value" is our locus of continuity with the doings and sufferings of that vast human community. It is not a small or trivial thing.
Should it concern us to imagine that the universe as a whole lacks meaning and value? Why should it, if we ourselves are generators of meaning and value? That's a big question. But though it's a big universe, we're continuous with it. If we possess meaning and value, it does too.
Should it bother us, that our "forms of agency and value" are radically immanent and thus will leave "no lasting trace"? Freud was not the only one to greet such complaints by imploring us to "grow up and face the indifferent universe..." Kant did too, to name another. That's the meaning of enlightenment, after all, to take courage and throw off our self-incurred immaturity.
Charles Hartshorne wondered what it matters that we're definitely here now, "if the universe has no way to retain the definiteness?" That's a strange question. I prefer to turn it around. What does it matter that the universe may not contain our definiteness, if we're definitely here now?
In billions of years we almost certainly will all have long since been "melted down and washed away," but Bertrand Russell was surely right:
Nobody really worries much about what is going to happen millions of years hence. Even if they think they are worrying much about that, they are really deceiving themselves. They are worried about something much more mundane, or it may merely be a bad digestion; but nobody is really seriously rendered unhappy by the thought of something that is going to happen to this world millions of years hence. Therefore, although it is of course a gloomy view to suppose that life will die out—at least I suppose we may say so, although sometimes when I contemplate the things that people do with their lives I think it is almost a consolation—it is not such as to render life miserable. It merely makes you turn your attention to other things. --"Why I Am Not a Christian"
And Annie Hall's Dr. Flicker was right too, when he told young Alvy Singer that the universe "won't be expanding for billions of years yet, Alvy. And we've gotta try to enjoy ourselves while we're here."
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