While we're here

LISTEN. 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. 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."