[MD] Theocracy, Secularism, and Democracy

[Matt Kundert]

Hey Steve,

Steve said:
Militant secularists (like Rawls and Rorty and probably lots of people 
you know) want to further the secularization of government at the 
expense of religious freedom (and freedom of speech) by promoting 
limits on what is acceptable in political reason-giving.

Matt:
Hmm, I remain unconvinced that "secularism" is not the label for me 
(and Rawls, Rorty, you and Stout).  Consider, for example, people 
who yell "Fire!" in theatres: should we not promote limits on what is 
acceptable speech in theatres to avoid stampedes?  The argument is 
Stanley Fish's, from There's No Such Thing as Free Speech (and It's 
a Good Thing, Too): "freedom of speech" is a negotiated area of 
discourse in which some things are allowed in and others are not, 
at _all_ times.  Unless you assimilate "freedom" to "chaos" 
(something like a distinction between the Hobbesian state of nature 
from the Millian state of negative liberty), you can only create a 
space of freedom by demarcating it from an area of non-freedom.  
One way we do this is to say that there are some freedoms you 
don't get until you're 18.  Or, by being a citizen.

Should we not promote limits on what is acceptable in political 
reason-giving?  Isn't saying that you farted the morning of Nov. 2, 
2004, and your bad gas caused you to vote for George W. Bush be 
ruled as unacceptable?  Isn't an area of unacceptable reasons the 
area in which we hope children we train in good reasoning skills do 
not flirt?  This area is always negotiated, but it is an area you _do_ 
have to promote, in the form of cultural reproduction.  But if we 
stretch out the terms of description, so that the culture Rawls and 
Rorty are trying to promote looks like a curtailment of freedom, 
doesn't you _not_ teaching your child to believe in God or Allah 
_also_ function as a curtailment on free speech?

I'm not convinced that we've found the right way to handle Rawls 
and Rorty, on the one side, and Harris and Dawkins, on the other.  
I think there's a big distinction between the two.  I doubt Dick and 
Mary Rorty taught their children to believe in God, but I also doubt 
Dick would have tried stamping it out if they had started leaning that 
way.  Rorty's admiration for the Wordsworthian God of Whitehead and 
Hartshorne (that he could never quite find his way to believing), and 
his commendatory explications of James' Will to Believe, need to be 
balanced against Dawkinsian cultural aggression.

If we acknowledge that you have the right to say anything you please, 
do we also need to take it seriously?  Shouldn't there be a space 
between promoting a culture you want to see reproduced in the 
future and leaving people alone when they're not actively trying to 
reproduce their culture in you and your children?  And shouldn't there 
be a further distinction between future-oriented cultural promotion 
and present-oriented political discourse?  I think the muddiness of 
philosophical discussion on this topic might be clarified if we 
distinguish between these valences: it will still be muddy because our 
troubles revolve around how to negotiate between the areas on both 
sides of the distinctions.  Because if we don't make these distinctions, 
am I then being inconsistent by (eventually) not teaching my children 
to be good Christians and _not_ going out to the street corner after 
work every day and standing on a soapbox urging people to give up 
belief in God?  Shouldn't we _not_ assimilate those two things?  And 
if we don't, isn't there room for thinking that political discussion is 
not best done in certain terms and _not_ also thinking that God is a 
delusion?

Matt