[MD] Theocracy, Secularism, and Democracy

[Steven Peterson]

Hi Matt,

On Thu, Aug 12, 2010 at 9:01 PM, Matt Kundert
<pirsigaffliction at hotmail.com> wrote:
> Matt:
> There's a couple things I'd like to disentangle.  The first is the last
> sentence here: you can't be talking about either Rawls or Rorty.  I
> don't recognize either one of them as thinking that religion damages
> their sensibilities.

Steve:
I think you're right. But I think that there are many of us who
construe separation of church and state to mean that we have a
Constitutional right not to be confronted with religious talk in
politics that is continually trod upon.

Rorty's final position was anti-clericalism. Rorty from A
Reconsideration: "Secularists of my sort hope that ecclesiastical
organizations will eventually wither away...Religion will, in this
secularist utopia, be pruned back to the parish level."

"Religious belief, according to the "ethics of belief" that I share
with William James, is not irrational, or intrinsically wrong-headed.
But, in the first place, putting political convictions in religious
terms gives aid and comfort to ecclesiastical organizations, and thus
to religious exclusivism, contempt for people who should be accorded
the same respect as the rest of their fellow-citizens. In the second
place, leftist politics - the sort whose sacred texts are On Liberty
and Utiliarianism - is strengthened just insofar as belief in a
providential deity who will provide pie in the sky is weakened."
...

"So we secularists have come to think that the best society would be
one in which political action conducted in the name of religious
belief is treated as a ladder up which our ancestors climbed, but one
that now should be thrown away. We grant that ecclesiastical
organizations have sometimes been on the right side, but we think that
the occasional Gustavo Guttierez or Martin Luther King does not
compensate for the ubiquitous Joseph Ratzingers and Jerry Falwells.
History suggests to us that such organizations will always, on
balance, do more harm than good. "

Rorty has moved the conversation fro a concern for religion as such to
the danger of ecclesiastical organizations. "For ecclesiastical
organizations typically maintain their existence by deliberately
creating ill-will toward people who belong to other such
organizations, and toward people whose behavior they presume to call
immoral. They thereby create unnecessary human misery. "

Rorty gave some examples to show how ecclesiastical communities have
learned "that encouraging exclusivist bigotry brings money and
power..."

Stout respond in Rorty on Religion and Politics (all Stout quotes in
this post are coming from there):
"But surely, history does not show that each and every ecclesiastical
organization has done more harm than good. King led the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference,an ecclesiastical organization that
certainly desired to have political clout, raised a lot of money to
support the cause of civil rights, and seems in retrospect to have
done muchmore good than harm. Even if we knew that most ecclesiastical
organizations havecaused more harm than good, the reasonable policy
would still be to evaluate them oneby one and to offer encouragement
to the good ones."

While Rorty has responded to Stout's anti-essentialist critique of
Rorty as opposing religion as _essentially_ a conversation stopper, he
has fallen back into arguing something similar, that ecclesiastical
organizations are _essentially_ disposed to fuel bigotry rather than
to promote freedom and justice. Stout on Rorty: "He wants to say what
such organizations “typically” do and then to oppose theinvolvement of
any such organization in politics. We have no need, however, to
frameour options in such a general and abstract way; we can easily
take one case, or one class of cases at a time."


Stout:
"In remarks given at the 2003 Annual Meeting of the American Academy
ofReligion (AAR) in Atlanta, 13 Rorty reasserts the anti-clericalism
of “Religion in thePublic Square,” but also says that he “persist[s]
in thinking that non-theists make bettercitizens than theists,” a view
that hardly limits itself to criticizing the behavior oforganizations.
Again, it is hard to see why Rorty should not be taken to be assuming
thatthe right way to approach the question of religion and politics is
to think in terms ofessential traits or tendencies: in the realm of
citizenship non-theists are essentiallydisposed to behave in a
relatively good way, whereas theists are essentially disposed tobehave
relatively poorly."

...

"It is not theists as suchwho make worse citizens than non-theists. We
have every reason to complain abouthateful theists, cruel theists,
theists who take God to be a jealous commander of vengefulcruelties,
and so on. But one should also have the same problem with hateful
non-theists,cruel non-theists, and non-theists who take the historical
dialectic to justify mass murderand the crushing of dissent. “Do
theists or non-theists make the better citizens?” is a bad question,
the sort of question a pragmatist would be expected to undermine
rather than answer."



Matt:
>That poses a problem for who we are talking
> about with respect to the community you want to label "militant
> secularists": you've been suggesting that the moniker houses
> everyone from Rawls and Rorty to Harris and Dawkins.  I think this is
> a clear indication that we are talking about two different communities,
> because while it makes sense to think that Harris and Dawkins find
> religion qua religion objectionable, it does not make sense to think
> this about Rawls and Rorty.

Steve:
True and to further muddle things, I think that Harris isn't one of
the militant secularists who say that religious reason-giving ought
not happen in politics. He wants to expose the religious
justifications rather than have them hinted at with secret code so
that politicians can pay the political price for using such lousy
justification.


Matt:
I've been trying to suggest that there is
> another community, the only one I want to defend, that does not
> include Dawkins, and that there objection is, basically, to religion qua
> politics.  I think these different communities.
>
> The way I would explicate the difference between these two
> communities is by saying that this other community, which I would
> like to call the "secularists," does _not_ think religious reasons in
> public are objectionable because "they don't convince."  There's a
> difference between finding the thought "Obama isn't leading this
> country well, so I'll vote for someone else" unconvincing and finding
> the thought "Obama doesn't love Jesus enough, so I'll vote for
> someone else" unconvincing.  The first is unconvincing because,
> though it _could_ qualify as convincing, it doesn't.  The second is
> unconvincing because it _couldn't_ convince because the premises
> of the line of reasoning are not premises you use.  It's analogous to
> speaking French to convince people to vote Republican: you might
> be making perfectly cogent points _in French_, but because the other
> person doesn't speak French, there's no hope of understanding, let
> alone convincing.  The analogy between natural languages (like
> French) and various vocabularies that function as the terms in which
> arguments get stated is basic to Rorty's philosophy, and by extension
> his moral/political philosophy.


Steve:

Rorty in response to Stout and Wolterstorff (who I should look into)
wrote "A Reconsideration" where he grants to Stout that the attempts
of Audi and Rawls to draw up "rules that are neutral between the two
sides are pretty hopeless." Rorty would not want to argue that
religious reasons aren't really reasons that couldn't be used to try
to get consensus with at least some people.


Matt:
> Religious reason-giving is not objectionable because there's
> something wrong with religion: it is objectionable because religious
> freedom means the freedom to have whatever religious background
> you want without being punished for it, and for using whatever
> religious vocabulary you want without being punished for it.

Steve:
That may be a good way to cut the issue between the types of secularists.


Matt:
>This
> creats a _culture_ in which this sector of vocabulary-formation will
> vary to a scale in which communication will be a problem.  If religion
> is a private affair, who cares?  If religion is a legitimate political
> vocabulary, then everyone must _believe_ in Jesus, Yahweh,
> Muhammed, the Buddha, Shiva, Shakespeare, Proust, and Pirsig
> (amongst much else) because the basis of legitimacy that I think we
> must work with is: can everyone use these reasons in their own
> reasoning?  Is the vocabulary in which reasons get stated a neutral
> vocabulary with respect to political problems?
>
> Tensions in how we work out "legitimacy" will certainly come up, but
> I'm not convinced that secularists are commiting anti-democratic
> fouls in the way you seem to be suggesting.


Steve:
Why does everyone need to use the same reasoning? We don't all hold
the positions we do for the same reasons. Reasons don't have to be
relevant to all of us for them to be worthy of giving. They just have
to have some hope of convincing some people who are still unconvinced.



>
> Steve said:
> Freedom of religion which is consistent with 1st amendment
> secularism is taken by the militant secularist to an extreme of
> freedom _from_ religion. We ought not have to listen to religious talk
> in politics. We have a right not to have to hear it. A couple of years
> ago I would have agreed. Now I am not so sure.
>
> Matt:
> Are we required to listen to my stories about the bad gas that caused
> me to vote for Bush?  "We ought not have to listen to religious talk in
> politics."  Stated that way, I'm not sure what the problem is.  I ought
> not to have to listen to disquisitions on Leviticus because it is
> irrelevant.  Despite the fact that I'm wont to say "good for you" when
> someone says it was God's love that led them to vote progressive, it
> is a bit of a waste of my time because it does not help _me_ figure
> out whether I should vote progressive.  It's not irrelevant to the
> orator, but the question looming in the background is "ought we take
> every reason that every person finds convincing in their own
> reasoning processes seriously?"  That fart is still lingering over this
> conversation, because the only reason I can make out that you think
> religious-reasoning should be thought _relevant_ is that _someone_
> finds it relevant.  Then what about that SBD I let out in the voting
> booth that caused everybody in the basement of the Methodist
> Church to start crying?  Everyone voted for Bush that day because,
> in a moment of historic seredipity, everyone became convinced that
> the smell of my foul, asparagus-inflected bowel emission was
> reason enough to vote Republican.  (It's about as good a reason I
> can think of.)
>
> I need another reason to find religious-reasoning relevant than that
> _someone_ finds it relevant.


Steve:

In addition to my assertion that we don't all need to be convinced by
the same reasons, here is another reason. Dewey didn't think that Kant
had uncovered the secret formula settling moral disputes, but he
thought that considering the generalizability of an action is a
commendable practice in moral deliberation. He didn't take it
seriously as a system of ethics, but he thought it still had some use.
Couldn't it also be regarded as a commendable practice to ask what
would Jesus do? How would a person who acts only out of love for
humanity and never out of personal self-interest do  in this
situation? There is a literary tradition to reference to help make a
case about what such a person would do and we can argue about an issue
in terms of the perspective of an omniscient being who created us and
who loves us all equally sinner and saint. So I think reasons rather
than farts or bare appeals to authority can be of issue when religion
enters political discourse.



Matt:
> I should say, too, that it's unclear to me why "freedom from religion"
> strikes you as wrong.  If someone wants to wage a cultural war on
> a cultural form they think should die out, that's their perogative.  You
> can then fight back if you wish.  What is illegitimate in this war is the
> use of the State, by either side.  The movement of secularism,
> however, is not that cultural war.  It may have once thought of itself
> that way, but the gerrymandered tradition of "secularism" that I
> attach to my flag and community has little to do with killing off
> religious traditions.  Freedom of religion is a freedom from religion,
> insofar as you cannot be punished for wanting to avoid the religious,
> just as the religious cannot be punished for running headlong into it.
> What secularism in politics requires, however, is that you not be
> forced to take seriously a thing which you have a right not to take
> seriously.  In legal practice, this should be a clear "no
> religious-reasoning parrading around as law."  For the 1st
> Amendment suggests that no laws can be made with a religious
> prejudice (given that no one should be punished for their religious
> beliefs).

Steve:
I would of course prefer a situation where our laws can be justified
in terms that all people can understand and support.

Rorty echoed this view:  "I doubt that there is at present a consensus
that good citizenship requires us to have non-religious bases for our
political views. I should be delighted if there were such a consensus,
because I should be delighted if the U.S. became a society which was
self-consciously and openly utilitarian in its understanding of the
purpose of legislation and public policy. If we secular humanists have
our way, the liberal democra-cies will eventually mutate into
societies whose most sacred texts were written by John Stuart Mill.
But there is a long way to go before that ideal is reached."

But given the plurality of world views, there is not much hope of
getting there any time soon. Until then if ever we will probably keep
believing (and disbelieving) many of the same things but for different
sets of reasons. Note that a utopian vision where no reasoning on
religious premises infects our laws suggests that there is something
inherently wrong with religion. And we agreed that there is nothing
_intrinsically_ wrong with religion. So how can we say that religious
reasons are inherently not as good as other reasons? Don't we need to
clarify more specifically what it is about religious reasons that is
problematic? If we can identify the issue perhaps not _all_ religious
reasons have this issue. And perhaps some of our nonreligious reasons
are infected by this issue. Their eradication ought to be part of this
utopian vision as well.



Matt:
In practical politics, it is surely less clear, but I still can't
> quite get myself past Rorty's pithy "religion is a conversation-stopper":
> nothing against religion, it's just irrelevant.

Steve:
But religion isn't essentially a conversation stopper because it isn't
_essentially_ anything. What we can retain from this is that a Rortian
view of democracy includes a duty not to stop the conversation. We
ought to keep the conversation going for as long as possible. The
aspect of many people's way of being religious that is problematic for
democracy is when faith is appealed to in conversation as though to
say, "I have no further reasoning to offer, but what I said is
nevertheless true, and I won't be convinced otherwise. There is no
point in continuing this conversation." Stopping the conversation is
what needs to be staved off for as long as possible. Those of us
committed to democracy must be committed to avoiding making this move
if we can. However, "As Stout properly reminds us," says Rorty, "this
kind of reply is not confined to the religious. It is the one I should
have to make if I were asked why I believe that the aim of political
life should be the greatest happiness for the greatest number. So,
instead of saying that religion was a conversation stopper, I should
have said that citizens of a democracy should try to put off
conversations-stoppers as long as possible. We should do our best to
keep the conversation going without citing unarguable first
principles, either philosophical or religious. If we are sometimes
driven to such citation, we should see ourselves as having failed, not
as having triumphed."





Matt:
> Shouldn't we promote a
> culture of political discourse in which elected representatives, in
> discussing the State's Business, do not think to justify their decisions
> about how the government should act with recourse to the Bible?


Steve:
Yes, but I suppose that is different from saying that some law or
custom should forbid it, and it is because I think there is something
wrong with the way the Bible often gets used. It still needs to be
spelled out why a Rortian can have recourse to Mill's "On liberty" but
other people can't bring their favorite texts to a political
discussion. I think it has to come down to _how_ it is used.  Rorty
makes this clarification in "A Reconsideration."

"I would not consider myself to be seriously discussing politics with
my fellow citizens if I simply quoted passages from Mill at them, as
opposed to using those passages to help me articulate my views. I
cannot think of myself as engaged in such discussion if my opponent
simply quotes the Bible, or papal encyclical, at me... [Liberal
democracy] forbids certain moves being made in the course of political
discussion. What should be discouraged is mere appeal to authority."

I think appeal to authority is what distinguishes a religious
committed democrat from a theocrat.




Matt:
> Legal practice tells you that a Law is not just a sentence, but the
> reasoning of what that sentence means.  So, we still argue about
> what the Constitution means with recourse to all kinds of generated
> lines of reasoning which sit the words on the page in a web of
> justification.  That web is functionally the Law.  And since Congress
> writes the Laws, should we not promote a political culture in which
> religious-reasoning does not become embedded in the Laws, since
> that is a violation of the 1st Amendment?

Steve:
I think you make a good case that if a law can only be argued on
religious grounds that ought not be a law. But that doesn't mean that
religious reasoning cannot be used in addition to other reasoning. I'm
thinking of Pierce's cable. One particular weakest link argument is
not what we should desire.



Matt:
> Do I think it's sad that a portion of the Atheistic Left won't join
> hands with the Religious Left?

Steve:
As an aside, I was just thinking how for some reason Bono is the one
figure who seems to be able to do that. He even resonates with the
religious right in the areas where fundamentalist Christians who
thought something cool was happening when Bush talked about
_compassionate_ conservatism diverge from the kind of conservatism we
know and hate.


Matt:
>Sure.  That's bad political strategy.

Steve:

Stout also thinks it is bad political strategy to rule out citing
Leviticus 18:22 in political discussions because "the arbitrariness of
these appeals can only be exposed if the appeals are first expressed
openly and then subjected to rigorous public scrutiny." Harris
complains that bad religious beliefs are held in large part because
they are not allowed to be held to such scrutiny. He thinks it is
believers who have set up  impediments to open inquiry in creating a
taboo of questioning someone's faith, but the secularists have
contributed to the impasse as well.

While Rorty is right that some people quoting Leviticus are homophobes
who are merely "hiding sadistic grins behind sanctimonious masks,"
others are making a sincere effort to take the Bible seriously and to
understand what the Bible teaches about homosexuality. Stout says that
"many people who now favor same sex marriage started out as such
believers." Since we are granting that at least some believers are
rationally entitled to their beliefs since rational entitlement
depends on contextual features that vary from person to person, we
should begin any discussion with the charitable assumption that some
of our religious interlocuters are open to rational persuasion. Like
anyone who we hope to convince of anything, we will have to meet them
where they now stand and accept at least some of their premises for
the sake of argument. But if we don't allow religious premises to ever
be expressed, then we never get to challenge them.

Stout:
"The best way to persuade sincere believers that legalizing same-sex
marriage would not be the end of the world, it seems to me, is to
encourage them to have their say on what Leviticus 18:22 means and
then challenge them on their own ground. It is not easy to explain how
Leviticus 18:22, as interpreted by culturally conservative American
Christians, can be made to cohere with the failure of such Christians
to treat many other passages from the Old Testament – or from Paul’s
letters – as binding on the contemporary church, let alone on our
society as a whole. A Christian father who nowadays cited Deuteronomy
13:7-11 as a reason for permitting him to kill his Wiccandaughter
would be treated by nearly all cultural conservatives as either crazy
or evil. AChristian candidate for the Senate who cited Leviticus
24:10-16 as a reason for legalizingthe stoning of blasphemers would
immediately be denounced by the vast majority of cultural
conservatives as gravely in error."

...

"Responding to the appeals simply by arguing that religious premises
have no place in public discussion has the effect, ironically, of
stopping the conversation before the point at which the flimsiness of
the reasoning is brought fully to light. Only after people have been
confronted with the flimsiness of their reasoning and nonetheless
persist in clutching to their original conclusions are we in a
position to knowor to show that their acceptance of those conclusions
has been motivated simply by hatred or fear."



Matt:
> But I don't have a grasp on what is anti-democratic about the
> Atheists evangelizing their point of view.  It is when either side
> tries to embed them in Law, that's when we have a problem.  If
> everyone became Atheist, would the world be a better place?
> Maybe, because at least people wouldn't think to fight over it
> (though they'd no doubt think to fight about something else).  The
> trick of the question, of course, is that you could fill for "Atheist"
> _any_ answer to the "religious question": it's the uniformity that
> makes this possible world "better."  (And even then, some people
> don't care for uniformity.)  So if that's what Atheists are using as
> an argument for Atheism, then that's a reason for being bored by
> it.  But it doesn't strike me as a political stance.

Steve:
What is anti-democratic is to try to stop the conversation. Trying to
enforce limits on what sorts of reasons can be given (if they are
reasons and not just appeals to authority) is to do just that. Here
are some arguments from Stout on secularism as anti-democratic:

Stout (Still from "Rorty on Religion and Politics"):
"Far from persuading most religious people to confine their religious
convictions to the private sphere, secularism gives them reason to
conclude that liberal democracies are essentially inhospitable to
their concerns. Many of them then either retreat from public life into
communities of like-mindedness, or attempt to use the electoral
process to advance theocratic ends. Both tendencies spell trouble for
democracy."

...

"Theocrats and secularists inspire fear in one another in part because
they are trying to establish rules of discursive purity that would
take the concerns of the opposite party off the list of things one
ought to express. Each side's proposed purity rules look to the
opposite side like tools of oppression. Fortunately, secularism and
theocracy are not our only options. It is interesting to note what
they have in common. They are both monological in the sense that they
propose to set the terms of public deliberation in advance. The
democratic alternative to monologue is dialogue, an open-ended
political culture in which the citizens of various kinds hammer out
their differences as they go along. One thing that democracies haggle
over is what sort of reasons are good reasons, what the terms of
public controversy will be. As far as I can tell, there has never been
a settled compromise, of the sort Rorty here wishes us to honor,
concerning what premises citizens may express in public life."

...

"Democratic deliberation tends to break down not when religious
reasons are voiced in the public square, but rather when some group,
religious or secular, starts behaving as if it intends to dominate
others...What counts as domination is itself one of the main questions
to be debated by each generation in a democratic republic. But the
point of the Bill of Rights, a system of checks and balances, and an
extension of the franchise to the entire adult population is to
minimize the opportunities for domination. Every time one faction
tries to enforce a monological approach to decision making, other
groups are entitled to accuse that faction of having a desire to
dominate, of trying to impose its views on the public. The spirit of
democracy, being dialogical, is at odds with both secularism and
theocracy."