[MD] Theocracy, Secularism, and Democracy

[Steven Peterson]

Hi DMB,

I think that is a good analysis and a textbook example of what Pirsig
was on about. I just can't figure out why Fish was buying what Smith
is selling. Why would he think that secularists are somehow prohibited
from using such premises as "human beings ought to be treated with
profound respect"? Any such value assertion is supposed to be somehow
a smuggled in element of religion???

Best,
Steve




On Wed, Aug 18, 2010 at 1:52 PM, david buchanan <dmbuchanan at hotmail.com> wrote:
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> Steve said to Matt:
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>  You've mentioned Stanley Fish before so I thought you'd be interested in this article of his on secularism.
>  http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/22/are-there-secular-reasons/  I think he is conceiving of secularism as something like logic which can't function without premises to start with rather than secularism as limiting our justifications for laws to concerns that are secular, i.e. of this world. We shouldn't consider the various  other-wordly visions. If you can't make a case for a law without needing us to suppose that some supernatural power wants us to act in certain ways or he will get mad, then you don't get to make that law.
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> dmb says:
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> If you look at Smith's complaints, I think he's not talking about secularism so much as objectivity. He's complaining about the same thing as Pirsig, about the modes of rationality that have no provision for morals. He's complaining about amoral scientific materialism.
>
>
> Check out these two paragraphs from the article you linked, for example...
>
> "Once the world is no longer assumed to be informed by some presiding meaning or spirit (associated either with a theology or an undoubted philosophical first principle) and is instead thought of as being “composed of atomic particles randomly colliding and . . . sometimes evolving into more and more complicated systems and entities including ourselves” there is no way, says Smith, to look at it and answer normative questions, questions like “what are we supposed to do?” and “at the behest of who or what are we to do it?”
> ... If public reason has “deprived” the natural world of “its normative dimension” by conceiving of it as free-standing and tethered to nothing higher than or prior to itself, how, Smith asks, “could one squeeze moral values or judgments about justice . . . out of brute empirical facts?” No way that is not a sleight of hand. This is the cul de sac Enlightenment philosophy traps itself in when it renounces metaphysical foundations in favor of the “pure” investigation of “observable facts.” It must somehow bootstrap or engineer itself back up to meaning and the possibility of justified judgment, but it has deliberately jettisoned the resources that would enable it do so."
>
> And then Fish concludes the article, saying:
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> "But no matter who delivers the lesson, its implication is clear. Insofar as modern liberal discourse rests on a distinction between reasons that emerge in the course of disinterested observation — secular reasons — and reasons that flow from a prior metaphysical commitment, it hasn’t got a leg to stand on."
>
>
> dmb continues:
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> Do you see how Fish, following Smith, is equating secularism with disinterested observation? I think Pirsig is saying that these are two different things. In the same way that SOM is the problem rather than intellect itself, these attitudes of disinterested observation are the problem rather than secularism itself. The MOQ's expansion of rationality is all about solving this problem of amorality. He does so in a way that distinguished intellectual values like democratic rights and freedoms against the encroachments of traditional social level moral codes, which certainly include religious morals. The secular cause is well served by the MOQ's social-intellectual distinction. Compare that to Fish and Smith. This is where they differ from Pirsig:
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> "But, Smith points out, freedom and equality — and we might add justice, fairness and impartiality — are empty abstractions. Nothing follows from them until we have answered questions like “fairness in relation to what standard?” or “equality with respect to what measures?” — for only then will they have content enough to guide deliberation. ...the abstractions, in and of themselves, cannot settle them. Indeed, concepts like fairness and equality are normatively useless, except as rhetorical ornaments, until they are filled in by some partisan or ideological or theological perspective, precisely the perspectives secular reason has forsworn. Therefore, Smith concludes, “conversations in the secular cage could not proceed very far without smuggling.”  Fish points out that this view is widely held and adds, "I myself argue that “there are no neutral principles, only principles that are already informed by the substantive content to which they are rhetorically opposed."
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>
> For Pirsig, the standard is evolution but it does not pretend to be neutral or disinterested and so requires no smuggling. These so called abstractions (freedom, equality, justice, fairness) are not just rhetorical ornaments, they're for real. Further, it is this attitude of objectivity that renders them so impotent, that turns them into a "soup of sentiments". This section from Lila, chapter 24 in this thread before and it seems quite applicable again:
>
> "What passed for morality within this crowd was a kind of vague, amorphous soup of sentiments known as "human rights." You were also supposed to be "reasonable." What these terms really meant was never spelled out in any way that Phaedrus had ever heard. You were just supposed to cheer for them.
> "He knew now that the reason nobody ever spelled them out was nobody ever could. In a subject-object understanding of the world these terms have no meaning. There is no such thing as "human rights." There is no such thing as moral reasonableness. There are subjects and objects and nothing else.
> "This soup of sentiments about logically nonexistent entities can be straightened out by the Metaphysics of Quality. It says that what is meant by "human rights" is usually the moral code of intellect-vs. -society, the moral right of intellect to be free of social control. Freedom of speech; freedom of assembly, of travel; trial by jury; habeas corpus; government by consent—these "human rights" are all intellect-vs.-society issues. According to the Metaphysics of Quality these "human rights" have not just a sentimental basis, but a rational, metaphysical basis. They are essential to the evolution of a higher level of life from a lower level of life. They are for real."
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