[…]
No, I’d much rather see a struggle for a new secularism in the United States. Rather than countering identity politics with identity politics, a new secularism might constitute a space/between identities: a non-discursive knowledge/power that generates something other than the current age’s proliferation of subjectivities. Science, skepticism, solidarity and the social, democracy and economic security.
Only this deep into postmodernity could one lapse into utopianism while yearning for a resurrection of the secular. But when even Habermas has abandoned the latter as a precondition for fair speech, what’s left but to dream about but a rationale for justice and material distribution which, itself free of godheads, is big enough to encompass how we do or don’t worship and who we think we are?
[Much, much, much more on this in the context of the contraception debate, can be found here.]
Where can I subscribe to the newsletter of this new interstitial movement of progress? We’ve discussed the point before, but I’m not sure that Habermas has abandoned the secular as a precondition for “fair speech” (however that may be defined) as much as he has allowed for a vision of religion’s “semantic potential” (every sermon is sacred, in other words) entering the realm of public discourse on condition of it meeting secular requirements (no extremism, no claims of faith, etc.). But I agree that we are in an odd situation were the imagination of politics is so impoverished that secularism is seen as a dry desert of anti-faith persecution rather than the foundation of civic society.
I enjoyed the recent Irish Times editorial entitled ‘The war against faith’, which pulled together Santorum, Baroness Warsi in Britain, and the controversy over the closure of Ireland’s embassy to the Vatican, until I realised just how weak and watery its conclusion was:
“It is easy to demonise Obama, or Eamon Gilmore, however preposterously, as campaigning atheists, and the media as propagandists for a godless future. Much harder, though, to take on the pluralist case for mutual respect, tolerance, and a neutral state. There is in the charges being made a deliberate and misleading conflation of three quite different and distinct agendas – atheism, secularism, and pluralism. To the latter only, this paper pleads guilty as charged.”
No matter that the ‘neutral state’ is the essence of neoliberalism and laissez-faire in economic affairs, and social affairs (especially when we view the state as responsible for education and healthcare, or at least aspects of provision thereof) are not really exempt from the necessity of active state involvement - unless you’re not actually a liberal but a libertarian. It’s the idea that secularism is an opinion, not an actual thing (non-materially speaking, of course) that annoys me. (Also that the grammar in the final line is inexact, since ‘latter’ usually refers to the second in a pair, not the last in an order of three.)
I don’t really know if it would be quite fair to class the Irish Times - or any modern, mass-market newspaper - as ‘secular’, but I doubt it would be fair to deny it that description either. I sometimes enjoy its ‘Rite and Reason’ column (despite pondering the possible mismatch between those two words), and I don’t mind that ‘Church of Ireland’ and ‘Presbyterian Notes’ retain a small space in echo of its Southern Unionist, Protestant tradition; and even the odd discussions of Catholic theology in the opinion pages mainly register as, well, odd rather than threatening to the broader discourse of society (why theorists of an ideology that actively discriminates against those of different sexualities, and gender, while carrying a legacy of disturbing and disturbed puritanism have a role in public discourse is a more problematic issue, but one which can be safely left aside for a moment*). It is a secular newspaper because it carries those opinions and voices, but it does not privilege them in its editorial line or its coverage of modern society. That is secularism, not pluralism - pluralism would be if the Irish Times sometimes took the Catholic line on public issues, sometimes the socialist line, sometimes the republican nationalist… which of course doesn’t happen in reality because it has its own pseudo-liberal orthodoxy, but also in theory because it is independent of single or plural ideologies, religious or non-religious: in essence, secular.
The supposed ‘war against faith’ necessitates that atheists and agnostics, and just plain secularists (i.e. those who might not share the personal views of the preceding, but who don’t make public bones about it), make it unambiguously clear what their standards do and do not require in terms of “tolerance” and “respect” - which is a certain equality, and a certain freedom, and a certain conscientiousness of reasonable behaviour - but also that we keep a space for developing our ideas beyond religion, beyond naive spirituality and beyond a false pluralism that insists that faith and reason must be held equal because they are different, rather than noting that they are separate because they must be different. That, I believe, is what a post-Habermasian secularism should look like.
*I was going to say, as a snide comment, they also have a column on fly-fishing, but the comparison is exactly false for that reason, that fly-fishing carries little or none of the same political baggage.
(Source: Washington Post)
