The ideas and principles surrounding the
enlightenment start-up of a “more perfect union” and the philosophical
articulation of “We the People,” are notions of an American version of the
Civil Society organized around the idea of Freedom, an idea handed down to
subsequent generations, and finally to this present generation, from the
Enlightenment philosophes of the 18th
century. We Americans have been wearing these hand-me-down ideas, with some tweaking
and amending, for almost 300 years. Now, though, it would seem that recess is
over, and that we must once again take up our studies about civics and history
and philosophy with some degree of due diligence; because if Jefferson is
correct:
“The most
effectual means of preventing [the perversion of power into tyranny],” are to
illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large, and more
especially to give them knowledge of those facts which history exhibits, that
possessed thereby of the experience of other ages and countries, they may be
enabled to know ambition under all its shapes, and prompt to exert their
natural powers to defeat its purposes” (Thomas Jefferson: Diffusion of
Knowledge Bill, 1779. FE 2:221, Papers 2:526).
Yet it is not enough for civil society,
however composed, simply to celebrate its cornerstones of civil freedom without
also guaranteeing the ongoing relevance of those cornerstones as civil values. To
do this, Jefferson encouraged the creation of a specific type of education, which
even today constitutes the bedrock of a distinctly American program of liberal
education—namely the study of politics, and history, and of philosophy for
virtue.
“The value of [general knowledge] to a republican
people, the security it gives to liberty by enlightening the minds of its
citizens, the protection it affords against foreign power, the virtue it
inculcates, the just emulation of the distinction it confers on nations
foremost in it; in short, its identification with power, morals, order and
happiness (which merits to it premiums of encouragement rather than repressive
taxes), are considerations [that should] always [be] present and [bear] with
their just weight. (Thomas Jefferson: On the Book Duty, 1821).”
I have
written elsewhere that if ‘We the People’ desire to continue enabling a
Jeffersonian vision of a civil society, which must be anchored in the ongoing intellectual
improvement of democracy’s gatekeepers, then we who teach in the Liberal Arts “must
continue to insist upon the study of those subjects that keep our eyes riveted
upon Power of all sorts, and upon the subtle permutations of power into
tyranny. We need to study history, and politics, civics and current events in
order to keep before our eyes the (…) institutions whereby Men define and
govern themselves; and we need to study foreign languages, philosophy,
religions, mythologies and literatures, and all the sciences in order to understand
that it is through various and diverse languages and “stories” that we as a
people initially begin to frame, and then to flesh out, our political and
social institutions, which in turn become reflections of the intellectual life
of the American demos.
Why
do we do this? Because, ‘[i]f the
children are untaught, their ignorance and vices will in future life cost us
much dearer in their consequences than it would have done in their correction
by a good education’ (Thomas Jefferson to Joseph C. Cabell, 1818. FE 10:99).”
So today’s versions of the civil society stand
now at a fork in the road of the History of Civil Society, as so many before us
have stood, where “two roads diverged in a yellow wood.” On the one
hand is the road “less traveled by,” the Civil Secular Society, which was taken
by the American enlightenment philosophes,
which they also sought to protect for posterity by articulating and then
transmitting the freedoms of enlightened [read: non-religious] education and
the open society [read: freedom from religion]. On the other hand is the return
to some form of a religious or sectarian expression of Theocracy—to an
unenlightened and closed model of Society that is autocratic by every definition.
Let
me state for the record books of History that, “as the night the day,” it
necessarily follows that within the paradigm of the Civil Society as an idea the Spirit of Enlightenment must
finally oppose the Magical or Religious Spirit, which is replete with Neanderthalic
mores (to borrow a rather felicitous expression from a recent Salon article). We must not lend credibility to the Spirit of
Religion in the civil space because “Doing so lends credence to faiths that, by
any humane standard, long ago discredited themselves and should certainly not
be legitimized with Washingtonian pomp and reverence.”
There are certainly differences between the
various forms of civil society that evolved in Europe, and Civil Society as it
was philosophically articulated and constitutionally enshrined in the early
days of the American colonies. Principal among these differences is the notion
of pluralism as a philosophical value. In American civil society pluralism is
neither a primary philosophical nor political value; nor, by extension, should
it be construed to be a significant pillar of western civil society in general.
Pluralism is a derivative or secondary value in America, because it is first premised
on the deliberate intellectual assent to a certain set of core civil
principles, which are of primary
importance.
When
there is intellectual assent about the philosophical foundation, goes the
American version of Civil Society, then the edifice of state can be constructed
upon it. What is important in this American version of the story of pluralism
is that Individuals came together from all over the world in order to build
their lives around an idea. This, in fact, was the opportunity in the Land of
Opportunity. The individuals were of plural origin, but the idea of We the
People was always primary and singular; therefore it was predictable that while
there would be disparity or plurality in public discourse among all the diverse
opinions concerning deity and morality, politics, taxes, etc., it was
philosophically untenable that there should be discord about the core values
articulated in the Constitution.
That
premise, of course, was sorely challenged during Lincoln’s presidency by a
fratricidal war among American brothers mutually grounded in a single
philosophical premise, and he famously questioned, “whether that nation, or any
nation so conceived (in liberty) and so dedicated (to the proposition that all
men are created equal) can long endure.” Spoiler alert: the answer was Yes, but
not without a fight. Thus the idea of a common philosophical foundation or
premise –freedom, was reinforced in the American mythology: first comes assent
to a philosophical idea, then comes trying to work out the particulars about
how we who share that common intellectual foundation can live together
practically and functionally within the confines of Freedom.
Civil societies in Europe, of course, each
have their own unique history, and the evolutions of the idea of Civil Society
among and between the various “European peoples” seems to have necessitated an
early assurance guaranteeing the importance of material pluralism; this was in
order to ensure the peaceful cohabitation of the various tribes, clans, ethnic
groupings, or who- and what-ever else one might wish to stick in this category
of ‘outsider’ living among ‘Us.’
Even
the umbrella document that acts as an ad hoc constitution for member states of
the European Union, the Treaty of Lisbon (2009), identifies inhabitants of the
member states as “the European peoples,” with the following values, which
prevail in civilly defined western democracies:
Lisbon: “The Union is founded on the values of respect
for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect
for human rights, including the rights of persons belonging to minorities.
These values are common to the Member States in a society in which pluralism,
non-discrimination, tolerance, justice, solidarity and equality between women
and men prevail.”
However, it is insufficient to call
pluralism a value where other and more fundamental “ideological,” or idea-based
values do not also hold sway, where there is a philosophical vacuum, as it were.
As a political value or idea, the European conception of pluralism simply
cannot compete against the ethnically unalloyed society or the society that has
been purged of religious diversity, which clearly stand stronger in their
homogeneity than the state structured around plural groups with competing personal
interests. In other words, a theocracy (or a monarchy or an oligarchy) is a
stronger cohesive unit than a democracy.
The
historical virtue that backlights cultural pluralism, at least in America,
which is the first State truly founded upon an “open” or freedom-based philosophy, is not that any and every material cultural group could go to
America for the better life, but that All and Sundry flocked to the philosophical concepts that grounded the
possibility of America as an Idea – to the freedoms that framed her as a land
of opportunity. The world’s diversity was drawn to the American idea like
insects to a light bulb; they were fascinated by the idea that it was possible
to live in society as self-determining free men, and they voted with their feet,
choosing to leave the various forms of autocratic, theocratic, totalitarian and
authoritarian societies that were their homes, in order to participate in the
new philosophical experiment that was America, Land of the Free and Home of the
Brave.
Obviously there will be many analyses of and
responses to this crisis, where the idea of Civil Society stands at an historical
fork in the road. Some, like French academic Didier Raoult, perceive the natural end of the idea of Civil Society and
the promise of some future religious social reality:
“It is not all over; but the “peace and love” that
illuminated my youth is certainly gone. One cannot allow the enchantment of a
generation of “dunces” (to paraphrase J. K. Toole), which never grasped the
failures of the Marxists and those of the Enlightenment (Rousseau’s universality),
to lead us into a civil war by invoking an ideal that was never able to become
a substitute for religion.”
For this thinker, the plurality that is
France is reducible to a simple material-geographical state of being, which has
no grounding in an idea or principle: “It is France’s language and her culture,
which are constantly changing and being transformed, which unify [the French
state].”
For
others, such as Inna Shevchenko, the leader of the topless, anti-religion activist group
Femen,
“Steadfast
belief in the inerrancy of religious dogma, coupled with… convictions that the
dogma’s many mandates are meant to apply to all humanity, clash with principles
of secular governance and Enlightenment-era precepts that oblige us, at least
ideally, to sort out our problems relying on reason, consensus and law. (…)
[W]e cannot “adapt” here, especially under threat of violence. We must
unabashedly stand by reason, the rule of law, and secularism.”
The choice is actually quite simple: if a
country wishes to represent the values of the Civil Society within its borders,
then it must stand by the Civil cornerstone of secularism, which means that any
religion, all religion, must relinquish its claim to the Public Space, and must
finally yield to reason in Public Discourse and the articulation of Public
Values. Civil Society will either oversee the decline of the Spirit of Religion
within its boundaries, or it will be ultimately consumed by that Spirit and thereby
cease to be Civil. We cannot travel both roads.
As an individual I can remember things from
my childhood; but I cannot remember things from my father’s childhood, or his
father’s, or his… For longer-term recall we need resources and education, and
we need to study that past deliberately, to learn how to value a time and its
ideas, which really belonged to someone else. As with individuals, so it is
with nations. We tend to be born into our cultural soup, to learn the ‘ways’ of
that soup naturally, then to forget that we ‘learned’ because it seems so
natural to us. Then that cultural soup changes as new ingredients are added, as,
over time, different chefs take over the tasks of spicing and cooking. With time
the original cultural soup is gradually changed, sometimes augmented, sometimes
diminished, sometimes on high heat, sometimes on low. Equally, and in keeping
with the simile, the edges of an original national identity will necessarily
become blurred with the passage of time and the accretion of new and diverse members
with their new and diverse thoughts and ideas and ways of viewing the world.
So
it is inevitable that there will come tipping-point moments in the life of a
society. It is also predictable that societies that have been framed around a
materially porous national identity will confront, in the course of their
histories, changes of a fundamental nature as their material compositions
change through various immigrations. The idea of the Civil Society as it was
created in the young America, however, is not grounded in any form of evolving
historicism; rather it is framed around an unchanging core of ideas – it is a
true ideology in the most positive sense of that term.
There is no necessarily correct or right
form for a religion. Each religion is ultimately authoritarian or autocratic in
structure to whatever degree it is framed around some External Authority and not
grounded in the values of the civil state—the individual. History shows that the
Spirit of Religion will remain true to itself; this is the nature of the beast.
So it is a media-driven Null Set {}, the nonsensical rhetoric of non-thinking minds,
to say that some certain form of a religion, such as its moderate or its extremist
expression, is more or less desirable than some other form of that religion. It
is no more possible, or meaningful, to argue that moderate Christianity is the
most desirable form of Christianity, than it would be to argue that an
extremely liberal form of C. or an extremely fundamentalist form of C. is most desirable.
However,
it is possible to make the argument that only the moderate form of a religion,
such as Christianity or Islam or Judaism, is conductive to all parties thriving
in the civil secular democracy, and that it is therefore the most desirable form
of that religion within the civil and secular society. Hence the
philosophico-theological quandary when a Civil functionary, in the form of an
American president, makes indemonstrable utterances on intractable religious
issues (from Salon):
“…Obama launched into what so riled conservatives — musings about faith being,
as he put it, “twisted and misused in the name of evil.”” No matter the speaker, this speech is nothing
more than a meaningless “tale /Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, /Signifying nothing.”
In their expressions of the Civil Society, France
and America share in having laws on the separation of church and state, which
is certainly a defensible ideological foundation for the secular state. The
French version was not legislated until 1905, some 125 years after the American
version, and finally constitutionally enshrined in 1956; so it is the later
variation on this theme. There is, however, an interesting nuance to note
between the two different conceptualizations of separation of church and state.
In the original American idea it is question of the ‘exercise’ or public
practice of religion, but this is not so in France. In a recent U.S. Supreme
Court ruling (‘Hobby Lobby’), for example, Justice Kennedy wrote:
“In our constitutional tradition, freedom means that
all persons have the right to believe or strive to believe in a divine creator
and a divine law. For those who choose this course, free exercise is essential
in preserving their own dignity and in striving for a self-definition shaped by
their religious precepts. Free exercise in this sense implicates more than just
freedom of belief . . . It means, too, the right to express those beliefs and
to establish one’s religious (or nonreligious) self-definition in the political,
civic, and economic life of our larger community.”
So while the American government may not
interfere in the free exercise of religion in the public space, the French
state has simply chosen not to intrude at all in the question of religion.
It
would seem that the place of Religion in the American Civil Society is finally
being taken to the next level of challenge, which is to say that John Locke’s
original anti-religion argument, which he published in his 1689 Letter
concerning Toleration, is finally being taken
seriously. In his letter Locke argues for the complete separation of church
authority from civil authority because, he says, a civil magistrate is not
qualified by his civil office to make competent distinctions between competing religious
authorities with competing claims. This argument was sufficient, at the time,
for the framers of the American Constitution to separate the interests of state
from the interests of church in the young republic.
Locke’s
argument was recently resurrected in an essay at The Immanent Frame entitled “The Impossibility of Religious Freedom,” by Winnifred Fallers Sullivan,
professor of law and religious studies, who follows Locke’s thinking, and then
some, by making a vigorous and compelling argument against even the very
possibility of Freedom of Religion, at least as a category under the law. “Big
“R” Religion is a modern invention, an invention designed to separate good
religion from bad religion, orthodoxy from heresy—an invention whose legal and
political use has arguably reached the end of its useful life.” Her conclusions
are incisive:
“The legal and religious fictions of religious freedom
have become lies designed to extend the life of the impossible idea that church
and state can still work together after disestablishment. There is no neutral
place from which to distinguish the religious from the non-religious. There is
no shared understanding of what religion, big “R” religion, is. Let’s stop
talking about big “R” religion.
What
remains, as Clifford Geertz reminds us, is for us to work on creating new
fictions together, political, legal, and religious…”
We must not delude ourselves: ‘keeping
faith’ with the ideas of the Civil Society comes at a cost…. How much are we
willing to yield up to some one else’s desire? How much are we willing to yield
up our right to be offensive or offended, to be critical or to be criticized? Are
we really willing to become all that the Other desires? What will happen when,
not satisfied with western democracies’ principles of an open society, Others
choose to take offense at the way we dress? At our access to consumer products
and to credit purchases? At the gods we may or may not worship? At the cars we
drive? How far can the open society yield to the closed society? How far will
western civil democracies submit to the fatwas and other whims of clerics
camping in Yemen?
At
some point, we either stand with the principles and ideas of Civil Society, or
we must be prepared to yield our ideas and principles to the one who wishes to
stand with his, and to impose them on us. The ideas and principles of Civil
Society have defined the various countries of the democratic west for several
centuries; but peoples have been moving and borders have become porous… some
are forced to leave the country of their birth and culture, others choose to.
And in the movement of peoples between countries, like Nietzsche’s camel, they
enter into the west carrying cultural burdens that are, quite distinctly, not
western. In and of itself, this very practical reality is neither a good nor an
ill; but it is in this way that hard choices are imposed upon us – does the
immigrant travel with his culture on his back, bringing his old home into his
new, or does he abandon what he was in that other place in order to become
something new in this place? And we, who were born in a democratic and open
society, what do we expect from the visitors we receive – that they should
cease valuing the ideas that held sway in their home, that they should become
as us? So, to some degree, the religious questions that have begun to trouble
the west should inform our thinking about immigration.
There are many kinds of jihad… a very
physical jihad where one sweeps over the opposition to impose rule; and
philosophical jihad, where one world-view attempts to impose itself upon
another.
Phrontisterion stands with Charlie Hebdo
and the uncompromising Voltaire on the question of Civil Society: Écrasons l'infâme
(Ecr. L'inf.)
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