~by David Aiken~
All the ideas and principles that surround the
enlightenment start-up project of “a more perfect union” & the
philosophical articulation of “We the People,” are drawn from an American
version of the Civil Society organized around the foundational idea of Freedom.
This idea was crafted for the West and handed down to subsequent generations,
and finally to this present generation, from the Enlightenment
philosophes of the 18
th
century, who referenced of course, every school child learns this, the Greek
philosophers.
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 play period 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 diversely
it may be composed politically, simply to celebrate its’ cornerstones of civil
freedom without also guaranteeing the ongoing relevance of those cornerstones
as civil and civic values. To encourage precisely this type of constant
relationship between philosophical values and an evolving society, 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 training 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, increasingly, today’s incarnations of the civil
society stand 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 a model
of Society that, while perhaps structurally, i.e., superficially democratic, because
it tolerates unenlightened and obscurantist elements within and without, is a political
model that is at least partially closed, which is to say autocratic, by any 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). The democratic model of society 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.”
The American version
of the civil society is framed around the foundational ideas of the freedom to
express, and the freedom to believe or not and to practice or not, religion;
but that New Colossus, the American statue of Lady Liberty,
which was once fresh and original but
which is now somewhat tarnished and dinged, no longer necessarily stands beside
the “golden door” to light our way—Lady Liberty and her torch, to the degree
that She has become too tolerant of the Spirit of Religion, may have become the
anchor dragging us to our philosophical graves. The outcome depends entirely upon our
response, as representatives of Civil Society, to the various autocratic
interests soliciting our interest,
among which is certainly religious jihad in all of its forms, interests that are seeking to gain control of
western societies’ free and open thought life.
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 premised
first and foremost on the deliberate intellectual assent to a certain
set of core civil principles, which are of primary
importance.
When
and where 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 origins, from anywhere
and everywhere, 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, culture
and alcohol, politics, death and 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 Abraham Lincoln’s presidency
by a fratricidal war (1860-1864) 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 social 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 transformation
of the natural I-Thou status quo into a structural social value, thereby guaranteeing
some degree of protection for material diversity and 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.
It is inadequate, however, 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 or clan-oriented interests. In other words, socially, every form of
authoritarianism, whether theocracy or monarchy or oligarchy, or… ad infinitum,
is a naturally stronger cohesive unit than a democracy.
The historical advantage
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 rather that All and Sundry were drawn 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; 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 crises, where the idea of Civil Society stands at an historical
fork in the road. Some, like French academic Didier Raoult, reflecting upon the Charlie Hebdo massacre (2015) by
Islamic fanatics, 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.
At the end of the day, the philosophical 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 and Autocracy within its boundaries, or it
will be ultimately consumed by that Spirit and thereby cease to be Civil. We
cannot travel both roads. And, not choosing, is choosing.
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, or collective recall, we need
resources and education, and we need to study our past historical experiences
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 are born into
our cultural soup, and we absorb everything naturally; so we learn the ‘ways’
of our cultural soup naturally, and we tend to forget that we ‘learned’ everything,
because it all 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.
As it
goes in the lives of individuals, so, also, it is inevitable that there will
come tipping-point moments in the life of a society. It is also predictable
that societies which have been framed around a materially porous national
identity, as their material compositions are influenced and transformed through
various immigrations, will confront in the course of their history changes of a
fundamental nature. The idea of the Civil Society as it was created in the
young America, however, is not grounded in any form of evolving historicism of
its various ethnicities; rather it is framed around an unchanging core of ideas
– it is a true philosophical ideology in the most positive sense of that
term.
So at this moment in
the history of the American version of ‘We
the People’, as the
American national identity is being so fundamentally challenged, not by any
form of material immigration, but by the malign growth within the Secular Civil
State of the Religious and Theocratic Mind, which is pernicious to the very
concept of the open Civil Society, the People, the e pluribus unum, needs to continue studying the ideas and the
arguments that created the original national identity of the American People–
otherwise that Unum is destined to become irremediably lost in the famous
Santayanian aporia -- "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to
repeat it" [George Santayana (1905) Reason in Common Sense,
p. 284, volume 1 of The Life of Reason]. Hence the
absolute importance of a broad liberal arts education in the Civil, Secular
Democracy, as opposed to a form of education that specializes either in the
transmission of a religious world-view, or in narrowly defined specializations—with
a potential social yield of a “confederacy of dunces.”
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 value 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 Christianity or an extremely
fundamentalist form of Christianity is most desirable.
On
the other hand, though, it is absolutely possible to make the argument that
only the moderate and assimilating 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 servant, in the form of an American president, for
example, 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, on this
subject, so saith the Bard, this type of 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 specifically the case in the French
application of the principle of laicity. 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 someone 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 religious 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 those who wish to
stand with their own vision of the world, and to impose that vision on everyone
else. The ideas and principles of Civil Society have defined the various
countries of the democratic west for several centuries at this point; 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 leave. And in
the movement of peoples between countries, like the camel of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra,
they enter into the west carrying cultural burdens that are, quite distinctly,
not western and not necessarily democratic. 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, like the escargot,
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 also
inform our thinking about other matters, such as immigration.
There is more than one kind of jihad. There is,
obviously, a very physical jihad where one sweeps over the opposition to impose
rule. And there is the philosophical jihad, where one world-view attempts to
impose itself upon another.
What can we learn
from the Charlie Hebdo massacre of 2015, and
those that have come about subsequently?
The first edition after the massacre, depicting Mohammed, was already described
by a British national Muslim cleric as an act of war. Just as
many religious fundamentalists have been called to jihad by radical Islam, so Charlie Hebdo’s resolute and tenacious
stance on the non-sacred depictions of Islam’s prophet, can be seen as a
declaration of secular jihad, which is grounded in the idea that the open and
secular society, as it is envisioned in Enlightenment philosophy, is a preferable political
society to one grounded in an authoritarian belief, be it of Christian kings or
others from the community of believers, or of radicalized
Islamic clerics, or any manifestation of the Religious Mind. The Spirit of
Religion is, inherently, a variation on the colonizing themes of empire – it
wishes to create a kingdom of God in the world of men. Resistance is
not futile!
Further reading:
· https://eu.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/11/29/religious-rights-trump-covid-illness-deaths-supreme-court-column/6436196002/
· A brief
fun video summery of John Locke’s philosophical solution to the presence of
religion in civil society: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xILFxFkF3E
(Reprised and reworked from an original essay published on Phrontisterion
on March 1, 2015)
