The Secular
Posted: February 15th, 2008 | Filed under: Modern / Not Modern |Iris Marion Young:
“The ideal of urban life I conceptualize entails a political conception of differentiated citizenship. Political institutions and discourse ought to define the scope of the polity as extending across the city and region in which people share the effects of external economic and environmental forces, and interact in dense networks that create interdependencies and mutual effects. The institutions and motivations of citizenship should encourage people to conceptualize how they are together with distant strangers. At the same time, they should be able to understand themselves as participating in more local associations of neighbourhood and/or cultural affinity. Citizenship can properly be differentiated among groups who choose to cluster but recognize that they are together with differentiated others in a common polity. I discuss the implications of such a balance between togetherness and local difference for a vision of metropolitan regional governance.”
Archbishop Rowan Williams: (in his recent controversial speech on Islamic law and British law)
“The rule of law is…a way of honouring what in the human constitution is not captured by any one form of corporate belonging or any particular history, even though the human constitution never exists without those other determinations.”
Though I acknowledge that perhaps Williams, in his position, might not be best serving the church through launching such a debate, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with his statements. He spoke right to a central limitation and problem with secular modernity - that of the fundamental intolerance for forms of belief that aren’t individualized, private, and romantic or counter-rational. By relegating belief to the realm of individuated interiority, modernity also seals the deal on an approach to sociality in which the isolated person is the fundamental default unit. Interdependence or corporate being are surrendered to what Charles Taylor speaks of as “the buffered self,” a protected zone of preferences, desires, decisions, agency.
Of course not every modern subject has been granted this luxury. We might also remind critics of Archbishop Williams that, at least in the States, the rule of law has not been carried out equally for all groups, and is in fact highly differentiated across race and class through zoning law, sentencing laws, predatory loan practices, medical insurance.
Neoliberalism’s answer to this is, understandably, to complete modernity’s incomplete project, to ensure equal access for all to an isolated private interiority, to fair application of the law. As an affluent white male, I have only benefited from unjust application of the law and unjust delineations of subjectivity. And so I’m hesitant to, with modernity’s leading critics, deconstruct and deride that which has been promised to all, granted me but not realized for others. Yet there do seem to be conditions that we share, impasses in public life, that call for practical application of critical theoretical approaches to self and society. From what little I’ve read, Iris Marion Young asked questions about the atomistic social structure of justice liberal democracy not just for theory’s sake, but in relation to specific spatial justice issues in her environs, that of post-War Chicago. Archbishop Williams isn’t just musing about law and society, but proposing ways of dealing with the pressing problems of co-existence in modern liberal democracy of European secularists and non-European religious communities.
I just listened earlier this week to a lecture by a former mentor of mine, Dick Keyes. At a talk for the University of Virginia, he questions the presumed humility of popular relativism in regards to religious belief. We might ask the same in regards to ethics, aesthetics. To illustrate his point Dick reminds us of two common metaphors for understanding religious belief in a secular age - that of the blind men who each only feel a piece of the elephant, and so can’t fully describe the beast, or of the pilgrims on a mountain, each taking a different path, but reaching the same summit. Hidden in these pictures, Keyes, points out, is a secret pride in being the one who can actually see the whole elephant, who has toured the whole mountain and can see more than the mere pilgrims below.
Modernity’s critics have long pointed to the hubristic, colonialist and even violent nature of an epistemology based on full knowledge, the penetrating gaze, the mapping impulse. The best critiques have come from those who speak to the suffering and injustice committed under such missions. Feminist and postcolonial theory, writers on race and class have revealed the misogyny and violence of the Enlightenment’s totalizing perceptual legacy. But many of these essential voices still stand within secularism, a world possibly described as an Edwin Abbott problem of dimensional perception. I wonder if, as a more violent form of critique gains favor and attention in the world, modernity’s critics from outside secularism, those who don’t necessarily believe in the possibility of a clear birds-eye view, might find more ears listening.
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