Talal Asad - on secular cruelty

Talal Asad wrote, in response to the Rushdie crisis:


In the West today, intolerance of Europe's Others has again become more strident. Collective cruelty is, of course, neither new nor confined to the West. Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, and Christians continue in our day to perpetrate acts of violence and cruelty. But it is the secular moder state's awesome potential for cruelty and destruction that deserves our sustained attention - as citizens and as athropologists of modernity.
from Genealogies of Religion, 1994, p. 306

Has subsequent history confirmed his analysis? It is hard not to think so. It is interesting that opposing cruelty is the very thing Rorty thinks secular liberalism has to offer the world...

Butterfield and elasticity of mind

Richard Rorty wants we citizens to be 'ironists': to hold loose to our ideological commitments and to our metaphysical beliefs. This is the basis of the healthy disrespect necessary for the maintenance of sound liberal political order. Ideology causes us to be cruel.

Of course, one difficulty as with many liberal suggestions, is that it asks religious people to be two people instead of one - something Tony Blair has recently said himself. Even as PM, he had to maintain a secret double life as a Christian believer, pretending that he made decisions without reference to his beliefs. But, more than this: is the ironic stance beloved of Rorty really feasible in a time of crisis when something more is required?

Actually, the rule of Christ ought to give the Christian just the sense of irony about human systems of rule that Rorty wants - with all the pragmatic benefits (if we must stoop to his level). Cambridge historian Herbert Butterfield, writing in the aftermath of WWII, wrote this remarkable conclusion to his book Christianity and History:

In these days ... when people are so much the prisoners of systems - especially of those general ideas which mark the spirit of the age - it is not always realised that beleif in God gives us great elasticity of mind, rescuing us from too great subservience to intermediate principles, whether these are related to nationality or ideology or science. It even enables us to leave more play in our minds for the things that nature or history may still have to reveal to us in the near future. Similarly, Christianity is not tied to regimes - not compelled to regard the existing order as the very end of life and the embodiment of all our values. Christians have too often tried to put the brake on things in the past, bu at the critical turning-points in history they have les reason that others to be afraid that a new kind of society or civilisation will leave them with nothing to live for. ..There are times when we can never meet the future with sufficient elasticity of mind, especially if we are locked in the contemnporary systems of thougt. We can do worse than remember a principle which both gives us a firm Rock and leaves us the maximum elasticity for our minds: the principle: Hold to Christ, and for the rest be totally uncommitted.

This 'elasticity of mind': I think this is superior to Rorty's irony, and founded on something other than merely what apparently 'works'.

Cruelty - the worst thing we can do?

As Richard Rorty tells it (and he gets this from Judith Shklar), a liberal is someone who thinks that 'cruelty is the worst thing we do'.

Shklar herself wrote:

Sins are transgressions of a divine rule and offenses against God; pride, as the rejection of God, must always be the worst one, which gives rise to all the others. Cruelty, as the willful inflicting of physical pain on a weaker being in order to cause anguish and fear, however, is a wrong done entirely to another creature. When it is marked as a supreme evil, it is judged so in and of itself, and not because it signifies a rejection of God or any other higher norm. It is a judgement made from within a world where cruelty occurs as part both of our normal private life and our daily public practice. By putting it irrevocably first—with nothing above it, and with nothing to excuse or forgive acts of cruelty—one closes off any appeal to any order other than that of actuality.

Cruelty stands alone as a kind of self-referencing evil: for Shklar it is evil on its own terms and not because of some higher norm. Christians may loath cruelty, but unless they put it first and worst, she argues, they will always find a reason somewhere to excuse it. She sites Christian history to prove it - the terrible episode of the Conquistadors being just one.

Of course, liberal democracies have also been complicit in cruelty - whether by participating in economic systems which produce it or by the explicit use of torture in war.

Rorty: America is an experiment

Yes, you Americans: the whole American idea ain't nothin' but a great experiment and y'all are its lab rats. Richard Rorty says so:

Both Jefferson and Dewey described America as an 'experiment'. If the experiment fails, our descendants may learn something important. But they will not learn a philosophical truth, any more than they will learn a religious one. They will simply get some hints about what to watch out for when setting up their next experiment. Even if nothing else survives from the age of the democratic revolutions, perhaps our descendants will remember the social institutions can be viewed as experiments in cooperation rather than as attempts to embody a universal and ahistorical order. It is hard to believe that this memory would not be worth having...

So, what hints do you think the next generation ought to get from the American experiment? Here's some:

1- don't say anything about arms in your constitution!
2- state religion actually makes religion more boring, not less.
3- Texas oughta be its own country.

Got any others? Don't go being rude now...

Rorty on an analogy with the decline of religious faith

The Last Judgement Mosiac on St Vitus' Cathedral, Prague.

Here's old man Rorty on the decline of religion and the theology of heavenly rewards:

That decline, and specifically the decline of people's ability to take the idea of postmortem rewards seriously, has not weakened liberal societies and indeed has strengthened them. Lots of people in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries predicted the opposite. They thought that hope of heaven was required to supply moral fiber and social glue - that there was little point, for example, in having an atheist swear to tell the truth in a court of law. As it turned out, however, willingness to endure suffering for the sake of future reward was transfered from individual rewards to social ones, from one's hopes for paradise to one's hopes for one's grandchildren...

Fascinating, this, given the rhetoric of environmentalism AND also technological triumphalism which reference grandchildren, though both contradict one another profoundly.

However, his comment about ethics is interesting: one which Christian apologists fail to realise frequently. Somehow, humans continue to behave in more or less ethical consistency in liberal society without reference to religion. (By which I mean: sure, people remain sinful and greedy, but chaos does not reign as we might expect it to). How is this to be accounted for? Has Rorty perhaps overestimated religion's decline? Are people still referencing some kind of divine judgement seat even though they do not articulate it in this way? Are people merely doing what helps them (and theirs) to get along best - ie, is it actually in their self-interest to act 'ethically' and so they do it?

Rorty on literary criticism

The recently deceased pragmatist liberal Richard Rorty, in his key text Contigency Irony and Solidarity makes the fascinating observation that for 'ironists' - by which he means people who deny that there is any metaphysical referent to our language and that we ought always be aware of that as we use grand sounding words - for ironists, literary critics are 'moral advisors', not metaphysicians.

As he writes:

literary criticism does for ironists what the search for universal moral principles is supposed to do for metaphysicians. p. 80

Literary critics, you see, engage in the placing of books into traditions of books. Their business is not absolute claims, but relative ones: relating books to other books. Literary critics have basically read alot, and so are less likely to get sucked in by any one book. The critic's job goes well beyond the bounds of mere literary criticism, of course:

...the critic is now expected to facilitate moral reflection by suggesting revisions in the cann of moral exemplars and advisers, and suggesting ways in which the tensions within this canon may be eased - or, where necessary, sharpened. p. 82

Richard Rorty - the priority of democracy to philosophy

Richard Rorty is a more than somewhat provocative thinker. In an essay entitled 'The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy' he puts forward the pragmatic argument that, as his title suggests, what really should concern us is the forging of democratic agreements on which some progress can be achieved, rather than speculating on unsolveable philosophical issues. Liberal democracy should give up pretending that it is founded on a grand metaphysical principles like 'rights' etc and instead realise that it is merely the best working solution to the problem of political community. So, he writes:

The philosophical tradition has assumed that there are certain topics (for example, 'what is God's will?' 'What is man?'...) on which everyone has, or should have, views and that these toics are prior in the order of justification to those at issue in political deliberation. This assumption goes along with the asumption that hman beings have a natural center that philosophical inquiry can locate and illuminate. By contrast, the view that human beings are centerless networks of beliefs and desires and that their vocabularies and opinions are determined by historical circumstance allows for the possibility that there may not be enough overlap between two such networds to make possibile agrement about political topics, or even profitable discussion of such topics.

Truth, in the Platonic sense is 'simply not relevant to democratic politics'. Neither is a notion of the self: even a very loose and postmodern one. You just don't need to bother yourself with it! Now, you gotta like that for straight shooting!

He goes on:

The encouragement of light-mindedness about traditional philosophical topics serves the same purposes as does the encouragement of light-mindedness about traditional theological toics. Like the rise of large market economies, the increase in literacy, the proliferation of artistic genres, and the insouciant pluralism of contemporary culture, such philosophical superficiality and light-mindedness helps along the disenchantment of the world. It helps make the world's inhabitants more pragmatic, more tolerant, more liberal, more receptive to the appeal of instrumental rationality.

Well, what a relief!