Freedom and the good

David Bentley Hart writes:

Democracy is not an intrinsic good, after all. Where the moral formation of a people is deficient, the general will malign, or historical circumstance unpropitious, it is quite unamiguously wicked in its results...The only sound premise for a people's self-governance is a culture of common virtue directed towards the one Good. And a society that can no longer conceive of freedom as anything more than limitless choice and uninhibited self-expression must of necessity progessively conclude that al things should be permitted, that all values are relative, that desire fashions its own truth, that there is no such thing as 'nature', that we are our own creatures. The ultimate consequence of a purely libertarian political ethcs, if it could be take to its logical end would be a world in which we would no longer even remember that we should want to choose the good, as we would have learned to deem things good solely because they have been chosen... From 'In the Aftermath', p. 80

Hart puts his finger on something very real for Australian public discourse. The principles of political liberalism do not of themselves promote the good in the citizenry. Freedom is only beneficial when you have a culture of common virtue. Such a culture, if it ever existed (and actually, perhaps it certainly did), is but a distant memory... Moral outrage at pedophilia and Islamic terrorists are what we use to fill the blank space.

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...

The Men Who Stare At Goats

Hearing reports about CIA agents torturing terror suspects chills me to the bone. Turns out this 'conspiracy' had the ring of truth after all. It reminded me of this review I wrote a couple of years back:


After The Da Vinci Code I have learnt not to trust books that begin by saying that “this is a true story.” It is pretty much an admission by the author that what is contained within the covers of the work is, well, unbelievable. It has a plausibility problem.

And I am not prone to believe conspiracy theories. Yes, the Apollo moon landings did occur. No, the CIA and the Mafia didn’t shoot JFK: Lee Harvey Oswald did it.

But the more bizarre elements of Jon Ronson’s The Men Who Stare At Goats are anchored in a disturbing reality that we know to be the truth. The shocking images from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were too weird, too perfectly calculated to do psycho-sexual and cultural damage, to be merely a case of a couple of bored, barely literate prison guards having a lark.

What mentality, what tactic, lead to the pyramids of naked prisoners? Recent reports of Australian Mamdouh Habib being splattered with the menstrual blood of prostitutes while in captivity at Guantanamo Bay are entirely in keeping with the species of prisoner interrogation displayed at Abu Ghraib.

Ronson’s story is a meandering series of interviews with ex-army personnel, false trails, intriguing rumours and investigative journalism. He struggles to make sense of it all, a feeling I, for one, share. One way of reading the story is this: that following the embarrassment of Vietnam the US military has invested heavily in alternative forms of warfare, including experiments in the paranormal. According to Ronson’s sources, they even had men trying to kill goats just by staring at them. That would, I guess, give an army a certain advantage over the enemy.

In the 1970s, Vietnam vet and lieutenant colonel named Jim Channon wrote a book called The First Earth Battalion Operations Manual. Channon imagined an army of the New Age, whose soldiers “would carry with them into hostile countries ‘symbolic animals’ such as baby lambs” (p.41). They would greet the enemy with “sparkly eyes” and give them an “automatic hug.” Ambient music would be broadcast to pacify the enemy. He presented his ideas to the top brass…

Only, once the military regained its confidence, it saw that some of the ideas in the manual could be used to shatter people rather than to heal them. Loud and repetitive music (rather than noodling ambient sounds) has been used by the Psychological Operations (PsyOps) group in Panama, at the Waco siege in Texas, in Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. The theme tune to children’s programme Barney the Dinosaur was blasted at some Iraqi detainees in a shipping container in the desert, as well as some Sesame Street favourites. Ronson records a hilarious interview with composer of some of the melodies used, who considers claiming royalties; and then he visits the PsyOps HQ to inspect their CD collection. They have Avril Lavigne, apparently.

Are the US military really experimenting with parapsychology and having battalions of men stare at goats? Some of the people Ronson interviews seem to have the obsessive intensity of the truly unhinged and lack credibility. But then – they would, wouldn’t they?

There certainly are some pretty unorthodox methods being used by the US to wage war and interrogate captives. Would it really be surprising if it were true?

The point is that the War on Terror particularly and the defence of freedom generally have produced an odd kind of paranoia among some people who have the power and resources to put their whacky ideas into practice.

But there is a blindness to see that this is in itself terror of another kind. The symbolic terror of the destruction of the two towers has its counterpart in the utter shaming of the bodies and minds of these hapless captives. The ideological madness of the religious extremists on the one side is well matched by this furtive nuttiness on the side of the forces of freedom. It makes George W. Bush’s appeal (in his second inaugural address) to a common humanity made in the image of the creator ring more than a little hollow.

The Sin of Impiety

What disturbed the pagans about the Christians?

That in itself is a tricky historical question. But, broadly speaking, the first Christians stood accused of impiety. That word or its opposite is actually used often in the martyr-acts in the interrogation of the suspects, and despite the Christians protesting that in fact they were dutiful citizens in good standing with everybody, they could not go forward and sacrifice to the Emperor in order to maintain the peace. That is to say, their lack of worshipful regard for the spirits that were held to be the guarantors of social order and agricultural fruitfulness caused their neighbours no end of worry. Tertullian famously wrote (in Apologeticum 40): "If the Tiber rises so high it floods the walls, or the Nile so low it doesn't flood the fields, if the earth opens, or the heavens don't, if there is famine, if there is plague, instantly the howl goes up, "The Christians to the lion!" What, all of them? to a single lion?" Ha ha. Christians were labelled atheists because of their impiety.

I have mentioned Jeffrey Stout's definition of piety before:

Piety ... is not to be understood primarily as a felling, expressed in acts of devotion, but rather as a virtue, a morally excellent aspect of character. It consists in just or appropriate response to the sources of one's existence and progress through life. Family, political community, the natural world, and God are all said to be sources on which we depend, sources to be acknowledged appropriately.

We need to forget the use of piety in its strictly religious sense. In Stout's sense, there remains today a properly social piety: that 'just or appropriate response to the sources of one's existence and progress'. These may be entirely material: so, the nostrums of liberal order - free speech, rights, freedom of/from religion, equality and so on, need to be treated with due regard. They can even be sung about. It is interesting that 'good luck' or 'fate' still looms large in contemporary vision of piety, since whatever good fortune we enjoy is a result of the turn of the wheel in our favour. And so, modern culture is replete with sacrifices to fortune - in the form of gambling and divinisation; and also defences erected against the arbitrary turns of the wheel (life insurance anyone?). Also, the almost sacred regard family enjoys, even today, comes unexpectedly to those who continually rail against its demise. Environmentalism (rightly) appeals to piety in this sense.

Is it fair to say that Christians stand once again accused of impiety: for we give scant regard to 'luck', or ought not to. More importantly perhaps, we with other religious people threaten the fragile and hard won peace of our communities by bringing our beliefs to the table. Or, by becoming another special interest lobby group we cut ourselves off from our community and the duties of membership in it. We deny the absoluteness of family ties (or ought to); we shockingly tell young people that they ought not to pursue material goals or pleasure as their priority. By suggesting that all religions are not the same we again stand accused of threatening the social order, of inflaming 'religious hatred' or whatever...

Jeffrey Stout and Piety II

Piety - an intriguing notion. It was precisely for lack of piety - meaning that mix of civil and religious duty - that the early martyrs were killed.

I think the accusation is still very much in play: Christians, if/when they are faithful witnesses, stand accused of impiety against the liberal secular order.

Stout describes modern piety thus:

Piety ... is not to be understood primarily as a felling, expressed in acts of devotion, but rather as a virtue, a morally excellent aspect of character. It consists in just or appropriate response to the sources of one's existence and progress through life. Family, political community, the natural wolrd, and God are all said to be sources on which we depend, sources to be acknowledged appropriately. Emersonians and Augustinians agree that piety, in this sense, is a crucial virtue, and they share an interest in clarifying the proper relationship between civic and religious piety. But they disagree over how the sourecs should be conceived and what constitutes appropriate acknowledgment of our dependence on them. ( Democracy and Tradition, p. 20)

Charles Taylor and difference-blind liberalism

There's a form of liberalism that imagines it can offer a neutral ground on which people of all cultures can meet and co-exist. And it polices that ground - the prosecution of the 'Catch the Fire' ministry for saying some pretty awful things about Muslims in Victoria is a case in point.
On this view, it is necssary to distinguish public and private, religion and politics and so on, so that you can put contentious difficulties into a non-political sphere as far as possible.

Taylor writes:

...a controversy like that over Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses shows how wrong this view is. FOr mainstream Islam, there is no question of separating politics and religion the way we have come to expect in Western liberal society. Liberalism is not a possible meeting ground of all cultures, but is the political expression of one range of cultures, and quite incompatible with other ranges. Moreover, as many Muslims are well aware, Western liberalism is not so much an expression of the secular, postreligious outlook that happens to be popular among liberal intellectuals as a more organic outgrowth of Christianity - at least as seen from the alternative vantage point of Islam. The division of church and state goes back to the earliest days of Christian civilisation.

(Taylor, 'The politics of recognition' p. 62)

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.

Charles Taylor on Salman Rushdie

For purposes of my thesis I was delighted to discover a comment by Charles Taylor on the Rushdie controversy of the late 80s. What Taylor rightly observes is that The Satanic Verses 'is a profoundly Western book', whatever its exotic subject matter.

In Rushdie's book, one has the comfortable sense that exactly the things which repel him from religion...are the things its devotees cherish. They experience exactly the same spiritual realities, and just reverse the sign. Rushdie's book is comforting to the western liberal mind, which shares one feature with that of the Ayatollah Khomeini, the belief that there is nothing outside their world-view which needs deeper understanding, just a perverse refection of the obviously right. To live in this difficult world, the western liberal mind will have to learn to reach out more.

Quite. But, can it? The western liberal mind always already has ordered views other than its own, either by means of a progressivist narration ('oh, they are so primitive, we got over that years ago') or by demonising it as 'intolerant'. So, why will the western liberal even see the need to reach out? Isn't it rather a matter of teaching the world to behave in the right way?

The Trouble With Principle - Stanley Fish (review)

It must be hard to be liberal in a world full of extremists, hard-liners and fanatics. Liberalism – the ideological offspring of the eighteenth century Enlightenment – is the convictional pattern that today governs practically all public and intellectual discourse in the Western world. Liberals appeal to a set of principles that they hold to be incontrovertible, even “self-evident”: free speech, equality, tolerance, freedom of belief, democracy, the right of the individual to make independent and autonomous moral decisions. These are the dogmas of liberalism.

Yet every now and again the smugness and complacency of liberal thinking is exposed for the sham it is - usually when people whose rights liberals advocate won’t behave. For example, when indigenous or third world peoples speak against homosexuality, western liberals are quite plainly confused as to how to respond without appearing racist, as was the case with the Episcopalian bishops at the Anglican Lambeth conference in 1998. Likewise when David Irving, the historian who claims that the Holocaust was largely a hoax, sought permission into Australia, his right to freedom of speech was denied it because it was thought he might inflame racial hatred. Further, when novelist Salman Rushdie was condemned to death by the Ayotollah Khomeini, this was deemed by Western observers as taking free speech too far. The principles of free speech and the tolerance and protection of minorities are plainly at cross purposes.
The trouble is, liberals appear to advocate a comprehensive tolerance when in fact they do nothing of the kind. They would advocate freedom of religious belief – so long as that freedom does not transgress its carefully proscribed limits. Religious belief, for example, should not be a matter for parliaments or courts, nor should it have any influence there. And yet for any person holding such a religious belief, this caveat will seem hilarious. How can any truly and firmly held belief be discarded as if of no relevance in one sphere of life?

This, in Stanley Fish’s words, is “boutique multiculturalism”. A boutique multiculturalist will “always stop short of approving other cultures at a point where some value at their center generates an act that offends against the canons of civilised decency as they have either been declared or assumed.” (p.56) A boutique multiculturalist suffers from an inability to take seriously the core values of the cultures he or she tolerates. He or she apparently enjoys diversity, but only when divergent cultures and views are presented in sanitised or tame versions.

A “strong multiculturalist”, on the other hand, makes a genuine effort: tolerance is stipulated as the first principle, and tries to accord all cultures a deep respect at their core. However, as Fish points out, strong multiculturalism founders when it encounters the very intolerance it loathes at the centre of another belief system. How do you respond to Muslim intolerance of Rushdie? You might tolerate it, in which case tolerance is no longer your core principle; or you might condemn it, in which case you turn out to be another boutique multiculturalist after all.

Stanley Fish’s aim in his book The Trouble with Principle is to unpick the rhetoric of liberalism and expose it as dishonest at the core. As he explains it, the really dangerous thing about the liberal appeal to principles is that it uses the rhetoric of neutrality and distance while being nothing of the kind. It takes the moral high ground, aloof from irrational evils like “dogmatism” and “fanaticism”, all the while being just as dogmatic, fanatical and irrational. It is “a wolf in reason’s clothing”. (p.187)

The strategy of liberalism is to clear a public space, free (allegedly) from ideological (and especially religious) concerns, and in which only agreed truths, such as “two plus two equals four”, may prosper. Other beliefs may be held, but only in private. The curriculum for a secular education, for example, should be absolutely free from religious influence. However, Fish points out that what is and what is not ideological is itself a matter of dispute: “Christ is risen” may be such a truth for some and not for others. In addition, in late twentieth century Western democracies, the values and ideology of liberalism are held to “go without saying”. The values and ideology of Christianity may only be held in a private way. They must be set aside in the public sphere.

The double standard of this seems obvious to me now that Fish has pointed it out! Whenever Christians enter into the public sphere as Christians they are exposed to ridicule and held to have transgressed the sacred boundaries traced by liberalism. David Marr’s book The High Price of Heaven is an example of just such a sustained and bitter attack on Christian interference in public affairs from an openly liberal perspective. He wears his boutique multiculturalism on his sleeve: he is completely – unashamedly - intolerant of Christian social policy in all its forms.

Stanley Fish is a delightful scallywag; but he is far more than that. Over four decades he has established himself as a world-class Miltonist, a philosopher of law, and a literary theorist. His books are always provocative and argued with an intense and vigorous logic. His texts are full of closely worked examples and case studies, where the implications are meticulously teased out. He does not like a snow-job: and he is happiest untangling and exposing them. Perhaps liberalism is the biggest snow-job of all.

Fish’s extensive study of the Christian poet John Milton has given him an understanding of what it is to believe. Indeed, he rightly sees that none of us is without “beliefs” – shaped by history and context and other beliefs - that stand prior to rationality. In fact, our beliefs actually condition our use of reason, more than we are conscious of. There is something deeply internal to true beliefs. They claim our souls and change our lives. Liberals, despite their rhetoric, want to hold all other belief systems at arms length – to admire, but not to really understand from within. They draw a wedge between “belief” and “reason”, and with extreme prejudice. Of course, this is all done by appeal to apparently neutral “principles”. The sleight of hand is obvious in the slow motion replays Fish allows us with his careful analysis: these “principles” are not neutral at all, but suit the vested interests of those who hold them.

The lessons to learn from Stanley Fish are many. We Christians have perhaps grown ashamed of our commitments and beliefs in the public sphere. We have perhaps bought the liberal rhetoric of neutrality too readily. We have perhaps hoped that we could easily shed our most deeply held beliefs when we needed to speak in public. We have perhaps allowed ourselves to be marginalised as “fundamentalists” and “fanatics”. We are perhaps embarrassed to cause a fuss and call the bluff of the liberals who sanctimoniously call on people with beliefs other than their own to hide them in public. What the rigorous analysis of Fish reveals is that the impressive edifice of liberalism is in fact a mirage; and that we need pay it far less deference than we do.

Like the Wizard of Oz, the very real power of liberalism rests on the illusion of substance.

Talking about God in public

The second tempter of the martyr Thomas in Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral offers him a collaborative arrangement under the power of the king. When he rejects this, asserting instead his episcopal authority, he is accused of being merely interested in power.

The same temptation is offered under very different historical conditions by the late-modern liberal segregation of the sacred (private) from the secular. Religious people are indeed invited to take their place in the business of public reasoning, but on the condition that they jettison those components of their thinking that held by others to be ‘religious’. The most prominent contemporary exponent of political liberalism – indeed, arguably the most influential political philosopher of the last forty years – is John Rawls. Rawls began in A Theory of Justice (1971) to concur with Kant and to try to earth justice solely in a universal and abstract notion of ‘Reason’. However, in Political Liberalism (1993) he suggests the notion of ‘reasonableness’. He distinguishes this from ‘Reason’ by noting that a person acts reasonably when they are willing ‘to propose principles and standards as fair terms of cooperation and to abide by them willingly, given the assurance that others will do so’. From behind the ‘veil of ignorance’, Rawls proposes that people will choose reasonably for fair terms that will receive acknowledgement by ‘overlapping’ consensus. It would be quite possible for people to hold the same political values for quite disparate reasons: but these reasons are in the end quite irrelevant. Rawls writes provocatively, ‘[F]or the purposes of public life, Saul of Tarsus and Paul the Apostle are the same person.’ Rawls claims that this conception of justice is ‘freestanding’: it moves entirely in the practical and political world and leaves philosophy (and presumably theology) untouched. Rawls’ attempt to justify political liberalism at least has the virtue of accommodating the fact of pluralism: it (supposedly) allows for peaceful disagreements, and finds considerable space for positive agreement. Rawls wants to establish more than a modus vivendi: if groups in society are merely tolerant of one another, there is always the possibility of instability if the balance of power shifts and one group gains more power than others. His theory appears also to avoid the difficulty of appeal to some form of ‘comprehensive doctrine’ (the term he uses for ‘the contents of persons’ determinate conceptions of the good’). This modus vivendi forestalls the entry into the public space of the religious in such a way as to protect society from facing discussions about matters which may prevent the productive and safe conduct of its business. However, it also forces religious groups to speak in public only in terms of outcomes and utility, and perhaps about (their own) rights. The business of the actual concrete determination and management of justice must be carried out without reference to the ‘shadowy’ discourse of theology. Any Christian address of a controversial matter of public interest must prove itself in a measurable way, aside from its own logic. Economics is the new queen of the sciences to whom all other forms of knowledge must pay tribute. There is an option, however, delivered by postmodernity and present in the later Rawls. This is the ‘territorial’ option, whereby the religious group asserts and protects its own interests within the public sphere, usually on the basis of ‘rights’. Its speech having been excluded from the public forum, it can now only speak in the language that succeeds in that space, occupy as much of it as possible, and engage in talking mostly in an inner-directed way to its own constituency. The group may even succeed in gaining representatives of its interests elected into government office. The result is that it creates a new public space for itself, which it seeks to enlarge at the expense of other groups. To put it another way: the exclusion from the public forum of religious types of speech means that religious people feel a great difficutly at feeling their point of view is really heard in public. This situation may be accepted by some, who then have to live with the Paul/Saul bifurcation of their identities; but, for others, it is an invitation to occupy as much of the public sphere as possible without feeling the need to talk persuasively in the public sphere at all.

More Globalisation

Globalisation may be interpreted as a secular western liberal adaptation of a Christian vision. The linchpin of globalisation is a liberal view of market economies, so that trade barriers are minimized if not removed (as they were between Australia and the USA in 2004-5). Free trade can have the positive effect in small economies of breaking down the wealth and power of oligarchies in favour of the majority; which has the apparent effect of advancing western liberal values.

This of course worked in Eastern Europe, where religious life had been by and large suppressed; but has had limited success in the Islamic world. It was relatively easy to dazzle the citizens of the gray cities of the communist bloc with consumer goods and so to turn them against their governments. As President George W. Bush’s 2005 inauguration address revealed, the emancipatory master narrative of freedom is also being applied globally (and, ironically, by force if necessary). Globalisation means, in reality, the universal application of liberal values. Human fraternity – a secular catholicity – will be achieved in the end because Western culture is assumed to be the universal – or, at least, the universally desired – civilization. This is a soteriology without an eschatology: in other words, the ‘end of history’ is to be proclaimed from within history. In other words, what we may readily observe with secular western liberalism is a secular form of post-millennialism.