08.19.07
Times: The politics of god
The Politics of God
By MARK LILLA
Article in Times on religion, secularism, and the liberal context of religion.
It might be worth commenting on this several times this week, but to simply indicate the broad outlines of a response is simply done in the context of Darwiniana blog by pointing to the need for a post-Darwinian liberalism, a new historically based renewal of core liberalism and its significance in relation to religion.
All the talk of secularism forgets the reduced nature of the current brand, and the failure to fulfill the Enlightenment’s potential to both lead beyond religion and yet recreate it in a potentially more intelligent form. The place of Rousseau, as indicated in the article, is significant, and as significant is the immediate echo in Kant, triggering the phase of German classical philosophy which potentially solves the question of religion and modernity.
The oddity of current discourse is seen in the way secularists, reduced to the stupidities of Darwinian social ideology, and theism/atheism quibbling, in an age of technocratic Big Science, are suddenly on the defensive with respect to resurgent fundamentalism.
Only an historically based understanding, with a supercharged recreated liberalism able to understand its classic roots in the total Enlightenment can move to both embrace and transcend the assault of religious reaction.
In its current form the reign of scientism has produced a generation of students so narrow that even the historical study of religion has become beyond their capacity.
The rise of modernity was an isolated sneak attack against global inertia and the decay of religious traditionalism. It is not surprising therefore that sooner or later these traditions would demand to be reckoned with. That is not always easy because the legacy of Protestantism leading to a Euro-centered modernity leaves secularists ill-equipped to deal with such things as the spread of Buddhism, or more problematically the enigma of Islam (and one must include Hinduism, the vast field of New Age religion, etc, in fact, any aspect of religion historically given).
There is an immense discourse possible here.
But the moment of Rousseau is the tipping point and indicates the classic dialectical seed that leads to the great descant on the Enlightenment seen in the Romantic era, which is the larger Enlightenment that should inspire, taken altogether, a more robust secularism.
Here Kant, inspired by Rousseau, and the legacy of Newton, sees the light at the end of the tunnel, and produces a matrix of liberal post-Protestantism at once informed by science and the legacy of religion. Here in one phrase the keynote is sounded in the adjunction to causality based scientism of the idea of freedom.
From this we can foresee, not the hybridization of false compromises under the threat of religious reaction, but the creation of a secularism that is a far superior foundation for religion than the archaic remnants of the Axial Age, among them the classic monotheisms, whose fate is sealed by the dynamics of a New Age of history. And yet these religious formations linger with a warning that the technocratic cults of pseudo-science and Social Darwinist economism and biologism have failed the promise of a true secularism. And they issue a warning that modernity will be swept away if nothing more is imagined than the absurd posture of the iron cage administered by the mind control fascists who have hijacked the name of the Enlightenment.
However limited its form the notion of a Kantian ‘religion within the limits of reason’ sounds but one great chord of religious potential in a secular age. Beyond Kant we see the ‘instant Buddhism recreated’ of Schopenhauer, and the vaunted ‘consummation of Protestantism’ in the ‘liberal’ Hegel. This spectrum of possibilities in a fuller universe of creative philosophical-religious innovation represent the real future of religious secularism, their already quaint forms apart.
We need hardly point out that by this rubric Marx is a ‘liberal’ of some kind, and that the ideologies of liberalism are stunted political adjuncts to economic elites, ‘classical liberalism’. The failures of the ‘liberal’ far left in the spectacle of communism have left the future momentarily ambiguous. It is this intractable logjam of ‘liberal’ ideology, left and right, more even than the fact of renewed fundamentalism, that has slowed the momentum of secularism. Into that void flow the incoherent remnants of the Axial Age, demanding some account better than Darwinian cliches of ‘evolved human nature’. The current biological reductionist world view positted as the resolution of science on man is so denatured as to force the persistence of religious traditions. Secularists need to get their house in order or face the destruction of modernity in the implosion of archaic Axial religion.
The study of the eonic effect in this context can be helpful in broadening perspective on the place of religion and secularism in world history. The rise of secularism has the potential to offer something superior to the fossilized monotheisms but is thwarted by the narrow rendition given it in the triumph of positivism.
The twilight of the idols has been postponed. For more than two centuries, from the American and French Revolutions to the collapse of Soviet Communism, world politics revolved around eminently political problems. War and revolution, class and social justice, race and national identity — these were the questions that divided us. Today, we have progressed to the point where our problems again resemble those of the 16th century, as we find ourselves entangled in conflicts over competing revelations, dogmatic purity and divine duty. We in the West are disturbed and confused. Though we have our own fundamentalists, we find it incomprehensible that theological ideas still stir up messianic passions, leaving societies in ruin. We had assumed this was no longer possible, that human beings had learned to separate religious questions from political ones, that fanaticism was dead. We were wrong.