What does Jürgen Habermas, considered by many
to be the finest moral philosopher of the last half century, have to say about
secularization? Not what people on both sides of the ideological spectrum want
him to say.
Habermas intuited something that a vast swath
of the secular-minded is uncomfortable with. The great risk of Western culture –
its enormous faults notwithstanding – is that it will no longer transmit its
peculiar gifts to the world as a whole. The risk is to itself in the first
place, that it has become a cut-flower civilization, the beautiful bloom of a
plant rooted in the soil of millennia past, a past, however, from which it has cut
itself off. Once that happens, it is destined to perish against the orange and
pink of a beautiful sunset, no matter how stately it appears, a single green
stem without roots, in the splendid isolation a crystal vase affords. The darkness
of twilight cannot but settle upon it.
Habermas understood this. In his own words:
Das Christendom ist für das normative Selbstverständnis der Moderne nicht
nur eine Vorläufergestalt oder ein Katalysator gewesen. Der egalitäre
Universalismus, aus dem die Ideen von Freiheit und solidarischem Zusammenleben,
von autonomer Lebensführunf und Emanzipation, von individueller Gewissensmoral,
Menchenrechten und Demokratie entsprungen sind, ist unmittelbar ein Erbe der
jüdischen Gerechtigkeits- und der christlichen Liebesethik. In der Substanz
unverändert, ist dieses Erbe immer wieder kritisch angeeignet und neu
interpretiert worden. Dazu gibt es bis heute keine Alternative. Auch angesichts
der aktuellen Herausforderungen einer postnationalen Konstellation zehren wir
nach wie vor von dieser Substanz. Alles andere ist postmodernes Gerede".
Zeit der Übergänge (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2001) 174-175.
A relatively literal translation (my own):
As far as modernity’s normative self-understanding is concerned,
Christianity has functioned not only as a forerunner or catalyst. Egalitarian
universalism, from which sprang the ideals of freedom, a common life built on
solidarity, a conduct of life guided by the principles of autonomy and
emancipation, the ethical stance of the individual conscience, and human rights
and democracy, is the direct legacy of the Jewish ethic of justice and the
Christian ethic of love. In substance unchanged, this legacy has been, on a
continuous basis, critically re-appropriated and re-interpreted. To this
day, there is no alternative to it [italics mine].
Furthermore, in the light of the current challenges of a post-national
configuration, we draw on this substance no less than before. Everything else
is postmodern chatter.
A mistranslation of the above has circulated
widely: see the appendix below.
The quote is telling, so telling that its
obvious sense has been denied by those who seem to know little about the use of
the word “secularization” in the history of Continental philosophy and
theology. For an example of special pleading, go here.
Secularization in the sense Habermas builds
on is an emphasis of Luther and Calvin, two of the greatest contributors to
modernity even though they are anti-modern as well: the emphasis on the calling
(vocatio, Beruf) of the Christian to translate one’s own faith into the
mundane, into every sphere and every nook and cranny of life. The emphasis
overlaps with, but is not identical to, the doctrine of the priesthood of all
believers. The revolutionary force of this emphasis is perhaps most easily
assayed through reading the manifesto of the Reformer of Strasbourg, Martin
Bucer, entitled De Regno Christi (On the Reign of Christ).
It is also the case that an agnostic or
non-believer can draw on the substance of a profoundly religious heritage
without accepting the metaphysical foundations on which it rests. Furthermore,
the agnostic will, if she draws on the substance, be exercising a form of pietas
that may exceed that of a self-identifying religionist. To this extent, to
conclude from the argument of Habermas that everyone must convert to
Christianity is a bridge too far.
From a sociological point of view, however, the
metaphysically weightless appropriation of the Judeo-Christian heritage by agnosticism is an accident waiting to
happen. If secularization is defined, not in the resonant and dialectical sense
of Habermas, but in the reductive sense of a decline in religion and religious
contents in collective and personal self-understanding, the thing defined is a highly
unstable quantity. Almost inevitably, something will eventually be found to play the role of ultimate ground of one's being and destiny. It is not surprising that a former theorist of
secularization in the reductive sense, Peter L. Berger, has recently argued
that “the world today is as furiously religious as it ever was, and in some
places more so than ever,” and that “the whole body of literature by historians
and social scientists loosely labeled ‘secularization theory’ is essentially mistaken”
(p. 2 of work cited in the bibliography).
As it turns out, the appropriation of an
originally Continental Protestant Christian emphasis has not proven difficult
for Anglicans, Roman Catholics, the Orthodox, Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists to
accomplish, so long as the framework in which the appropriation takes place is
sufficiently Western - i.e., sufficiently rooted in the heritage of which
Habermas speaks. Nor has it proven difficult for Jews in a process of
assimilation to something with analogues and precursors in Jewish tradition.
But once the appropriation is no longer ongoing,
once the secularization is not based on a divine command, but on the fancy of a
culture that believes more in random acts of kindness than on a common life
built on daily subordination of one’s desires to those of others, a death knell
has been sounded, even if, on account of deafness, no one hears it.
Starter bibliography
Peter L. Berger, ed. The
Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics (Washington:
Ethics and Public Policy Center; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999); Jacques Ellul,
Trahison de l'Occident (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1975); ET The Betrayal
of the West (tr. Matthew J. O'Connell; New York: Seabury Press, 1978); Friedrich
Gogarten, Verhängnis und Hoffnung der Neuzeit : die Säkularisierung
als theologisches Problem (2nd ed.; Stuttgart: Vorwerk, 1958); Jürgen
Habermas and Joseph Ratzinger, The Dialectics of Secularization:
On Reason and Religion (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2007); Michael Novak,
The Catholic Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Free Press, 1993);
Max Weber, Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus, Vollständige
Ausgabe. (2nd ed.; ed. Dirk Kaesler, München: Beck, 2006 [Tübingen:
Mohr, 1934]); ET The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (tr. Talcott
Parsons; foreword, R. H. Tawney; Mineola: Dover, 2003 [New York: Scribner,
1958]
Appendix
A famous misquote
Christianity, and nothing else is the
ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the
benchmarks of western civilization. To this day, we have no other options [to
Christianity]. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything
else is postmodern chatter.
A “canonical translation”
For the normative self-understanding of
modernity, Christianity has functioned as more than just a precursor or a
catalyst. Universalistic egalitarianism, from which sprang the ideals of
freedom and a collective life in solidarity, the autonomous conduct of life and
emancipation, the individual morality of conscience, human rights and democracy,
is the direct legacy of the Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of
love. This legacy, substantially unchanged, has been the object of continual
critical appropriation and reinterpretation. To this day, there is no
alternative to it. And in light of the current challenges of a postnational
constellation, we continue to draw on the substance of this heritage. Everything
else is just idle postmodern talk.
In “A Conversation about God and the World,” Jürgen
Habermas, Time of Transitions (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006) 150-51.
damn you got some good stuff here
Posted by: whereswaldo | February 26, 2010 at 08:36 PM