Last November I mentioned a fine book by Hunter Baker titled The End of Secularism which explained how the project to secularize the public arena is dying a death of intellectual inanition.
A reader named Bill passes along an article on the same theme written for the New York Times' Opinionator blog by Stanley Fish which he titles Are There Secular Reasons?
Fish draws on a book by professor of law Steven Smith, The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse, in which Smith argues that the secularist ideal of a public discourse sterilized of any religious premises is doomed to vacuity. It can only accomplish anything by smuggling in metaphysical, or religious, presuppositions "incognito."
Here's Fish writing about Smith's argument:
...the "truncated discursive resources available within the downsized domain of 'public reason' are insufficient to yield any definite answer to a difficult issue - abortion, say, or same sex marriage, or the permissibility of torture . . . ." If public reason has "deprived" the natural world of "its normative dimension" by conceiving of it as free-standing and tethered to nothing higher than or prior to itself, how, Smith asks, "could one squeeze moral values or judgments about justice . . . out of brute empirical facts?" No way that is not a sleight of hand. This is the cul de sac Enlightenment philosophy traps itself in when it renounces metaphysical foundations in favor of the "pure" investigation of "observable facts." It must somehow bootstrap or engineer itself back up to meaning and the possibility of justified judgment, but it has deliberately jettisoned the resources that would enable it do so.
Nevertheless, Smith observes, the self-impoverished discourse of secular reason does in fact produce judgments, formulate and defend agendas, and speak in a normative vocabulary. How is this managed? By "smuggling," Smith answers.
. . . the secular vocabulary within which public discourse is constrained today is insufficient to convey our full set of normative convictions and commitments. We manage to debate normative matters anyway - but only by smuggling in notions that are formally inadmissible, and hence that cannot be openly acknowledged or adverted to.
The notions we must smuggle in, according to Smith, include "notions about a purposive cosmos, or a teleological nature stocked with Aristotelian 'final causes' or a providential design," all banished from secular discourse because they stipulate truth and value in advance rather than waiting for them to be revealed by the outcomes of rational calculation. But if secular discourse needs notions like these to have a direction - to even get started - "we have little choice except to smuggle [them] into the conversations - to introduce them incognito under some sort of secular disguise."
There's much more of value in Fish's essay, and I thank Bill for recommending it.
One way this "smuggling" occurs, we might note, is that the secularist will make a moral claim to appeal for support among people who agree with the claim on religious grounds, even though the secularist does not himself share those grounds. For example, he might argue that we should not selfishly exploit the planet's resources and Christians will nod their heads in agreement because they believe for religious reasons that selfishness is wrong. It never occurs to many of them, though, to ask the secularist why he thinks it's wrong. Thus, the secularist is able to exclude religious reasons from the public square even though he piggy backs into the square on the shoulders of those reasons.
RLC
