From: "Tom Bridges" <bridges-AT-civsoc.com>
Subject: HAB: September 11 and the demise of the Habermasian project
Date: Mon, 17 Sep 2001 13:22:28 -0400


	Can the Habermasian project survive the terrorist attack on NY
and Washington?
	By "Habermasian project," I refer to the philosophical project
of (roughly) deriving universally valid norms of truth and justice from
a formal pragmatics -- i.e., from a reconstruction of the rules and
assumptions that all speakers and hearers (regardless of differences in
culture and context) inevitably employ in everyday processes of
communication.
	It seems to me that if Habermas himself had abandoned his
universalist, quasi-Kantian, postmetaphysical ambitions and had
presented his theory simply as an account of the style and norms of
communication prevalent in societies influenced by the ideals of the
European Enlightenment and liberal democracy, his philosophical
contribution would have a lasting value. It seems plausible to me to say
that, at least in the case of the very best citizens of Western
democracies, everyday processes of communication are indeed governed by
the aim of achieving mutual understanding, so that context-transcending
validity claims and a willingness to justify those claims discursively
are indeed defining features of such communcative interaction.
	But I wonder -- after September 11, does anyone really still
believe that Habermas' formal pragmatic account of everyday
communication captures the rules and assumptions governing speakers and
hearers in the Middle Eastern cultural context that glorifies religious
martyrdom and Islamic holy war? In that cultural context, are everyday
patterns of communicative interaction really captured by an account of
action oriented toward mutual understanding as Habermas defines it? Do
the speakers and hearers shaped by radical Islamic fundamentalism engage
in communicative action that raises context-transcending, discursively
redeemable validity claims? I don't think so.
	But the fact that Habermas' account of communicative action
cannot shed much light on the communicative competence required for
participation in Islamic fundamentalist societies does not make his
account less illuminating as an analysis of the communicative competence
required for participation in Western civil societies. The trouble is
that Habermas would no doubt reject this more modest, culturally
particularist revision of his account of communicative action. To rescue
his universalist claims, he would no doubt call into play a theory of
social evolution that would relegate the forms of communication found in
radical Islamic fundamentalist contexts to some sort of developmentally
deficient category. Unfortunately, this kind of strategy reflects
precisely the sort of cultural arrogance of the West that is responsible
in part for producing the terrorist culture of the Middle East, a
culture that seeks to destroy the very forms of communicative action
that Habermas insists are normative for all humanity.

Tom Bridges
http://www.civsoc.com   




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