File spoon-archives/habermas.archive/habermas_2001/habermas.0109, message 91


Date: Thu, 20 Sep 2001 07:24:54 -0700
From: Kenneth MacKendrick <kenneth.mackendrick-AT-utoronto.ca>
Subject: Re: HAB: Peace & Evolution


At 07:39 PM 9/19/01 -0700, you wrote:

>Doesn't a social evolutionary approach to understanding and
>interpretation include religious worldviews? Of course. Forbiding
>women a position in public life is unacceptable, but you can't force
>people to grow.

Do you mean to say, "we can't force these men to grow?" - because women are 
excluded, often by force. Women are judicially tried according to separate 
standards, they are forbidden from participation in schools and 
universities and so on. It doesn't strike me that there is anything 
critical about a theory that has to wait for men to grow up. Back to 
Marcuse - intolerance toward toleration that tolerates domination.

>  It's like forcing children to grow up; that's bad
>parenting. Growth happens, under conducive conditions, but across
>generations. I don't believe that the conditions of life for women
>under theocracy is basically a religious issue (See Martha Nussbaum,
>_Women & Human Development_, Cambridge UP, 2000).

I haven't read Nussbaum's book, and I suspect if Nussbaum argues that life 
for women under theocracy isn't a religious issue then she's radically 
misunderstood the link between religion, politics, and women. According to 
some strands of Islamic fundamentalism (and a variety of other 
fundamentalisms) there is no such think as a valid "non-Islamic state." 
Islam means an Islamic state. Not unlike Charlemagne's interpretation of 
Augustine's City of God - the empire is, and can only be, a Christian empire.

> > A fundamentalist regime of
> > such quality cannot 'peacefully' coexist without 'secular' or
>'modern'
> > interference on a continual and ongoing basis. I would tentatively
> > propose that the fundamentalism *cannot simply go its own way.
>
>I agree, but this "cannot" is not a matter of overtly preventing
>fundamentalism from following its path of development.
>  Ironically, in
>social evolution, *freedom* undermines backwardness. It's like
>letting teenagers learn truths of life in their own time; try to
>control them too much, and they willfully hold to immature attitudes;
>give them supervised freedom, and they grow up. The "cannot" arises
>from the co-existence of fundamentalism IN modern life.
>Fundamentalism is destined to become untenable, in my view, but I'm
>not in support of great missionary campaigns to convince
>fundamentalist Muslims of this. The social evolutionary conflict of
>theocratic and modern aspects of life on this tiny planet is
>inevitable.

This is at the heart of my problem with Habermas. I gave a run at it when I 
typed up my Hegelian critique of Habermas which received no comment from 
anyone on the list. If the critical theorist, or liberal democrat, assumes 
that the other, politically included or not, is immature / backward / 
whatever - then this in itself will *prevent and, likely, be a reigning 
cause of further reproach. Part of the anger that people have toward the 
US, aside from their flagrant bombing campaigns, is the attitude of 
smuggness, the presupposition that the US is the greatest nation on the 
earth, superior to all others. It is this attitude of socio-cultural / 
cognitive superiority that ignites antagonism. If the critical theorist 
adopts the same attitude... we can see the parallel between Hegel's 
lordship and bondage dialectic. The lord pats the slave on the head, "good 
slave, some day you will grow up and be free, like me, until then you can 
make shoes." I think we still have a great deal to learn from Marx: the 
critique of religion is the premise of all criticism. Why not? Marx had a 
simplified understanding of religion of course, highly undifferentiated, 
but where is the Habermasian analysis of systematically distorted 
communication when it comes to patriarchal theocracy? In Catholicism, for 
example, have Habermasian challenged the refusal to ordain women? Catholic 
doctrine maintains that women cannot be ordained because Jesus was male. My 
guess is that there is no Habermasian analysis because claiming that this 
doctrine stems from a systemic misunderstanding is, well, silly. What if 
humanism isn't at the bottom of tradition, religious or not, what if 
misogyny and violence are at the heart of a 'cultural ethic.' Rene Girard 
argues this is the case: human relations begin with conflict, and there 
needs to be a sacrifice to quell envious relations between equals, a 
sacrifice that deflates the hated by transforming it into love and solidarity.

>All of the major religions have a humanistic ethic.
>But I readily grant that wide open debate applies here.

What about those traditions that dictate that 'reality' is an illusion?

> > Rome did line the streets and highways with hanging bodies after
>all.
>
>I referred to a "Greco-Judaic" root shared by modernity and Islam.
>Roman transgression is not important to a context in which Islam
>didn't yet exist; and Christianity was not born from a Roman ethic.

Ahem... Christianity *developed* out of a Roman ethic. Until Constantine's 
conversion Christianity was a branch of Judaism, persecuted on and off, 
mostly on. Until it was grafted into Roman mythology there was no 
widespread Christianity to speak of. We can't *historically* speak of an 
'original' Christianity without being ahistorical. After Constantine's 
conversion, hoards of pagans were converted in mass, and Constantine 
'invented' a Christian civil service to dispense orthodoxy. This, of 
course, double the existing taxes. With an increase in taxes, the 
enforcement of said orthodoxy became impossible. This created a social need 
for 'holy people' to negotiate between the hand-outs from Rome and the 
local pagan practices. Christianity, then, aside from the writings of 
theologians, is a mix of local pagan traditions and abstract edicts from 
afar. Pointing to an 'original' Christianity means picking a passage from a 
scripture and saying that this is the essence. Well, this wasn't the 
essence for those who didn't read Latin, nor was it the essence for those 
prior to the institution of the biblical text...different communities at 
the time used different texts. Orthodoxy, at times, was enforced by the 
sword if necessary, but also by the silent rules of decorum, the slow 
pressure of custom. If there is an 'essence' to development, that's it: the 
slow drive of contingency bearing the weight of local traditions entwined 
with a top-heavy bureaucratic taxation and normative edict.

>In part, I suppose. Proselytizing is part of most traditions, but not
>constitutive of those traditions. Isn't it the case that what's
>constitutive for both Christianity and Islam is one's relationship to
>God / Allah, not one's evangelism (which serves God among *many ways*
>to serve God)? Self-determination "under" God/Allah is primordial.
>Freedom here, relative to secular modernity (the context our shared
>interest in this email medium), is basically *away* from this
>secularity--to be "left alone" in this kind of sense, relative to
>secular modernity. Left to its ownmost destiny, I would say.

It might be more appropriate to say that "service to God" is more important 
than either freedom or happiness (at least for the monotheistic traditions, 
and then only certain strands). In a world that is corrupt, then there is 
only corruption that must be resisted... freedom and happiness will arrive 
in the afterlife, the rest can go to hell.

ken



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