Date: Tue, 27 Nov 2001 13:11:23 -0800 (PST)
Subject: HAB: Post-Secular Humanity (part 3 of 4?)


I know that analytical reading is not very appropriate with a
translation of a lecture designed for a general audience of
listeners. As someone familiar with JH's work, I want to see some
discursive thread furthered, but don't--and so what. But a some
critical points seem pertinent to me, in the face of JH's very
agreeable presentation that is largely meant to recall long-standing
"Frankfurt" themes in a spirit of religious inclusion. 

It was interesting news to me that "the word 'secularization' has a
juridical meaning that refers to the forcible appropriation of church
property by the secular state" (10), but JH gives more weight to this
than seems warrented (according to various contexts of discussion of
secularization in _Encyclopedia Britannica_--searchable
online-amazing!), since it was Germanic *Protestant* interests that
apparently motivated appropriation of specifically *Catholic*
properties; that is, the expropriation was internal to the evolution
(cultural differentiation) of religious economics *in* German
modernization, not a mark of the secular state as such vis-a-vis
religion. In fact, the religio-economic expropriative meaning of
'secularization' seems socially marginal to the large-scale
*cultural* incorporation of Christian-Renaissance humanism (and its
sense of individual entitlement) contemporaneous with post-Medieval
mercantilism. In short, it is not an *expropriative* meaning of
'secularization' that has notable historical causality that "has
since been extended to the emergence of cultural and societal
modernism in general" (10). JH is making 'secularization' do too much
heavy lifting for the spirit of hegemony which he wishes to connote.
Rather, it was the emergence of cultural and societal modernism that
is the backdrop of the exploitation of secularization within the
evolution of northwest European religious economies-perdurance of
feudalism within modernization. Accordingly, "the word
'secularization' has been associated with both of these opposed
judgments" (10), but a counterposition of "taming" and "unlawfulness"
conveniently suppresses the primacy of constructive modernization
that generally prevailed over distorted miscarriages of authority.
JH's counterposing patronizes religious alienation with a story that
occludes a basis for re-owning the cultural *evolutionary* character
of constructive historicality that belongs to both European religious
culture and liberal political culture. From my vantage point, on the
west coast of the western reaches of The West, JH voices a
Eurocentric guilt burdened by the German legacy of hegemony (It was
in northwestern, Germanic regions of Europe that the expropriations
largely took place, in the 16th century). Indeed, "both
interpretations [presented by JH] make the same mistake" (12), but
not, I think, so much because "[t]hey both consider secularization as
a kind of zero-sum game…" (12); rather, because they both occlude the
largely progressive nature of modernization within both religion and
politics.  It's an anthropological mistake to conceive modernization
primarily in terms of "the productive powers of science and
technology harnessed by capitalism and… the tenacious powers of
religion and the church" (12). Indeed, "[t]his image" not only "no
longer fits a post-secular society" (12), but doesn't fit the
cultural-psychological-economic- political (anthropological)
modernization that was itself the basis for "posit[ing of] the
continued existence of religious communities within a continually
secularizing society" (12) that JH now associates with
*post*-secularity. JH might apply to his own discussion that: "And
most of all, this too-narrow view overlooks the civilizing role of
democratically enlightened common sense, which proceeds along its own
track as an equal third partner amid the murmurs of cultural conflict
between science and religion" (12) within modernization. In other
words, JH's *critical* point about what's too narrow applies to the
set-up of his own critical point. It appears, then, that JH is
mapping a misunderstanding of modernization (on the part of religion)
back into a misreading of secularization that patronizes (1)
religious alienation and (2) the hegemonical reading of modernization
(overbearing reading of overbearing threads of history?).
 
Nonetheless, JH's main point is well-taken, re: "reflective thrusts"
that "run[ their] course through the public spaces of democracy"
(13). My general critical interest toward JH is fundamentally in
accord with his own thinking; but I find opportunistic appropriations
of dialectical rhetoric (in this case) or sociocentric rhetoric (in
other cases) in views by him that could benefit from a better
application of his own originality (which is post-dialectical and
3-fold / multi-centric) to contemporary issues, especially in light
of developments (recalling his "liberal eugenics" essay) that
complement his communicative interest in the potentials of human life
(complementarities that counter the genophobic strain in his current
views, that too readily revert to sociocentrism).


[to be continued, probably just one more posting]

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