Interesting post on this subject at Hullabaloo where an article, "Heaven Can Wait," appearing in Dissent magazine by Susan Jacoby is quoted at length. Jacoby wants to make the case that religion in politics creates more problems than it solves. Reason is the only way forward:
the left needs to present its case in unapologetically moral terms. But those moral terms should be grounded in reason, not in pandering to the supernatural beliefs of Americans. Indeed, American presidents in the past—and not only the distant past—have had great success in combining reason with moral passion. Perhaps the most outstanding example is John F. Kennedy’s June 1963 American University commencement speech, now regarded as the beginning of détente with the Soviet Union. Kennedy spoke of peace as “the necessary rational end of rational men” and declared, “Our problems are manmade—therefore they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man’s reason and spirit often solved the seemingly unsolvable—and we believe they can do it again.” Then Kennedy memorably observed that “our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”
Could there be a more reasoned yet passionate statement of secular morality than the assertion that we owe our children a peaceful world not because we are immortal but because we are mortal?
Call me crazy, but I have a feeling that a great many Americans, including religious Americans, are sick of hypocritical politicians who pretend that their policies deserve support because they are the work of a Higher Being. The question is whether there are any political leaders left with the courage to appeal to voters as reasoning adults, with arguments based not on the promise of heaven but on the moral obligation of human beings to treat one another decently here on earth.
Yes and No. I don’t think she’s crazy, and I’m sympathetic to almost everything in this quote, but it also betrays an obtuseness that I find typical of secular intellectuals. I agree with her that secularese needs to be the lingua franca that a pluralistic society speaks in the political sphere. This is something I explained in detail in the Religion in Politics post I put up in February. But I also think that reason isn’t enough. People don’t derive the "moral passion" that she talks about from Reason. She’s combining two things as if they were the same.
People don’t fight for reasonable objectives. They fight for deeply held values that are given meaning insofar as they are embedded in a mythic narrative. The narrative provides the source for the moral passion. People use reason to justify what they do and to explain themselves to others, but their motivation for action lies in longings that derive from levels of the soul that can be described either as super-rational or sub-rational. The problem that Jacoby has with religion is that very often people with sub-rational motivations use super-rational language to justify their actions.
So when she points out that the mainline southern churches supported slavery and segregation in this country, I would say that’s an example of sub-rational motivations justified by super-rational language. And that by definition is false consciousness. This kind of false consciousness also explains the widespread, enthusiastic Christian support for this barbaric war in the Middle East. The subrational motivations are revenge and fear. The super-rational justification is to bring freedom and democracy to the oppressed. You don’t have to be religious for this particular bit of mental bait and switch to work on you. But a certain kind of religious personality type seems more vulnerable to its use by demagogues. So I have no quarrel with Jacoby in her pointing that out about how religion is used to support the most immoral behaviors.
My quarrel with her lies on a different level. What she doesn’t seem to realize is that her own presentation of reason as the noble ideal that should inspire all political discourse is itself part of the Enlightenment rationalist mythic narrative. For me this was a narrative that does have a beautiful nobility to it, but so does Dante’s cosmological hierarchicalism. Both have little relevance in shaping the way we now experience the world, even though at one time they were they represented the highest achievements of their respective cultural eras.
So no, she’s not crazy, just quaintly irrelevant and out of tune with the current zeitgeist. The question is not about whether reason is a good thing, but about which master does reason serve. In other words, the important question is not whether we are being reasonable or not, but in whether we have bad or good will. Reason in itself has no moral content. It is an important tool, and like any tool it’s better to have one that is sharp and well oiled. But that’s all it is. It’s not an end in itself. It’s simply a tool to help us work toward achieving goals that have super- or sub-rational motivations. Everything depends on the origin of the motivation.
So my problem with Jacoby lies not with her critique of religion as false consciousness, but with the inadequacy of the underlying mythic narrative that she appeals to as an alternative. Ultimately we all make a leap of faith into something, even if it’s into the salvific power of Reason. But reason is a silly thing to believe in. It’s like believing in a computer or lawn mower. I go into more detail about this in two posts I put up in January here and here.
Leave a Reply