THEMES AND QUESTIONS FOR DEBATE, PROGRAMME   OF WORK, and BACKGROUND NOTE

THEMES AND QUESTIONS FOR DEBATE

Theme 1: Do secular liberal democracies need to redefine their relations with religions, and/or with the spiritual realm?

Among the issues that could be addressed:

• How should democracies respond to the rise of theocratic nation-states?
• Internally, in most liberal democracies, churches are no longer a threat to the power of the state and, in many cases, the number of the faithful is shrinking. What are then the reasons for questioning the virtues of secularism?
• Are western democracies reopening debates on secularism and laicism essentially because of the increasing weight in their population of people of Islamic faith?
• What is and should be the meaning of tolerance, or toleration, for a secular liberal democracy in today’s world? Should the state for instance facilitate the building and maintenance of churches, mosques and other places of worship, or should it leave this task to private hands?
• More generally, what is the meaning of religious freedom in a globalized world?
• If secular liberal democracies actually suffer from having neglected the spiritual dimension of human beings and societies, what could be the practical remedies for this situation?

Theme 2: What can be said of the seemingly troubled relationships that secularism entertains with ethics and morality?

Among the issues that could be addressed:

• To give a foundation to moral rules and duties, liberalism replaced divine law by natural law and by utilitarianism. The concept of obligation, however, which is common to divine law and to natural law, has lost much of its moral content. And the doctrine of utilitarianism degenerates into moral relativism and moral expediency when, to use the language of Durkheim, the “cult of the individual” turns into the “cult of the self-interested ego.” Then, where are the moral foundations of secularism and liberalism to be found?
• Are the instrumentalization of reason and the related instrumentalization of ethics due to a neglect of triumphant modernity for the rich array of sources of knowledge and access to reality that are available to humanity? Has the reliance on experimental proof led to the abandonment of revelation (or mystical knowledge), intuition, artistic understanding of “things” and simply affective emotion and love, all different ways of apprehending the world and using Reason? Has modernity mutilated Reason and Ethics?
• Seen from another angle, is the problem of modernity with ethics the result of a forgetfulness of the fact that human affairs are regulated according to complementary but distinct orders? Pascal, most notably, distinguishes the “order of the body”, the “order of the mind”, or reason, and the “order of the heart”, or charity. Each of these is indispensable and each has its limitations. And ethics requires the interplay of these orders. Would this and other comparable frameworks be useful points of entry to analyze the current form(s) of modernity?
• At a time of trivialization of ethics and monopolization of the moral discourse by reactionary and authoritarian forces, it might be particularly useful to go back to a few founding texts. In addition to Pascal’s Les Pensees, The Ethics of Spinoza is one of these. For Spinoza, Ethics replaces Morality. Ethics is not concerned with judgment, nor with the Good and Evil, but with the good and bad as “qualitative differences of mode of existence” (Deleuze in Spinoza, Practical Philosophy). Good brings joy, bad brings sadness. “Joy is a man’s passage from a lesser to a greater perfection. Sadness is a man’s passage from a greater to lesser perfection.” (The Ethics, Book III, II/191). Should the problems encountered by secularism, liberalism and modernity be addressed by a revisiting and deepening of the spirit of the Enlightenment?

Theme 3: Politics should be conceived as an art and practiced as a service to humankind. Which ideas should be grafted on secular-liberal-democratic doctrines and practices so as to move politics towards such ideal?

Among the issues that could be addressed:

• Should the idea of progress be rejuvenated, notably by the shedding of the various forms of scientism and positivism with which it was and still is loaded? If individual and social progress would be seen as a possibility and as a moral and political duty, would it become again a mobilizing utopia for liberal and social democracies?
• At present, science, technology and the economy (often reduced to chrematistics) are conditioning the polity and politics. But wealth is not able, by itself, to create a humane society, nor an interesting civilization. Consumers do not readily become active citizens. And democracy requires civic training and a public space for the confrontation of ideas and projects.  The omnipresence and omnipotence of market relations tend to transform democracies into plutocracies. Globalization exacerbates this reduction of politics to an adjunct of market relations. And this marketisation of the world goes hand in hand with the destruction of the environment, aggressive nationalism, conflicts and wars and violations of human rights. Under which conditions could politics be geared towards goals such as the building of a pluralistic and harmonious world community?
• Politics, it was said, notably by Max Weber, has to be oriented by “an ethic of responsibility” rather than by “an ethic of conviction”. The latter is focused on the ends of human action and on the duties of Man vis-à-vis the Good. The person of conviction is impatient with imperfections and with constraints. A responsible person knows that the mediocre and the ambiguous in human thoughts and actions can produce acceptable results for the human condition. Yet, the pursuit of an ideal and the devotion to public activities require convictions. What can be said of the tension, or dialectics, between conviction and responsibility in today’s world? How to reconcile the exercise of power and the practice of wisdom?

Note: The Triglav Circle has touched several aspects of this subject in its previous work. One may wish in particular to consult several chapters of Candles in the Dark, A New Spirit for a Plural World, including the Introduction, Chapter 1 (Nitin Desai on Global Ethics), Chapter 2 ( Richard Falk on Secularism), Chapter 7  ( Tu Wei Ming on Confucian Humanism) and Chapter 11 (Barbara Sundberg-Baudot on Progress). Also, in the booklet dated 1 November 2006, Notes on the Activities of the Triglav Circle during the period January 2005-September 2006, several pertinent discussions are reported, notably on human flourishing and the recourse to different sources of knowledge (pages 7-8 and 23) and on modernity (pages 24 to 36).

BACKGROUND NOTE

1. Secularism is the doctrine of strict differentiation and separation between two spheres of life in society: the sphere of the temporal and the sphere of the religious. According to its basic tenet, public institutions are to be neutral with regard to faiths and churches, and individuals with public responsibilities are to refrain from justifying their actions on religious grounds. They are also to refrain from promoting or denigrating any religion. Secularism prevailed over clericalism, or the temporal power of the cleric, in Christianized Western Europe through a long and tumultuous history. Secularization was the progressive affirmation that the affairs of city and state ought to be managed independently of church prescription and religious faith. Tragically facilitated by the religious wars of 17^th century’s Europe, secularism found its philosophical and legal expression with the Enlightenment and the American and French revolutions and, by the end of World War II, it had gained recognition in most national constitutions throughout the world.

2. At present, it is still “statistically” true that political regimes, based on separation of church and state, or at least on the recognition of the autonomy of the public sphere vis-à-vis religious credos, constitute the majority of the membership of the United Nations. But it is also true that secularism, as a practice and as a political philosophy, no longer enjoys the type of quiet and comfortable domination that it had in the five or six decades following World War II. Secularism is challenged, even embattled. What are the manifestations of the difficulties presently encountered by secularism? And, what ideas can be advanced as to the causes of this state of affairs? The purpose of this Introduction is to address briefly these two questions and to evoke, even more briefly, solutions that some are proposing to what might be seen as a “crisis” of secularism.

3. Manifestations of the problems and challenges that secularism is currently facing might be regrouped under three points:

Ø  First and most obviously, secularism is challenged by fundamentalist regimes. These are based on a literal interpretation of a sacred text that clerics have the mission to implement. Social relations are governed by religious law. Since religion is all-encompassing there is no distinction between spheres in society. This fundamentalism cum clericalism regained power in Iran in the 1970s, is dominant in a few other states and influent in a number of others. Geo-politically, Islam represents a direct challenge to the secularism identified with the Western world.

Ø  Second, apart from fundamentalist regimes, fundamentalist ideas are influential in liberal democracies, notably in the oldest and most powerful of them, the United States. Since its creation, this country has been remarkable for its practice of religious freedom and pluralism as well as its religious fervor. Its constitution proclaims the separation of church and state, but with the aim of protecting religious freedom from state interference rather than protecting the state from clericalism as it is historically the case, most notoriously, in France. Such a separation still prevails in the United States, but approaches to issues involving religion are becoming more formally contentious and legalistic. Christian and Jewish fundamentalist groups as well as various forms of millennialism have lately gained significant political weight. Mainstream established churches have directly intervened in political debates on issues that they considered morally and doctrinally critical. And “God” is routinely invoked by political leaders as a protection or justification for a number of political decisions.

Ø  Third, in other liberal democracies, particularly Western European, secularism is confronted with a religious revival sometimes taking the form of religious militancy. Various sects, often originated in North America, are expanding their membership and activities and some governments are attempting to control them. More significantly, the proportion of people of Islamic faith in the population of these countries is growing, notably through immigration, and many of these people practice seriously their religion. They pray, they attend ceremonies and they do not hesitate to model their lives according to their beliefs. Such developments and behavior stand in sharp contrast with the overall and rapid decline in these same countries of their traditional Christian religions. People who often remain nominally Christian through baptism are interested in the Christian message of love and charity, but refuse to be told how to behave. They are interested in spiritual matters, in philosophies offering ideas and practices on how to live better and reach serenity in an increasingly rapidly changing world, but they reject dogma and moral prescriptions. There is then a question of coexistence between religious skepticism and religious fervor and the matter is made much more complicated by the history of colonialism and domination, by the conflicts in the Middle-East and by the popularity of notions such as “the clash of civilizations.” As evidenced by the controversies surrounding the adoption by France of a law prohibiting women to wear a veil in public places, notably in schools and universities, a number of liberal democracies are struggling to adjust their secularist doctrines to changing and difficult times.

4. Do these challenges which confront secularism have readily identifiable causes? Are there weaknesses or flaws in the political philosophy that underlie the modern avatars of secularism? Six elements of reflection are presented below:

• Beginning again with the most obvious, secularism, contrary to the expectations and hopes of some of its proponents, has not destroyed religion. Worldwide, some established religions, including Islam, are growing. For Christianity, its decline in Western Europe, should not obscure its growth in Latin America, Africa and, to a much lesser extent, Asia. And, as evidenced by the multiplication of a large variety of sects and philosophical cum religious movements and groups, the religious feeling, or religious need of people seems to be as great now as in previous periods of human history.
• In a related vein, secularism is accused of neglecting the spiritual needs of individuals and the spiritual dimensions of society. Neutrality on religious matters, it is said, has too often been confused with indifference to spirituality and ignorance of essential dimensions of the human person. Because secularism offers little more than technocratic and commercial responses to societal issues, because there is scarce public space for dreams and ideals, because science has severed many of its relations with conscience, individuals, looking desperately for a sense of purpose in their lives, sometimes give up their freedom of thought to manipulative sectarian pseudo-prophets and, more often, suffer from diverse forms of alienation.
• Secularism implies the reign of Reason, as opposed to Revelation, of the rational as contrasted with an irrational identified with the fanciful and the magic, but Reason has progressively deteriorated into a series of instrumentalities. Rulers and public servants were to follow the Weberian imperative to apply rationality to the goals they would pursue and the means they would utilize. Instead, they reduce their horizons to technocratic recipe. The population at large is also expected not to be bound by the teachings of any church or sectarian movement. Ideally, citizens of secular states are to be intellectually and morally autonomous human beings. Instead, they are too often passive consumers of the products of the media controlled by large financial capitalist interests and are, on occasions, the complacent victims of demagogues and populist manipulators. Secularism is failing because its philosophical basis, which is a rich and imaginative vision of Reason, is being eroded.
• In line with its emphasis on rationality, secularism has replaced the religious ideas of salvation and resurrection by the idea of a continuous progress open to humankind. Secularism, humanism, and modernity are closely linked. Faith in progress, of the individual and of society, is in many respects the religion of secularism.  The marvels brought by science and technology are supposed to be paralleled by progress in human consciousness and ability to organize society for the good of all its members. And, indeed, living conditions have improved dramatically in Western countries and, to an extent, throughout the world as “development” has became the mobilizing motto of the second part of the 20^th century. But this same 20^th and 21^st centuries are also marred by unprecedented atrocities. And the realization has been spreading that industrialization is destroying the ecology of the planet. Moreover, at present, wars, internal conflicts, violations of human rights are more numerous than they were a quarter of a century ago. Thus, it would seem more appropriate to warn about the resurgence of Barbarian times than to eulogize the idea of progress. .
• Politics in many liberal industrialized regimes tends to be reduced to the administration of the economy. The traditional criticism that capitalism has reduced to commodities all aspects of society, including social relations has not lost its pertinence. Moreover, the damage that the primacy on production and consumption inflicts on the natural environment is a mater of increasing concern.  And the process of globalization, under the aegis of giant corporations supported by a few governments, is feeding the sentiment that states are simply the servants of a huge financial machine creating needs and transforming “ci-devant” citizens into passive consumers. When this occurs, economics deteriorates into chrematistics, the process first described by Aristotle by which wealth is used to create more wealth and more social gratification for those who have privileged monetary positions. Politics is thus shrinking to the administration and management of “things” and loses its grandeur and appeal. The problem to be considered is the nature of politics in the modern market society. Is it reasonable to consider that as participation in public affairs becomes reduced to an occasional vote, and, as parliaments are being supplanted by the executive branch, that representative democracy is in crisis. Is it certainly possible that this situation will lead to authoritarian tendencies, of a technocratic or populist variety. Then, both secularism and political liberalism are in jeopardy.
• Ethics has also been largely instrumentalized in modern secular societies. Secularism, at the end of the 19^th century and to some extent after World War II, had strong moral overtones. In Europe, North America and elsewhere in affluent lands, good citizens, supposedly free of the yoke of the church, were taught a vigorous humanism where civic virtues were immersed into an optimistic outlook on society and its future. Moral education had a privileged place in school’s curricula. Morality was a mix of the compulsory and the desirable. This was an era with many certainties that came to an abrupt end with the First World War. With this event, sophisticated secular political cultures had shown their capacity for self destruction.  And subsequent atrocities nurtured skepticism and cynicism: humanists came to be seen as naïve and actually dangerous souls, for they were making the fatal mistake of taking for granted the benevolence and perfectibility of Man and Society. At present, ethics has become a tool for boosting the social status and respectability of institutions in many powerful settings and situations. There are many committees and commissions on ethics and the domains of application of guidelines for ethical behavior range from bio-techniques to accounting and trade. The most publicized business ethic, also called corporate responsibility, is very hard to differentiate from a simplified version of the traditional virtue of honesty, except that being “ethical’ is not presented as an end in itself but as a recipe for growth and success. To be successful economically and financially is to contribute to a culture of immediate satisfaction of one’s needs, or desires, or impulses, or whims. This culture prevails in the Western model of civilization and advertising is its privileged tool. At the same time, and quite logically, what is perceived as excessive liberalism in social mores feeds religious and moralistic reactions of the fundamentalist type. They are in the Western world and elsewhere many proponents of a “moral order” ready to sacrifice freedom to virtue. Then, secularism would have recreated its once vanquished nemesis.

5. On the basis of such diagnosis of the difficulties that the doctrine of secularism is facing, difficulties which are hardly separable from those of liberal democracy and the dominant form of modernity, a number of attitudes and strategies are possible. One can seek to “reform” the practice of secularism, making it more amenable to the basic spiritual needs of individuals and to the various forces and processes that make a society and a world. This goes through a recognition that various types of rationality are possible and legitimate and that the strict separation of a public sphere and a private sphere, to which religion ought to belong, is unrealistic. One can also attribute the current problems of secularism to the hopefully temporary resurgence of obscurantist tendencies that are never definitely obliterated from modern civilization. Then the duty of those who are attached to the great achievements of secular liberal democratic regimes – including the freedom of thought that they give to their citizens – is to continue the work of the Enlightenment, instead of putting in question its faith in Reason and in the capacity of Man to improve its condition. In the piece mentioned in the Note above Richard Falk calls for a “reconstructed secularism” that would involve “the extension of human rights based on an ethos of solidarity” and a “form of collaboration between religion and politics” and that would entail “a recovery of the sacred.” In this sense, says Falk, “the most intriguing challenge of post-modernity, here conceived as a space for spiritual and normative creativity, is to resurrect “spirituality”.” ( Candles in the Dark, Chapter 2, pages 61 and 62.)