Islam and apostasy a (sort of) reply

Before reading this, I alert you to a number of disclaimers which I offer  to try to prevent any discussion sliding off into the pointless. You should probably read them beforehand, but, human nature being what it is, I don't want to drive away more readers through tedium than I have to. You'll find them at the bottom of the page.*

One of the most consistently interesting online presences Da Masked Avenger has recently blogged on the subject of Islam and apostasy (here). I hope that it's fair to summarise his intent as follows:

a) His primary intent is provide a purely rational reassurance to Muslims who, on the basis of revelation, accept the teaching on the killing of apostates from Islam, but find themselves undermined in their confidence in that teaching by the perception that it is against reason. By providing an examination of western (liberal) philosophical reasons in favour of such a teaching, he hopes to encourage Muslims to hold fast to the truth of revelation.

b) A secondary intent (or at least an interest that outsiders may find in the blogpost) is in the defence of the rationality of killing apostates. At the very least, such outsiders (eg non-Muslim western liberals) need to take account of the existence of many arguments historically in favour of such a position within western thought.

Before going any further, I think it's important to be explicit that Da Masked Avenger is very clearly NOT calling for any actions within the UK that would put such a view into effect. He is simply saying that, within an ideal Islamic state, that would be the legislative position. (That's important: he's not advocating terrorism but a different vision of society. This is a crucial difference.) At the moment, that's a difference that has a very practical implication: whatever your views on that 'ideal' society, Da Masked Avenger is not a terrorist but a political thinker. Think about throwing him into the chokey and you'll find Rousseau, Locke etc already waiting there.

Let me deal with a) first. One of the main themes of the following discussion will be realism. Pierre Manent makes the following point about modern western elite discourse about Islam:

Those who decide what we have the right to say and do do not engage Islam as a social reality. It is not considered in itself. Instead, “Islam” becomes a test of our post-political resolve. It must be accepted without either reservation or question in order to verify that Europe is indeed empty of any national or religious substance that might get in the way of human universality. The refusal to treat Islam as a social or, more generally, a human reality therefore has nothing to do with Islam but instead with Europe’s self-image.

[Here.]

One of the things I find most irritating about a lot of non-Muslim commentary on Islam is the tendency to talk about the 'real' Islam or 'true' Islam or what Islam 'needs'. It comes from both the nut-job right and the nut-job left (which latter, frankly, takes in most of the political establishment these days). Anyone who knows anything about Islam knows that, deep within the authoritative sources and interpretations, there are a number of hard sayings, for example, in the area of Hudud punishments. There is no point in pretending these don't exist and, more generally, there's absolutely no point that Islam is simply the same at heart as those nice Green voting hippies at the local Unitarian church. Equally, there's no point in pretending that Islam is simply identifiable as the crassest, most violent forms of such as ISIS. Anyone who is situated within any sort of tradition (and that's all of us) needs to recognise that it is part of the human condition to find oneself inheriting and indeed in some sense holding positions that are very difficult to endorse. Catholics who simply ignore what leading Catholics have said and done over the years (eg Aquinas on heresy), are fanatasists, as are secularists who deny the evils of the French and Russian Revolutions. (Or western Europeans who deny that we inherit the riches of the Atlantic slave trade.) How we deal with that tension between what we can see clearly as moral and what we find ourselves inheriting is not an easy thing to resolve, and perhaps the only certainty here is that 'To immanentize the eschaton' (ie to try to achieve a perfect (in Berlin's term) 'Final Solution' here) is the most dangerous solution of all.

How we (and that includes 'we Muslims') live with these tensions is really a matter of detailed and concrete practice. Da Masked Avenger is engaging in that and not all Muslims will agree with his take on it and some will. I'm not sure that non-Muslims have much to add here: at the very least, any suggestions ought to be contributed in a spirit of humility and an awareness of how crass outside interventions however well meant can be. (Any Catholic who has been lectured on what Catholicism is really about by an outsider (or even some ill informed insider) should be particularly sympathetic to the dangers here.) I suppose all I would say on a) is that the disciplinary element of western liberal thought is only one side of the western philosophical tradition here and perhaps not the most difficult for Islam to engage with. The other liberationist strand has tried to find a place for freedom of exploration as a key social value. (So roughly, if you're going to offer up Rousseau as a defence of killing apostates, you also need to grapple with (say) Mill on why people should be free to conduct their experiments in living. And why (to the extent that these things ever end) the debate has ended up rather closer to Mill than to Rousseau.)

I now turn to b). Even though Da Masked Avenger's main interest is a), I hope he'll forgive me if I take b) as my main interest! Moreover, to the extent that I've already suggested an alternative 'liberationist' viewpoint, I don't intend to go any further in arguing why (even (especially?) in an ideal state) killing apostates is wrong. My main reason for not pursuing the substantive argument any further is that I am keenly aware of how unresolvable it is on the intellectual level.. He and I are both committed to the existence of revelation, but we disagree on the source and content of that revelation. Even the purely philosophical argument is not as straightforward as nut-job liberalism pretends it is. (And you can wonder why this is the case and perhaps in passing think about what MacIntyre says about the incommensurability of traditions and the lack of a coherent western intellectual tradition in modernity.)

Instead, I want to talk about what the difficulty in dealing with the argument shows politically. I take it to be a Straussian conclusion that there is a gulf between (political) philosophy and politics, and that what is impossible/difficult to settle philosophically can be dealt with politically in other ways. And there we are back to Manent: realistically, we have in (and let's just focus on the UK as any political solution has to be resolved within the concrete traditions of a nation as Manent is arguing) our nation citizens (ie us) who don't accept...

And of course, that is the first point. Whenever 'British values;' are paraded as a list, it becomes unconvincing. That 'Muslims don't accept...' followed by a list is generally unconvincing in two ways: first, because there is a variety of Muslim detailed positions amongst Muslims which are difficult to catch in opinion surveys; and secondly, because very many non-Muslims don't accept them either. Generally, I find myself agreeing with Professor Robert George that Catholics should view Muslims as natural allies: I have far more in common with people who worship God, who have a sense of divine law; who value chastity and restraint etc etc. I'm certainly not going to line up with those who find it totally unBritish that they don't want to get p***ed on a beach in Benidorm.

But, as a second point, whatever I think of Islam (and it's in no one's interests to pretend that Catholicism and Islam are a totally neat fit) the realism at the centre of politics requires that I acknowledge that Muslims in the UK are a reality. Many have been here for several generations; they are not going away; and they are not going to change Islam simply because late modernity has come up with a parcel of extraordinarily strange beliefs that it believes are somehow clearly rational and beyond dispute. The main political question is, first, can we find a way of getting along that doesn't destroy civic peace? And, secondly, ideally, can we find a way (ways) of getting on that involves a genuine contribution to each other's flourishing in a wider sense?

There are no guarantees here. Because politics isn't precisely rational, there is no guarantee of results. Fifty years ago, no one would have suggested that the most pressing social problem is admitting transsexuals to public loos. Fifty years ago, no one would have predicted the rise of ISIS. (And (as an aside) note Manent's lament over the abandonment of a trust in providence here:  Simultaneously—and perhaps this is not a coincidence—we have lost faith in Providence, in the benevolence and protection of the Most High; or, if these expressions appear too obsolete, we have lost faith in the primacy of the Good. Unlike the Americans, we no longer call on divine protection over our nations, even if we still pray for ourselves and for those close to us. How long has it been since the bishops of France prayed for France, except perhaps very rarely and timidly?)

But there are reasons for hope. The bare minimum of civic peace strikes me as perfectly achievable. That only 4% of British Muslims have any sympathy for ('told the researchers that they had sympathy for people who take part in suicide bombing to fight injustice') political violence  strikes me as something near miraculous. (I bet in my undergraduate days I could have picked up far greater support for political violence than that among my 'progressive' pals.) Where the real difficulty lies is in a genuine mutual engagement which enriches everyone. And here I think there's probably as much danger in the progressive liberal side as there is in any Muslim suspicion of free speech. Liberals don't regard their own views as in any way non-rational and rooted in a particular set of historical and social circumstances. (That they often pay lip service to such relativistic ideas makes it more difficult for them to acknowledge the ways in which in reality they act as if they deny such foundations.) Debates are pre-censored: if you hold anything like traditional Muslim beliefs, you can't even discuss them. (Politics is secular, so the key issue of revelation is ruled out. Sexual identity is fluid, so anything based on sexual essentialism and complementarity is immediately homophobic and patriarchal.) Engagement has to be one way according to progressivism: they have to learn from us.

Engagement isn't just a matter of formal 'academic' debates. It's how in those thousands of everyday interactions we get along. As I said, there's no guarantee of how this will all turn out. But I'd hope that if we can remember that we are all human beings created by God, that Islam has been one of the great world cultures and isn't reducible to the actions of a few butchers, that an overly utopian view of what can be achieved by politics is inevitably destructive, that (traditional) virtues of restraint and politeness in engagement are essential etc etc it may not be too bad and may even be rather good.

Let me end with two quotes. The first from Pierre Manent summing up that realistic hope that is the centre of his approach:

We must recover a view of the European experience that allows us to see Islam as an objective reality, instead of making it the reflection of our self-­misunderstanding. We need not claim to determine the truth of Islam. Like Christianity, it too has its uncertainties and its possibilities. Europeans, and especially the French, must come to terms with Islam and try, with its help, to bring about its entry into European life in a way that takes account of European realities and possibilities, not into the dream world of hundreds of millions of individuals united by the promise of ever-greater human rights.

[Manent: here]

Secondly, an extract from an article by Greg Daly on the Trappist martyrs of Tibhirine, an account that I think makes concrete some of the ways in which (as Manent says) 'a nation of the Christian mark is the only form that can bring us all together' while, by dint of the circumstances and their results, underlines some of the extreme possibilities and dangers that are also involved:

The new prior had long had a deep fondness for Algeria’s Muslims, and had admired their simple devoutness since his time in the armed forces. During the war, a Muslim named Mohammed, a father of 10 children, had saved his life during an ambush. The future Fr Christian said he would pray for Mohammed, who replied, “I know that you will pray for me. But look, Christians don’t know how to pray!” Mohammed was found murdered the next morning, leading the young Frenchman later to reflect: “In the blood of this friend, I knew that my calling to follow Christ meant to live, sooner or later, in the country where it was given to me the greatest gift of love.” Algeria’s simple ordinary Muslims, he felt, were typically far more prayerful and devout than France’s Christians, and so he sought to ensure his Christianity was open and welcoming, recognising Muslims as children of God and hearing “the notes that are in harmony”.


*Disclaimers:

1) I don't think apostates should be killed. As it happens, I don't think anyone, even the worst criminal, should suffer the death penalty, a view I take to be most consonant with Catholic principles although I accept there is a legitimate debate about this. (But please spare me the 'Oh you're just dreaming of your own sharia but with an Inquisition'.)

2) I think the ideal world would be one in which everyone were a Catholic. That's because Catholicism possesses the fulness of truth. But a) that implies other views can possess quite a lot of truth and b) if you look at how awful Catholic societies have been in the past, even at their best, there is still a constant reminder of the City of Man as a 'vale of tears'. Our natural end is rarely achievable and never completely satisfying. Our supernatural end is.

3) I'll make references to Leo Strauss and (the slightly Straussian) Pierre Manent. I'm not at all confident that I have quite got either writer right (although I'm also probably bloody minded enough to argue that I have). As my main aim here is not exegesis, feel free to regard such references as relating to L-Strauss and L-Manent (ie the feverish and fictional creations of Lazarus which have only limited contact with their real world equivalents). What I take to be most important about Straussian perspective here is the way that philosophy has difficulty entering the political sphere: coherent philosophical positions do not sit well in the shifting world of doxa and the demos.

Stoicism and Eudaimonistic ethics

                                                                 Where's Zeno...?


After reading a report from STOICON 2015 (ie a conference on Stoicism) (here) I tweeted the following question:

Reading report from STOICON wonder here about relative attractiveness of Stoicism vs Ancient Philosophy in general. Arguably all Ancient Philosophy is therapeutic, but what is it about Stoic therapy that appeals? (Why eg don't we take Platonic injunctions to mathematics or even theurgy as seriously?) For a modern 'therapeutic' Platonism see http://edwardfeser.blogspot.co.uk/2009/11/andersons-pure.html …

(That provoked a very helpful exchange mostly with Cathy Barry (@Cathyby) with Jules Evans (@julesevans77) joining in at the end to which I'm grateful for prompting me to further thought.)

The original question wasn't (purely anyway) rhetorical: Stoicism does seem peculiarly attractive to many moderns and I'm not sure exactly why. In the report I linked to above, much of what is valued in Stoicism is common to much ancient philosophy. For example, most ancient ethics is therapeutic in the sense that it offers to improve your life: to make you eudaimon (flourishing). Moreover, it is focused primarily on internal goods (the virtues) rather than external goods (stuff, social status). To the extent that Stoicism tends (more than other schools) to be (at least) deistic, perfectionist, rationalist, suspicious of emotions and utterly dismissive of external goods (you can be as eudaimon on a rack as you can be watching TV with a good whisky), it might well be thought to have particular difficulties that make it less attractive to the modern mind than other ancient ethical approaches.

I'm pretty sure that most of the answer lies in the peculiarities of Roman Stoicism, and in particular the philosophers Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus and Seneca. Roughly, all of these tend to be much more interested in practical techniques rather than in the more foundational questions raised by the earlier Greek Stoics. Moreover, to the extent that Stoicism in general rejects external circumstances as an element in flourishing to a quite unusual degree (certainly when compared to the Peripatetics), it is peculiarly compatible with any modern lifestyle: why change your life when you can just change your mind?

Now, I have two related worries about this. First, technique without asking serious questions about what purposes those techniques serve isn't philosophy , certainly not in a sense that Socrates or a modern academic philosopher would recognize it. (Indeed, were I to be waspish, Plato might well find a combination of marketable techniques and the promise of success in the everyday world rather more characteristic of sophistry than philosophy.) And to the extent that philosophy, that personal, desperate grappling with truth, is part of the good life, then a focus on technique together with a distraction from the pursuit of truth is at least unfortunate and perhaps harmful. Secondly, to the extent I've reflected on the ethical claims of Stoicism, I'm pretty sure they're wrong. In ancient terms, I suppose I'd count as close to a Peripatetic (ie Aristotelian) with a consequent emphasis on the need for reforming the political space, a focus on good upbringing, the cultivation of appropriate emotions (including anger)  and contemplation of 'divine things' as the perfect life. Whether I'm right in that judgment isn't terribly important: what is important is that many of the specific claims of Stoicism are by no means clearly correct and if the techniques recommended actually do have an effect, they may well be producing vice rather than virtue.

I suppose at the end I'm left with wondering what would be lost or gained if we didn't have conferences like STOIKON or events like Stoic Week, and instead had VIRTUEETHICSCON or Eudaimonia week. What would be lost, I think, is the coherence of a brand: here is something with a fairly coherent message and with immediate, relatively easy instructions for getting involved at once. You don't have to think much: you just have to be attracted and act. And that's not necessarily a bad thing: we all have to start somewhere and most of us have stumbled onto the deeper things that inform our lives by some sort of combination of luck and immediate (erotic) attraction. I'm not sure that any other school of ancient philosophy can do that quite as easily as Stoicism (although Mark Anderson has a damn good go for Platonism) even if I'm pushed to be absolutely clear as to why that's the case. (Another suggestion that crosses my mind is that it is to do with the occasional, conversational style of Roman Stoicism (esp) Seneca, quite apart from the issue of content. Much more engaging than (say) the 'contents of an academic's wastebin' style of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. But anyway...) But I think it would be terribly sad if you stopped there and didn't explore ancient ethics further and, in particular, when examining Stoic claims, ask: Is this true? Is this truly virtuous?

Why does any of this matter, except to those (undoubtedly a minority) who have an existing interest in ancient philosophy? There are a number of possible answers to this, many centring on the general role of classical studies in modern education. But let me give a more narrowly philosophical answer. There is a view (one I largely share), developing from Elizabeth Anscombe and Alasdair MacIntyre that there is something radically amiss with modern moral philosophy. (Anscombe's paper of that name is the locus classicus for this analysis.) In essence, both advise a return to eudaimonistic ethics, an ethics based on human flourishing and the virtues. If anything along those lines is right, then adopting the correct view of eudaimonia and its attainment is of central importance not only to each individual's life, but also to our wider society. Stoicism may well be an excellent introduction to that ressourcement and the general pattern of eudaimonistic ethcs, but it is one that we Aristotelian-Thomists at least would like to see subject to philosophical challenge and ultimate abandonment.

Kant vs the Qur'an

                                         Kant vs the Qur'an: you decide


I've always been slightly worried in agreeing with Brendan O'Neill. He is (for example) one of the few commentators to note how appallingly bad same sex 'marriage' arguments are without coming from a Christian point of view. And on a number of issues, I and fellow Catholics have often found ourselves cheering the lad on: 'Go on, Brendan! You tell them!' I've always been slightly uneasy though, not being quite sure whether he is just a genuinely free thinker content to follow the arguments where they go, a clickbait merchant relying on contrarian views to generate, well, views, or some sort of cunning Commie who wants to suck the desperate sad loons like myself in, where, upon waking up, we'll find ourselves living in a caravan and selling copies of the Trotsky Newsletter round social housing ghettos.

Anyway, bit of a relief then to find him talking the sort of rubbish I can disagree with. Much more the natural order of things. In an article entitled, 'Why won’t we tell students that Kant is better than the Koran?' (here) he calls out university teachers for not simply telling students, well, what it says in the title...

Given that their universities won’t stand up for Kant or Mill or the superiority of rationalism over superstition, and considering their identities have been ringfenced from ridicule by a whole host of censorious slurs, is it any wonder some students flirt with non-academic, non-Western ideas? The academy implicitly invites them to, by sending the message that its own values aren’t that great, and it unwittingly encourages them to hold on to their non-academic ideas by safe-spacing them from robust critique.

[...]

We should let everyone speak, including the haters, and we should simultaneously challenge the cult of relativism on campus and strip away every slur that is now used to silence those who criticise superstition or stupidity and who uphold Enlightenment values. We should tell students that, with his call on humanity to grow up, to dare to know, and to use moral reasoning to impact on the world, Kant is worthy of close and serious study. Kant is better than the Koran. And if they cry Islamophobia? Do that thing with your fingers to signify the playing of the world’s smallest violin just for them.


Good fighting talk. Go on, Brendan! You tell them!! But...

First, let's put aside the University of Westminster from where the article which prompted O'Neill's spleen emerged. It's perfectly possible that it's a rubbish university with rubbish teachers. I don't know. But in a wider academic context, I recognize the conversation referred to:

I recall a seminar discussion about Immanuel Kant’s “democratic peace theory,” in which a student wearing a niqab opposed the idea on the grounds that “as a Muslim, I don’t believe in democracy.” Our instructor seemed astonished but did not question the basis of her argument; he simply moved on. I was perplexed, though. Why attend university if you have such a strict belief system that you are unwilling to consider new ideas? And why hadn’t the instructor challenged her? 

So. I've taught Kant. (Not admittedly Kant's Perpetual Peace which I assume is being referred to here.) I've also had students preface their remarks by, 'As a Muslim....' (though not as many as have prefaced their remarks by 'As a Christian...' or 'As a feminist...' or 'As an atheist...' or 'As a gay man..') and then gone on to explain why this or that philosophical position is unacceptable. I think I'm probably good enough at deadpan not show my astonishment (although I have been astonished over the years). I've also sometimes moved on rather than tackle the remark. So I reckon I've probably had more relevant experience in this area that O'Neill, whose response to an outburst of anti-semiticism was to use the hoary old Enlightenment tactic of calling the man a sh*t.

The first thing to remember is that reports of classroom discussions (particularly free flowing ones) are incredibly unreliable: I have been genuinely astonished at what students have thought has been said in such discussions as opposed to my own recollection. But assuming the facts are as stated, there might be any number of reasons why the instructor moved on rather than challenging the view. (Imagine you've got an hour to discuss Kant. How much time do you want to spend refuting Islam for the benefit of one student?) But perhaps more to the point, the challenging of the sort of 'I am an X' remark is pretty commonplace in my experience. You're usually better not calling students 'sh*ts' but trying to get them to set their own beliefs in this or that ideology aside for the moment and try to argue rationally. It's as much about distraction as anything else: 'Well, look, you appreciate that not everyone accepts the Bible/Qur'an/Stonewall as you do, so what might they say without relying on that source?'

I suspect that O'Neill here might retort that this is the sort of lily-livered cowardice that fails to tackle the rot directly: rather than convincing the student that Kant is more important that the Qur'an, the yellow academic sidesteps the issue and allows the student to remain in the position that Kant (at best) is just one more view alongside the Qur'an (and more realistically, just a piffling thought experiment rather than the correct way to see the world). The trouble with this is a) it's impossible; and b) it's a fine example of saloon bar chatter but not really a rigorously academic position.

Let's take a). I don't know how, in an academic debate, you show that 'Kant is better than the Koran'. It's the sort of blithe confidence in the power of reasoning that once made me sure that I could show Christianity is rubbish. Debates do have a role to play in changing people's minds, but perhaps more effective is the institutional sneer: 'You don't really believe in that, surely?' Not exactly quite what we take Enlightenment values to be, but nonetheless, perhaps a realistic example of what they are in practice. Having lots of free speech on a campus won't make any difference: the nuttiest views then just become one more voice in the clamour. (And the institutional sneer doesn't always work either, or at least plenty of Catholics have been through (or even emerged from) the secular Protestant, 'You don't really believe that, do you?' Drink and sex probably are more likely ways of luring people away from a religious background. Now that would be an interesting Prevent strategy...)

Turning to b), the lack of academic rigour in the claim that 'Kant is better than the Koran' really ought to be apparent. Putting aside the tempting alliteration (which I guess this is really what it's about), I suppose this is little more than the claim that the Enlightenment is better than Islam. How is one supposed to assess that sort of claim? Is the university supposed to be turned into some four year balloon debate, in which only one ejectee (an entire culture?) is possible?

I don't always agree with Peter Hitchens but I think his Christian faith does make him seek the truth rather than celebrity. His recent piece is, I think, much closer to the truth:

 As we saw in an interesting poll, these Muslim fellow citizens don’t want to chop our heads off or murder us. They are reasonable, peaceful people who make better neighbours than many indigenous Britons.

But they think differently from us about the world. And they believe in something, which most of us do not. That’s the chief difference between us. And bit by bit, as they become more numerous and find their way into our institutions, helped by their competence, self-possession and sobriety, they will change society into one that suits them.

I don’t see how this process can be stopped now. I sympathise with a lot of their concerns, though I greatly dislike their attitude towards women. Like them, I find our way of life tawdry, immoral and often debauched. I just wish we had found our own British, Christian solution to these problems.

But we turned our back on patriotism and the church long ago. And round about the same time, we opened our borders, so wide that I do not think we will ever be able to close them again.

This thing has happened. We are going to have to try to learn to live with it as best and as kindly as we can, for the alternative is horrible. 

I'm less hostile to immigration and its effects than he is. (The biggest destruction in modern Britain is self-inflected by secularising liberalism.) But putting that aside, the idea that you can just wish away the religion and culture of students by calling them sh*ts or grandly informing them that Kant is better than the Koran is nonsense. I don't quite know what the solution is (although I suspect that MacIntyre's vision of competing institutions teaching from within a deep understanding of a particular tradition coupled with Hitchens' living with this 'as best and kindly as we can' is a far more realistic alternative). But far too much of the response to the perceived 'Muslim problem' is about posturing and fantasies rather than a serious attempt to discuss how people of very different views can live together peacefully.

Richard Harries and secularism

                                        Lord Harries. Or a secularist. Thinking.


I confess I hadn't realized that the House of Lords were debating 'religion and belief' until it was all over (Hansard here). Anyway, I'm going to focus on the contribution made by Lord Harries, former Anglican Bishop of Oxford, and particularly to his discussion of secularism.

Now despite the continual claim by secularists that secularism is a clearly good thing and that it's very different from atheism, I've posted enough on this subject in the past to make my own position (and the reasons for it) clear: 'secularism' is an ill defined word and, so far as it is actually used in modern Britain, it usually means atheism applied to the political realm. (Perhaps the main posts on this have been here and here. If you're an atheist, do try and deal with the arguments before coming on here to tell me I'm an idiot.)

Bryce Gallie came up with the term 'essentially contested concepts' (here) for terms that served as openings to debate. The flipside of that is the existence of 'essentially uncontested' words which serve to structure debate by closing it down. In Scotland, it is essentially uncontested that we are progressive. More generally, it is essentially uncontested that religions are faiths and that good government is secular. Well, I contest all of those, but let's focus on the latter claim as channelled by Lord Harries (from Hansard here).


...we need to be very careful about the use of that word secular. The former Archbishop of Canterbury, the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Williams of Oystermouth, draws a helpful distinction between programmatic and procedural secularism. The latter is what we must all accept, for it refers to a set of procedures, arrangements and rules of discourse that enable rational debate to take place and decisions to be made with everyone participating on an equal basis. Programmatic secularism, however, has been perceived as an attempt to drive the religious voices out of the public square altogether, and this must be resisted, for the public square is quite rightly a crowded place where all voices need to be heard, including religious ones. As often as not, those religious voices will be translated into the shared assumptions of public reasoning, but this should not be mandatory.

[...]

Thirdly, public authorities should beware of privileging only certain forms of authority or religious representation. There are often groups, such as women, who need to be heard and who lack access to power. Public authorities should not replicate and reinforce oppressive practices that might be present in a particular faith community.

Fourthly, in a society in which we all have multiple identities, our identity as UK citizens imposes a duty to the state. While both Christians and Muslims, for example, will claim a higher loyalty, according to the tenets of their religion, this must not be interpreted as loyalty to a foreign power structure, as it was, for example, by some Roman Catholics in the 16th century.

Fifthly, in devising public policy we need to take into account where we are as a result of our history and culture. There is no neutral realm, and what we have now is a quite specific achievement that has been worked out over many centuries. It is a fantasy to think that there is some neutral secular blueprint existing somewhere else, which can simply be plonked down. Clearly, one feature of where we are now is the existence of an established church, and here of course I have to declare an interest as someone who has had the privilege and fulfilment of being a bishop in that church, serving society for my lifetime.

Let's kick off with that distinction between programmatic and procedural secularism. Let's agree that programmatic secularism ('an attempt to drive the religious voices out of the public square altogether') is wrong. What of procedural secularism?

The latter is what we must all accept, for it refers to a set of procedures, arrangements and rules of discourse that enable rational debate to take place and decisions to be made with everyone participating on an equal basis.

Well, contrarian as I am, why must I accept this? Let's start by cavilling at the word 'secularism' here. If the claim was: 'we must support a set of procedures etc that enable rational debate to take place etc and decisions to be made with everyone participating on an equal basis', I might (for might see below) be inclined to accept it. But to describe that as secular is (given the normal use of the word) profoundly misleading. The problem of course is that what is rational and what is equal (or more exactly fair) is highly contested: to bracket out religion from what constitutes fairness and rationality is to concede far too much without discussion. (For a fuller development of this thought, think eg Alasdair MacIntyre.) So by all means let's look for those rational and fair procedures, but let's not assume that they can be described as secular without a great deal of explanation. (Indeed, just to be provocative, let's at least consider the possibility that they have to be religious, at least in the sense of requiring the social cohesion of a civil religion.)

Let's move on to the third point: public authorities should beware of privileging only certain forms of authority or religious representation. 

There's a bit of a non sequitur from the Bishop here: the claim 1) public authorities should beware of privileging only certain forms of authority or religious representation is linked (in the next sentence ) to 2) there are often groups, such as women, who need to be heard and who lack access to power. Public authorities should not replicate and reinforce oppressive practices that might be present in a particular faith community. The two claims are in principle distinct. I suspect that, to put forward a coherent point,  what he should be saying here is that, when privileging religions, one should be careful not to encourage oppressive practices. But what it sounds like (and again, I suspect this is deliberate or at least the culpable negligence of the bien pensant eager for social approval) is that the existence of some oppression within religion means that no subset of religions should be given privileges over other religions. The absurdity of the latter claim is clear: whilst we should clearly be careful about reinforcing (say) FGM in some religions or cultures, that carefulness has absolutely no implications for the privileged role of (say) the Church of England in national life. (I would also mention here the weaseliness of the word 'oppression': I have no doubt at all that Lord Harries regards the exclusion of women from (ordained) ministry as oppression and, hence, the exclusion of most traditional religions from 'privilege' in principle as entirely justifiable: highly convenient, no doubt, for the sort of liberal Protestantism he embodies.)

Moving on to point four: While both Christians and Muslims, for example, will claim a higher loyalty, according to the tenets of their religion, this must not be interpreted as loyalty to a foreign power structure, as it was, for example, by some Roman Catholics in the 16th century.

OK. Point received. Nonsense. My loyalty to Catholicism is not simply to obey everything coming out of the Vatican. But equally, I do have a loyalty to a 'foreign power structure'. (And analogous things can be said about Jews and Muslims etc etc.) Inconvenient for Erastians, I know, but get over it: that's what proper religions are like.


Fifthly, in devising public policy we need to take into account where we are as a result of our history and culture. There is no neutral realm, and what we have now is a quite specific achievement that has been worked out over many centuries. It is a fantasy to think that there is some neutral secular blueprint existing somewhere else, which can simply be plonked down. 

Now, this I agree with!! To adopt 'secularism' as a 'essentially uncontested' term is to assume a rupture of pietas and tradition: the existing state (State and situation) of the UK is not one where there is a neat separation between Church and State (let alone between Christianity and the State). If secularism is adopted as an unproblematic aim, then, on almost any interpretation of the word (and certainly on any of the usual meanings chucked around by the secularist clubs), we would need to change and abandon traditional ways of doing things. So, we need to ask, why? On what grounds (and on what evidence) do we assume that changing the (rather lazy vague Protestantism) of Scottish and English history in favour of some Spartist atheism is going to benefit anyone? I'm sure there's some tweaking to be done (in particular to allow, eg, theists from a non-Christian background such as Muslims to participate fully and bring up their children in their religion). But my bet would be that those sorts of accommodations would be more easily obtained in a culture and a State run by Christians (say) signed up to Dignitatis Humanae


It is in accordance with their dignity as persons-that is, beings endowed with reason and free will and therefore privileged to bear personal responsibility-that all men should be at once impelled by nature and also bound by a moral obligation to seek the truth, especially religious truth. They are also bound to adhere to the truth, once it is known, and to order their whole lives in accord with the demands of truth. However, men cannot discharge these obligations in a manner in keeping with their own nature unless they enjoy immunity from external coercion as well as psychological freedom. Therefore the right to religious freedom has its foundation not in the subjective disposition of the person, but in his very nature. In consequence, the right to this immunity continues to exist even in those who do not live up to their obligation of seeking the truth and adhering to it and the exercise of this right is not to be impeded, provided that just public order be observed.

Further light is shed on the subject if one considers that the highest norm of human life is the divine law-eternal, objective and universal-whereby God orders, directs and governs the entire universe and all the ways of the human community by a plan conceived in wisdom and love. Man has been made by God to participate in this law, with the result that, under the gentle disposition of divine Providence, he can come to perceive ever more fully the truth that is unchanging. Wherefore every man has the duty, and therefore the right, to seek the truth in matters religious in order that he may with prudence form for himself right and true judgments of conscience, under use of all suitable means.

than by the sort of secularist whose view of religion is summed up in the following (here)

The Cambridge Secular Society was formed in 2009 to provide a forum for likeminded freethinkers concerned that religion, far from being in terminal decline, is making a comeback. With the establishment still in the thrall of religion the reasons are easy to see, for the politicians it is the grovelling pursuit of votes that motivates them along with the misguided idea that religion is good for us and our children, for others it is the cosy familiarity of Bishops smothering us all with pious words and incantations of God's love...

'Secularism' is not a clear desideratum. Lord Harries is wrong to accept procedural secularism as an aim. Instead, we should aim for a public space and debate that is rational and just, but also accepting that what this means is not easy and will involve conflicting views. How we live with that conflict is what matters, and that will be more easily done within the sort of broad theism (I might even be tempted to say deism) that existed within the institutionalized Protestantism of the existing State than within the shrill certainties of secularism.

Kenan Malik and the wisdom of mobs

                                              All a jolly good idea

I've had Kenan Malik's A Quest for a Moral Compass on my Kindle for a while now. My interest in it was provoked by Tom Holland's puff: ‘I can imagine it replacing Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy on many a bookshelf - certainly mine.’ Although I've a great respect for Tom Holland and am quite prepared to believe that a context might add nuance to this remark, as it stands, it's silly. It's a category error. Whatever else might be said about either book, Russell is writing a history of philosophy, not morality (or even moral philosophy). Russell was, again, whatever else might be said, a seminal figure in Anglo-American academic and popular philosophy. His book -clearly barking though it is in places- is a classic of popularization. You might replace Russell with Malik, but it would be in the same way you'd replace a book with a vase of flowers: you'd be replacing one thing with something else and something different. Anyway, it sits there on the Kindle more because I want (eventually) to find out whether it is as ludicrous as the advertising, rather than because I suspect I will find enlightenment in it. (I think I can reasonably claim to have read enough proper books in this area to suspect there'll be little to surprise me. But who knows?)

In the meantime, there's Malik's essay on 'The death of god and the fall of man' (here). This attracted my attention in part because it deals with two philosophers I have learned  much from (MacIntyre and Anscombe) and in part because of the 'odd' claim at the end:

Or, to put it another way, the moral incoherence of the modern world derives perhaps from the inability to think like the mob outside the Bastille.

Now, I think, that Malim regrets this. In essence, his essay appears to argue that the problem of modern morality is that it is trapped either at the pole of believing in an external standard of behaviour that is ineluctable (such as a biological determinism) or at the opposing pole of a radical subjectivity that is contentless and arbitrary:

the consequence of the coincidence of the Death of God and the Fall of Man is that the relationship between what Alasdair MacIntyre called ‘man-as-he-happens-to-be’ and ‘man-as-he-could-be’ has become obscured, indeed broken. The secular ‘Fall of Man’, the loss of faith in the human capacity to act rationally and morally, and to collectively transform their world, has narrowed the conception of what humans could be, confined our notion of what we are and eroded the link between the two.

And as the link between the two has eroded, so moral thinking has polarized between the belief that morality is nothing more than the immediate product of ‘man-as-he-happens-to-be’; and the belief that ‘man-as-he-happens-to-be’ cannot of himself define ‘man-as-he-could-be’, but that this must be defined not by humans as we are but in some objective sense, either through God or through science. On the one hand the idea that morality can be nothing more than personal preference; on the other that for it to be anything more than personal preference, it has to be anchored by some external legislator or in some objective realm.

The solution to this?

The answers to moral questions are neither subjective nor objective but rather rooted in a rationality that emerges out of social need, a rationality that can only emerge through humanity’s collective judgement.

And the model for this collective judgment is the mob storming the Bastille: it is a group that emerges from concrete external circumstances, but is not paralysed by them:

The mob only formed because of wider aims, aims that were social and historical rather than individual and personal. It is, in Sartre’s words, a ‘fused group’, not a ‘seriality’. The mob storming the Bastille was, in other words, an expression of the transformed meaning of telos.

Now there's a lot in Malik's essay that I'm not going to tackle here. In particular, his understanding of MacIntyre as simply thinking of social embeddedness in terms of tradition rather than 'transformation' doesn't do justice to MacIntyre: indeed, MacIntyre's main task in After Virtue and his succeeding work is to recommend a transformation of society by an adoption of (roughly) communitarianism as a way of life and Thomism as a way of thought. But putting aside the question of the accuracy of his analysis of MacIntyre and Anscombe, what of his own solution?

One point to make quickly is that his understanding of Classical philosophy appears quite warped. For example:

Human life was framed by the gods and yet humans could not rely upon them. They had to depend upon their own wit and resources. It was human reason and human morality that imposed order upon an unpredictable world, and carved out dignity and honour within it.

Now, however adequate such a view is of Graeco-Roman popular culture, it is entirely inadequate as an account of Graeco-Roman philosophy, especially that of Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics. Their key idea was that of nature, in particular, human nature: there was an order in the world which human beings had to reflect much more than carve. But that reflection required thought and virtue. For Plato, a revolutionary mob would be not the paradigm of emancipatory action, but a predictable consequence of what happens when power is given to those who are unfitted for serious philosophical thought: they will end up following the whims of a tyrant (see eg Book 8 of the Republic). For the Greeks as much as us, the question of how to move from what we already are to what we could be is a hard one. But unlike Malik, the mainstream Graeco-Roman solution is that the answer is found by hard thinking, not mob action.

And to note that is to note that, once again, we are back with the need to discern what is true and what is good and what is beautiful. A mob doesn't think: at best, it is manipulated by one who does think (the demagogue). But other forms of collectivity do. A choir is immersed in a search for beauty which requires both virtue in the leadership (the choir director) and in the following (the chorus). A research group again requires thought and discussion in its search for the true. A charity likewise requires the exercise of practical wisdom and virtue in its pursuit of the good. Why are none of these better examples than the Bastille mob for Malik? Because they highlight what Malik is seeking to obscure: that collective transformative action can be good and bad. And it becomes good only when it undertakes, more or less explicitly, the sort of conscious rational reflection that Socrates, Plato and Aristotle undertook about human nature. It is not, pace Malik, 'the transformed meaning of telos' but simply the same old search for the same old telos.

The challenge for those such as Malik who want (in some way) to draw a line between modernity and the pre-modern moral world is to explain why the two worlds are so different. For such as me, they aren't -and his failure to explain why a mob should be taken as a paradigm of good collective action is evidence of that. There is a perennial philosophy or at least a perennial search for that philosophy. In essence (as I think Leo Strauss sees most clearly among modern political thinkers) the ancients said all that could be said: the world of the Stoics and Plato and Aristotle is our world. The only thing to be added to that (and this transforms not so much the questions or the search so much as the definiteness and practicality of the solutions) is the Christian revelation.

To return to Malik's claim:


Or, to put it another way, the moral incoherence of the modern world derives perhaps from the inability to think like the mob outside the Bastille.

Against that, weigh MacIntyre's:

We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another—doubtless very different—St Benedict.

Both transformed society, but one did so with a conscious reflection on human flourishing and the other was a murderous rampage on a whim:

At 4pm, the Marquis de Launay surrendered and let the people enter the Bastille. The guards were violently killed and the Marquis de Launay was beheaded, with his head then put on a stake and carried all over the city as a sign of victory.

There weren't many prisoners in the Bastille at the time of the storming; only 7 people were freed.

That very night, 800 men began to destroy the Bastille.

[Here.]

The need for religious schools

All those in favour of religious schools?

From a Catholic point of view, I suppose the main justification for Church schools runs roughly along the lines of 'keeping-one's-children-away-from-as-much-rubbish-as possible'. However, a slightly more sophisticated articulation of such a view might well be in order...

The main argument against religious schools (putting aside the rather crass 'stopping religion because it's wot sky fairy worshipping bronze age goat herds believed' argument) seems to be that it breaks down community cohesion: by educating children separately, you encourage them to think of themselves as separate (and even antagonistic). Rather than just dismissing such an argument, it's worth acknowledging that it does have some force as a worry. If there were nothing else to be said, it might well be that such a consideration would tip the balance against religious schools.

However, there is something more to be said which throws the burden of proof back on to the opponents of religious education. Let's concentrate on the consequentialist arguments for now rather than, say, that deontological argument that parents have a right to control their children's education. In essence, this amounts to the claim that it is better for the sum total of happiness in society that religious schooling exists.

1) The Burkean argument. The traditional conservative view is that social cohesion is built, not from the State down, but from the family and civil society up. By being socialized within a 'little platoon', we grow to be socialized into wider society. As Burke puts it:

To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed toward a love to our country and to mankind. The interest of that portion of social arrangement is a trust in the hands of all those who compose it; and as none but bad men would justify it in abuse, none but traitors would barter it away for their own personal advantage.

A school rooted in the values of its community and the families whose children attend it is one that contributes more to social cohesion than a school which tries to separate children from the values of home and community.

2) The MacIntyrean argument. All intellectual endeavour, but more particularly the moulding of character and morality, takes place within a tradition. There is not one understanding of the good life, but a number of competing views more or less successfully supported by a coherent way of life and practices of reflection. 

[Alasdair MacIntyre] believes that modern philosophy and modern life are characterized by the absence of any coherent moral code, and that the vast majority of individuals living in this world lack a meaningful sense of purpose in their lives and also lack any genuine community. He draws on the ideal of the Greek polis and Aristotle’s philosophy to propose a different way of life in which people work together in genuinely political communities to acquire the virtues and fulfill their innately human purpose. This way of life is to be sustained in small communities which are to resist as best they can the destructive forces of liberal capitalism. [Here.]

Unless education takes place in such a community, not only will the happiness of the individual suffer, but the intellectual depth of the education offered will be undermined by the absence of a coherent philosophical underpinning. 

The force of both arguments can be seen in the current mulling over the 'Trojan Horse' schools. By trying to impose a culture antithetical to that of the home and the community, instead of promoting social cohesion, schools instead produce deracinated and alienated youth who fail even in the basic terms of exam success. By working with the grain of the 'little platoon', schools will be able to produce integrated individuals who are able to function productively in society.

The Burkean argument emphasizes the aspect of sentiment and the emotions, the MacIntyrean the aspect of intellectual and moral coherence. But both represent the conservative belief that an integrated society emerges from the bottom up rather than the top down. Opposed to that is the statist view that cohesion can be imposed from the top, even if 'cohesion' produces individuals deracinated from their families and their cultures, even if the resulting culture clash results in poor educational performance and individuals alienated from the economic system. (And this is quite apart from the deeper -and highly problematic -assumption that social cohesion is identical with social uniformity.) 

What is Scholasticism and what sort of Scholasticism?

                                        Angelic proofreaders pointing out typos...

There's been a rather interesting exchange going on between Ed Feser (Thomist extraordinaire) and Michael Sullivan of the Scotist blog, The Smithy on Feser's recent Scholastic Metaphysics: an Introduction. [Feser's latest post on this -with links to further instalments of Sullivan- is here.]

In essence, the debate centres on two points. First, is Feser's version of Scholasticism too exclusively Thomist, particularly at the expense of Scotus? Secondly, is it too ahistorical, smoothing over detailed engagement with actual Scholastic writers in favour of quick neo-Thomist caricatures? The detailed posing (and answering) of these questions is an education in itself -and I'd urge anyone even remotely interested in understanding Scholasticism to read the posts and the combox discussions (as well as Feser's book!).

Behind any detailed criticism of the book, however, stand rather more general issues about the nature of philosophy in general, and Scholasticism within the Catholic Church in particular. To pluck away at a couple of these:

a) Grand narratives vs detailed grappling. There is a tendency in academic philosophy (particularly English language analytic philosophy) to focus in incredible detail on narrow issues. The good (essential) aspect of that is rigour: carefulness in argument and examination is necessary to achieve truth: there are no shortcuts. On the other hand, there are losses. One loss is that of popular engagement. For philosophy to engage outwith the academy, it needs to deal in recognizable issues in recognizable ways: too much technicality and narrowness of focus and philosophy becomes confined to the philosophy department. (Whilst there is clearly more to be said about how philosophy can be both rigorous and popular, I'll leave it with the simple (and I hope plausible) claim that highly technical philosophy can't be popular and that, since some philosophy needs to be popular, not all philosophy can be highly technical.)

Perhaps an even more serious loss is the absence of what I shall style 'narrative imagination'. To take two particular examples, one of the most influential recent-ish works in English speaking philosophy has been that Alasdair MacIntyre, in particular, that of After Virtue. Much of that work involves an historical narrative that, to put it mildly, is open to detailed criticism.: if MacIntyre had stopped to deal with every detailed point that could be raised against his narrative, the force of the work would have been much diminished. A similar point could be made about the (again influential) Radical Orthodoxy movement in theology. If Milbank's Theology and Social Theory -which again contains a rather 'sweeping' narrative- were to grapple with every possible detailed criticism, again, the force of the work would have disappeared.

There are clearly many possible reactions to such a (clearly true) observation. One possibility is simply to abandon the idea of a grand narrative and to concentrate on detailed grappling. I'll simply note that, in my view, such a solution has unfortunate consequences both ethically (in depriving individuals of a sense of their place in an historical narrative) and pedagogically (in depriving pupils of a sense of  shape to an issue which they can then subject to further critical scrutiny). Another (and this I'd favour) is to note that both the grand and the detailed are required: in any healthy intellectual ecosystem, there will be a creative tension between those who produce imaginative narratives and those who subject them to detailed critique.

b) The place of philosophy in Catholicism. As I've made clear over the history of this blog, I'm in general sympathy with the view that the loss of neo-Thomism (ie the sort of Thomism of the nineteenth and twentieth century manuals) as an intellectual tradition in Catholicism is at least as serious a loss as any that has been felt in the liturgy. (Let's not get bogged down in details: there's a problem in liturgy in the modern Church and there's a problem with the destruction of neo-Thomism.) This has (at least) two aspects. First, there is the loss of a focus on St Thomas Aquinas. By taking as alternative paradigms either non-Catholic thinkers such as Levinas, Lacan, Derrida, Butler etc, theologians have cut themselves off entirely from (at the least) an extremely rich intellectual model which attempts to do justice to reason, revelation and ecclesiastical authority. But while this is true of some (perhaps even many) Catholic theologians, it also remains true that Aquinas has not been ignored and yet remains a central figure in theology. (Even the much attacked Tina Beattie has recently published a monograph on him.) From this aspect alone, things could be a lot worse.

Which leads me on to the second aspect. Neo-Thomism had a particular understanding of a number of issues, in particular, the place of philosophy within Catholicism. Roughly put, most neo-Thomists thought that philosophy -reason unguided by revelation- could attain truth, albeit incomplete and albeit with difficulty. Moreover, neo-Thomism was, to a large extent, a creation of teaching institutions and, especially, seminaries: it was a Thomism shaped by the need to be taught and used by those who were not professional and specialized theologians, but who were priests engaging with ordinary people and non-Catholic intellectual challenge. Much modern Catholic thinking even when approaching Aquinas is fideist (ie carried out in terms only acceptable to those who already accept dogmatic teaching) and academic (destined for an audience of other professional theologians or students). In other words, neo-Thomism carried in a narrative imagination an understanding of what it was and how it fitted into the world that is lacking in other Catholic theologies, and indeed other grapplings with Aquinas.

What follows from this? In terms of Feser's book, its characteristics are those (unsurprisingly) of a neo-Thomist: what it foregrounds and what it glosses over are precisely what you'd expect from a neo-Thomist. If this is surprising, it is only because the neo-Thomist has become a rara avis. In more thickly populated intellectual flocks (analytical philosophy, for example) very few stop to wonder why introductory manuals fail to take seriously the details of natural theology: the writing off of an intellectual tradition has taken place as part of the background narrative imagination. If you think his approach is wrong, then the problem lies less in the book and more in the background movement.

More importantly, Catholics (lay and clerical) need to develop an intellectual culture which can function as an ancilla theologiae -a preparation for revelation. That is wider than philosophy, but it includes philosophy. I think that's best conceptualized as a return to neo-Thomism, but I'd be open to (and indeed sometimes personally do) think of it as a return to the philosophia perennis of the Greeks of which Thomism is merely the final flourishing, or (in politics) to the politics of natural right envisaged by Leo Strauss. Each of those conceptualizations is an act of narrative imagination and is open to detailed critique. But I'm pretty sure that, without some such boldness of vision, Catholic intellectual life is going to be steamrollered by the narrative imagination of secularism.

As a coda to all this, let me quote from my current bedtime reading (Garrigou-Lagrange's Le Sens Commun -which primarily contains his refutation of Bergson and I'm reading as a proleptic refutation of post-modernism). In that, he sketches the content of the philosophy of common sense:

[The anthropologist Le Roy obtained from his field studies of primitive peoples] a residue of common elements which corresponds almost exactly to what is, for traditional philosophy, the content of common sense:

1) Distinction between the invisible and visible worlds.
2) A feeling of human dependence in respect to the superior world, particularly in the use of nature.
3) Belief in a Supreme Being, creator, organizer and master of the world and at the same time father of human beings.
4) Belief in independent spiritual beings, some beneficent, some hostile.
5) Belief in a human soul, distinct from the body, conscious, surviving death.
6) Belief in a world beyond, where spirits live and souls survive.
7) A universal moral sense, based on the distinction between good and evil, feelings of justice, shame, responsibility, liberty and duty. Implicit or explicit recognition of conscience.
8) Prescriptions and proscriptions in view of a moral end; a notion of sin with sanctions applied by the authority of the invisible world or its representatives.
9) The organization of culture, prayers and sacrifice.
10) A priesthood charged with sacred duties.
11) Distinction between the sacred and the profane.
12) Establishment of the family as religious and social centre.

[p88 Le sens commun (my translation and slight adaptation)]

Nothing there, I think, to surprise, say, the reader of Plato or Confucius. But remember this is supposed to be the pre-existing foundation on which revelation then builds. To even achieve this level of explicit belief in a secularized public culture is going to be quite an achievement although -and this is the intriguing aspect for me- implicitly I'm pretty sure this is what most people actually do believe even in the West. (Thought experiment: watch reruns of Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Battlestar Galactica whilst regarding the above as foolish.)

Law, religion, Sir James Munby and Gorns

                                       The Judge in the Hampstead Coffee Shop.... 


Although I'd been vaguely aware of Sir James Munby's ruminations (PDF here) on the law and religion, I'd filed it mentally under the heading 'another sign of things falling apart' without giving it much attention until the Law and Religion blog got its teeth stuck into it. That blog gives it quite a respectful hearing. I'm afraid my reaction is rather different.

My overall impression of Sir James' speech is frankly disbelief that a senior legal figure should come up with something quite so superficial. I might hope it's simply rubber chicken syndrome: like many of those in the great world, he finds himself yet again invited to one of those annoying dinners where the price of entry is getting up on your hind legs and speaking; he puts something together at the last moment, utters forth to the accompaniment of soothing noises from rhubarbing middle aged men; and then settles down to wrestling with an indifferent fowl bathed in some sort of gloop. It's only a speech, you  might suspect he would say if challenged...

I fear however since it is dubbed 'a keynote address' that it must be held to rather higher standards. Much of his argument centres on the disputes between John Stuart Mill and James Fitzjames Stephen in the nineteenth century,  and Hart and Patrick Devlin in the twentieth. Both have taken on the status of symbolic struggles between a broadly libertarian view of the law as promoting the maximum amount of negative liberty subject only to the avoidance of harm (Mill and Hart) versus a view of the law as embodying substantive moral content (Stephen and Devlin). (A very brief summary of the key issues is given here.)

Now oddly enough, I'm rather on the side of Mill and Hart in this. Given the nature of our society, I'd rather have the legal protection to carry on (in Mill's terms) my experiments in living, rather than having government or other agents stepping in to curtail my negative liberty. Do I think that's an ideal state? No, but it's better than one where I -as a member of a minority (Catholic) group- am subject to state coercion to restrict or change my views or behaviour. Mill bases his view on the great importance of liberty; living your life according to your own lights is, for Mill, the central aspect of long term human happiness which he, as a utilitarian, is intent on promoting.

This rather grand and bracing vision of human nature is completely ignored by Munby who turns a debate centred on liberty into a debate centred on religion. There is little in Munby's speech about the importance of autonomy, free speech and experiments in living. Instead, we have:

Today, surely, the judicial task is to assess matters by the standards of reasonable men and 
women in 2013 – not, I would add, by the standards of their parents in 1970 – and 
having regard to the ever changing nature of our world: changes in our understanding 
of the natural world, technological changes, changes in social standards and, perhaps 
most important of all, changes in social attitudes.  (p7: PDF)

Now, according to Mill and Hart, the simple answer to this would be no: the judicial task is to make sure that I have as much negative liberty as possible subject to the harm principle:

The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.

On the other hand, 'the standards of reasonable men and women in 2013' reads as though Munby is channelling Devlin:

How is the law-maker to ascertain the moral judgment of society?...English law has evolved and regularly uses a standard which does not depend on the counting of heads. It is that of the reasonable man. He is not to be confused with the rational man. He is not expected to reason about anything and his judgment may be largely a matter of feeling. It is the viewpoint of the man in the street -or to use an archaism familiar to lawyers -the man in the Clapham omnibus. (Devlin: The Enforcement of Morals.)

It is this blindness to the real nature of the Mill/Hart and Stephen/Devlin dispute that is most worrying about Munby. It is one thing to note that we live in an extremely fragmented society where there is no real shared substantive view of the good. For such a society, there is much to be said for Mill's view of maximizing personal liberty, the negative liberty of freedom from interference, particularly by government. In the sort of recent 'hot button' cases concerning religion, that would mean that religious minorities would have a strong presumption in favour of their right to act as they like unless clear and direct harm was being caused to others. (So B&B owners would be almost certainly be able to discriminate against unmarried couples and registrars would be able to negotiate exemptions from carrying out same sex 'marriages' etc.) It is quite another thing to suggest that, now the man on the Clapham omnibus has changed his views, we should be imposing a religion-free morality in the same way that Devlin and Stephen would have imposed a religious morality.

Of course, there may well be arguments in favour of such a Devlin-like position: Frank at Law and Religion seems to endorse Lord Justice Laws' view which is that

the conferment of any legal protection or preference upon a particular substantive moral position on the ground only that it is espoused by the adherents of a particular faith, however long its tradition, however rich its culture, is deeply unprincipled. It imposes compulsory law, not to advance the general good on objective grounds, but to give effect to the force of subjective opinion. This must be so, since in the eye of everyone save the believer religious faith is necessarily subjective, being incommunicable by any kind of proof or evidence. It may of course be true; but the ascertainment of such a truth lies beyond the means by which laws are made in a reasonable society. Therefore it lies only in the heart of the believer, who is alone bound by it. No one else is or can be so bound, unless by his own free choice he accepts its claims.

In essence, the claim is that morality based on religion is subjective and the law deals only with objective morality. Frankly, this is utter tosh. The philosophical debates in this area ought to be well known, but, in short, the taking of such a view would have to respond (at least) to Macintyre's analysis of all moral thinking as taking place within a particular tradition, and the Catholic understanding of reasoning about our nature and its flourishing taking place within an Aristotelian conception of ethics rather than one based on faith. There's absolutely no sign that either Laws or Munby have even started to grapple with such considerations.

In fine, we are left with the irony that Munby is defending a position like Devlin's whilst under the apparent impression that he is supporting Mill and Hart. (It is merely that the test is now the judge in the Hampstead Coffee Shop rather than the man on the Clapham Omnibus.) If one assumes that there is one commonsense moral opinion that can, in rough terms, be discerned by the mind of the passenger on the omnibus, then the imposition of that view may be possible, even if it leaves open the further question as to whether that view (and its enforcement) is actually morally good. But the deeper challenge of post modernity -or, perhaps more narrowly, the challenge of a society that no longer coheres around a particular institutionalized worldview (such as that of the Church of England or Church of Scotland) is that there is no longer such a single worldview. There is no such thing as one secular worldview that remains after religion is subtracted.

The unnoticed confusions in the speech over the relationship between Mill's views and James' championing of a Devlin like test based on a social coherence which no longer exists suggests two conclusions. Either our great and good are too dumb to understand what they are arguing; or they know quite well what they are saying and are simply covering up their real intentions under a smog of verbiage. We can immediately reject the first possibility as too bizarre to be worth considering. I am therefore going with the assumption that our country is being run by giant alien lizards who are engaged in a worldwide conspiracy to impose secular (ie Gorn) standards on us.

You read it here first...

            A member of the judiciary proposing a toast to the overthrow of  Christianity 

Stupid atheists

                                Some Catholics are dunces, but are some Brights dull?

A while back, I managed to irritate a 44 year old atheist computer geek by suggesting (as he read it) that some atheists were dumb. (Ironically, in view of his protestations of smartness, he'd misread what I said -which was (in essence) that some types of atheism betray the sort of stupidity characteristic of smart but immature and narrowly educated young men- but put that aside.)

Putting away the sniping here, why should the suggestion that some atheists are not intelligent be regarded as such an insult? Certainly, I'm quite happy to accept that some Catholics aren't intelligent: indeed, I positively glorify in that fact. When I was becoming a Catholic, one of my wife's family declared that the only people in her family who were Catholics were the servants. Quite apart from the factual oddities here (Mrs L is hardly blue blooded) I remember thinking that this was as good a reason as any for going ahead: what sort of Christianity wasn't for the servant and the master, the bright and the stupid? Whatever else is clear from the New Testament, it is perfectly clear that you don't enter the Kingdom of Heaven via diplomas and a healthy bank balance.

The only entry ticket for Catholicism is being human. It starts from conception and ends with the death rattle. You can be mentally disabled or a genius: it doesn't matter. How you contribute to the Body of Christ will be affected by your talents, but there is a place for everyone.

Atheists, at least of the New Atheism variety, seem heavily invested in their (individually) being smart. Dennett's adoption of the 'Bright' label is the most obvious symptom of this, as is the obvious smarting of the 'smart' commenter at my jibe. But behind this is the foundational illusion of New Atheism: they are out to free people from the tyranny of religion so they can think for themselves. That's fine if you're a public school educated Oxford academic (well, you'd think so anyway) but what of those less well endowed? And frankly that's really all of us at some time: no one is smart throughout their life; no one is completely master of all fields of knowledge. New Atheists seem compelled to pretend to a greater knowledge than they actually have; Catholics sooner or later admit that we fall back on faith and authority. We are, as MacInyre puts it, 'dependent, rational animals'.

New Atheism really seems to substitute a new, rather ill-imagined authority structure for old, rather more thoughtful ones. As a Catholic, there is a very explicit authority structure on which I rely: its very explicitness allows me to assess and critically engage with it. New Atheists have a very inexplicit authority structure, but one which is just as real: a set of slogans; a set of heroes; a set of holy writs.

So what should stupid atheists do? Is there any room in the Bright new tomorrow for the fool or even the slightly below average intellectually? Or is the solution a final one: that when you are a suboptimum child, you are aborted? When you are disabled, you are  euthanized? And when you can no longer read even The God Delusion with complete understanding, you ask nurse for the final remedy for all cognitive failure?

Thomism and system: getting the whole picture:

                                            

In our own age, Thomism has become one of the only plausible contenders left that  offers an authentic vision of the  sapiential  unity  of human knowledge  amidst the diversity of  university disciplines.  Politically, our situation is one of cultural disenfranchisement, to be sure. We are complete outsiders, an underground movement frequently unwelcome in the university. But the rivals who today are offering either the Church or the modern world a plausible narrative of  the intellectual life are diminishing and are not having such an easy time themselves. As a Dominican friar of the Toulouse province said in the 1970’s during an episode of particular turmoil: “Brothers, things are bad here, but by the grace of God, they are worse elsewhere.” If your goal is to win over the larger culture today, inside the Church or outside of it, it is not much easier today to be a Kantian, a Balthasarian, a Marxist, a logical positivist or a Derriddian, than to be a Thomist. In this heterogeneous landscape, there is an increasingly level playing field, and in that case its not bad to have Aquinas on your team. 

(Fr. T. J White O.P, Thomism after Vatican II. H/T The Smithy.)

One of the oddest things when reading a neo-Scholastic manual is the insistence on system. For example, Harper's The Metaphysics of the School (pp. liv-v) (published 1879):

Hence it comes to pass, that our modem Metaphysics is a thing of shreds and patches ; — here a Logic, — there a sort of Psychology, — in another work, an Ideology, — sometimes an essay on causes, — or a dissertation on final causes,— or a discussion on the primordial constituents of primordial substance. There is no order or completeness, but a general disintegration; and the disintegrated parts receive their respective names in token of their individuality. Accordingly, we read of Teleology, Aetiology, Morphology, and other imposing clones without number, which remind one of Job who  'openeth his mouth in vain, and multiplieth words without knowledge.' 

The simple fact is, that the educated men of our time, owing to the prepossessions which they have imbibed from their cradle and to the specimens of philosophy which have fallen across their path, have not as yet realized the fact that Metaphysics is a science,— with its own terminology and its own first principles, — most difficult of acquisition — requiring long continued, patient, devoted, laborious study. They seem to imagine that they can jump into it all at once with as much ease as they can get into a new suit of ready-made clothes. 

This emphasis on systematic, careful study is even more at variance with the typical modular pattern of modern education in the humanities: a bit of Derrida here, a bit of a language here, a bit of psychology there.

Without the ability to articulate -but perhaps even more importantly to see- the world coherently, the averagely educated, non-specialist in the humanities is flung upon the tide of fashion. Pumped up with the desire to be open minded, but without a thorough enough formation to retain an intellectual integrity through that open-mindedness, those external fashions sweep opinions before them. One year we're in favour of free love and encouraging children to express their sexuality. The next year we're in favour of keeping children in a sort of sexual purdah for fear of abuse, whilst plying them with contraceptives and pornography. One year, we're laughing at funny effeminate men. The next we're abolishing marriage to respect their dignity.

System is important in two ways. It is important because Catholics are rationalists: because the world has been made by intelligence, it is discoverable by intelligence. The rational structure of systematic philosophy and theology reflects the systematic structure of the world. But system is also important morally. Without a coherent Weltanschauung to inform and structure your life and personality, it is hard to see how a person can develop character, that wholeness of being that allows one to deal with the world as an agent rather than as a piece of flotsam.

For Catholics who are intelligent enough to need the structure of academic philosophy and theology, but who are not specialists in those areas, there is a need for a basic systematic understanding: for many reasons, not least historical, Thomism looks best placed to provide that basic structure. That isn't to say that specialist theologians or philosophers within the Catholic tradition have to be Thomists, or have to adopt a particular form of systematic Thomism. But it probably does mean that we should all be starting from that sort of firm formative foundation, and continue on to work within a sort of scholastic Ideenraum, a space which is structured by the inputs of the various philosophical and theological schools of scholastic and patristic Catholicism, in turn built on foundations of classical Greek philosophy and classical Jewish thought.