This short book is the outcome of an event held on 22nd October 2009 in New York City's Cooper Union where these four very well known figures were invited to give a paper and then engaged in a debate and take questions from the audience. As the blurb on the back cover indicates, ‘[The occasion represented] a rare opportunity to experience a diverse group of preeminent philosophers confronting one pervasive contemporary concern: what role does—or should—religion play in our public lives?’
The sheer eminence of those who contributed papers raises the bar of expectation quite high. This is not of course simply a debate of academic interest. With the threat from fundamentalist followers of Islam and the unresolved conflicts between Palestinians and Jews in Israel the topic has philosophical and practical urgency. In the months since the publication of the book the so-called Arab spring has come to figure large in global imagination and reality. Although the issue of religion has featured in the debate, in the early stages of change, it has not played the key role that some feared. The relationship of religion to governance has now acquired even more interest and urgency.
It would be exciting indeed if there was a sense of new thinking in this book. However, what most of the contributors actually do is set out a brief summary of positions which they have described much more comprehensively elsewhere. It succeeds at the relatively prosaic level of usefully summarising the key positions of the speakers at the conference whose views often seem complementary rather than contradictory.
Jürgen Habermas opened the proceedings with a paper entitled ‘The Political: The rational meaning of a questionable inheritance of political theology’. He starts by carefully distinguishing between ‘the political’ and the social sciences, politics and policies. The origins of the state are
to be found in organised societies where the law was originally sacred and religion legitimized its enforcement. Only with the advent of the early modern state, do we see the beginnings of secularization of the political. There is no ‘pure’ state of political being, however, since the waters are further muddied as a result of the influence of religion in the formation of the state. In many countries, the language of the political is couched in terms which were originally derived from religion. Today, the concept of the political has been stripped of any serious reference to religion. However, as Rawls avers, ‘The liberal constitution itself must not ignore the contributions that religious groups can make to the democratic process within civil society.’ This sounds close to treating religion as a kind of sop to the masses—Marx via the back door perhaps.
Charles Taylor takes up the baton with his paper, ‘Why we need a radical redefinition of secularism’. He points out that there is a general agreement that democracies have to be secular, even if as Habermas shows, there are a number of problems with this view.
He avers that secularism is not a synonym for atheism and there are aspects of belief which may not be strictly speaking secular or religious but which have a profound influence on the political. However there is no pure religion-free place from which to institute a secular society. Firstly the right to religious beliefs must be guaranteed even if we fear that such beliefs are inassimilable in a democratic society. Interestingly he cites here the work of José Casanova who pointed out that American Catholics were the source of similar fears in the nineteenth century. As history went on to show, the result was not an irresolvable conflict but a change in precepts and practice of American Catholicism. Too often we fear that change will take place in only one direction.
Taylor thinks that the separation of church and state needs to be carefully thought through. He takes the example of wearing of the hijab by Muslim women, cites the varied responses in western democracies, and notes that the balance of the competing claims of religious practice and political allegiance is drawn differently in each country. The issue is not a simple matter of response to events or the imposition or otherwise of the rule of law. A political identity is forged in modern democracies which is never completely established and is always being swayed by considerations of basic principles of democracy, human
rights and equality on the one hand and historic, linguistic and religious traditions on the other.
Taylor asserts that Habermas and Rawls confer a special status on non religiously informed Reason, what he terms ‘reason alone’. This view makes two assumptions:
that the addition of religion is always the component which causes the problems; and
that religion can be subtracted from the equation leaving a ‘religion-free’ discourse.
To this list of problems, a psychoanalyst might add a third:
the impossibility of removing unconscious but nevertheless influential references to religion from any discourse.
Taylor's paper concludes with a reference to a ‘first crucial move to self-sufficient reason’ and concludes, hopefully, with the notion that secularism is not a bulwark against religion but a bona fide attempt to secure a balanced political entity supported by this reference to reason.
With Judith Butler's paper a view of the role of the unconscious and of alterity arrives in this book for the first time. In ‘Is Judaism Zionism?’, Judith Butler makes a particular case rather than a general argument. She sets out important distinctions between Judaism, Zionism and the political acts of the State of Israel towards the Palestinians. She draws our attention to Edward Said's description of the overlapping histories and fates of the Jews and the Palestinians, such that, ‘This is a mode of living in which alterity is constitutive of who one is’ (77). She then goes on to consider and distinguish concepts such as pluralization in contradistinction to universalization and notes that equality does not homogenize those to whom it applies. Her paper ends with reflections on the practice of remembrance citing the work of Walter Benjamin. Strikingly absent however, is a psychoanalytic addition, namely a reference to Freud's notions of repetition and working through.
The final paper in the conference is a breath of fresh air, ‘Prophetic religion and the future of capitalist civilization’, by Cornel West who
describes himself as ‘A blues man in the life of the mind, a jazzman in the world of ideas’ (93). He provocatively asserts that ‘Brother Christopher Hitchens must become more religiously musical. Too many secular thinkers are religiously deaf and flat-footed’ (93). Only West seems aware of religion as something more than an inconvenient set of often irrelevant beliefs with which the political has to grit its teeth and defer to in the politest possible terms rather than cause offence.
West makes the point that the dominant forms of religion are often on the side of capital, not the poor. He argues for prophetic religion, ‘[W]e're talking about something that is engaging, something that is risk taking, and it has everything to do with the enabling virtue, which is courage—the courage to expand empathy, expand imagination, think, critically, organize, mobilize, and maybe, like Brother Martin Luther King Jr., pay the ultimate price’ (100).
He refers to Benjamin's famous ninth thesis which I reproduce below:
A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. (Benjamin 1970: 249)
I have reproduced this because the work of Benjamin makes us aware of what is missing from this book. The contributors, despite, or perhaps rather because of the arguments they make, are confined in a discourse which, by comparison with Benjamin, is indeed religiously
deaf and flat-footed. Psychoanalysts will find the book interesting and sometimes provocative but I doubt it will speak to them about the aspects of psychoanalytic discourse which are, or which touch upon, the religious.
What kind of incident heralds the arrival of Klee's Angelus Novus? It is not necessarily an overtly religious issue in itself; it may be simply an event which causes shock, alarm or disturbance followed by political change as a result. An incident which sticks in my mind is the the Dunblane massacre in 1996 of sixteen children and a teacher. After Dunblane, we could no longer be comfortable with the notion that mass school killings only occurred in the United States. The incident provoked political change in the UK with regard to the ownership of guns. So what connects religious thinking to this incident? People who are not normally churchgoers suddenly wish to find solace for their feelings of sadness and anxiety in a church service. Furthermore, many of my patients at the time talked about the incident in therapy and linked it to their own fears about sudden death and dying.
I understand this phenomenon as follows: the world around us seems to have changed or ‘progressed’, even if our personal world has changed hardly at all. Religions/religiously inflected thinking offer many of us a possibility of sharing our perceptions of change/progress with others, an attempt to comprehend meaningless violence and enable us to repeat and work through the impact of trauma.