I am also grateful to the three panelists who spoke so graciously at the panel and who have provided written versions of their comments. I tried to respond to them ex tempore at the event and have seen a video of my remarks, but I will use this occasion to give a more considered answer to the many questions they raised, having to deal with some overlap between them as I go along.

Early on Wendy Doniger calls in question the very idea of the axial age and more generally the very idea of a breakthrough. She writes, “The problem with the idea of a breakthrough is that evolution goes too slowly to be pinpointed in a single age, that change is gradual.” I will first discuss briefly the objection that the fact that change is gradual rules out the idea of moments of dramatic change, of breakthroughs. It is surely the case that much of the time, maybe for millions of years in biological time, change is indeed gradual. Nonetheless there are moments of dramatic change, transitions, in which the emergence of new capacities leads to remarkable new developments. John Maynard Smith and Eors Szathmary, in their book The Major Transitions in Evolution, describe a number of such developments, as I indicate in chapter 2 of my book. No transition is more remarkable or, as far as we know, more sudden, as the transition from inorganic matter to life itself, something that we know happened maybe 3.7 billion years ago, but that no one knows for sure why it happened. The transition from monocellular to multicellular life is another such transition, as is the emergence of almost all the major body plans of multicellular organisms in the early Cambrian period. Perhaps the single most important transition at the level of cultural evolution is the emergence of language itself, the greatest development in human technology in history, upon which all later developments rest, and relative to which the invention of computers seems minor indeed. And, although there may have been something like proto-language, the emergence of fully grammatical language was almost necessarily sudden. So my argument that theoretic culture emerged during the axial age in the first millennium BCE is hardly startling, nor is it undermined by any emphasis on gradual change, which in the area of metallurgy, agricultural technology, urbanism, etc., was indeed also taking place in the same period.

Doniger’s doubts about the actuality of the axial age focus mainly on India: Wasn’t something like theoretic culture, my index for the axial transition, already present in the Vedas, well before the Upanishads and the Pali Canon of early Buddhism, which are usually seen as exhibiting axial traits? My answer is that no, it wasn’t: the Vedas are largely tribal ritual poetry with a few moments of riddling that could be seen later as foreshadowing metaphysical developments, but are not that different from riddles in many tribal cultures. The startling thing is that the tribal poetry of the Vedas remained the basis of later Hinduism, or at least the Brahmins claimed it did, though it took an awful lot of interpretation to make it seem so. Something similar can be seen in the reworking of tribal myth in Genesis in the Hebrew Bible to make it conform to much later ideas.

The axial age is a complex phenomenon and I cannot repeat here all I said about it in the book. But I should underline one point: an axial transition is only possible when an archaic state has come into existence. Aboriginal Australia could never have given rise to an axial age breakthrough. What is most characteristic of archaic states is the emergence of two mutually entailing ideas: gods and kings. Archaic civilizations fuse the ideas of gods and kings in a single cosmology in which kings are gods or children of gods or will be gods when they become ancestors. I argue that tribal societies are basically egalitarian and have neither chiefs nor gods, but do have powerful beings who are not worshipped but rather identified with in rituals. The cosmological fusion of a degree of divine and political power unknown in tribal societies is the necessary precondition for axial breakthroughs, which in every case call into question the fusion of god and king, claim an immediate relation of ordinary people to the divine and question the legitimacy of the political order. In so doing they use abstract reasoning that can be called theoretic in Merlin Donald’s terms. These theoretic ideas can be metaphysical or ethical or both depending on the case. I argue that they are metaphysical in the Upanishads but become also ethical in early Buddhism.

Doniger raises the question of diffusion versus independent emergence, which as far as I am concerned is a valid and still open question. I tried, as much as I could given the patchiness of the data, to discover diffusion, but failed to do so. The four axial cases are so radically different that I don’t see them as versions of a single breakthrough. There are analogies at a high level of abstraction, but not similarities of substance. Doniger raises the idea of reincarnation, which she finds in Hinduism and Buddhism, but also in Plato. Actually Gananath Obeyesekere, in his Imagining Karma: Ethical Transformation in Amerindian, Buddhist, and Greek Rebirth shows that the idea of reincarnation is very widespread among tribal peoples on every continent, but refers simply to the idea that children may be the return of dead relatives, completely lacking the theoretical structure of karma as found first in the Upanishads and then in early Buddhism. Reincarnation in Plato also lacks the structure of karma and it is far from clear how seriously Plato intends it. It never attained the centrality in Greco-Roman culture that it had in India. The specific implications of the idea of karma, namely that your rebirth will reflect how you have behaved in your present or past births, is specifically and solely Indian. It is a theoretical development of the widespread and very simple idea of rebirth.

I must admit to a degree of skepticism as to whether overcrowding had the significant consequences that Doniger attributes to it. I think the renouncer idea, so well developed in India but not missing in any axial case, has much more to do with a rejection of the socio-political status quo than a wish to avoid overcrowding. Actually overcrowding would be just the kind of social condition that I think should be avoided in speaking of the “cause” of the axial transition. I pointed to a number of social, economic, and political conditions that might be necessary preconditions for an axial breakthrough but cannot be seen as sufficient conditions. Breakthroughs do seem to occur in advanced agrarian societies when they suffer serious breakdowns, but here, as I note, breakdowns are much more frequent than breakthroughs so cannot be sufficient conditions for them.

Several commentators implied that I wanted to explain the axial age or religious evolution generally only by means of social conditions, but I never do that. In every case individual agency is critical and the kind of person involved in that agency will have enormous consequences. It is one of the indices of axiality that there were in the axial age individual thinkers with whom we can still argue, persons that are real to us as interlocutors, what Mencius called “friends in history.” It is striking to me and decisive for my understanding of the Axial Age that there are no such figures before the first millennium BCE. Undoubtedly the Epic of Gilgamesh is a great story, but we cannot argue with a story. We can however argue with Confucius and Mencius, with the Buddha, with Isaiah and Jeremiah, and with Plato and Aristotle. They are alive to us in a way that earlier figures are not and it is no accident that all the great traditions that are still alive today begin then and not before.

As to Doniger’s reflections on ethics, I never said ethics emerge only in the axial age—all societies have ethics. I said universal ethics begin in the axial age, and I stand by that. All earlier ethics are particularistic. Doniger herself in The Hindus: An Alternative History argues that Hindu ethics are almost completely particularistic. Nor do I equate universal ethics with Kantianism, which is unintelligible without the background of modern individualism arising from the Reformation and the Enlightenment. Neither Confucian ethics nor Buddhist ethics, nor the ethics of the Hebrew prophets, nor the ethics of Plato and Aristotle are Kantian, but they are all universal. Universal ethics is one important indicator of the theoretic element in axial culture, but it is no more important than metaphysics or cosmology.

Let me now turn to Luke Timothy Johnson. My admiration for Wendy Doniger will be evident to any reader of my book from the many citations to her work in the chapter on India. There are no citations to Luke Johnson in my book only because he writes on a period that I do not reach. Nonetheless, I want to express my admiration for his many books and in particular for Among the Gentiles: Greco-Roman Religion and Christianity, because it is a deeply comparative book that takes Greco-Roman religion as seriously as it takes Christianity and finds many parallels between them in the early centuries CE. It is just such comparative work that I find extremely helpful and seeing a specialist reach out to undertake it is most encouraging.

Johnson has raised five serious questions about my book, and I will do my best to respond to them.

1) He asks if my use of evolution is to be taken literally as applying to cultural as well as biological development. Yes, it is. Language is a biological capacity that turned out to have enormous cultural implications, but culture never ceases to be a biological capacity and is subject to the same evolutionary pressures as are biological organisms (many more than humans have incipient cultural capacities, we should not forget). I say in the preface that we need to understand what religion is before we argue about whether it is adaptive or not, yet the question of adaptation looms over the whole book and does not just return at the end of the conclusion. Even in the preface I ask whether we moderns can adapt to our own adaptations, and here the question is definitely survival. I will return to the question of evolutionary adaptation in my next book, if I live to write it, because it is in the modern era, with which that book will be concerned, that the issue becomes absolutely central. In that book I will point out that natural selection, modified in terms of recent biological theory, applies to religion as much as any other cultural sphere. For example, no tribal religion can survive in today’s world without protection from a modern state, because no tribal society, and religion is the cultural basis of all such societies, can survive in competition with much stronger, more complex societies. A careful reading of my book will find such intimations in many places. For example, I cite W. G. Runciman’s argument that the ancient Greek polis was “an evolutionary dead end.”

2) It surprises me to read that Johnson thinks that I, following one (wrong) reading of Durkheim, place the social group higher than the individual. In the theory of my teacher, Talcott Parsons, culture, society, personality, and the behavioral organism are all equally essential and interpenetrating aspects of human action. Myth and ritual, even among the Australian Aborigines, are constantly changing, and who changes them? Individuals, of course, acting within the constraints of their culture, society, and their bodies, but never without an aspect of independent creativity. And when it comes to my treatment of the axial age, I give the highest priority to creative individuals, always acting in a total situation, but with remarkable ingenuity and innovation. Johnson seems to recognize this in my treatment of the axial cases, but there is no change in my theoretical presuppositions there. Of course it is just in the axial age that we first find identifiable individuals with whom we can converse to this day. But I recognize the dancers of ritual and the reciters of myth as my teachers in my acknowledgements and they are surely individuals.

3) Johnson’s questions about the axial age start with issues raised by Doniger so I won’t go over the issue of radical transitions in biological and cultural evolution. Of course they all have precursors—nothing comes from nothing—but they are still radically new.  But Johnson is wrong in thinking I shift entirely to the cognitive in treating the axial age. In the case of ancient Greece I give quite a bit of attention to the development of the sacrificial system and its unusually egalitarian side, something that helps us understand the emergence of political egalitarianism. And I place great emphasis on festivals, especially the City Dionysia devoted to Dionysus. Here mimesis and narrative are central, not theory, but I see the great dramatists, all involved in religious performance, as narrative precursors of the axial breakthrough.

I insist that nothing is ever lost—that ritual and narrative are reconstructed in the emergence of the theoretic, but that they never go away. The focus on the cognitive, the theoretic, in my treatment of the Axial Age is not because that was all there was but because that was what was new. I did not set out to do a comprehensive history of religion in all its complexity—that would have required a much longer book. I had to focus on what was important in terms of my overall argument. Finally, Johnson argues that I stop too soon, that Hellenistic developments in Greece and postexilic developments in Israel are so important that they shouldn’t have been missed. I have already explained why the book ends where it does and that I hope to continue it in the future. Yet is Johnson right? Who are the greatest figures in Greek thought who influenced Christianity? Surely Plato and the Neo-Platonists, and much later Aristotle. The Epicureans were a largely isolated cult in ancient times and their influence on the Renaissance has been much exaggerated. And I end my Israel chapter with Deuteronomy, the core of the Torah, and not with the prophets

4) Here Johnson returns to a question with which I have already dealt. Play is dealt with throughout the book. But my book is not a history of religion but a history of religious evolution and I must focus on new capacities and the new possibilities, for good and for ill (evolution can end in successful survival, or, much more commonly, in extinction).

5) Johnson’s queries about how my book ends again miss the theme of ambiguity and human involvement with our own evolution that runs throughout the whole book. Evolution is not some absolutely deterministic external force that stands over against us. We participate in our own evolution as have all organisms since the beginning of life. How will we do so? Yes, extinction would be a natural evolutionary outcome, yet changing our ways to avoid extinction would also be a natural evolutionary outcome. My ecological reflections at the end of the book are integral to its whole argument.

Finally, let me turn to Jonathan Z. Smith. It was I who asked that he be included in the panel, and at the event I tried to explain why. For one thing he is a lifelong comparativist, as I have been. I think only such a comparativist knows the agony as well as the delight of doing comparative work, where every move is open to question, but where new insights emerge that give great pleasure.

But there was another reason. Smith had been a very strong critic of my 1964 article “Religious Evolution” and I thought it likely that he would have similar objections to my new book. Academic argument, even civil academic conflict, is essential to the life of the mind. I didn’t want to shy away from disagreement, but hoped the open discussion of disagreement would forward the general discussion. But I am quick to admit that I was happy that Smith took a much more charitable view of my book than he had of my long-ago article, though I am also glad he raised enough points of disagreement to allow a continuing discussion.

I am more than happy to accept Smith’s apology for the intemperate language in his criticism of my 1964 article “Religious Evolution.” I also understand the grounds for that criticism that he spelled out in his comment. I agree that the article was highly condensed and the explications he asked for would surely have helped to clarify what I wanted to say. But at this point that is all water under the bridge, shall we say. My new book goes much more deeply into the subject matter of the earlier part of the original article and the subject matter of the latter part of that article will be developed in dramatically new ways in my next book. I see no value in continuing to discuss an article that had considerable influence in its day, but is now outmoded by my own subsequent work.

Before dealing with the questions Smith raises about my new book, let me offer him thanks for mentioning so favorably an early article of mine, “Durkheim and History.” When putting together two collections of my writings, Beyond Belief and much more recently The Robert Bellah Reader, I seriously considered including that article. I decided against it on the grounds that it was too erudite and too specialized, but I now see that that was a mistake. That essay was based on a complete reading of Durkheim, including a thousand pages of French text not then translated in English. I suspect it was just the erudition of that article that Smith admired and that I should have thought of more highly.

So let me now take up the two questions Smith raises about the new book: the first has to do with the status of the axial age, a concern of all three commentators, and the second with the relation of play and work in thinking about ritual. Smith’s first objection to the axial age idea seems to have arisen from Jaspers’s failure to give an adequate causal explanation for its sudden emergence, dealing with it “more as a miracle than an event.” I have no causal explanation of the axial transition, although I do spell out some of the necessary but not sufficient conditions. The event itself has to do with new ideas that cannot be explained in terms of material or social conditions, though some such conditions may be necessary. Individual initiative in response to similar kinds of social crises in the four cases is surely part of the story, though how “causal” they are is problematic. In general I prefer to deal with the axial age in interpretive rather than explanatory terms, and, as I have said before, I am reassured by the fact that most of the great biological and cultural transitions in history remain unexplained to this day.

Just a word about Smith’s unhappiness that ancient Mesopotamia was not included as an axial case. He notes that I characterize Mesopotamia as archaic, but not axial, and he finds Mesopotamia to be more significant in its religious achievements than the other societies I characterize as archaic. I can see how the little information we have about Shang China, due to the nature of the texts that have survived, would limit comparison with the much richer record in Mesopotamia, but I fail to see why the very rich record of ancient Egypt would give it lesser status. In any case Mesopotamia fits my essential criterion of an archaic society, one in which cosmos, gods, and kings are fused. As Thorkild Jacobsen wrote of Mesopotamia, “the cosmos was seen as a state and the state as an essential element in the cosmos.” It is just that fusion that is broken through in every axial case.

With respect to work and play in relation to ritual I really think that there is less difference between us than Smith seems to see. Even though I quote Friedrich Schiller, I don’t think of play in Romantic terms, and especially not in terms of freedom, at least not exclusively. I see play as involving from its earliest animal appearance what Smith calls “constraint,” and indeed rules. Play requires the constraint of aggression and the maintenance of equality between the players and thus is rule-governed from the beginning. Within those rules and constraint it is true that play is free, is its own reward, but it would not be possible without the presence of constraint and rules. Rather baffling to me is Smith’s readiness to see the relation between ritual and games, but not ritual and play, when, as I think most people would agree, games are a kind of play: we “play a game.” Games indeed have rules, which is, I think, Smith’s point, but so, I have argued, does play. As to the opposition play/work, I think it is preferable to play/reality, for I think play is quite real to the players. But that ritual involves work is certain. In my Kalapalo example, months of work lead up to the great rituals and involve the accumulation of food for those who will attend, the preparation of ritual objects, and a great deal of rehearsal. A Navajo sing, lasting several nights, has been compared to a performance of Richard Wagner’s Ring; plenty of work there. Yet I think that there is a powerful element of play in ritual itself, which often involves dancing, celebration and feasting. As on most issues I am a both/and person rather than an either/or person, so I see ritual as both work and play, though perhaps its genesis was in play. Certainly my thirteen years of work on my latest book involved a great deal of work. Yet it often gave me great joy and I felt it was also a kind of play.

I cannot say how much Jonathan Z. Smith’s various appreciative remarks about my book mean to me. I admire him as one of the great students of comparative religion of our day. If he has found my book useful and even enjoyable, then I am immensely pleased.

The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless.
—Steven Weinberg

When an interviewer for the Atlantic Monthly blog asked me “What prompted you to write this book?” I apparently replied, “Deep desire to know everything: what the universe is and where we are in it.” I don’t deny that I said it—it’s just that I would have thought I would have given a more pedestrian reply, because I am a sociologist, with a Ph.D. in my discipline and some 40 years experience as a professor at Harvard and Berkeley. And I am quite aware that early in the last century Max Weber, in a famous 1918 talk called “Science as a Vocation,” warned that “science has entered a phase of specialization previously unknown and this will forever remain the case.” It does seem that he didn’t apply this dictum to himself, but he was talking about the future when huge projects like his own would no longer be possible. So what is this “deep desire to know everything” in a world of super-specialization? When I look at books like Robert Wright’s The Evolution of God, Nicholas Wade’s The Faith Instinct, Pascal Boyer’s Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought. and Scott Atran’s In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion, recent books that might seem parallel to my own new book, I can only say Weber was right—these books should not have been written, or, to be charitable, they may be good journalism but they are not serious contributions to understanding.

Weber was certainly right that we are in a world of specialization, and dangerously close to the point where specialized work is only intelligible to other specialists. A few years ago a study found that over half of sociology professors couldn’t understand many articles in the ASR or the AJS. Are we living in a world of ever increasing knowledge and ever declining meaning? In the end all that specialized knowledge has to be put together again if it is to be of use. Yet, as I have suggested many of the books that purport to give the big picture are shockingly shallow, based on tertiary sources that only repeat tired clichés or on novel claims that have not been adequately evaluated. We have an enormous “external memory,” as Merlin Donald calls it. It is potentially part of our very selves if we know how to access it. But therein lies our problem.

I’m sure there will be some who will gladly throw my book on the same heap as those I have criticized, but I will try to show a third way, a way that could possibly overcome the split between knowledge and meaning. This way would be to take Weber seriously about specialization but to follow him in not giving up the search for the big picture. What that means is to try to learn a lot about quite a few things. We have more information available about biological and cultural evolution than anyone has ever had before. We have resources to access that knowledge, but it cannot be done quickly or on the cheap. The resources we now have, and I very much mean the web but also e-mail, and books, ever new books, allow us to become quasi-specialists in at least several fields.

It is now possible not only to find out a lot about many areas, but to find out if the real specialists  think you are crazy or not. Some of these are people in the academic world one happens to know—for example the greatest specialist on Shang China in the world, David Keightley, Professor of Chinese history at Berkeley and an old friend, went over my section on Shang China with a fine-toothed comb and saved me from serious mistakes. I had read Terrence Deacon’s The Symbolic Species when it first came out in 1997 and had been very impressed by it, but when I realized over 10 years later that he actually teaches at Berkeley I went to hear him lecture and got acquainted. He and his group were especially helpful in reading my chapter on religion and evolution, giving me some advice, but telling me I was on the right track.

But when it is a field where you know no congenial specialist, you can make friends on the web. Since I wanted to situate religious evolution in the deep biological past I had to learn a lot of biology—rather late in life to say the least. Stephen Jay Gould’s enormous The Structure of Evolutionary Theory of 2002 was a marvelous introduction to many things for me, but Gould was already dead by the time I got to his book. It turned out that animal play was going to be quite important in my argument and the greatest specialist on that subject, Gordon Burghardt, whose splendid book The Genesis of Animal Play would be invaluable to me, is alive and well at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. I have never met him in person but to this day we have a continuing e-mail friendship and, as I note in Chapter 2, Religion and Evolution, he made many suggestions to me about what I wanted to say about play. Equally important for my whole argument is the evolutionary psychologist Merlin Donald, whom I have met but who has been especially helpful with e-mail comments. For early Greece Ian Morris, the historian and archaeologist of ancient Greece, but also the author of the stunning and breathtakingly ambitious new book, Why the West Rules—For Now, gave me several pages of single-spaced comments on my chapter on ancient Greece, and since he is at Stanford we did meet for coffee once when he was in Berkeley. Michael Witzel, a Sanskritist at Harvard and a great historian of early India was equally helpful with many pages of comments on my ancient India chapter, where of all the four axial cases I had most to learn, but we have never met in person.

Of course there are people who will turn you down—I have had my share. But what is more surprising is how many busy, productive scholars will help, especially if your questions indicate that you have already prepared yourself in the field. Becoming a quasi-specialist in several fields takes time, but becoming a super-specialist in one field also takes a lot of time. And what are all those juicy monographs waiting for if no one is going to take them seriously enough to show their theoretical and comparative importance? I have 12 case studies in my book, several of the axial age chapters being long enough to be small books in themselves, but I have one case of tribal religion, the Kalapalo of the Amazon Basin, about which there exist exactly two books of only one anthropologist, Ellen Basso of the University of Arizona. I know as much as anyone knows about the Kalapalo, except for Ellen Basso and the members of the tribe itself. But even for my other two tribal cases, the Australian Aborigines (though I did focus on a Central Australian group, the Walbiri), and the Navajo, there are thousands of publications.

So from early on in my book I had to develop strategies that would give me more than superficial knowledge without taking over the rest of my life. Obviously you have to use the best of the most recent books, and if possible, as in the case of the Navajo, consult specialists (and I started out studying the Navajo for my undergraduate honors thesis, Apache Kinship Systems, over 60 years ago). Without any guidance the amount of material available on any one case is overwhelming. Even finding the best recent secondary works often requires help or maybe luck and you also need to look at the classic secondary works. And you can’t just rely on secondary work where good translations are available as they usually are for most cases (Shang China being a notable exception). There you have to find out which are the most reliable, also not an easy task. It is claimed that the Daodejing is the most translated book in the world, but 99% of those translations are worthless. You need to find the reliable ones. When working on ancient China I regularly used five translations of the Confucian Analects because they had different virtues. It also helps to know enough Chinese to check key terms in the translations against the Chinese original. I don’t mean to discourage scholars from pursuing similar studies; I’m just trying to describe what is involved in serious comparative work.

But of course, if you are a sociologist, you are doing more than describing fascinating cases, though you have to do a lot of that as Weber and Durkheim already showed us; you have to have a theory, maybe a multi-stranded theory, since so much is going on in each case and there is no simple one fits all formula. Before discussing my theoretical resources let me give you another example of the kind of work I did in my new book: one of the finest books ever written by an American sociologist is Randall Collins’s The Sociology of Philosophies, a book even longer than mine. And Collins is not just talking about Classical Greek and modern European philosophy—he includes Islamic, Indian, Chinese and even Japanese philosophy. I may think he is sometimes wrong but I never think he is stupid. How he read so much while carrying a full teaching load staggers me. I had to retire to write my book, even though retirement is not so retired as you might think. And Collins’ approach is theoretical all the way through. He uses his micro theory of interaction ritual chains amazingly well to understand the macro development of philosophy in a variety of very different traditions. I might have added Collins’s interaction ritual chains to my theoretical took kit, but I have to admit that I didn’t read every last word of this great book until after I had finished my own.

So let me just list some of my theoretical frameworks and address them as thoroughly as I can here.

I start with Clifford Geertz’s definition of religion in his “Religion as a Cultural System,” which I should give in my abbreviated version to clarify what I mean and don’t mean by religion: “Religion is a system of symbols which, when enacted by human beings, establishes powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations that make sense in terms of an idea of a general order of existence.”  I should point out that neither Cliff nor I use the terms gods or God. What Geertz meant by a cultural system is very dependent on his reading of Alfred Schutz, particularly his paper on multiple realities or multiple worlds, terms which Schutz took from William James. Besides what Schutz called the paramount reality, the world of daily life, what Weber called “the everyday,” Schutz distinguished the world of science, the world of religion, and the world of art.

After describing what kind of multiple reality religion is, I wanted to look at the major forms of religious representation, the ways in which people engage in religious action and religious thought. Here I turned to the field of child development, not to look at the ways in which children become religious, though some have worked on that, but to look at the way infants and then children acquire the various capacities to relate to the world. Here was another big field to master, but one in which I have long been interested—especially the work of Jerome Bruner, one of my teachers in graduate school, who is the most important cultural psychologist still living and whose categories for the cognitive development of the child turned out to be remarkably relevant for my purposes. Bruner, himself adapting ideas from Piaget, sees the child as moving from enactive to symbolic to conceptual representations. I prefaced these with the idea of unitive events rooted in the original unity of mother and child but emerging later as religious experiences, usefully described by Alison Gopnik of UC Berkeley’s psychology department in her recent book The Philosophical Baby. So Piaget, Bruner, and Gopnik were my anchors but I looked at a lot of other things as well, particularly the work that links cognitive development in human children with comparable development in the great apes and other mammals.

The major stages of ontogeny turn out to parallel the major stages of phylogeny as described by Merlin Donald in Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition. Donald prefaces his three stages by referring to episodic culture which we share with other higher mammals and that I see as analogous to unitive events in ontogeny.

I should note that in both Bruner and Donald stages are never left behind, but are reconfigured in new contexts when subsequent stages emerge, leading to my general rule that “nothing is ever lost,” by which I don’t mean cultural content which is all too easily lost (most of the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, for example) but the cultural capacities themselves, which never lose their essential and indispensible nature. Donald’s three stages are mimetic, mythic, and theoretic, paralleling Bruner’s enactive, symbolic, and conceptual.

I want to describe what Merlin Donald means by mimetic culture because it makes intelligible what happened during a long period of human evolution, most likely the period between the appearance of Homo erectus, 1.8 million years ago, and the emergence of our own species, Homo sapiens, during the last two or three hundred thousand years. Mimetic culture involves a kind of bodily communication more elaborate than anything comparable among the other great apes, lacking language but probably involving spoken or sung communication, what some evolutionary musicologists call musilanguage. Mimetic communication almost certainly led to ritual, though as yet without myth, which requires language capacities that were lacking.

In modeling the society itself as well as its constituent roles, mimetic culture provided the necessary resources for moving beyond the rather anarchic chimpanzee band to a larger group capable of controlling in-group aggression such that pair bonding and same-sex solidarity in various contexts could result. In-group solidarity did not mean these mimetic-culture based societies were peaceful. There is every reason to believe that they were not, that there was endemic conflict between groups and probably in-group aggression was only relatively successfully controlled.

The limitations of mimetic culture are evident. Donald writes:

Mimesis is thus a much more limited form of representation than symbolic language; it is slow moving, ambiguous, and very restricted in its subject matter. Episodic event registration continues to serve as the raw material of higher cognition in mimetic culture, but rather than serving as the peak of the cognitive hierarchy, it performs a subsidiary role. The highest level of processing in the mimetically skilled brain is no longer the analysis and breakdown of perceptual events; it is the modeling of these events in self-initiated motor acts. The consequence, on a larger scale, was a culture that could model its episodic predecessors.

It is well to remember that we humans are never very far from basic mammalian episodic consciousness, the awareness of the event we are in. Mimetic culture is an event about an event. Narrative, which is at the heart of linguistic culture is basically an account of a string of events, organized hierarchically into larger event units. But the moment when our predecessors first stepped outside episodic consciousness, looked at it and what was before, around, and would be after it, was a historic moment of the highest possible importance. Other higher mammals, although they are social, are more tightly locked each in their own consciousness. They are, as Donald says, almost solipsists. But humans, once mimetic culture had evolved, could participate in—could share—the contents of other minds. We could learn, be taught, and did not have to discover almost everything for ourselves. Mimetic culture was limited and conservative; it lacked the potential for explosive growth that language would make possible. But it was the indispensable step without which language would never have evolved.

Further, mimesis is, though in many respects less efficient than language, indispensable in its own sphere. As Donald writes, mimesis “serves different functions and is still far more efficient than language in diffusing certain kinds of knowledge; for instance, it is still supreme in the realm of modeling social roles, communicating emotions, and transmitting rudimentary skills.”  Maybe not just rudimentary skills, for mimesis is basic for the teaching of quite complex skills in such fields as athletics, dance, and possibly other arts. Finally mimesis remains indispensable in “the collective modeling and, hence, the structuring” of human society itself. That is what ritual does, and if Randall Collins is right, it is micro-ritual moments that make our lives bearable whenever we interact with others.

So far I have been talking mainly about where religion came from so I must say a little about where it was going. Where it was going was toward language, what Donald calls mythic culture, and beyond that theory, though it would take a long time to get there. But remember we are still in the world of egalitarian foragers. Most of my book deals with hierarchical class societies, yet they all derive from egalitarian forager societies. That’s where it all begins and that is where our most basic capacities were formed.

We are so fascinated with ourselves as language users that we think discovering the origin of language is the key to understanding human evolution. It is one of the great virtues of Merlin Donald’s work that he takes culture—the ability to escape our solipsism and connect with a larger shared consciousness—as the key to what makes us unique. It is in this context that his idea that language “piggybacks” on culture makes sense. Language acquisition in the individual is social: even if there were such a thing as a language module, which neither Donald nor I for a minute believe, it could only become operative in a socially provided linguistic context. Isolated children do not learn spontaneously to speak. Jerome Bruner, as Donald reminds us, has shown convincingly that language learning requires an external support system, a linguistic milieu, to be effective. The question is, what was the “external support system” that made language possible in the first place? My answer would be ritual, which provides the security, intensity, and redundancy without which language would not emerge. Donald writes:

Linguistic universals spring from the context in which real-world languages are learned and, more important, in which they evolved. Like any other set of conventions, linguistic conventions are shaped by the situations in which they originated. They have mimetic origins. Thus, once we change our paradigm, the features of universal grammar emerge smoothly from a close analysis of gesture, mime, and imitative behavior. The “language instinct” exists, but it is a domain-general instinct for mimesis and collectivity, impelled by a deep drive for conceptual clarification.

But why this drive toward conceptual clarification? Donald suggests that there was a need for a more coherent representation of the world than was possible through mimesis. “Therefore,” he writes, “the possibility must be entertained that the primary human adaptation was not language qua language but rather integrative, initially mythical, thought. Modern humans developed language in response to pressure to improve their conceptual apparatus, not vice versa.”  Myth is a profoundly ambiguous word, so it would be well to be clear what Donald means by it:

[M]ythical thought, in our terms, might be regarded as a unified, collectively held system of explanatory and regulatory metaphors. The mind has expanded its reach beyond the episodic perception of events, beyond the mimetic reconstruction of episodes, to a comprehensive modeling of the entire human universe. Causal explanation, prediction, control—myth constitutes an attempt at all three, and every aspect of life is permeated by myth.

It is because of, in a sense, the primacy of myth over language that Donald calls the stage after mimetic culture, mythic culture.

Donald, in emphasizing the cognitive role of myth, approaches the view of Claude Levi-Strauss, the anthropologist who, more than any other, has emphasized the intellectual function of myth. Levi-Strauss, nonetheless, does not think of myth as a form of science, or a primitive precursor of it, but as having a different cognitive function:

To say that a way of thinking [myth] is disinterested and that it is an intellectual way of thinking does not mean at all that it is equal to scientific thinking. . . It remains different because its aim is to reach by the shortest possible means a general understanding of the universe—and not only a general but a total understanding. That is, it is a way of thinking which must imply that if you don’t understand everything, you can’t explain anything.

That is a view of myth that would indeed see it as “impelled by a deep drive for conceptual clarification.”  So Aristotle was not wrong when he wrote the first sentence of his Metaphysics: “All humans by nature desire to know.”  And what did Aristotle want to know? Everything. But for him it wasn’t myth but theory that would get us there, and we can see how well we are doing with that right now by looking at the institution in which most readers of this blog are presently situated:  the university.

There is a great deal of talk about what Obama stands for and many commentators claim it is hard to know.  He is placed along a continuum in which the words “center-left” and “center-right” often appear.  In fact in America we have never had a very clear left-right split; the very idea of one is rooted in European traditions we have not shared.  For all the talk about culture wars, what in America unites left and right, liberals and conservatives, is a fundamental individualism that is perhaps the strongest, though not the only, strand in our tradition.  It is rooted in the earliest and most pervasive religious culture in America, Protestantism, which has deeply influenced every other religious tradition that has entered our common life.  It does not divide Evangelicals from liberal Protestants—it is something they share.  We may argue about the value of the market or the state but the purpose of both to most Americans is to allow the maximum of individual freedom with the least encumbrance.

Some reviewers of Habits of the Heart believed the book affirmed a continuous decline of community and an increase of individualism throughout American history, whereas in fact the authors of Habits believed that we have had  cycles of individualism alternating with periods when social solidarity was emphasized.  Some historians even accused us of offering only another version of the old nostalgic “loss of community” narrative, applied to virtually every period in American history.  In our current situation, as Obama seems to be emphasizing that we are all in this together, the cyclical theory is resurfacing, especially in Michael Lind’s argument that there have been four republics in America—corresponding to the presidencies of Washington, Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, and now Obama—when a period of radical individualism has been reversed and a new emphasis on the common good has followed.  Neither in Habits nor elsewhere have I ever argued for the long-term decline of community in our history, since I see individualism as powerful from the very beginning and social solidarity as always weak and vulnerable in American history, though stronger at some times than in others.  Our fundamental individualism was vividly represented by the seventeenth-century New England Puritans.  When the Church was no longer seen as the mediator of salvation but the exclusive club of the elect, whose members must experience conversion all by themselves before being admitted, we had a new emphasis on the solitary individual.  When the Word eclipses the Sacrament, then it is society that suffers.  Such an emphasis released enormous power, economically, culturally, and politically, but the price was high.

Efforts to restore a viable balance by reappropriating a sense of the common good and social solidarity have marked Western history for the last couple of centuries.  In Europe such efforts were spearheaded by Catholic social teaching and democratic socialism, whose political expression in Christian Democratic and Social Democratic parties created the decent societies that have marked the recent history of Britain and Western Europe.  When the present Pope in his last year as Cardinal Ratzinger met with Jürgen Habermas, he expressed his sympathy with the tradition of social democracy and said that it was similar to Catholic social teachings.  In its fullness that is surely the case, but when American Catholic ideologues reduce Catholic ethics to an exclusive concern with abortion and gay marriage they take the social out of Catholic social teachings and become spokesmen not for the authentic Catholic tradition but for a narrow quasi-Protestant sect.

For the reasons I have just suggested, radical individualism is what I call the default mode of American culture.  It is where we go when things are relatively stable and we face no enormous challenge, or are denying that we do.  It is the power of this core tradition that has given rise to American exceptionalism, what makes us so different from most other advanced nations in the world, none of which share this strand to the same extent.

American exceptionalism is often interpreted to mean how exceptionally good we are.  In some respects this is warranted:  I can think of no other society that has so successfully integrated immigrants.  Race has been harder to overcome, but Obama is surely right that this is the only country where he could have achieved what he has.  But it is important to remember also how exceptionally bad we are in comparison with other advanced nations.  It is our radical individualistic culture that allows us to tolerate a level of poverty higher than any other advanced nation, a degree of income polarization that would be unacceptable in most advanced nations, a health system that leaves tens of millions without insurance, that is the most expensive in the world but leaves the health of our citizens only slightly above that of many third world nations, an environmental policy that has not only failed to lead the world to greater sustainability but actually stood in the way of the things which almost all the other advanced nations have tried to do, and these are only the most obvious of the many ways we have differed for the worse from most of the advanced world.

But when we are faced with challenges that we cannot deny, we do have other resources we can draw on, resources that we described in Habits of the Heart as Biblical and Civic Republican.  Neither of these traditions is without an element of individualism (see the new Introduction to the 1996 paperback edition of Habits), but both of them have the capacity to talk about the common good in a way that the core tradition of radical individualism cannot do.  Ruth Braunstein in her recent post has emphasized the centrality of the idea of the common good in Obama’s thought, drawing as he does from both the Biblical and Civic Republican traditions.   He has found in the Black church tradition, and even in the theologically somewhat vacuous UCC tradition, an emphasis on social justice and the plight of the poor that is at the core of both the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament.  Although I have no evidence for it, I would be surprised if Obama has not also been influenced by Catholic social teaching with its focus on the common good, perhaps when he was a community organizer.

But our default individualist tradition finds the very idea of the common good incomprehensible.  This is well illustrated in an article by Simon Critchley in the November Harper’s entitled “The American Void,” where Critchley describes Obama’s talk of the common good as “an anti-political fantasy.”  Critchley seems to be unaware that the idea of the common good lies at the core of the Social Democratic and Christian Democratic traditions in Europe that have led to the creation of the most humanly viable societies, for all their imperfections, that this earth has yet seen.  He is also unaware of how profoundly political the idea of the common good is, how strongly it is resisted, and what power, in ideology, public opinion, and legislative votes, is required to implement it.

If you look at Obama’s specific policy concerns you will find the common good at the core of almost all of them.  Universal health care is an obvious example.  And why, except for our culture of radical individualism, don’t we already have it as every advanced society in the world has it?  Because in normal times common good arguments do not carry the day in America.  Obama’s jobs program, his environmental program, his foreign policy concerns are all examples of making the common good the focus of politics.  What all this leads to in my opinion is that Obama is not concerned with center-left or center-right but with making America into a country with a concern for all its citizens and not just the privileged few, a country like other advanced countries and less like a third world country.

There is another element in Obama’s thinking that needs comment:  his concern for America and its historical promise.  It has been hard for his opponents to call Obama unpatriotic when he speaks so glowingly of our nation and its heritage.  It is the eloquence with which he did that in his keynote address in 2004 that first told me that a remarkable new presence had arrived on the American scene.  But what Obama has stressed is the promise of America, one that is still unfulfilled.  It is our task as he has so often said to help create a more perfect union because this one is so imperfect.  Obama has rejected the idea that supporting the Iraq War is a measure of patriotism.  He has said, in effect, that the true patriot will oppose such a war.

Already in 2004 this reminded me of what I wrote in my most frequently reprinted article, “Civil Religion in America,” which was a call to see that the best of our tradition required opposition to the Vietnam War, not support of it.  Too many have read that article as describing American civil religion as “integrating,” or “Durkheimian,” in a way that doesn’t appreciate the radicalism of Durkheim.  Some friends who do understand what I had written in 1966 told me they thought Obama had read it.  I have no reason to think he has.  He doesn’t need me to see that the promise is the core we must celebrate, not the often desperately disappointing reality, which he notes when he promises to close Guantanamo and renounce torture as American policy.  That one can see America as a beacon of hope, even, in Lincoln’s words, as “the last best hope of earth,” while also recognizing that America has committed the gravest of crimes from the colonial period to the present, seems to escape critics from the left and the right.  Obama would never speak like the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, but he knows, as any serious American knows, that Jeremiah Wright was telling the truth, even if not the whole truth, and that denial of the terrible side of our history is no more healthy for us than it would be for Germany or Japan.

Late in the campaign, McCain and Palin began calling Obama a socialist, because he believes in a progressive income tax.  There is a deep irony here.  Every normal modern nation has been influenced by democratic socialism.  If that tradition has been weak in America, it, or something close to it (the New Deal and Social Security, which, like the progressive income tax, was also denounced as socialist), has never been entirely absent.  Universal health care would put it on the agenda again, leading possibly to reform in our deeply unjust educational system and other areas as well.  In the context of comparative modernity, democratic socialist equals normal.  For the first time in a long time the possibility that we too could become normal, that we could better realize our good exceptionalism and avoid more of our bad exceptionalism, seems to have arrived.  It will take a very grown up leader and massive public participation to make that happen.  But as Obama has said so often, “This is our moment, this is our time.”  I am glad to have lived long enough to see even such a possibility in this great but benighted nation.

Let me take a passage in Habermas’s early essay, “Toward a Reconstruction of Historical Materialism,” as a point of departure. Habermas, while accepting the validity of neoevolutionist approaches in their own terms, argues that in studying social evolution we will inevitably be governed not only by cognitive standards, but by normative ones, though I am sure he would not want to confound the two levels. Even if we can speak of societies with normatively lower and higher levels of social learning capacity, we can never assume that there is anything inevitable about attaining the higher levels. If we are going to talk about levels at all, as I am prepared to do, we must expect to find regress as well as progress and face the possibility that the human project may end in complete failure. In speaking of the transition from tribal societies organized by kinship to the emergence of the early state, Habermas writes:

Social integration accomplished via kinship relations … belongs, from a developmental-logical point of view, to a lower stage than social integration accomplished via relations of domination. … Despite this progress, the exploitation and oppression necessarily practiced in political class societies has to be considered retrogressive in comparison with the less significant social inequalities permitted by the kinship system. Because of this, class societies are structurally unable to satisfy the need for legitimation that they themselves generate.

It is true that the early state and its accompanying class system emerge in what I have called archaic societies well before the axial age and generate a degree of popular unhappiness that can be discerned in the texts we have from such societies, but the legitimation crisis of which Habermas speaks arises with particular acuteness in the axial age, when mechanisms of social domination increase significantly relative to archaic societies and when coherent protest for the first time becomes possible.

In answer to the question of where this criticism originated there has been a tendency to speak of “intellectuals,” though what that term means in the first millennium BCE is not obvious. Scribal and priestly classes come to mind, but we can assume that most of them were too tied in to the existing power systems to be very critical. It is not easy to imagine the social space for criticism in such societies. It is here that we have to consider the role of the renouncer, to take a term most often used for ancient India.

There were renouncers already in late Vedic India, particularly within the Brahmin class. What the renouncer renounces is the role of the householder and all of the social and political entanglements that go with it. Buddhism provides a radical form of the renouncer, whose initial act is to “leave home” and to be permanently homeless. If the renouncer is “nowhere” he, and sometimes she, can look at established society from the outside, so to speak. It is not hard to see the Hebrew prophets as, in a sense, renouncers, though I have also called them denouncers. They too stood outside the centers of power, attempting to follow the commandments of God, whatever the consequences. Even in opposition, they were more oriented to power than were Buddhist monastics, to be sure, but the Buddhist monks also had a radical critique of worldly power. It is easy to see the early Daoists as renouncers, and they too have a critique of power, though perhaps more satirical than ethical. But there is a sense in which the Confucians were renouncers, criticizing power from the outside—especially the greatest ones who never held office or held only lowly ones briefly, who were in principle opposed to serving an unethical lord. And finally I will argue that Socrates and Plato were, in different ways, also renouncers, who were in, but not of, the city and also criticized it from the outside.

For all the differences among what can, in most cases, only loosely be called renouncers in the several axial cultures, the one thing they shared was that they were teachers, and founders of schools or orders, thus institutionalizing a tradition of criticism. Ultimately their power was exercised through the extent to which they influenced or even controlled elite education, as, to some degree paradoxically, many of them ultimately did. And inevitably their survival depended on what they charged for their services or were freely given. But then how did renouncers garner the support that allowed them to survive in their outsider position? It seems apparent that some degree of unease about the state of the world must have been relatively widespread, even among the elite, to provide the support without which renouncers would simply have faded away into the wilderness.

If Habermas is right about the legitimation crisis of the axial age brought on by the dissonance between the developmental-logical advance and the moral-practical regression—as I think he is—I would like to illustrate the response to this legitimation crisis by referring to the utopian projections of a good society that the various kinds of renouncers offered as criticism of the existing order.

In ancient Israel the prophets sharply criticized the behavior of foreign states, but also conditions within the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. According to Amos, the rich and the rulers “trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth, and turn aside the way of the afflicted.” In contrast the prophets look forward to the Day of the Lord when judgment will come to the earth and justice will “roll down like the waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” The prophets admonish rulers and people alike to change their ways but look forward to a divine intervention that will finally put things right.

In ancient China, Mencius, for example, along with many Confucians before and after him, bemoaned the sad state of society, the corruption of the rulers and the oppression of the peasantry, and offered an alternative form of government: rule by moral example, by conformity with the li, the normative order, and not by punishment. The Confucian hope for an ethical ruler who would follow Confucian injunctions did not involve any idea of divine intervention, except a vague notion that Heaven would eventually punish behavior that was too outrageous, but it was in its own way as utopian as was the prophetic hope of ancient Israel.

Plato, in the Gorgias and in the first book of the Republic, is a critic of a politics where the strong could inflict harm on the weak with impunity: for him despotism was always the worst form of government. In the Republic he depicted a good society in contrast to the one he criticized, but which he knew was a “city in words,” or a “city in heaven,” and not one likely to be realized on this earth.

The early Buddhist canon describes an ideal society so different from existing reality as to be perhaps the most radical utopia of all, the most drastic criticism of society as it is.

In each axial case, what I am calling social criticism is combined with religious criticism and the very form and content of the axial symbolization take shape in the process of criticism. The Greek case is exemplary because our very term “theory”—which I, following Merlin Donald, take as diagnostic of the axial transition—first appeared there. It is not surprising that it was Plato who took the traditional term for ritual theoria and transmuted it into philosophical theoria, which is not the same thing as what we mean by theory, but is its lineal predecessor.

Andrea Nightingale in her book, Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy: Theoria in its Cultural Context, describes theoria before Plato as “a venerable cultural practice characterized by a journey abroad for the sake of witnessing an event or spectacle.” It took several forms, but the one which Plato took as the analogy for philosophical theoria was the civic form where the theoros (viewer, spectator) was sent as an official representative of his city to view a religious festival in another city and then return to give a full report to his fellow citizens. Nightingale notes that the traditional theoros was a lover of spectacles, particularly of religious rituals and festivals, while the philosophical theoros “loves the spectacle of truth.” Plato put great emphasis on vision, on seeing the truth more than hearing it; it is also a special kind of seeing, seeing with “the eye of the soul.” It is this kind of seeing that requires a protracted philosophical education to prepare for, but it ends with the “theoria [the 'seeing'] of all time and being.”

I cannot here give an account of the beauty and complexity of the Parable of the Cave in the Republic, which is the locus classicus for the Platonic treatment of theory, but can allude only briefly to those aspects of it that relate to my argument. The parable begins with a person who is “at home” in his own city. Home, however turns out to be a dark cave that is in fact a prison where one is in bonds and is forced to look at shadows on the wall cast by people (ideologists?) behind one’s back projecting images by holding various objects in front of fires. Still, those shadowy images are what one is used to, so that in a situation where one is freed from one’s bonds and, in Plato’s words, “compelled to suddenly stand up and to turn [one's] head and to walk and turn upward toward the light,” (515c) one will be confused, in a state of aporia, that is, profound uncertainty. One will have entered, in Nightingale’s words, “a sort of existential and epistemic no-man’s-land,” being able no longer to recognize the old familiar shadows nor yet to see anything in the blinding light above, so that one would be tempted to flee from the whole journey and return to the old familiar prison.

Yet the would-be philosopher does not flee back, but goes on to actually view and be transformed by the form of the good. In a good city when he returns he will be given civic office and expected to serve, even though he would rather spend his time in contemplation, yet even in office he is still a kind of foreigner in his own city. But if he returns to a bad city, his report of what he has seen will be mocked as foolish and nonsensical: he will be abused, he may even be killed. Nightingale sums up: “When he returns to the human world, then, he is atopos, not fully at home: he has become a stranger to his own kind.”

In the good city the philosophic rulers, or, as they are often called, the “guardians,” are an ascetic lot, and have been compared to a monastic order. Not only are they committed to a life of poverty (they live on what the city gives them, not on anything of their own, and can be considered in a way to be beggars), but their sexual life is so regulated that, though they have children, they have no family life, no personal household: the children are raised in common. They embody the virtue of wisdom, but they preside over a city that is characterized by the virtues of justice and moderation, and, not insignificantly, where there are no slaves.

In the Buddhist case, religious reform and political criticism also went hand in hand. The Buddhist Myth of the Cave is in an important sense the whole elaborate story of the Buddha’s life as the tradition handed it down. Just as the philosopher had to leave his city, the Buddha had to leave his kingdom. Seeing sickness, old age, and death, the Buddha wanted to leave that cave, and spent years of suffering and deprivation trying to do so. In the end, however, he found a middle way between the sensual indulgence of the world and the harsh austerities of the renouncers who preceded him, a way in which serene meditation could lead him to the vision of the truth and the release which he sought. And, giving up the temptation to withdraw completely from a world filled with lust and hate, the Buddha undertook, out of compassion for all sentient beings, forty-five years of itinerant preaching to make sure that the truth he had seen would not be lost to the world.

The great utopias served for the renouncers as stark contrasts to the actual world, and their vision of that other world could be called “theory” in Plato’s sense. But the very distance they felt from the world to which they returned made possible another kind of “theory,” another kind of seeing—that is, a distant, critical view of the actual world in which they lived. The renouncer sees the world with new eyes: as Plato says of the ones who have returned to the cave, they see the shadows for what they are, not naively as do those who have never left. One could say that the ideological illusion is gone.

Once disengaged vision becomes possible then theory can take another turn: it can abandon any moral stance at all and look simply at what will be useful, what can make the powerful and exploitative even more so. One thinks of the Legalists in China, and of Kautilya’s Arthashastra in India. Although the Hebrew prophets saw and condemned the self-serving manipulations of the rich and powerful, we can find in the Bible no example of someone arguing for such behavior in principle. Except possibly some of the Sophists, whose surviving writings are fragmentary, we have nothing quite like Han Fei or Kautilya in Greece. Or do we?

Aristotle was not an amoralist; he was one of the greatest moral theorists who ever lived. Yet in Aristotle we have the beginning of the split between knowledge and ethics that will have enormous consequences in later history. He severs the link between wisdom (sophia) and moral judgment (phronesis). Though he sees contemplation (theoria) as the best life for human beings, it is, in his words, useless. It is a good internal to itself, but it has no consequences for the world. Aristotle’s Politics, furthermore, is no utopia, but an empirical and analytical description of actual Greek society, containing ethical judgments between better and worse to be sure, but distant, in a sense disengaged. He was the founder of sociology, which Durkheim recognized when he assigned the Politics as the basic textbook for his students when he first began to teach at the University of Bordeaux. Aristotle on the whole used the word theoria in Plato’s sense, but he also used it from time to time for “investigation,” or “inquiry,” that is for the study of all things in the world, natural and cultural, to see how they worked and what they are for.

The axial age gave us “theory” in two senses, and neither of them has been unproblematic ever since. The great utopian visions have motivated some of the noblest achievements of mankind; they have also motivated some of the worst actions of human beings. Theory in the sense of disengaged knowing, inquiry for the sake of understanding, with or without moral evaluation, has brought its own kind of astounding achievements but also given humans the power to destroy their environment and themselves. Both kinds of theoria have criticized but also justified the class society that first came into conscious view in the axial age. They have provided the intellectual tools for efforts to reform and efforts to repress. It is a great heritage. I doubt that any of us would rather live in a tribal society than in one whose beginnings lie in the axial age; I know I would not. Yet it is a heritage of explosive potentialities for good and for evil. It has given us the great tool of criticism. How will we use it?

[This post is a condensed version of a keynote speech delivered at a conference on "The Axial Age and its Consequences for Subsequent History and the Present." Held last month at the the Max Weber Center for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies (in Erfurt, Germany), the conference was sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation in cooperation with Robert Bellah and Hans Joas.---ed.]

Habermas and I are in agreement with respect to the necessary neutrality of the modern democratic state. Indeed neutrality is the very meaning of secularism in a democratic state, for the neutral state is prohibited from enforcing any secular orthodoxy just as much as any religious orthodoxy. By the same token, the state must guarantee the access to participation in the public sphere of individuals and groups whatever their secular or religious beliefs. Such participation is conditioned, however, on one fundamental norm, namely the renunciation of violence. In the United States today we have sporadic incidents of eco-terrorism, usually acts of violence against property, but always running the risk of violence against persons. Though some extremists defend these acts as a form of speech, they are just as unacceptable as religious terrorism, such as attacks on abortion clinics, and just as much a violation of the rule of law that makes a democratic society possible. Beyond the renunciation of acts that are in violation of law, however, the cultivation of everyday practices, what Tocqueville called habits of the heart, that express civility and mutual respect between citizens even when their views are widely divergent, is probably also a necessity for a viable democratic society. Here we are dealing not with legal enforcement, but social consensus. The speech of the intolerant and the disrespectful must be tolerated legally—in the United States in accordance with the First Amendment—though discouraged in practice by modeling tolerance and respect even in situations where one’s opponents do not reciprocate. Martin Luther King, Jr., was a great teacher in recent American history, not only about the substance of civil rights, but about the importance of non-violent persuasion in furthering them in the public sphere.

Habermas has argued convincingly that a state guaranteeing the freedom of the individual is not dependent on a pre-existing “unifying tie” deriving from cultural resources from an authoritarian past, but rather that the “unifying tie” can emerge from the actual practice of democratic freedom and participation in public debate. Such an idea is not only of theoretical importance, but a practical necessity in a world where many societies emerging from authoritarianism are trying to institute democratic regimes today. Still, such transitions are never easy—they are not completed simply by carrying out a free election. They require an extended period of time during which democratic habits and customs can become second nature, and during which a variety of setbacks must be expected. Habermas has spent his whole adult life in attempting to further the internalization of democratic norms in post-war German society, something that is always in process, even in an old democratic society such as the United States.

This leads me to my next major point. The neutrality of a democratic state is always conditioned by its past, and, in particular, by its religious past. To put it another way, neutrality may not always be what it seems, for the very understanding of neutrality will depend on cultural preconceptions, not entirely conscious, that derive from a long history. To take the American case, freedom of speech and religious freedom were not simply the projects of Eighteenth Century leaders deeply influenced by Enlightenment philosophy, as the American founders certainly were, but by a public made up in significant part of dissenting Protestants, Quakers, but above all Baptists, who had suffered from religious establishments and were committed to ending them. Thus the disestablishment of religion in the early American republic was not the product of intense anti-clericalism (even though some of the founders were privately anti-clerical), but of an alliance of secular and religious publics with a common end in view. As a result, no significant American religious group rejected the republic on religious grounds.

Even though both secularists and religious dissenters wanted a neutral state when it came to religion, the very particularity of American history meant that the neutrality of the state and of the civil society was strongly influenced by a Protestant, even more specifically, a dissenting Protestant, cultural atmosphere. For a very long time the “wall of separation” of which Jefferson spoke (this image had no legal standing) was much less high and much more porous than Jefferson had hoped. The majority Protestant population continued to believe that it lived in a Protestant country even though it accepted the separation of church and state. As a result, Catholics and Jews, who immigrated to America in the millions in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries, were not for a long time, perhaps not until after World War II, fully integrated into American life, even though their legal rights were, not always but usually, protected. Thus those who have imagined that the recent appearance of religion in American political life is something new, unheard of in the American past, simply do not know much about American history. When the Christian right first emerged as a political force in the 1980s, I got calls from reporters asking me if I wasn’t disturbed by the presence of religion in American politics. My response was, have you forgotten Martin Luther King? I could have mentioned many others in American history, but that usually made my point.

Another fact not always noticed by secular observers is how powerfully the Protestant presuppositions of American culture have influenced all other religious groups, such that Catholics and Jews have been, not entirely, but significantly, “Protestantized,” and I would venture to imagine that the same fate awaits American Muslims and Buddhists as well. If the United States, thankfully, does not seem to face the kind of inter-religious hostility that appears to be on the increase in Europe, it may not be because we are more tolerant, but because the dominant culture has succeeded in considerable degree in homogenizing religious differences.

It has been my concern for many years that a one-sided cultural tradition in the United States that emphasized individualism and negative liberty, that is the protection of the individual from state interference, has obscured another precondition for a successful democratic society—namely the solidarity, the concern for the common good, what can be called the positive freedom of all to participate in social, political and economic life—that is equally necessary for a successful democracy. Without solidarity and positive freedom, there is a danger of what Habermas has referred to as “the transformation of the citizens of affluent and peaceful democratic societies into solitary, self-interestedly acting monads who merely turn their subjective rights like weapons against one another.”

In Europe some critics see the depletion of the solidarity upon which a successful democracy depends as the result of secularization, that is, the erosion of religious traditions that promoted solidarity as a religious obligation. In the United States it would be hard to make such an argument. It would seem that there has been a deficit with respect to solidarity that has deep historic roots in both our secular and our religious traditions.

Our early history helps explain this element of American exceptionalism. Our geopolitical isolation, with no strong nation on either continental boundary, meant that for a long time we did not need a strong military establishment, something our founders greatly feared, nor even a strong state. In the early Nineteenth Century, Hegel famously said that the Americans had no state at all. Tocqueville, visiting us in the 1830s, noted the absence of bureaucrats, so ubiquitous in European societies. Until late in the Nineteenth Century it was still possible for individuals to head West to take up new farmsteads or start new small businesses, with little in the way of governmental regulation. Even in my own state of California, which achieved statehood in 1850, throughout the second half of the Nineteenth Century there was virtually no government, in the sense of executive agencies capable of carrying out policies, though, of course police and judicial functions existed. This meant that the state legislature time and again passed laws that were never put into effect because there was no agency to put them into effect. It was not until early in the 20th Century, under several Republican reform administrations, that the apparatus of a modern state was created in California.

The growth of a modern state in the United States has occurred in fits and starts, largely as a result of foreign wars or domestic crises, in the teeth of a deeply entrenched anti-state, or as Americans would say, anti-government ideology. Since in the modern world the social needs that can only be met by solidarity have long outstripped the capacity of private charity to meet them, public provision has grown everywhere, even in the United States, but to a markedly reduced degree in this country. For example we consent to a poverty level of near 20 percent that is two or three times higher than in any other advanced industrial nation. We are the only advanced democracy without a national health care system. And we have a degree of income polarization that is more characteristic of third-world nations than can be found in Europe or East Asia.

My point, however, is that, beside the exceptional nature of American history to which I have alluded, the weakness of public provision as an expression of social solidarity in the United States is not the result of a secularizing erosion of notions of the common good, but, in part, of a religious tradition that never emphasized, except in moments of emergency, the common good, but which, on the whole, reinforced an individualistic ideology. Dissenting Protestantism was always suspicious of the state and emphasized the self-sufficiency of the saved and the prime necessity of individual salvation. The Christian symbol of the Body of Christ, so central in churches with a strong liturgical tradition, such as Roman Catholicism, was often marginal in Protestant thought. To the degree to which all religious groups in the United States have become Protestantized, the religious resource for solidarity has been weakened.

American history is not simply a history of radical individualism. John Winthrop’s famous sermon on the Arbella just before the Massachusetts Bay Pilgrims disembarked, from which the often used phrase describing us as a “city on a hill” comes, is a powerful expression of a solidarity that is at once political and religious: “we must be knit together in this work as one man, we must entertain each other in brotherly affection, we must abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others’ necessities. . . we must delight in each other, make others’ conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community. . . as members of the same body.”

But in stark contrast we must consider the words of a recent interview recounted in Robert Wuthnow’s Loose Connections: A man in his late twenties who works as a financial analyst describes the individualism that “you’re just brought up to believe in” as follows: “The individual is the preeminent being in the universe. There’s always a distinction between me and you. Comity, sharing, cannot truly exist. What I have is mine, and it’s mine because I deserve it, and I have a right to it.” It would be hard to imagine anything more secular, more opposed to the teachings of Christianity, than this young man’s statement. But, as the Catholic theologian Francis Schüssler Fiorenza notes, there is indeed a resonance between this statement and common beliefs among conservative Christians today. Schüssler Fiorenza writes, “It is my guess that, despite a Christian critique of modern society as secular and irreligious, modern social values have surreptitiously become identified as Christian values. Has not a kind of capitalistic cult of individual self-reliance, a worship of individual achievement, and a trust in one’s own ability to save oneself crept into the belief system” of some Christians such that “this individualism, self-sufficiency, and localism become the idols to whom the Christians have begun to offer their sacrifices and burnt offerings?” While I think Schüssler Fiorenza’s observations are apt, I do not agree that he is describing an invasion of modern values into Christianity, but rather one kind of Christianity that has long propagated a highly individualistic ethic, one well described just a century ago in Max Weber’s most famous essay, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

But if our one-sided emphasis on individualism and our relative neglect of the common good have religious as well as secular roots, how can those of us who are unhappy with this one-sidedness respond? In discussions of religion in the public sphere it is often said that religious positions, insofar as they are based on revelation, belong outside the public sphere, whereas secular views that are open to rational argument belong inside the public sphere. I would like to raise a serious question about this kind of contrast between reason and revelation. I would like to argue that if we see revelation, as I think we must, as a kind of transforming encounter, then strong secular views are often also derived from a kind of revelation.

In a talk I attended by Habermas he referred to philosophical “classics,” works that remain contemporary regardless of when they were written, with one of his wonderful metaphors. He said, “The thoughts of a classic thinker are like the molten core beneath a volcano. . . ” whereas their lives are merely like the hardened lava on the outside of the volcano. In the first place I would argue that those who have encountered the “molten core” of the thoughts of a classic philosopher have often been transformed in a way similar to those who have received a religious revelation. But I must also challenge Habermas’s argument in the same talk that the lives of philosophers are much less important than their thoughts. That may often be true, but he unaccountably ignores the great exception. Although for centuries when scholars mentioned the philosopher, they meant Aristotle, and Alfred North Whitehead famously said that all of Western philosophy is but a series of footnotes to Plato, it is not Plato or Aristotle who has been the very embodiment of philosophy through most of Western history, but Socrates, who never wrote a word, but whose life, and above all, whose death have provided the great encounter that is at the very heart of the philosophical tradition.

The several Platonic dialogues that recount the trial and death of Socrates have been the New Testament of philosophy so to speak. It was the willingness of Socrates to die for his beliefs, and for the city of Athens of which he was proud to be a citizen, that helped to shape the very ideal of a life of inquiry. And Plato was telling his Greek audience, Don’t look at Achilles, the beautiful, athletic, murderous, narcissist, as the ideal of the good life, but at this old, ugly, stone-mason who devoted his life to trying to get his fellow citizens to face the truth about their lives, and was willing to die for his mission. He is the one who can show us how to live.

But if philosophy has the moral equivalent of revelation, religious revelation, I would argue, has always cried out for reason. Habermas himself has a remarkable commentary on the First of the Ten Commandments that God gave to Moses, “You shall have no gods but me.”

From a philosophical point of view, the first commandment expresses that ‘leap forward’ on the cognitive level which granted man freedom of reflection, the strength to detach himself from vacillating immediacy, to emancipate himself from his generational shackles and the whims of mythical powers.

What could be more quintessentially revelation than the Ten Commandments, yet Habermas finds the very germ of reason in the first of the ten. Further, Habermas has also found the germ of Western individuality in the form of the encounter between God and Moses: “You shall have no other gods. . .” The King James Version says, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me,” using the archaic English second person singular, the German du. Yes, through Moses, the commandments are addressed to the children of Israel, and ultimately to all human beings, yet they are addressed to each Israelite or each human being individually. Not, of course, that the individual is isolated, but rather taken up and included in a defining relationship with the Lord of the universe. The utterly social and the utterly individual come together indissolubly, in the words of the great commandments.

So, I would ask, where is the dogma that defies argument? The transforming encounter, whether secular or religious, has a validity all its own, one that is not rationally deduced, but simply is. A reader of an Ayn Rand novel who suddenly sees that the only thing in life worth doing is pursuing his or her own self-interest, is as immune to reason as the thunderstruck children of Israel at the moment of the reception of the Ten Commandments. But no sooner has the transforming encounter occurred than the argument begins. Even the grammar of the first commandment has led to a great deal of argument, so that its exact meaning is still in controversy. Nor can we with complete certainty interpret what it meant at the time the text was written down. And how it should be applied, then, now, or ever, is a source of never-ending controversy. The hermeneutic enterprise as described by Hans-Georg Gadamer, with its three moments of understanding, interpretation and application, requires rational argument at every stage.

The very idea, which some secular scholars affirm, that theology depends on revelation, but not on reason, is refuted by a visit to any theological library, where thousands of books can be found arguing rationally about almost every term in the Bible. No term has attracted more argument or more controversy than the absolutely central term, God, itself. And if the theologians aren’t agreed, neither is the general public. Nearly 90 percent of Americans answer yes to the question of whether they believe in God, but when asked to define God their answers are remarkably various. Another example: For Christians an absolutely central belief is that Jesus is the Son of God. I recite that every Sunday during the Nicene Creed, which is part of the liturgy of my church, and I believe it. But what exactly does it mean? How are the three members of the Trinity related? It would be hard to imagine how much ink has been spilled to explain it, and every new theology gives us a new interpretation of the Trinity, or, less often, rejects it for some reason or other.

Since the religious life is no more lacking in rational argument than any other sphere of human life, whenever religious views are expressed that bear on issues in the public sphere, it is legitimate to argue with them not only in terms of their implications for the common life, but also as to the adequacy of their expression of religious truth. If in my view a commitment to radical individualism not linked to an equally radical commitment to the common good undermines the very existence of a democratic society, then I can make that argument on purely secular grounds. But if that position is put forward on biblical grounds, I am equally entitled to argue that the Bible, taken as a whole, does not support such a view. In short, argument is argument, and once something is in the public sphere it can claim no privilege of revelation. No one, secular or religious, has to prove the validity of his or her transforming encounters. But as soon as one draws publicly relevant conclusions from those encounters, then one must defend them in public discourse.

Since both Habermas and I believe in a public sphere, underwritten by commitments to individual rights and the common good, where all forms of non-violent persuasion and rational argument are appropriate, particularly if they are undertaken with respect for the dignity even of those with whom one most disagrees, there is not much difference between us. Probably my remarks can best be seen as expressing a slightly different angle on a series of common concerns. In conclusion, I want to express my gratitude to Habermas for his life-long effort to keep public discussion vital, and to exclude no one on a priori religious or secular grounds.

Since Graham is a serious politician and not a charlatan, it is worth looking at his sentence closely and trying to determine his meaning. First of all, what does “people of faith” mean? Does it include all people of faith: Hindus, Buddhists, and Muslims as well? Does it even include all Christians? Thinking of the Sermon on the Mount with its injunction to turn the other cheek and not to resist evil, can we ask if any Christians would be concerned with “beating” radical Islam or anything else? “Beating radical Islam” sounds more American than it does Christian, though, remembering the Crusades, it does have a Christian lineage.

On purely pragmatic grounds, “beating radical Islam” along with the ubiquitous phrase “war on terrorism” are profoundly mistaken ways of thinking about the present global problem of terrorism. It is worth remembering that terrorism is a world phenomenon, not an exclusively Islamic one. Certainly we have our own homegrown terrorism, as in the case of Timothy McVeigh and the 1995 Oklahoma bombing or the religious attacks on abortion clinics and murder of abortion doctors. But terrorism, Christian, Muslim, or otherwise, is not something one can “beat.” The reason “the war on terrorism” is the wrong metaphor is that it is not a war–so it cannot be won. We could beat Saddam’s army in a couple of weeks. In five years we have suffered victories and setbacks against al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups in Iraq, but the terrorists are still there and are likely to be there, even with diminished capacity, for a long time. The situation in Afghanistan is not much better. We and our Afghan allies easily won the war against the Taliban government, but the Taliban terrorists are still busily at work all these years later.

There are two things to keep straight about terrorism that are obliterated by the war metaphor: 1) you can contain terrorism by police action, but you can’t defeat it by military action; 2) social change in the direction of better living conditions, greater public participation in political life, and a decrease in regional conflicts such as that between Israel and the Palestinians, will gradually weaken the support for terrorist organizations and marginalize terrorist ideology. Spending billions (or trillions) on state-of-the-art military technology will not “win the war on terrorism.” On the contrary, to the degree we are tempted to use these weapons, we will increase the support for terrorism.

But to return to Senator Graham’s statement: if people of (conservative Evangelical Christian) faith really want to “beat radical Islam,” then we must ask why. Apparently they are afraid that radical Islam will beat us or at least do us grave harm. It is surely the case, with the laxity that the Bush administration has shown about securing nuclear weapons and the weak security at our ports, that a terrorist group might set off a small atom bomb in an American city. This is truly a chilling possibility. Yet preventing it is above all a matter of good intelligence, excellent security work, and global efforts to control nuclear and other “weapons of mass destruction.” To focus on “beating radical Islam”—with its sporting as well as military tone—is simply unhelpful in allaying the genuine fears that many Americans feel after 9/11.

Even more unhelpful is the phrase “radical Islam” itself. Do we speak of “radical Christianity” because there are Christian terrorists? Do we call them “Christianists”? Islam, like all the great religions, has its extremists, a small minority of whom have resorted to terrorism. But however qualified by assertions that they “really respect Islam as a religion,” when preachers or politicians use Islam in any part of a term to define the enemy, they are engaging in religious stereotyping and bigotry. Nationalist Americans—and the most patriotic in the sense of traditionally nationalistic Americans are conservative Christians—need a genuine Other to help them define their in-group solidarity.

Many other nations have moved beyond that kind of nationalism but it is only one aspect of American exceptionalism that we, at least in large numbers, have not. The fall of Communism led to a deep sense of absence. Where could we turn to find the next Other who would unite our otherwise rather fractured polity? Even before 9/11 Islam seemed to be the leading candidate. After 9/11 the gloves were off. Bush more than once used the loaded term “crusade” for the war on terrorism. “Islamofascism” became a widely used derogatory term among right wing commentators. In spite of all declarations of support for “moderate” Muslims, the constant use of “Islam” in some combination of terms has led to the inevitable conclusion that Islam is our new Other. Once again, what is supposed to support our war on terrorism is self-destructive. To the degree that we identify Islam with the enemy, we support the beliefs of many Muslims–not all of them extremists and certainly not all of them terrorists–that we hate them and that we should be opposed.

My suggestion is that we drop the use of the word “Islam” in any phrase applying to our enemies. We can identify them with the specific groups they are, such as al-Qaeda, but we don’t need to identify them with the whole religion of Islam. In so doing, it is the responsibility of Christians and Jews to take the lead, not to participate in religious stereotyping. All three Abrahamic religions share some profound convictions about the essential dignity of human beings. It is these shared convictions that we must emphasize now, rather than pandering to a politics of fear that requires a massive and dangerous Other to be effective. Unfortunately, Ron Paul will not be the Republican nominee. All the others seem to rely on the politics of fear as their only hope of election. So far the Democratic candidates have not taken that line. Let’s hope they continue to reject it. And let’s hope that the leadership of all American religious communities commends them for their present course.

While I agree with Taylor that what we need at the moment is neither paleo- nor neo-Durkheimianism as he defines them, I would argue for a more substantive and less abstract alternative. For one thing, I think symbols drawn both from the religious and the ideological past can, if phrased properly, help us move from the past into the future. In my initial discussion of Taylor’s use of the idea of “post-Durkheimianism” I suggested that Durkheim himself, in his religion of the individual or religion of humanity, was already moving into a new phase that would transcend both the old established church ideology and modern nationalism. He did so not by rejecting, but by redefining inherited symbols. He spoke of the inherent rights of individuals, in principle immune to state interference, but also of communion and solidarity that would provide a social basis for individual rights. He was thus drawing from both Enlightenment and Christian symbolic vocabularies.

In my view, both Taylor and Habermas, however each uses the word “abstract,” are using quite concrete and historically grounded symbols for the kind of common consciousness they are advocating. Habermas speaks of “obligatory cosmopolitan solidarity,” and Taylor has long affirmed the international human rights regime. What I think is happening here is that both of these extraordinarily influential thinkers are implying that the common consciousness that must undergird any viable society can no longer be limited to the boundaries of that society. So if one is to describe an inclusive Canadian citizenship that will include all Canadians regardless of ethnicity, religion or ideology, it can only be a sense of Canada as embodying ideals that now transcend Canada or any particular nation and that are, in principle, global. Durkheim’s effort to think of France not as a particular nation but as the embodiment of universal values was phrased too narrowly given the limitations of his time, but he was on the right track. If we are to give up religious exclusivism and barbaric nationalism, then we must move to a next higher level of global solidarity and human rights. This level will not be “abstract” but can be phrased in quite powerful symbolic terms. It can legitimate any group, including any nation, that adheres to it, while it also affirms that none of these particular groups can claim absolute allegiance or solidarity, for the only allegiance and solidarity that have a claim to ultimacy today must be global. I am aware of how easy it is to claim universalism for some limited particular position, and particularly the danger of Western nations using universalism to legitimate imperial claims, so the global universalism of which I speak must involve the full participation of all the great world cultures and will have symbolic contributions from many of them. But though I think the great cultural transition we are presently experiencing will not be easy or free from conflict, I would still argue that what must replace paleo- and neo-Durkheimianism is a global Durkheimianism.

What Habermas is describing is a double disparity between economics and politics: economics is seen as the realm of the natural, not the social, whereas politics is the sphere of intentional social choice. But when nations are the sole locations of effective politics and the economy has become global, then the disparity in power between the global economy and even the strongest state means that it is the economy that will in the end determine outcomes. In this situation Habermas asks whether “we can have a politics that can catch up with global markets” in order to avert the “natural” disaster that an uninhibited market economy seems to entail. That idea is opposed by those who view the economy not as a human creation but as a force of nature, as something that can only be accommodated, never controlled, ideas that make global market culture into a god that can only be worshiped. Habermas sees this as an enormous challenge to citizens of all countries to form a global civil society: “Only the transformed consciousness of citizens, as it imposes itself in areas of domestic policy, can pressure global actors to change their own self-understanding sufficiently to begin to see themselves as members of an international community who are compelled to cooperate with one another, and hence to take one another’s interests into account.” What we need, he argues, is “an obligatory cosmopolitan solidarity.” He stresses the need for a “world domestic policy,” because we are now living in a world, not in nation states alone, and the world market requires such a policy.

The most fundamental question that Habermas is raising is whether a global civil society and some forms of global governance are possible, a civil society and governance that would not replace nation states but would place some limits on their autonomy, as the global economy already does. And here there is a question of what kind of people we are. Could we as Americans accept the notion of common global membership such that we would be willing to give up something of ours for the sake of Somalians or Vietnamese? It is at this point that I think we have to ask what are the cultural resources for thinking of global citizenship that would go along with global economics and moderate its excesses? Is abstract constitutional patriotism enough? It is here that we have to consider philosophical and religious resources for thinking about membership in global civil society, membership that would entail at least short-term sacrifice, though as we look at global warming and the growing numbers of failed states, the Tocquevillian idea of self-interest rightly understood is not to be ignored.

Since we actually have since the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its subsequent elaborations something that can be called a global ethic, sometimes referred to as a human rights regime, we can ask how much help we can derive from this consensus, one that is not simply an ideal but that has significant legal weight, though by far not enforceable everywhere, not even in the original home of legal human rights, the USA. And we can ask whether the questions raised by non-Western and non-Christian thinkers about the adequacy of an exclusive emphasis on human rights can be answered, as well as the question whether an exclusive focus on human rights may not be part of our problem, however much in the end it must surely be part of a solution.

To the extent that human rights as we understand them have significant Christian historical roots (something many supporters of human rights may not be aware of or care to be aware of), it is also worth remembering that Christianity is now a global phenomenon. Webb Keane in his powerful book Christian Moderns has pointed out that at the beginning of the twenty-first century one-third of the world is now Christian and that one-third of those Christians live in former colonies. He further points out that many of the leaders of non-Western countries (often formerly leaders of independence movements) were educated in missionary schools even though they were not converts. One could add that reform movements in Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam have been to more than a small degree a response to Christian, especially Protestant, examples. So if there is a relation between Christianity, modernity, and human rights, it has for some time been global and can no longer be dismissed as Western.

But we must remember that the market, the individual as autonomous agent who is free to choose, the consumer, are also global, and that there is a relation between the global market culture that Harvey Cox warned us was taking on religious functions and the very tradition that named Mammon as the great alternative to God. We cannot get out of the conundrum by denouncing “European Universalism” as simply an ideological cover for the exercise of power over non-European peoples, as Immanuel Wallerstein comes close to doing. European universalism has so often provided the ideological tools for resistance to European oppression that, again, we can no longer think of it in simple geographical terms. Even so, those who suggest that non-Western traditions have resources that would help ameliorate the radical individualism of the current human rights regime are not to be dismissed out of hand, except, I would argue, where they want to use such non-Western traditions, for example Confucianism, as a cover for undemocratic practices and violations of human rights.

Let me turn back to the way that Habermas has posed the problem. How can we create a global civil society that will have the same capacity of citizens to identify with the plight of fellow citizens as already exists in nation states, and to his example of the immediate task of creating such a civil society that would include the whole European Union. While accepting Habermas’s framework, let me offer a couple of caveats: 1) Under the regime of the neoliberal market it is not always easy to get even the citizens of the same nation to identify with all other citizens (in the United States it has never been easy). 2) The situation in which such identification has been most effective has usually been war: we are all in this together because we have a mortal enemy that we must defeat. If we can’t assume the ability to identify with all fellow members of civil society even in advanced democracies and the conditions that have made that possible have usually involved war, we can see that the task of generalizing such identification beyond the nation state will never be easy.

It is for these reasons that I wonder if Habermas’s abstract constitutional patriotism will ever be enough. It is one thing to believe in abstract principles. It is another to mobilize the motivation to put those principles into institutional practice. Hans Joas has recently pointed out, following the pioneering work of Georg Jellinek, that, though ideas about human rights go way back in Western history, and include Classical, Catholic, Lutheran and Calvinist thinking, it was only when the American sectarian Protestants in the eighteenth century, mainly the Baptists and Quakers, were willing to insist on them that they got included in the American constitution. Religious fervor is always problematic because it has so often been used for evil as well as good purposes, but it may be that only such powerful motivation could make human rights genuinely practical. And though Christianity has a big contribution to make, it surely is not alone. Confucians hold on the basis of the Analects of Confucius that “all within the four seas are brothers.” Buddhists identify not only with all human beings but with all beings in the universe, natural as well as human—all have the Buddha nature. For millennia these deep commitments have been held but never effectively institutionalized. Can the world’s religions now mobilize their commitments so that they can at last have genuine institutional force?

[This is the third of three posts drawing on material from a paper presented at From Silver to Gold: The Next Twenty-Five Years of Law and Religion, a conference at Emory University. A version of the full paper will be published in a forthcoming conference volume.---ed.]

Early in the twentieth century William James raised the question of the moral equivalent of war. We have seen the use of war as a metaphor in such things as the war on poverty, the war on drugs, and so forth—but the metaphor never seems to be as effective as real wars. I suppose it would be too much to ask if we could mobilize a religious war against selfishness, ignorance, and sinfulness in each of us according to our own faith, in part because, I suppose, we have been fighting that war all along. In any case there are enormous threats on the horizon and a popular culture that seems more apprehensive than at any time in my life, with fear of the future replacing the certainty of progress. But anxiety and fear have often fueled extremely regressive movements and there is no certainty that they will move people in the right direction. There is also the great danger that anxiety and fear can immobilize rather than stimulate to action. It is a delicate balance.

Surely secular philosophies have ways of dealing with the fragility of solidarity, even at the national level, and the ease with which humans can be frightened into a negative solidarity against alleged enemies. But if the religions may have capacities to strengthen and generalize a sense of solidarity so that it reaches truly global proportions, they can do so only in and through self-criticism. Let me say it plainly: Christianity, and especially Protestant Christianity, has contributed significantly to the institutionalization of human rights and human solidarity—I might give the American example of the religious roots of the Bill of Rights, but I must add the significant role of Evangelicals in leading the social gospel movement that helped (with the assistance of Catholics motivated by Catholic social teachings) to create in the middle years of the 2oth Century what became the beginnings of a welfare state in the US.

Yet Christianity and especially Protestant Christianity have also contributed to an emphasis on individual piety that makes the secular notion of radical autonomy attractive. Max Weber saw the relation between the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. The anthropologist Webb Keane has shown the relation between global Protestantism and neoliberal economics. It is in these regards that I would say that religion is part of the problem as well as part of the solution. And if Christianity can make a contribution to the creation of global solidarity only through self-criticism, such is the case with all the other religions, and secular philosophies as well. There is no way of sorting out the good guys from the bad guys in our present world crisis. We all need each other, but we need critical reason and profound faith reinforcing each other.

What the world requires now must go on at many levels—religious, ideological, political—and at the global, national and local levels. But one thing that is required is very evident, however difficult to achieve. We must now turn the idea of being citizens of the world into a practical citizenship, willing to be responsible for the world of which we are citizens. I truly believe that there are millions of citizens of the world in every country willing to make the necessary commitments. Whether they are anywhere in the majority, so that the politicians will listen to them instead of pandering to the short-term interests of their constituents, is doubtful. What we need is to turn a growing minority into an effective majority.

For those of us in the United States, a classical example might be instructive. As far as I know, the first usage of the idea of being citizens of the world originated with the Stoic philosophers in the ancient Mediterranean. They thought of themselves as kosmou politai, literally citizens of the world. But for us it is worth remembering that even the Roman stoics always used the term in Greek—there was no Latin translation. Sheldon Pollock speculates, following Ovid, that this was because the Romans thought their task was “to transform the kosmos into their polis, or rather to transform the orbis into their urbs, the vast world into their own city.” If one looks at George Bush’s National Security Strategy of September 2002, one can see that he claims the oversight of the entire world for the United States, which might explain why Americans have been relatively hesitant about becoming citizens of the world. It is the world that must recognize our primacy, not we that must recognize the primacy of the world.

Because I see neoliberalism as the source of our deepest global problems, it might be thought that I am opposed to it altogether. That would be as foolish at this point in history as to be opposed to capitalism altogether. What I worry about are the destructive consequences of the naturalization of neoliberalism, so that it has no effective challenge. I agree with Jürgen Habermas—whose work I will touch on in my next post—that world politics needs to catch up with the world economy so that an effective structure of regulation can be created that will protect the environment and the vulnerable of the earth, who are paying the price while only a few are reaping the benefits. If this is a political challenge it is also a religious challenge. I am convinced that religious motivation is a necessary factor if we are to transform the growing global moral consensus and the significant beginnings of world law into an effective form of global solidarity and global governance.

[This is the second of three posts drawing on material from a paper presented at From Silver to Gold: The Next Twenty-Five Years of Law and Religion, a conference at Emory University. A version of the full paper will be published in a forthcoming conference volume.---ed.]

The first time of trial was concerned with the question of independence and the second with the issue of slavery, but the third, as I then put it, was concerned with America’s place in the world, and indeed what kind of world it would have a place in. That “viable and coherent world order” for which I hoped, would, I believed, require “a major new set of symbolic forms.” So far, I argued, “the flickering flame of the United Nations burns too low to be the focus of a cult, but the emergence of a genuine transnational sovereignty would certainly change this.” A genuinely transnational sovereignty? This utopian idea is something we will have to think about later. But I did hold that, though the idea of a world civil religion would be in one sense the fulfillment of “the eschatological hope of American civil religion,” nonetheless “it obviously would draw on religious traditions beyond the sphere of biblical religion alone.”

This extraordinary vision might make it seem that my essay of forty years ago was hopelessly out of touch with reality—the resolution of the third time of trial being no closer today than it was then, perhaps even farther away—unless one realizes that much of the actual text of that essay was a severe criticism of an America that had gone badly astray and was not helping the world toward a viable and coherent world order at all. I included a long quotation from Senator J. William Fulbright about “the arrogance of power,” and I went on to recall Robinson Jeffers, whose poetry, I said, “seems more apt now than when it was written.” Alas, today those words are once again remarkably apt:

Unhappy country, what wings you have! …
Weep (it is frequent in human affairs), weep for
the terrible magnificence of the means,
The ridiculous incompetence of the reasons, the
bloody and shabby
Pathos of the result.

1967, 2007, where are we? In my own life do I have to go through this twice? I must admit on occasion to saying “Vietnam” when I mean “Iraq.” I envy those of you who have no actual memory of the Vietnam War since you will not have to go through the experience of seeing your country make the same catastrophic mistake twice in less than fifty years.

Still we can hope; perhaps hope is all we have. Times of trial in human history have often been protracted, have lasted a hundred years or more, and if ours seems to have no end in sight, we can still imagine the possibility, even the necessity, of a viable and coherent world order if our catastrophe—ecological, political, economic—is not to become total.

One thing I learned from the complex discussion of the 1967 essay is that for many, particularly religious believers but also secularists, the idea of “a civil religion” is viewed as a threat, one religion competing with and threatening to displace other religions, even being established. All my Durkheimian arguments that any really existing social group necessarily has a religious dimension never quelled the opposition, to the point where, by about 1980, I stopped using the term civil religion and talked about the same issues using other language, language that did not involve me in endless, futile, discussions of definition. So if American civil religion is a bad idea, a global civil religion can only be worse, and I can answer the question of my title, which itself was meant to provoke as much as to describe, in the negative: no, a global civil religion is not possible.

But for the creation of a viable and coherent world order a world civil society is surely an essential precondition, and, dare I say it, any actual civil society will have a religious dimension, will need not only a legal and an ethical framework, but some notion that it conforms to the nature of ultimate reality. The biggest immediate problem is the strengthening of global civil society. As I will elaborate in my next post, I would suggest that perhaps the religious communities of the world may have something to contribute to that global civil society, and, indeed, that their participation may be essential for its success.

[This is the first of three posts drawing on material from a paper presented at From Silver to Gold: The Next Twenty-Five Years of Law and Religion, a conference at Emory University. A version of the full paper will be published in a forthcoming conference volume.---ed.]