On more substantial issues, his instinct is exactly right (and mine) when he says that Taylor wants a neutralism that is not necessarily secular. I wrote a fair number of words in my essay to try and make that instinct into a sound bit of criticism in political theory. I am sure that I have not persuaded Taylor, but it is gratifying to see that During and I share an understanding of Taylor. If he and I are right, Taylor’s honorable and interesting effort to redefine secularism as his form of “neutralism” fails. Or at any rate—if one takes the view that definitions, being stipulative and conventional, cannot exactly fail—it is not theoretically well motivated. During doesn’t mention his grounds for thinking Taylor to be wrong, but does gesture at broad agreement with the grounds I had presented.

Where he seems to find my dialectic is missing something is at the point when I mention that the implementation of secularism (in those contexts where its implementation is called for) in the face of resistance to it, should appeal to a historicized conception of the subjects who resist it. He suggests that I should have given a thicker sense of the actual historical development that might be needed to bring such subjects around to secular polities and proceeds to guide me to a path by which this might be done by providing a genealogy of how it was in fact achieved in Europe. These genealogical and historical remarks are valuable, but I want to shepherd their relevance to a different part of my dialectic from where he places them.

The entire last two sections of my paper aim to address the philosophical issues that arise when secularism is called for but is resisted by religious identitarian groups, and they argue for a historically constituted conception of political subjectivity with dynamic possibilities for the presentation of internal reasons by secularism to those who resist it. Of these efforts on my part, During says this:

This is an ingenious philosophical prophecy. But the obvious problem with it is that history has not so far worked this way, and Bilgrami offers no good reasons for us to think that it will in the future either. I can’t address the issues that Bilgrami’s turn to history raises in any depth, so I’ll content myself with three broad points, the first two of which displace philosophic discussion of state secularization by connecting it to capitalism [and science’s role in society], and thus implicitly to contemporary history’s actual motor. The third places the debate between Taylor and Bilgrami in a different historical trajectory than the one that Bilgrami himself offers, by offering a distant genealogy of Church/State relations.

In response, let me repeat first what I had said in response to Colin Jager: I come bearing no prophecy. I have no predictive aims. What has perhaps misled During (which is why I say that his historical remarks are relevant at another stage of my dialectic than where he offers them) is that I was possibly not clear enough that at this stage of the paper, I am discussing a philosophical problem and invoking the relevance of history in a very philosophical mode.

When I had asked what secularists might do in contexts in which secularism is necessary but in which it faces religious identitarian resistance, I was really asking two questions that were narrowly philosophical. First, is it right for secularists to impose its policies from on high via the force that states possess or should it come to secularist policies inclusively by negotiation with those who resist it; second, should one justify this or that secularist policy to those who resist it by pronouncing some universal, “externalist” claim for its truth or should one seek “internal” reasons in the conceptual vernacular of the very groups which resist the policy. (These two questions are obviously related since the notion of negotiation in the second disjunct of the first question is of a piece with the ideal mentioned in the second disjunct of the second question, the ideal of seeking internal reasons in a conceptual vernacular of those who oppose one.) It is in the context of these specific questions that I introduced the appeal to history. The appeal was: If internal reasons are not available in these efforts at negotiation at any given time, one should not grant anything to relativism (relativism being the view that both parties to the negotiation have a right on their side, a relative right!), but rather one should (as a normative stance) see the party with which one was negotiating as consisting of historically constituted subjects whose moral-psychological economies might, as a result of changing historical circumstances, go on to develop internal conflicts that make them more susceptible in the future to revision of their views via internal reasons.

I had left things relatively schematic here and said nothing very specific about what sorts of historical changes might make for internal conflicts in the thinking of those who resist secularism. I did give one example of how a change in even many conservative women’s thinking in America in favor of pro-choice policies was partly shaped by historical changes in the nature of the economy owing to a proportional increase in employment opportunities in the service sector over the heavy goods manufacturing sector, as well as owing to the general shift away from industrial capital to finance capital. Such changes opened up greater possibilities for women’s work outside the home and that introduced new aspirations in women and that, in turn, introduced conflict in their thinking which may well have led to a deliberation towards pro choice. But, other than that example, I had not said much about specific historical developments that might bring about changes of mind towards secularism. During is disappointed in my silence on this score and thinks that I might have looked to actual history to fill the void in what I mean history to be doing in this stage of my paper. The instruction he is offering me might, thus, be formulated as follows: “Don’t leave things so schematic. Look at the past and notice how much the rise and then the flourishing of capitalism as well as the centrality of science in society did to shape secularist polities and then seek or hope to make (or to predict and prophesize less schematically than you have) historical changes of that kind in those societies in which there is resistance to secularism.”

I repeat: I am not prophesying or predicting any secularist triumph (something I have also stressed anxiously in my response to Jager). I am only normatively advancing (and to use Jager’s term “hoping” for) the triumph of secularism where it seems necessary to do so, i.e., in scenarios that mimic the European setting in which it had in fact been called up as necessary. What During’s instruction ignores is an earlier part of my dialectic in which I myself had given this sort of thick genealogy for how the need for secularism arose in European nations. In doing so, I was, for reasons rather similar to Mahatma Gandhi’s, rather explicitly skeptical of the virtues of the historical transformations in which secularist polities were seen as necessary. It seemed to me that there was no particular reason for countries outside the orbit of European influence and power to seek these transformations. I, again following Gandhi, took colonized countries to be in the orbit only peripherally and unwillingly, and found it quite understandable that they should resist aping these forms of capitalism and centralized state formation which had facilitated the rise of corporate domination in the colonizing nations, using science and technology primarily for corporate gain as well as for highly advanced militaries and armaments. And in my own genealogy, I had fastened on a particular modern form of exploitation of religion in European nation-building, which had grown in tandem with the things that During mentions (capitalism and the use of science in its development as an economic formation), a nationalism that was based on mobilizing majoritarian religious sentiments.  The point then is this: Capital, the deployment of science in the pursuit of profit, large scale technological militarization, centralized states tied in hyphenated conjunction with nations, nationalistic mobilization of religious majorities against religious minorities, all emerged gradually in European “modernity” in a familiar trajectory, and secularism as a political doctrine grew in this web of transformations with a very particular good to offer. It would repair the damage wrought by majoritarian religious prejudice and power often exercised with a sustained form of violence backed by the state and minoritarian religious backlash against it with its own form of prejudice and a more episodic form of violence of resistance. And I had said that once this sort of society with these features had been constructed, it is quite possible that nothing less and nothing other than secularism could be conceived and devised to control the damage, given its cumulative depth and pervasiveness.

So, it is precisely because I had in mind just what During presents in his genealogy that I had said, following Gandhi’s lead, that unless one had some vision whereby all of the world should end up as Europe and the West has, countries outside the orbit of such a European (or more generally, Western) construction, should resist pursuing and adopting these lamentable conditions that made it seem that secularism was a necessary solution. Thus, far from being prophetic, I was actually resisting the tendency to Whiggish declarations of secular outcomes in the future for the rest of the world. In this, I believe, I share something deep with Taylor. But, unlike him, I don’t find any need to redefine secularism, domesticating it to another meaning that better fits the urge we both share.

So, in this earlier part of my dialectic, I had myself denied that secularism could really be understood independently of this entire genealogically traced background of European modernity and nationalism, something that During himself nicely underscores in detail (more detail than I presented) in his comments. But he offers the genealogy to me as something I could introduce at a later stage of my dialectic when I am looking at contexts where secularism seems to be a good thing to advance, in the face of resistance to it. However, these contexts, I claimed, are contexts where, despite such resistance to secularism from religious identitarian groups, the conditions of European modernity described in my paper (and in greater detail in other work) had already been replicated in countries outside the main orbit of European or Western society. (I had in particular considered India in the period of the late 1980s and after when this form of religious nationalism and minoritarian backlash against it had emerged in full force –as contrasted with the period when Gandhi was writing, where there was no such replication.) But –and this is the punch line—if these conditions have already been replicated for the relevance of secularism to be acknowledged and advanced, then During’s suggestion that I accommodate those conditions in my appeal to history at the later stage of my argument, seems redundant. I would not have in the first place been advocating secularism for these societies in which there was resistance to it, unless these historical conditions of European modernity had been replicated in them. This is not to say that I don’t find his genealogical remarks valuable. I do and I am in full accord with them as bearing a relevance to the concept of secularism, as I’ve explained above. It’s just that I would place their value and relevance in a different place in my argument from where he proposes them on my behalf.

I couldn’t end this response without saying that I appreciate and find instructive During’s further suggestion that where secularism is necessary and one seeks to convince others of it, there is no reason to think that the state is the only agency whereby this is done. The sorts of more informal associations that he proposes where there might be such dissemination are certainly worth exploring and emphasizing. I don’t believe that the pursuit of these other sites in civil society where negotiation of a broad kind may be sought should make us think that the state should become abstemious and aloof from such negotiation. The field of force in which (to use my, rather than During’s, concept) internal reasons are sought to persuade others of the importance and need for secularism is capacious enough to include both the state and the more loosely constituted institutions of a wider civil society. (See my essay, “Secular Liberalism and the Moral Psychology of Identity” for some historical examples of how the state can effectively be part of this field of force.)

*   *   *

Let me now turn to the essay by Justin Neuman. This preening response’s repeatedly announced aim is to raise a question about the extent of religious homogeneity in modern societies. Since, in my essay, I had nothing invested in claiming a widespread factual presence of homogenous religious cultures, this striking of an attitude about plural religions is besides any point that was central to my concerns.

I also said very conspicuously that (S) was far less relevant than is often thought necessary by its advocates and gave very specific contextual conditions in which it has its normative relevance and most urgent need for implementation—when societies were under threat from nationalist forms of religious majoritarianism adopted in countries mimicking the post-Westphalian path of modernity in Europe. This strictly implies an acknowledgement that, as things stand historically, its main normative relevance is to societies with more than one religion. Moreover, the author himself registers that I myself point out that any religious group may find itself developing internal conflicts and undermine its own homogeneity. So it’s hard not to think that he wrote his commentary, half-knowing that he was presenting something that, however keen he may have been to put it in the air, was not deeply relevant to the essay he was setting out to address.

I say in the essay that a definition or characterization of an ideal of secularism has a marginal advantage if it has application to both highly pluralized religious societies and relatively homogenous religious ones. If one understands what the notion of an ideal is, one doesn’t need to be told that an ideal that is supposed to apply to two different sorts of conditions is not any less an ideal if one of those conditions doesn’t, in fact, at some given point, exist. But, evidently, I must do some telling. I was characterizing the secularist ideal. Nothing in it lapses if, in fact, societies are now predominantly plural in their religious convictions and practices. Charles Taylor proposed an ideal of secularism that is restricted to certain conditions. I propose one that is not so restricted. I claimed that it is an advantage to be less restricted in this respect—and anybody reading my essay with a view to comment on it rather than a mind to seize some misperceived opportunity to display his own pluralist credentials, would have taken in that non-restrictiveness was offered as a very minor advantage compared to the other much more substantial advantages claimed. Secularism, I had said, is a stand on religion. If it is true that all societies that exist have more than one religion, the unrestricted ideal is at no disadvantage whatsoever. If it should turn out that there is a society in which there is only one pervasive religion, the unrestricted ideal has application in a way that the restricted one does not. That is the marginal advantage I had claimed and nothing in the clichés presented in this essay about how there is a plurality of religions can undermine this claimed advantage. In a characterization of some ideal (secularism, for instance), words like “should there be…” and “If there are…” which I had used in (S) and have repeated just now are precisely meant to protect oneself from making any commitment to the facts that might restrict the scope of one’s characterization of the ideal. So, huffing on about what the facts are at a given time, makes no odds to an ideal, so characterized.  It is exactly this point that is missed by the proposal in the essay that I should remove the opening clause from my formula (S) which reads “Should there be…”

Various other points are also missed or misinterpreted.  I can’t find a thread of connection in the things they get wrong, so I’ll list them below as a miscellany.

1. There is a quite elementary failure to understand the position being taken, when I said that secularism is a stance about religion and in some broad sense in opposition to religion, in a passage such as this:

…by defining secularism in opposition to religion (secularism has for him only “parasitic meaning”) Bilgrami charts a course that departs from recent trends in the field, represented by Talal Asad and Taylor, both of whom conceive of secularism as a complex, historically specific set of ideologies and disciplines rather than in opposition to religion. Asad in particular has aimed to uncover the various ways secularism operates as a set of disciplinary and disciplining practices that produce and police the modern category of religion.

Secularism was said by me to have a complex history and I was trying to keep faith with precisely that history in my discussion that tried to make my stipulated characterization non-arbitrary. So I cannot possibly have been setting myself up against either Taylor or Asad on that score, when I say that secularism is a stand in some sense against religion. That secularism should have its own ideologies and disciplines (a point I certainly believe myself) does not rule out the fact that it can be understood as being in opposition to religion, for the utterly obvious reason that it may be some part of those disciplines and ideologies that they run counter to the commitments and disciplines of some religions. And if, as Asad says, secular ideology and disciplines can produce new and modern understandings of religions, I don’t see how that rules out the thought that the new understandings of religion can also be something that secularism stands in opposition to. I would think that if it “polices” them, it can hardly fail, at least implicitly, to do so. My own view, I should repeat here, is that modern understandings of religion emerge out of a range of other developments of modernity (such as nationalism devised on the European model, for instance, in the examples I discussed) and secularism nests in these, often introduced explicitly as getting its point and rationale by combating some of the harmful effects it finds these modern developments around religion to have. But I won’t elaborate on that here because it is really too detailed a thought to actually have any relevance to the essay to which I am responding. As for Taylor’s book in which he presents the secular age of Latin Christendom with its own positive humanist construction in contrast with the secular understood as an ideal of subtraction, I think Taylor himself would say that that topic is not quite the topic he is writing about in his essay on which I was extensively commenting. The concepts of “secularization” and “secular” were partly contrasted by me with the concept of “secularism” because I found myself much more in sympathy with Taylor’s book (which is on the first two of those concepts) than with the essay I was criticizing (which was on the third). And within my classification of these terms, some of Asad’s directions of thought can be read as follows. He makes the perfectly correct claim that modern understandings of religion emerge out of the “secular” and the process of “secularization,” and then secularism is constructed with the rationale of policing and repairing the damage done by the political presence of these modern forms of religion. My essay’s argument is, therefore, entirely compatible with Asad’s work and Taylor’s book, though not the essay by Taylor which is the foil to my own essay. This is hardly surprising since it should be plain to a knowledgeable and comprehending reader of my essay that it was, in part, influenced by both of them. But all of this has manifestly escaped the author of this essay.

2. The reply then moves seamlessly from speaking about plurality of religions to speaking more generally about pluralist elements in culture in a sermon that is so familiar that it needs no response, especially since there is nothing in my essay that contradicts these familiar points. All this culminates in the assertion, by now a mantra in our intellectual culture, that identities are multiple, with the authority of Amartya Sen to underline it.

Nobody should deny that identities are multiple for the plain reason that nobody should deny facts. But it is equally a fact that sometimes (as in the case of religious majoritarian mobilization, which was a central concern of mine), people present themselves as having some of their multiple identities matter to them more than others, especially in the political realm, and they convince themselves that it is so. This may even be an illusion on their part. But, as Sen himself points out, a good deal of identity is subjective, not objective, and so calling it an illusion with a view to dismissing it is to simply fail to grasp this basic distinction. Societies can be highly plural in their cultures and yet some mobilizations can put aside the plurality for political and other hegemonic ends. Religion can be exploited for these purposes. When this happens there is a bad form of identity politics as, for instance, in India in the 1980s and 1990s, that appeals in name to religion. The same elementary principle that I invoked earlier when I offered the advice that one should not deny that identities are multiple, applies equally to those who would deny these latter points.

3. I made no empirical commitments whatever on the question of how widespread the practice of female genital mutilation is. My remarks on the subject were wholly in response to an example given by Taylor in his reactions to my paper and I very deliberately and carefully worded them in a conditional, precisely so as to make no such commitments. The essay seems keen to parade some numbers on this question, but there is nothing that they say by way of addressing anything in my essay directly. I was equally careful to expend quite a few words on the question of “who speaks for religions” and religious groups and raised an entire question about this and the difficulty of democratizing those aspects of society in which religious groups are to be counted, since often very unrepresentative points of view get to have a representative voice. The pertinence of this discussion is entirely overlooked in certain attributions that are made to me on this subject of “who speaks for religion,” which I don’t find anywhere in the original essay. The pedantic revisions of (S) offered at the end of the piece in which the term “religion” is changed to “religious persons” (a revision to which I have no objection, as should be evident from much of what I had myself said in my essay) could easily be inferred from precisely the words I expended on the importance (and difficulty) of democratizing the notion of “who speaks for a religion”.

4. At one point we are told that the very idea of a lexicographical ordering such as is found in (S) is only likely to be “available” to those who are already secular. I must confess to finding this so hazy that I don’t quite know how to respond.

Does the remark mean that someone cannot say, “If (S) is what secularism is, I am against it?” I know any number of people who say this. There are several essays by distinguished writers such as Ashis Nandy, written over the last two or three decades, which have said it about a doctrine that is non-neutralist in a way that my lexicographical ordering was trying to capture and roughly codify, essays with titles such as “An Anti-Secularist Manifesto.” Nandy, I wager, would agree that (S), rather than a neutralist ideal of Taylor’s sort, captures secularism, and it is precisely what he is against. I myself, as someone who offered (S), had said, as I offered it, that it is not normatively apt in many contexts. It was one of the chief and explicitly announced goals of my essay, indicated even in its title. And the essay, far from making a clean distinction between religion and politics as this response bizarrely assumes and asserts, actually takes the view that (S) should only be normatively advanced in rather specific contexts partly because in many other contexts and places, religion and politics do not separate and need not separate cleanly.

Or does the remark mean that (S) is not comprehensible to someone who is not already a secularist? If so, I can present to anybody who would make such an astonishing claim any number of people I know who have a perfectly clear understanding of what (S) means and are not secularists. In fact, as you would expect, all those in the first class of people I mentioned (such as Nandy) are a subset of this second class of people just mentioned.

5. The essay cites another paper of mine in which I make a point about how some of the political resentments and angers voiced by Osama bin Laden against American foreign policy, Israeli treatment of Palestinians, etc., finds assent on the street in various parts of the world with large Muslim populations, even as most of those who give this assent are appalled by terrorist violence and the religious absolutism that accompanies this anger and resentment on political matters. A skeptical question is raised about the confidence with which I say this. So let me just say that my confidence is based on what I read in newspapers, what I hear on radio reports and interviews, what I read in blogs on the internet, what I see and hear on television reports and interviews (including on Al-Jazeera), and what I hear in my own personal conversations with ordinary Muslims in different parts of the world that I have visited in the last decade and more.

We’ve invited a small handful of scholars to comment on the increasing influence of anti-immigration and anti-Islam ideas and parties across Europe and to offer their thoughts on how best to accommodate minority claims (especially those involving Islam) in a democratic and liberal Europe.

Our respondents are:

Sindre Bangstad, Post-Doctoral Fellow, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo

Keith Banting, Professor of Political Science and Policy Studies and Queen’s Chair in Public Policy, Queen’s University; Will Kymlicka, Professor and Canada Research Chair in Political Philosophy, Queen’s University

Rajeev Bhargava, Director, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies

Jocelyne Cesari, Research Fellow in Political Science and Director, Islam in the West Program, Harvard University

Grace Davie, Professor of Sociology, University of Exeter

Ruby Gropas, Visiting Scholar, CDDRL, Stanford University and Research Fellow, ELIAMEP

Elizabeth H. Prodromou, Assistant Professor of International Relations, Boston University

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Sindre Bangstad, Post-Doctoral Fellow, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo

The breaking down of the cordon sanitaire surrounding right-wing populism is in fact not as recent a phenomenon as we like to think in Europe.  The political impulse to declare multiculturalism a dead letter—even where it never existed—seem to relate to the fallacious understandings of what multiculturalism might conceivably have meant prevailing among many European politicians. Critiques of multiculturalism are, these days, often used as rhetorical proxy for critiques of Islam and Muslims in Europe.  Anti-immigration and anti-Muslim sentiments need to be unpacked, analyzed, and responded to primarily at the level of particular nation-state histories and imaginaries. There is also an unprecedented level of co-ordination between various populist right-wing movements and activists across Europe. So much so that rhetorical tropes concerning Islam and Muslims travel seamlessly across the continent.  Right-wing populism in contemporary Europe also feeds on a liberal-secular nationalism of sorts, on anti-elitism, anti-intellectualism, and legitimate concerns over the future sustainability of European welfare states. Under the sign of democratic technocracy, across Europe we are witnessing a failure of political leadership and of intellectual vision, articulated in a conception of politics in which poll ratings and pandering to the shifting popular sentiment have become more important than the ideals and principles one espouses. This is a failure of both the mainstream political Left and Right. It requires a monumental intellectual effort by mainstream political parties to formulate more positive and less defensive narratives about the increasingly multicultural societies in which we happen to live; it is an effort still to be pursued in any systematic manner. Muslim minority claims are not necessarily the ‘special cases’ they are often made out to be; pragmatic approaches offer the best way forward.

Europe has a particularly dark history regarding its treatment of religious and ethnic minorities, and with that follows a burden of moral responsibility. It is a burden that must be shouldered even in the bleak and challenging times we are living in at present.

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Keith Banting, Professor of Political Science and Policy Studies and Queen’s Chair in Public Policy, Queen’s University

Will Kymlicka, Professor and Canada Research Chair in Political Philosophy, Queen’s University

In interpreting contemporary debates about multiculturalism in Europe, it is critical to distinguish between political discourse and government policies. At the level of discourse, there is a widespread perception that multiculturalism has ‘failed’ and that governments that once embraced a multicultural approach to diversity are turning away, adopting a strong emphasis on civic integration. This reaction, we are told, “reflects a seismic shift not just in the Netherlands, but in other European societies as well.” However, focusing on the level of government programs brings a very different pattern into view. New evidence from our Multiculturalism Policy Index (MCP Index) tracks the strength of multicultural policies for European countries and several traditional countries of immigration at three points in time (1980, 2000, and 2010). The results—available here—paint a different picture of contemporary Europe. While a small number of countries, including most notably the Netherlands, have weakened established multicultural policies during the 2000s, such a shift is the exception. Most countries that adopted multicultural approaches in the later part of the twentieth century have maintained their programs; and several countries have added new ones. Indeed, for Europe as a whole, the average score on the MCP Index went up, not down, between 2000 and 2010. This suggests that civic integration initiatives are often being layered on top of existing multicultural programs, leading to a blended approach to diversity. Moreover, as we argue elsewhere, more liberal forms of civic integration can certainly be combined with multiculturalism. It is the more illiberal or coercive forms that are incompatible with a robust multicultural approach.

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Rajeev Bhargava, Director, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies

Securing individual freedoms has been a strong point of Europe; handling diversity has not.

As is well known, the process of confessionalization in the early 16th century created religiously homogenized political units. Confessional dissenters were exterminated or expelled. A large majority of Jews were forced to immigrate to Poland. There were virtually no resident Muslims left in any part of Europe. This has changed in the 20th century. Cultural and religious diversity is precisely what characterizes Europe now.

Writing in the sixties, when Christianity was adapting to the intellectual hegemony of a scientific rationality, Wilfred Cantwell Smith wrote that the challenge posed to Christianity by science would be a cake-walk compared to the challenge of emerging religious diversity. Years later, writing specifically about Islam, Smith warned that few in the West realize how their perpetual reservations about Muslims and the generally negative perception of Islam follow a pattern set during the Crusades. More than a millennia of animosity between Christians and Muslims survives in the collective memory of both and so too does the urge to compete and settle old scores—not everywhere, not in everyone, but with sufficient strength to adversely affect us all.

In order to accommodate minority claims involving Islam, these virtually invisible background conditions need to be altered. The collective memory of mutual hatred has to be addressed head on. The European Left needs to see multiculturalism or religious pluralism as an integral part of its ideology, not as an enemy or a conservative ideology merely to be tolerated. Religious diversity must be rescued from the conservatives.

It will help if liberals and democrats shed their individualist bias and learn to make a distinction between ‘communitarian’ and what we in India call ‘communal’—between those who see themselves as belonging to a community and those who view their communal affiliation as necessarily antagonistic towards other communities. Such a distinction exists at least implicitly in the European constitution. Therefore, the salvation of every single European country lies in a proper European union. The ills of Europe can be rid only by more of Europe.

Finally, it would not do right-thinking people any harm if they introduced a mixture of prudence and ancient wisdom into their universe of moral principles. Without all this, minority claims do not have much chance of being met in Europe. And this failure would be a big disaster for the entire world.

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Jocelyne Cesari, Research Fellow in Political Science and Director, Islam in the West Program, Harvard University

The recent victory of socialist François Hollande in France’s 2012 presidential election was certainly a turning point for the social and economic politics of France. Unfortunately, this is less true when it comes to immigration, race, and culture, evidenced by Hollande saying he would firmly support France’s ban on niqabs, or face-covering Islamic veils, and his stance against Turkish accession to the EU.

François Hollande has made clear that he will address the material conditions and worries of French citizens. But he has been quite silent on questions pertaining to cultural diversity and social cohesion, for the simple reason that he shares with Sarkozy the same conception of French national identity, defined as an abstract community of citizens bound together by principles of equality and liberty. In these conditions, the cultural and religious background of citizens is not part and should not interfere with civic solidarity and public life.

However, such an ideal has been increasingly difficult to uphold when Muslims, among other cultural and regional groups, are claiming their right to express their specificity in public space, which has in turn raised the anxiety and fears of a lot of French citizens. These fears have been the main reason for the long-standing political success of the National Front, from its founder Jean-Marie Le Pen to his daughter Marine, the current leader of the party . At the same time, Muslims of all colors and stripes keep asserting that there is no contradiction between being French and being a Muslim.

Nations or groups need to exist in opposition to an ‘Other,’ and in today’s national imagination, Islam plays that role. It may be impossible for societies to completely rid themselves of this polarizing rhetoric.

That said, societies differ in how much their political imaginations are subjected to open critical discussion. Accordingly, it is necessary for French politicians across the political spectrum to explicitly reject economic and social issues being linked to cultural issues or the ‘Islamization’ of Europe. It is also imperative for policymakers to change the dominant narrative of French national identity by including Islamic culture and history.

Such a change would involve a new education project where, from history to arts and culture, Muslims are not described as the Other. It means acknowledging the cross pollination of philosophical and scientific ideas as well as the multiple encounters of artists, merchants, clerics, and migrants from medieval times to the immigration waves after WWII. Most Muslims already acknowledge France as their home and have made numerous artistic and cultural contributions to the French ‘patrimoine.’ The challenge is to reshape French imagination so Muslims can be seen as legitimate fellow citizens.

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Grace Davie, Professor of Sociology, University of Exeter

Two things are happening at once in European societies. On one hand the process of secularization continues, at times remorselessly; on the other religion has returned to the public sphere. The combination is difficult to handle. Continuing secularization has led, amongst other things, to a marked decline in religious literacy. At the same time complex religious questions make new demands on the knowledge and sensitivities of the actors involved. Hence an uncomfortable paradox: at precisely the moment European populations need them most, they are losing the vocabulary, concepts, and narratives that are necessary to take part in serious conversation about religion. The result, all too often, is a debate that is ill-mannered and ill-informed.

A debate that is ill-mannered denotes a lack of respect for both people and issues. Even more serious is the lack of regard for religion as such. Those for whom religion means little are unable to imagine the damage that is done by the public denigration of faith, be it Christian or other. Legitimate claims, frequently those of minority faiths (such as Islam), are lost in the confusion.

A debate that is ill-informed means that European populations are increasingly susceptible to error and exaggeration. An excellent example can be found in the wildly exaggerated statistics concerning immigration in general and Islam in particular. Astute politicians know this and—at times—overstep the mark. Unfortunately, acute economic uncertainty will make matters worse.

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Ruby Gropas, Visiting Scholar, CDDRL, Stanford University and Research Fellow, ELIAMEP

Over the past two decades, surveys have consistently noted a clear message: European citizens are anxious about immigration and its impact on society. Throughout this time, mainstream political parties and European political elites have attempted to respond to these trends: demonstrating the economic and demographic benefits of immigration; encouraging and promoting multicultural initiatives; consolidating and institutionalizing an anti-discrimination framework through EU directives, regulations, and national legislation; and adopting an inclusive discourse promoting the value of diversity, cultural exchange, toleration, and pluralism. They have also become increasingly detached from their base through the professionalization of politics. Throughout this same period, populist and extremist parties have done precisely the opposite. Positioning themselves as representatives of the ‘simple, average citizen’ they have been speaking out about the ‘real and everyday’ threats posed by ‘uncontrolled,’ ‘illegal,’ ‘massive’ immigration and of the ‘incapacity’ or ‘unwillingness’ of Muslim communities to integrate. They have gradually moved from underdog parties on the fringes to actually framing and conditioning pre-election debates and changes in citizenship and migration policies. Moreover, they have built an active presence at the neighborhood and local levels. The lower middle classes, skilled and unskilled working class citizens who increasingly find themselves in conditions of economic insecurity—whether due to the pressures of globalization, the eurozone crisis, or economic recession—have been identifying with the latter’s discourse, finding resonance and comfort in the statements of right-wing populists. Economic grievances, induced by insecure job prospects and shrinking wages and the perception of unfair competition over increasingly scarce social goods such as social housing, health, and pension coverage, are being coupled with strong feelings of cultural threat and the opinion that Muslim migrant communities pose an evident threat to national identity, civic values, and the country’s overall way of life. What is even more disconcerting is that this is taking place against a wider backdrop of dissatisfaction with the functioning of the country’s democratic governance and with falling trust in the mainstream political parties, exacerbated in many cases by corruption and mismanagement scandals.

It is urgent that mainstream political parties re-engage with the local level. There has been a growing gap between governing parties and their constituencies. In order to counter the influence of populist extremists, mainstream parties need to engage once again with voters who feel alienated and become once again integral parts of the communities they represent. At the same time, activities that encourage sustainable and meaningful interaction between different communities at the neighborhood, at the city, and at the regional levels must be intensified. Bringing together members of different groups has always increased understanding, countered perceptions of threat, and created ties that are much needed today to maintain the civic and social cohesion of European societies.

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Elizabeth H. Prodromou, Assistant Professor of International Relations, Boston University

The success of Golden Dawn (Chrysi Avgi), a fascist party that secured 21 seats in the Greek parliament on the strength of 7 percent of the popular vote, mirrors the alarming consolidation of far-right political parties and social movements underway across the Continent since the end of the last decade.

The Golden Dawn leadership drew directly from the toolbox of the New European Right—by mixing fascistic symbols, ethno-nationalist discourse, an anti-immigrant platform, and the use of street violence—to critique the colossal governance failures of Greece’s traditional political parties (left-of-center PASOK and right-of-center New Democracy). Golden Dawn spun standard, if extremist, Euro-populist discourse to excoriate mainstream PASOK and New Democracy leaders for bankrupting Greece, and this narrative resonated with the country’s shell-shocked middle- and working-classes voters. Similarly, Golden Dawn leader Nikos Michaloliakos echoed the xenophobic chauvinism of European rightists, such as Geert Wilders, Marine Le Pen, and Umberto Bossi, in linking Greece’s economic travails to immigration patterns that have produced one of the most accelerated demographic pluralizations in post-Cold War Europe.

Golden Dawn, then, is not a tale of putative Greek exceptionalism vis-à-vis a norm of EU modernity, but instead points to socio-political diffusion from ‘center’ to ‘periphery’ in Europe.

At the same time, Golden Dawn diverges notably from its far-right cohort in other EU member-states. For starters, the Golden Dawn qua party is likely to be an ephemeral force in politics. Most polls predict a decline in electoral support for Golden Dawn in the upcoming national elections in June, as protest-voters turn away from the party as a credible governing option.

More significantly, there is a specificity to the extreme Right’s message in Greece, which stands apart from the Islamophobic essentialism that has come to define the New European Right in other EU member-states. Chrysi Avgi blames clandestine, external forces as the cause for Greece’s economic travails; given the likelihood that the country’s economic implosion will continue apace in the near term, the search for ‘foreign’ culprits will maintain purchase in Greek society. But anti-immigrant intolerance, as well as some racist sloganeering and violent hooliganism, in Greece have been absent the deliberately, explicitly religious—read: anti-Muslim—vector of discrimination and prejudice that orients the New Right in the aforementioned European cases. Instead, Greece’s right-wing ideologues have deployed the broad rubric ‘foreign’—immigrants, Great Powers, and historical foes in the region—in a manner designed to evoke and to amplify a historical record marked by chronic linkages between the loss of economic sovereignty, on the one hand, and conditionalized political sovereignty and territorial loss, on the other. The origins and evolution of this distinction in Greece’s version of the New European Right bears additional study and attention, as part of any efficacious response by liberal democratic forces to reinforce tolerance, civility, and pluralism in EU politics and society.

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In May of 2010, I sat down for a conversation with the legendary human rights advocate Sidney Jones of the International Crisis Group. Jones and I had just come out of an intense two-day workshop at the SSRC on religion, peacebuilding, and development in Mindanao, organized in conjunction with the SSRC’s project on religion and international affairs. Participants in the workshop included scholars and peacebuilders from the United States, Mindanao, Japan, and Indonesia.

The following is a brief excerpt of the interview. Click here to read the entire transcript (pdf).

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David Kyuman Kim: This is David Kim from the SSRC’s Program on Religion and the Public Sphere. And I have the pleasure of engaging in a conversation with Sidney Jones from the International Crisis Group, in a segment for the Rites and Responsibilities series for The Immanent Frame. We have just come out of a two day SSRC workshop on the crisis in Mindanao, funded by the Luce Foundation, and part of the SSRC’s project on religion and international affairs. Sidney, before we get into your work, and because the conversations from workshop are still fresh in our minds, I’m curious to hear your perspective on and your characterization of what the Mindanao crisis is. Speak, if you would, not just as someone who’s been involved with the Mindanao crisis for some time. How would you describe the situation to someone who knows nothing about it?

Sidney Jones: I would say that, in some ways, we’re dealing with a fundamentally ethno-nationalist insurgency, but what makes it so much more complicated than many other areas is that there are several insurgencies going on at the same time, including the old Communist insurgency, which spills over into Mindanao. We have three guerilla groups that identify themselves as Moro, plus the NPA [the National People’s Army, the military wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines], which is still active. We also have three different peace processes going on at the same time, and any success on one track will have negative implications for the others. So, trying to fit all those things into some kind of overarching peace process is extraordinarily difficult. And on top of that, even if you were to settle all of those insurgencies, you would still be dealing with clan conflicts and structural problems of warlordism and feudalism, which would continue to account for what is currently 30 or 40 percent of the violence in Mindanao even if you got the peace processes signed, sealed, and delivered. So, that’s what the crisis in Mindanao is about.

DKK: As you know, the Rites and Responsibilities series is focusing on questions of sovereignty and authority and religion. And among the things that the folks in the workshop seemed to be wrestling with was how to account for the religious factors and influences in Mindanao. You yourself had very portrayals of the religious factors and influences, specifically, your insistence of not wanting to stick to an account in which the portrait was primarily about the disputes between Muslims and Christians. How would you describe the role that religious groups play, how religious actors play in Mindanao? What language would you use to describe them? What are the inadequacies of the characterizations that have been put forth?

SJ: There’s no question that there is a fundamental issue of religious identities involved. But it’s also true that the fundamental conflict is not religious. It’s about control over power and resources. And that control issue extends beyond Christian and Muslim communities to different ethnic identities among people who are Muslims. It also, like many of the conflicts in Indonesia, has an overlay of “indigenous-versus-migrant.” Some of these fundamental power relationships relate to people from upland areas in Mindanao who have been displaced by people from northern parts of the Philippines, who are mostly Christian, coming in and taking over land and political power from the Muslims themselves. The problem, for instance, in the agreement that failed in August 2008, which was trying to define “the Bangsamoro homeland,” was that the MILF [the Moro Islamic Liberation Front] was basically including Lumads, or indigenous people, in their definition of Bangsamoro. And the Lumads objected to this! They didn’t want to be part of the Moro concept of who was defined as a Moro. They wanted a separate identity. There were very definite ancestral land issues that were at the root of why they wanted a separate identity, and the MILF didn’t understand, or didn’t appreciate it fully. So that’s another part of the complexity of the whole process. And it’s why it’s a mistake to see this conflict as “Christian versus Muslim,” or to believe that appealing to religious leaders, such as the Catholic Church or Muslim ulama, will somehow be able to settle it.

DKK: As I hear you describe it, and also and on my reading of the white paper that Myla Leguro and Scott Appleby wrote for the workshop, there seems to be a structural problem that is fed by religion. Right? In other words, there is the structural problem that determines which groups are recognized, and which are not recognized. I think you objected at one point, in your response to their papers, saying “Well, it’s not even simply questions about conversion, but it’s claims about re-version.”

SJ: Yes.

DKK: Which is to say, it is a set of disputes over claims about original identities, originary identities. And these disputes involve appeal to religion to fortify the respective claims about identity. I guess I’m a little stuck, then, on the following. It’s one thing to say, “Well, there are all sorts of mischaracterizations of and misuses of religious identities.” But there are certainly resources in religious communities and religious traditions that could be used as sources of resistance––sources that don’t have to subsumed under the broad dichotomy of “Muslim v. Christian.”

SJ: Yes, let me give you a couple of examples. We had a major massacre in Maguindanao, in central Mindanao, in November 2009, in which one clan killed fifty-seven people—actually, fifty-eight, but one victim was never identified. And there was a sense that, first of all, it was Muslim-on-Muslim violence, in that this one clan leader carried out the massacre as a way of sending a message to his political rival, who was head of another Muslim clan. But there were thirty journalists killed in the process, and most of the journalists were Christian. And some of the Muslims in Mindanao were saying, “If there hadn’t been Christians killed, this issue never would have gotten the international attention it did, because there’s a sense that Muslims are always killing Muslims. So it would have been a horrendous massacre, but it wouldn’t have gotten the same level of attention.”

DKK: There’s a difference in the moral indignation or moral valence in the global community in response to violence against Muslims versus violence against Christians.

SJ: Yes! And then, afterwards, I was talking with the Archbishop of Cotabato, who was saying that there was a sense among his parishioners that the massacre intensified stereotypes of Muslims as violent.

DKK: Hm.

SJ: And therefore it would intensify resistance to any peace agreement that involved power-sharing with the Bangsamoro. So, in that sense, there was definitely a religious element, and stereotypes, involved, and it suggested that there was a role for the church, for example, to try and diminish the force of those stereotypes.

DKK: Yes.

SJ: But it was also true that there was a clear issue of clan rivalry among Muslims that wasn’t necessarily going to be able to be addressed by Islamic ulama. One of the people at this workshop was saying last night that he is a victim of one of these blood feuds among Muslim clans, or between two Muslim clans, I asked him if there was any way that the ulama could play a role in settling those feuds. And he said “No, because the ulama are all situated within the clans. And they wouldn’t accept somebody coming in from outside the clan.” So where is the role of religious leadership in settling that aspect of the violence in Mindanao? And it’s a critically important part of the violence, because the clan structure perpetuates it.

DKK: But when you say “religious leadership,” do you mean local religious leadership? Do you mean transnational religious leadership?

SJ: When I talk about religious leadership in Mindanao, I’m talking about local leadership—except that there’s a big difference between the Islamic and the Christian leadership, or at least the leadership within the Catholic Church. And I think it’s also important to underscore that inasmuch as we’ve been talking about Christians, we’ve only been talking about Catholics. There is also the whole issue of Christian evangelicals, which is a growing community within Mindanao, and their impact has been completely ignored. But when we talk about Catholic leadership, we’re often talking about priests or bishops who come from outside the community. The Catholic Church has a way of posting priests where they’re not necessarily native sons. But within the Islamic clergy, if it’s fair to use that term, there’s no tradition of having anybody from outside the community. And not only that, but one’s sphere of influence is much, much more limited than that of the equivalent role of a priest in the Catholic Church, because the priest, by definition, is part of a broader hierarchy. One of the problems I often see is that Catholics tend to view their Muslim counterparts in their own image, and to assume that Muslim leaders have the same ability to exercise this hierarchical chain-of-command structure, down to the village level, that the Catholics do. It’s a huge mistake to see it in those terms—and it’s one of the weaknesses of the Bishops-Ulama Conference—because they’re not equivalent.

To continue reading, click here for a complete transcript (pdf).—ed.

It is common in the academic study of religion to speak of groups of people–Muslims, Christians, atheists—as enjoying certain common characteristics over time and space, even while we give attention to the limitations of these denominations. In these conversations we work on further specifying characteristics—evangelical Christians—catholic Christians—orthodox Christians. Or further still—liberal Catholics—conservative Catholics—Irish Catholics—Hispanic Catholics. Or cradle Catholics, Catholic converts. In all these efforts we are speaking of collectivities, of the characteristics of collectivities, generalized across these populations. We know about these characteristics from our study of historical evidence and from sociological research.

We also write about individuals—usually virtuoso individuals. Ibn Arabi, Asoka, Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, Anne Hutchinson, Martin Luther King, Gandhi. Prophets, saints, seers, shamans, visionaries . . . innovators and conservators of traditions.

Linking these two ways of speaking is almost always awkward. Are we fascinated by these individuals because they are exemplary or because they break the mold? Is Luther properly regarded as Catholic or Protestant? Is he better understood using psychology or theology? Was Anne Hutchinson more or less true to the church than those who condemned her? Was her fate sealed by her gender or by her religious ideas and practices? Was the Buddha a Buddhist? If these famous exemplars do not fit the crude forms we make, what about ordinary people?

I recently re-read a classic text that attempts to specify the life of a single historical individual who was not a world historical figure. Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms. I did so during the week of the shooting at Ft Hood. I found the parallels between Major Hasan and Mennochio striking. Or perhaps, more carefully, the cautionary lesson we might take from Ginzburg’s masterpiece in trying to understand Major Hasan.

Immediately after the news broke, major news sources produced theories of who Major Hasan is/was and what/who might have motivated him to violence: his religious commitments, his lack of a wife, his dead-end career, his treatment by fellow soldiers, his suffering from vicarious PTSD. Everyone had a theory.

I will leave the psychological theories to those who understand them better than I. From the perspective of religious studies, however, I think it is interesting to consider in this context exactly what we mean when we assign a religious identity to a particular individual, or when we assent to such assignments.

What do we mean precisely when we ourselves assign or assent to the identification of Major Hasan as a Muslim? Or to the religious identity of any particular individual? Does this mean simply, as liberal theory would have it, that he has chosen certain religious beliefs, as is his right? How do we, as scholars, know that he is a Muslim? Because he associates himself with other Muslims? Because his parents were Muslim? Because he follows the precepts of a collectivity within the world-wide collectivity of those identifying themselves with Islam? Or because he says so? And what do we know when we have made such an assignment? What does saying that someone is a Jew or a Christian tell us or allow us to say further about a particular individual?

Menocchio’s judges seem to have struggled with these very questions. They were the religious experts of their day, members of the Inquisition, and yet they seem to have been uncertain of how to assess Menocchio’s religious identity. What exactly was Menocchio up to when he speculated in un-orthodox ways about the origins of the earth or the virginity of Mary? We can see the same struggle among the forty-five judges at the trial of  Joan of Arc, judges who were mostly faculty at the University of Paris, the religious experts of their day. What claim was Joan of Arc making when she asserted that God spoke to her through the voices of Sts. Catherine, Margaret, and Michael? Both Menocchio and Joan also made highly pious statements of association with the Church and its teaching. Were they heretics or Christians? Or both?

One of the features of the time in which we are living—a time in which it seems newly salient to speak of religion—is a certain lack of care about the assignment of religious identity. It is as if we had not learned the dangers of such assignments in the last century.

Today we lack institutionalized and legally-established religious authorities whose work it is to define the parameters of religious collectivities, and we profess to be committed to a completely unfettered individual right to define such identities on an individual basis. And yet we continue to speak as if such assignments carried with them certain non-negotiable habits of mind and practice. Catholics must be obedient to the Pope. Evangelical Protestants must read the Bible in a literal way and be intolerant of persons of other religious commitments. Jews must reject inter-marriage. Muslims must favor jihad.

How do we mean these attributions? Is it that by individually choosing to associate ourselves with a religious community, we sign on to a set of precepts and practices that are required for membership? Or do we mean something more involuntary? Either in a biological or social scientific way? That we act this way because we are either genetically or psychologically predisposed—even hard-wired—to such actions because of our involuntary membership in such groups? That they control us in some way?

To say “his religion made him do it” is to ascribe to an understanding of religion that is at variance with liberal theories of the individual.  But it is also to make a claim for the predictive quality of sociological groupings that is largely unwarranted by the evidence. While sociological and historical evidence might permit the claim that Protestants work hard, there is no evidence that should be permitted in court or in any context with rigorous standards of evidence, given our present state of knowledge, to warrant a claim that a particular person, because he is a Protestant, works hard—or worked hard on a particular day. Or that because a person might be denominated Muslim due to his social location, or his personal choice, he performed any particular action.

What does Ginzburg tell us about Menocchio? Before Menocchio we thought everyone in the sixteenth century had a defined religious identity. Certainly all peasants. After Menocchio we know that even peasants invented their own identities. And Ginzburg says we also know that there was another possible religious identity that we had under-valued—the identity of the orally transmitted religion of agricultural peoples over centuries, a religion characterized by a this-worldly practicality and immanent mythology. Ginzburg claims that by reading about Menocchio we can have access to this other religious form. But even knowing of this new religion, we wouldn’t have been able to predict that Menocchio himself, as a member of that collectivity, would act or believe in a certain way. How to parse the individual and the collective remains largely uncharted territory in the academic study of religion.

Why do we assign these identities? It could be because our brains are so structured as to require such categories in order to think. Or maybe we do so because it reassures us as to the order of the world. Or maybe it is because we are moderns. Or is it because we are Christians?

It is easy to misconstrue this integration as bellicose. “One must realize that war is shared,” Heraclitus writes, “and conflict is justice, and that all things come to pass in accordance with conflict.” Although this aphorism deliberately evokes the bloody war and greedy conflict denounced by his epic rivals, Homer and Hesiod, Heraclitus has in mind a universal principle according to which every unity is to some extent a tension of conflicting opposites. His best examples are bow and lyre, since both must strain in opposite directions just to be the unities they are. But their unity in opposition reverberates further. The lyre, for instance, needs the initial opposition of its frame and strings not just to be a lyre but to produce a higher opposition of notes, which together form a harmony. This harmony, in turn, may oppose the voice of a singer to achieve a still richer unity from additional opposition, and so on. Heraclitus invites us to see every unity, similarly, as a harmonious opposition. Put the other way round, he invites us to see every conflict as a harmonious unity.

Along with the meditation on time, culminating in recognition of our ephemeral selves, this second spiritual exercise about conflict is at the heart of Heraclitean philosophy. This second exercise is more difficult to maintain when we are not bystanders to conflict but suffer it ourselves, and most difficult when the outcome is death. Yet so too is the first meditation most difficult to maintain when the self that slips away is someone we love (la mort de toi) or, in time, ourselves (la mort de moi). Death thus presents us with the biggest challenge to the practice of both Heraclitean exercises, giving their spirituality its melancholic atmosphere, but also exposing its fundamental unity. Heraclitean spirituality is a meditation on death.

Lest it seem morose, however, we must remember the flame, recalling how it embodies the contradiction between need and satiety whenever it is frozen in a moment. With fire as our paradigm of greedy time, then, we should not be surprised to find everything in it simultaneously dying a death and nurturing a life. Sometimes the life is said to be its own, sometimes it is said to be another’s. In either case, Heraclitean spirituality is no less a meditation on life. Ultimately, though, it regards both life and death as unified in their opposition, harmonious in their conflict.

Heraclitus sometimes hints that fire is his god, just as he gives to war the epithet of Zeus (“father of all and king of all”), but the one aphorism that defines this god makes clear that he is celebrating not fire or war in particular, but rather the temporal unity in opposition that they exemplify: “The god: day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, satiety and hunger. It alters, as when mingled with perfumes, it gets named according to the pleasure of each one.” In this English approximation, as in the Greek original, the first sentence lacks a verb, or any syntax at all; it is nothing but a series of nouns. The second sentence of the Greek, in a way that is impossible to represent in English, has no explicit subject; it is nothing but syntax. What is Heraclitus saying with this odd juxtaposition between parts of speech?

With grammar as our metaphysics, we are tricked by nouns into thinking of the things they designate as static: “fire” and “self” seem to refer to stable things, to nuggets, although we have seen how they misrepresent their referents by doing so. Heraclitus destabilizes this implication by first listing only nouns that are polar opposites, suggesting that the god is no one static thing to which any of them refers, but is instead the temporal process of opposition between them all. Ignoring the lesson of this aphorism, for a moment, and lending this divinity the nominal illusion of stability, we could say that Heraclitus’s god is simply time itself. To dispel such an illusion, though, he switches in the second sentence to verbs, which more naturally convey processes and time. Were he less artful, and more Heideggerian, he might have said that god gods, or even that god gods in his godding. But such a ruse would have accomplished little beyond obscurantism. Verbs too may trick us into ossifying the world, into thinking processes themselves are stable.

When we think of a river or a fire, how often do we think of them as stable, if not static, things? (Things, to be precise, that could exist in a moment without contradiction.) Without practicing Heraclitean meditation—reminding ourselves perpetually of the passage of time, reminding ourselves often of the nonsense produced by trying to thwart its greed—the candid answer must be: almost never. So seductive is the illusion of this stability, fostered not just by language but also by the inveterate nostalgia of the human heart, that even with Heraclitean spiritual discipline we do well to affirm time’s passage sometimes; at best, often. To help us along, Heraclitus juxtaposes this aphorism’s two sentences in a unity of perfect syntactical opposition, using grammar itself to dispel the illusions of grammar. The logos he reports with this aphorism on god is not fully in one sentence or the other, then, but rather in the harmonious tension of the two. As so many other aphorisms, moreover, this one exhibits the logos it conveys: the immanent god is the unity of all these opposites, never static but always exceeding itself, the very process of their opposition at work in thought, language, and the world alike.

Yet this god redeems us neither from time nor from its conflict; on the contrary, the affirmation of this god promises to immerse us more deeply in both. This immersion nonetheless responds to our désir d’éternité, the longing for eternity to which every spirituality must respond: “Immortals are mortal, mortals immortal, living the other’s death, dead in the others’ life.” If our selves really are like rivers, sustaining themselves only for a while by the patterns of their flows, then the interruption of these flows is tantamount to their death. But we have already noticed how just an aphorism may effect such an interruption. Heraclitean aphorisms thus have murderous power, but so too do psychoanalytic interpretations, great works of literature, religious liturgies, the traumata of childhood, assassinations, wars, and so many other unpredictable events of this marvelous world. Even in our everyday lives, within every moment, within our very selves themselves, old selves die and new ones are born. Indeed, if we climb all the way to the Heraclitean summit, we survey a landscape in which there is no self at all. No self, that is, if we look for any thing. For the self is no thing.

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Mourning death properly retrieves new vitality for life, and this truth we learn from the deaths of our beloveds proves no less true with the daily sacrifices of our passing selves to greedy time. These little deaths may go unremarked as we bustle about, too busy to attend their neglected funerals, but each one that goes unmourned takes its silent toll. Only with the past mourned can the future be welcomed. This is the lesson of Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia, but also of the Heraclitean spirituality that is its ancient heritage. Jubilation must be mixed with the grief that is its due, jubilation over the infinite births made possible by grieving no fewer deaths. Every moment lived and felt consciously, even with some small awareness of its fractal complexity, should therefore be a moment of equal joy and pain. Freud elaborates the techniques of this spiritual practice, and Nietzsche adds affective color to its cognitive austerity, most of all when he writes in Zarathustra:

Have you ever said Yes to one joy? Oh my friends, then you also said Yes to all pain as well. All things are enchained, entwined, enamored—if ever you wanted one time two times, if ever you said: “I like you happiness! Whoosh! Moment!” then you wanted everything back.

The insight of these profound words would deserve liturgical incantation were repetition not inimical to their spirit. Yet they are often mistaken for a cosmological speculation about the eternal repetition of time, which should rather terrify than console, as Nietzsche intended. His genuine consolation to our frustrated longing for eternity is not in eternal repetition but in the carefully focused recognition and consequent celebration that time brings the birth of new mini-selves as well as the death of old ones. If this consolation be sufficient for everyday life—and in those whom it has consoled, from Marcus Aurelius to Proust, its cultivation by daily meditation is no easy task—when we face the supreme test, the death of a beloved, we may bring our discipline to a higher level, rising above the quotidian flow of mini-selves to see a higher-order pattern, the macro-deaths and macro-births of macro-selves. The logos is the same. With practice, so too is the consolation.

In fact, the same logos and consolation can be iterated infinitely to meet the demands of our dolorous world: to mourn the deaths of whole families, communities, and nations; to mourn intellectual and artistic traditions lost, civilizations in decline, and the inevitable demise of humanity itself; indeed, at the outermost reaches of this spiritual exercise, were it imaginable, the Heraclitean would contemplate the demise of this universe, the succession of universes of which it is a part, the succession of this succession, and so on. With each death comes a birth, and with each birth a death; for no matter the unity, it must be a harmony of opposites. To be sure, with each iteration the logos becomes more difficult to affirm, both emotionally and intellectually. Yet none but its heroic sages need ever climb to those uppermost heights. We succeed if we come to terms with la mort de toi and la mort de moi. The richest example of someone who climbed this high was Proust. His novel brings us along as his Narrator—with whom he deliberately confused himself toward the end—elaborates this spiritual exercise, sustaining it over a lifetime, until he produces the creative dissolution of self into an all-but-immortal work of creative art.

How Proust does so is a story for another post, but for now the Heraclitean meditation on time and conflict—whether upon a river, a fire, a lyre, or oneself—seems enough to produce a vertiginous wisdom. It is thus tempting to bottle this wisdom in a formula, to underwrite proscriptions and produce guidelines; in short, to fashion a Heraclitean ethics rivaling the other traditions of Greek philosophy, especially the Platonic and Aristotelian one that made rationality our function. According to this tradition, long dominant in Western philosophical history, we are best when we are most rational, worst when we are least so. So long as the notion of rationality be given some content—and Aristotle’s whole philosophy, coming to a point in the final book of the Nicomachean Ethics, accomplishes this task—such a formula can prescribe specific virtues, and even specifically virtuous actions, while proscribing certain vices, along with their associated actions. Pitting Heraclitus against Aristotle, we could say that our function is creativity, so that we are best when we are most creative, worst when most repetitious. But can Heraclitean wisdom be frozen in this way? Two serious problems arise if we surrender to this temptation.

The first problem concerns the content of the function it would ascribe to us: could it really prescribe specific virtues, let alone specific actions, while also proscribing vices and their attendant actions? Not all good appears creative, nor all evil routine. What about the saintly monk who appears a paragon of routine, or the inventive murderer of so many horror films? Appearances may deceive here. Yes, the monk may appear to the uninitiated to be living by a formula, just as the writer of sonnets may appear to the trendy critic to be writing by numbers, but the monk himself will tell you that the formula of his exterior life frees him to innovate in his spiritual interior—where true spiritual innovation happens. Conversely, if there is any truth in horror, looking within the soul of the apparently inventive murderer, we are more likely to find the repetitious fantasy of the coward than the fearless confidence of the creative artist. Plato tried to show this by opening up the tyrant’s soul for our inspection toward the end of his Republic, and Freud elaborated a somewhat similar diagnosis of the criminal in Some Character Types Met With in Psycho-Analysis. Even if these diagnoses fail, this first, psychological problem with a Heraclitean formula is not nearly as serious as a second, logical problem.

Aristotle gave content to the notion of rationality, as have many other philosophers, showing that this was possible without self-contradiction, whatever other problems it incurred. But how can the creativity that is supposed now to be our function receive any content without ceasing to be creative? After all, any formula for creativity would, when followed, preclude true creativity. This should stop the search for a Heraclitean formula in its tracks. Without a formula, however, what guidance can Heraclitean spirituality offer to someone who looks to it for wisdom?

The modern prophet of this spirituality, Nietzsche, met this challenge directly with his much misunderstood, and consequently maligned, notion of the Übermensch: “I teach you the overman. Human being is something that must be overcome.” Nietzsche’s overman strives to overcome humanity, to exceed it, to create a new man, but in the most disastrous misunderstandings of his task he stops as soon as he has succeeded, settling complacently into his new life as blond beast or capitalist superman. The fallacy of these misunderstandings is the repetition and stasis they sneak into the very ideal of innovation and creation. Nietzsche’s genuine overman would strive dynamically to overcome whatever it is he creates, the very moment he creates it. According to Zarathustra, “the overman is the meaning of the earth.” But even if you follow him, adopting his meaning as your own, you cannot rest content that you have at last discovered the meaning of life. True creativity must exceed even its most creative formulations of creativity.

Misunderstandings of this ideal are inevitable, as Nietzsche recognized, making Zarathustra scold his ape and dismiss his fawning disciples. Like those disciples, if not also that ape, we all crave formulae, recipes, and scripts to guarantee a meaning to our lives. And if creativity is paradoxically our meaning, this craving is altogether explicable. For if you must create a unique meaning for your life, you inherit a tremendous burden: as Sartre taught, you are condemned to be free. This is a condemnation because with such freedom comes the risk that you will fail, that your life will turn out meaningless despite your best efforts. Your condemnation is so total, in fact, that even your deliberate effort to be creative may prove to be your biggest obstacle to its achievement. Analogously, the neurotic’s deliberate effort to understand herself may prove to be her most obstinate defense against true self-knowledge, just as Oedipus’s deliberate effort to avoid his fate precipitates it. Formulae, recipes, and scripts are perennial temptations because they seem to relieve us of this heaviest existential burden. Aside from Sophocles’ tragedy, the most disturbing account of this perennial temptation is found in Dostoevsky. His Inquisitor rejects Christ, and would even execute Him, rather than allow Him to threaten the recipe of miracle, mystery, and authority that has allowed the Church to relieve humanity of its burden of freedom for millenia.

***

Heraclitean spirituality nevertheless has an ethics, just not one that yields ready answers. It enjoins you to be creative, but it cannot tell you how to follow the injunction. It must preserve an ironic distance from any moral or spiritual prescriptions, lest it contradict itself with a formula. We have flirted with the formula that our function or nature is creativity, remembering that whatever definitive content we supply to the notion of creativity, our nature would be to exceed even this content. In such a formulation, our nature would be to overcome our nature. If so, fulfilling it at a moment would be impossible because contradictory: to fulfill one’s nature at a moment would be to fall short in that moment of overcoming it. But we have met such a paradox already, first in the Heraclitean fire, then in the Heraclitean self. As fire or self become contradictory whenever they are frozen in a moment, so too does Heraclitean spirituality whenever it is bottled in a formulation. Approximations are useful as educational tools, and this post has aimed to provide an education as much to the author in writing as to the reader in reading; but tools should not be confused with the goal of that education: wisdom.

Wisdom is an activity, and so only writing that fuses its content with its form can perform this activity as much as report it. Heraclitus has shown us how to do this in Greek, with the philosophical resources available in his time. He left us the poetic prose of his aphorisms, with their deliberately ambiguous logos. But this logos should not be treated as a final testament, to be followed forever after as static truth. Nor could it be so treated without hypocrisy. This is why we have turned in this conclusion to more recent thinkers. For we should strive not just to put old wine in new bottles, but to ferment the wine still further. Heraclitean spirituality itself demands that we extend it, exceeding Heraclitus by integrating into his wisdom the contributions of subsequent thought. To keep this excessive philosophy from contradicting itself by formulation, finally, we must also give it a way of both reporting and performing its wisdom in English. With every expectation of failing, but sure that only a failure to try would ensure failure, here is my best effort thus far, Sic et Non:

No

twice

stepping into

the same river,

this specious now, this

very one, now gone, alas,

not even once, if truth be told,

nor can it be, truly, for knowing grasps

a thing, no thing, each thing is nothing in itself but

a waxing palimpsest, this selfsame text, myself no less,

waning at best before your very eyes, each blink

effacing, the drying ink tracing these echoes,

these dying refrains of infant palindromes,

returning again imperfectly somewhere

new, some time over or under,

wherever yields never the

same word twice, unless,

maybe, now, this

once,

Yes.

]]> http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2008/12/22/heraclitean-spirituality-divine-conflict/feed/ 2 http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2008/01/12/constitutional-patriotism/ http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2008/01/12/constitutional-patriotism/#comments Sat, 12 Jan 2008 18:13:09 +0000 Charles Taylor http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2008/01/12/constitutional-patriotism/ Robert Bellah’s latest post poses clearly the issues that we’ve been agonizing over in Canada, and in a different way now in Quebec. Lots of people want to shy away from a political identity which is primarily defined in ethnic terms. On the contrary when asked what are the crucial uniting ideas of our society, they come up with some variant of universal “values,” defined in terms of modern charters of rights (all heavily influenced by the Universal Declaration), principles of equality and non-discrimination, and democracy. Canadian “multiculturalism” fits into this category, as does “interculturalisme” in Quebec. [...]

(I) Where is the Secular Age?

Charles Taylor’s remarkable account of developments within Latin Christendom situates contemporary religious or non-religious commitments within what he calls the “immanent frame,” the key to which is the secular condition (his third meaning of secularity), in which belief is an option, and religion a distinct domain. Early in his study, he remarks that such is not the case everywhere: in Muslim societies generally, and for people in religious moments in the West: pilgrims at Czestochowa or Guadalupe, for example. We could add: and for people growing up in believing Baptist communities in Nebraska or Mennonite ones in Manitoba or Hindu ones in Gujarat or Bali.

We might also, in a pursuit which is not his, differentiate within a category such as “Muslim societies” and ask: what are the modes of relating to the transcendent that are possible within this tradition? For some, God is everywhere and the self porous, whether one is at work, at home, or in the mosque. “Muslim” is a self-identification rarely invoked in everyday life because Islam is the background condition for everyone, all the time. Such were the contours of life where I have lived in Sumatra, for example.

For other Muslims, in other places, “Islam” does become an object of study as a system of knowledge and practice rather than just a background condition, and it is for these people, in these places, that part of the “secular age,” with Taylor’s sense of embattlement, shapes life. As many scholars have noted, it is mass education, migration to cities (and a fortiori to Europe and North America), and global communications that develop this orientation to the world. This objectifying of the tradition and continual consciousness of religious pluralism may or may not, however, be accompanied by the other features of the package, such as the buffered self. Spirit possession lives on in urban Muslim environments.

If, then, we take this orientation to one’s tradition as one among many to be the key feature of the secular age, we then may ask about (a) the social features that develop or encourage it, and (b) the degree to which other features of Taylor’s secular package may or may not follow along. (I have mentioned the variability of notions of the self.)

But this approach threatens to reactivate the West/East divide that Taylor carefully acknowledges is not his intent. We then must ask: to what extent does Taylor’s package of elements of the secular condition apply to the pilgrims to Czestochowa or Guadalupe, or, to ensure that West/East is not fractally applied within Europe and the Americas, the pilgrims to Lourdes or the worshippers at a North American megachurch? Can, for example, the awareness that one’s faith is one among many, that one is embattled as a believer, not coexist with a temporary or even permanent sense of transcendence, a porous self, and a strong intra-community sense of religion-as-background? It may be that we need a stronger sense of scope, one that includes various types of communities, as more than the individual (Taylor’s quest seems to fall back on individual faith even as it acknowledges the power of “post Durkheimian” moments of enthusiasm for renewing that faith) and as less than the entire world.

(II) What is the post-religious dimension of secularity?

One of the more important insights in the book, I think, is the argument that you can only be post-religion if you continue to remember religion. This idea opens up analysis to specific forms of memory, but then requires that we think of secularity as an element in contemporary discourse as much as a label for a condition, and one that can be used to create new histories.

France is one of Taylor’s primary cases, and the French secularist sense of being post-religious highlights the memory of having pushed the Catholic Church out of its once-regnant role, and the need to remain vigilant lest that role be reassumed by it or by other, similarly noxious actors (read: Islamists). But part of that continued vigilance is a reading back into history a “victory of laïcité” story, wherein laïcité grows and develops and conquers over two centuries.

Of course there is no historical actor called “laïcité.” The word has only very recently been a key component of Republican rhetoric, even if one finds it in earlier dictionaries, whatever that tells us about rhetorical force. Nor has it ever had an agreed-on meaning: for some it is a legal framework (one that includes massive support for religious institutions, as when the state pays the salaries of the Catholic school teachers); for others it is a philosophy, a replacement for religion. But above all, it is an effective way of shutting down your opponent: being non-laïc is a bit like not supporting our troops or honoring the Queen—something no one would think of doing, so needlessly politically self-wounding it would be.

Secularity remains then, in W.B. Gallie’s phrase, an “essentially contested concept” that cannot easily become an analytical concept for investigating current political debates and arrangements. We cannot easily say that “the United States separated church and state” without taking into account the very different notions of what Thomas Jefferson intended to do, anymore than we can say that France “is a secular state” without charting the series of historically contingent interventions of the state into religious affairs. Studying the politics of secularism in the Secular Age thus needs to take “secularism,” “laïcité,” “separation” and so forth as objects of study rather than analytical tools.

Having now read the book, I’m inclined to think that, in this case, form follows substance: contrary to much sociological writing on religion stemming from Weber, A Secular Age focuses on the nature and background of contemporary religious experience – on the kind of experience of the transcendent one can have in our world (that is, the world of Latin Christendom). Leaving practically no area of humanistic scholarship or human experience untouched, Taylor argues that we have arrived, during the last 500 years or so, at an unprecedented juncture in human affairs. We have exchanged a world in which the transcendent was a taken-for-granted aspect of experience, and unbelief a problematic option, for a world in which belief and unbelief are at least equally plausible, and the option of a purely immanent, “exclusive humanism” entirely possible – even, perhaps, preferable for most people. Spiritually speaking, the very water in which we swim has changed profoundly and ineluctably.

In demonstrating that this is the case, Taylor has transformed the contemporary debate – now much warmed as compared to, say, the period before 1989 – over the meaning of “secularization.” He has shifted the focus of our attention from questions about the supposedly waning “public role” of religion and the possible decline of religious belief to a question concerning our experience of the world. For my money, he deftly captures the sense that, for wide segments of the Western world, it is perfectly acceptable to hold an outlook that seeks no further, in spiritual terms, than the enhancement of human flourishing. Indeed, the destination Taylor describes seems a good deal like the world that Durkheim adumbrated when he wrote, in the context of the Dreyfus affair, that “man has become a god for man and… he can no longer create other gods without lying to himself.”

Despite all the nuance and detail in Taylor’s presentation of his case, however, I wonder whether A Secular Age won’t have one baneful unintended consequence. Its characterization of a world “of” and a world “after” the transcendent suspiciously recalls similar developmental dichotomies in the history of social thought – from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft, from traditional to modern, from mechanical to organic (solidarity), etc. Taylor’s invocation of a world that is without any necessary commitment to the transcendent is fair enough. But I fear that it is likely to entrench those who encounter its argument (and at 776 pages of text, I suspect A Secular Age is going to be a book most people have heard about rather than read themselves) in the view that the old days were straightforwardly god-fearing and the “modern” world godless – for better or worse.

This would be an unfortunate outcome, since the present reconsideration of the concept of secularization offers potentially enormous prospects for new research. One can perhaps predict two general directions this new research will take. First, and already very much underway, is the question of the extent to which the contemporary period is, in fact, marked by a decline among Westerners in attachment to worldviews that transcend this world. Here the contrast between “spirituality” and “faith” takes center stage. While we may be talking about a re-orientation of the transcendent, the drift toward “believing without belonging” offers striking parallels to the weakened attachment to established social institutions more generally. The other tack that researchers are likely to take is to explore more fully the period before, say, 1500 in order to discern the extent to which unbelief really was a novel development.

In short, the historical trajectory of religious belief will come in for intensified scrutiny in order to assess the degree to which we’ve really moved from a world “of” to a world “after” the transcendent. Sociologists will not be well-equipped to undertake the historicization of (un)belief, yet it will be essential for them to assimilate the fruits of this research if they are not to persist in untenable generalizations about social change. Accordingly, we should all be looking forward to the results of Robert Bellah’s explorations of religious evolution. Even if they ultimately support Taylor’s perspective, they will form a crucial counterpoint that will help us make sense of secularization – a notion which, despite much need for qualification, ain’t dead yet.

Taylor convincingly argues that historical processes associated with secularization were deeply intertwined with Reform within Christianity, concluding that the movements drawing the largest masses of people into the “slipstream of disenchantment” were religious ones. As a result, the new humanism bears the mark of its origins, not only in being committed to an active, instrumental ordering of self and world, but also in the central role of universalism and benevolence within it.

It is because Taylor draws on such an impressive historical and literary repertoire and writes with such philosophical dexterity and generosity that his dismissal of the immanent counter-Enlightenment strikes me as problematic. He approaches the transcendent/immanent distinction such that the “place of fullness” is either: 1) outside or beyond human life (the position of “religious” transcenders); or 2) within human life with no reference to transcendent reality (the position of “faithless” immanentists). The “religious,” then, approach fullness as transcendence in a particular way. Religious faith in Taylor’s strong sense entails belief in transcendent reality and the aspiration to a transformation beyond ordinary human flourishing. So “religion,” at least in the historical European experience, is, essentially, Christianity.

Fair enough, until you get to the implications for those who fall outside the bounds of both “religion” and exclusive humanism. These radical theorists of immanence trouble Taylor throughout the book. They cannot be accommodated in the “face-off” between traditional faith and secular humanism because—neither endorsing “religion” nor eschewing metaphysics altogether—they are simply not playing the same game. Though Taylor wrestles with the need to adjust his categories and amend the rules such that a three-way face-off between these rivals becomes a genuine possibility, he struggles with the implications of doing so, and never commits to that path. Instead, he consigns unbelievers to living in a universe cloaked in absolute darkness. “A race of humans has arisen which has managed to experience its world entirely as immanent,” he writes. “We may judge this achievement as a victory for darkness, but it is a remarkable achievement nonetheless.”

Though I sympathize with Taylor’s antipathy toward the unreflectively anti-Christian strains of modern unbelief, I do not believe it needs to extend to all modes of believing or unbelieving (the categories themselves becomes problematic here) that fall beyond the reach of both “religion” and exclusive humanism. Though he acknowledges the proliferation of such alternatives with his figure of the “supernova,” he dismisses modes of belief/unbelief that come from within Western experience yet operate outside of and often in tension with the Christian categories that animate his extraordinarily rich analysis. We are led to conclude that he is pulled so strongly toward his version of the transcendent that what becomes most threatening are not exclusive humanists who “close the transcendent window” but their “nonreligious” rivals who represent an alternative to both a philosophy of transcendence and a philosophy of radical atheism.

Though it makes no appearance in this book, Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism comes to mind. For non-Christian metaphysicians like Deleuze, the transcendental field is transcendental in that it resides above or below appearance, but not in that it is unquestionable or authorizes a morality of command.

Can the field of immanence be “experience-far”? Can it also hold mystery, and, if so, would this open interesting possibilities?

I would have appreciated a more nuanced engagement with these questions. Instead, Taylor portrays exclusive humanism as the rightful heir of (Reformed) Christianity, while the immanent revolt is shunned as the illegitimate offspring of Reform, “a resistance against the primacy of life, but which has abandoned these traditional sources” (372). Taylor shuns it not only because it rejects his mode of transcendence (though this matters too), but because in equating a diverse tradition with a particular reading of Nietzsche, the revolt becomes nearly synonymous with proclivities toward fascism and a fascination with death and violence (637-38). With this position condemned both politically and metaphysically, Taylor bypasses an opportunity for what might have been a fascinating engagement between rival metaphysical traditions.

Perhaps this three-way face-off still lies ahead. And A Secular Age is magnificent nonetheless.