In expounding his misgiving about the humanism I proposed, Uday Mehta seeks—I think with some strain—to find an incompatibility between my ideal of fraternity and what I say in another essay of mine on Mahatma Gandhi in which I point out that, for Gandhi, one overcame relativism by presenting the moral truth (as one sees it, though, to repeat, that goes without saying) to others through exemplary living up to it in one’s actions and not by subsuming it under a universalized principle and generating an imperative. I don’t see any such incompatibility and I think that he only finds it because of the misreading of what I mean by fraternity that I have been trying to expose in this reply. He says:

He [Gandhi] made himself, as Bilgrami has…argued in another essay, exemplary and through that generated a convivial, one might say fraternal, radiance, which often moved his opponents.

And then later, after some examples and descriptions of how Gandhi went about being exemplary, he says:

This was also Gandhi’s way of going beyond the impasse of relativism and neutrality without having to rely on Hegel’s reason in history to sustain, as in the case of Bilgrami’s humanism, his confidence in secular liberal outcomes.

I don’t believe that Gandhi is well served by this conclusion.

When one sets an example to others by one’s actions, one tries to get them to perceive in one’s actions a reason for them to act in a certain way. So there is no incompatibility between the highly selective use that I make of Hegel’s idea of reason in history and Gandhi’s efforts at providing reasons by exemplary action. Mehta seems to think that Gandhi is opposed to providing reasons. He is not. He is opposed to a particular canonical conception of reasons that, as it happens, is found in a certain dominant strand in the history of Western thought (Kant’s moral philosophy being the most prominent and explicitly articulated representative of the strand). Being given a reason to act in a certain way by perceiving it in someone’s exemplary act is a form of access to reasons that is to be distinguished from access to reasons via the apprehension of universalized principles. It is to see the reason directly in the exemplary action; it is not to get access to it via some universalized principle that the action falls under (or generates). We would only fail to count perception as a source of reasons if we had a conception of reasons that regarded them as always flowing from some sort of reasoning. But it is precisely that sort of picture of reasons that Gandhi was denying and I don’t see why the selectively Hegelian picture I was presenting should always commit itself to deliberative forms of reasoning. No doubt sometimes reasons come to us via our deliberation. And, though I do mention deliberation in my paper, I have no commitment to internal reasons always being the outcome of deliberation. History can present us with encounters and situations that shift our way of thinking by our simply coming to see things differently than we hitherto have done.  The perception of someone’s or some action’s exemplariness is just as good a source of reasons for one as one’s cogitation and deliberation. Such a conception of reasons presupposes the idea that evaluative phenomena (values, in short) are properties in the perceptible world, which make normative demands on us (i.e., present us with reasons to act) when we perceive them. This idea is very important in Gandhi, as it is to me. But that is (and has been) a theme for other occasions. (I have written on it extensively in my writings on Gandhi other than the essay Mehta cites.)

Mehta says that he would like to extract something of relevance for fraternity from the fact that Gandhi “gave something of himself” in his effort to convince others of the truth, as he saw it. (At one point, his actual term is “wagering something of himself,” but that has too much of a ring of drawing up some sort of agreement, which doesn’t quite fit Gandhi”s way of proceeding.) I think this is a good thing to try and extract. But the bearing it has on my views is not what Mehta says it is. He is right to say that Gandhi did not simply pronounce that something is the truth, and leave it there. Since I was always clear that I don’t think humanism (even in my limited sense) is achieved just by caring for the truth, my position can’t possibly be seen as denying this. For him, Gandhi after fastening on some truth, went on to do those sorts of things that gave of himself so as to attempt to include others in the truth (as he saw it) and in doing so he signaled more human forms of caring and fraternity than my ideal. Let me for the sake of convenience simply dub this, as I already have, “the traditional” or “standard” form of fraternity,” which has its sources in things less “thin” (something Mehta seems to require fraternity to have, if it is to be any kind of fraternity) than “inclusion into the truth,” things such as compassion for others and “familial” (also Mehta’s word) forms of support in human relations. I don’t deny that Gandhi’s exemplary acts in which he gave of himself, signal this, though I wonder if “signal” is the best term to have used, unless one is clear that it is only a metaphor (“reflect” might be better since it doesn’t convey anything necessarily intentional). But even if they do signal or reflect these thicker sources of fraternity, that is, by Mehta’s own framing of it, in the service of the fraternity I have proposed—the fraternity defined in terms of wanting to move others to be included in what, for Gandhi, is the moral truth. Striving to include others in the truth, as he saw it, was often the point of his committing the exemplary actions in which he gave so much of himself, thereby signaling “thick” sources of fraternity.  When I presented the goal of including others in the truth as a kind of fraternity, I was not presenting a rival to the “traditional” form of fraternity that Gandhi’s various actions, giving of himself, signaled. And it certainly couldn’t be a rival if acts of giving something of himself by his exemplary actions (which signal the more traditional forms of caring and fraternity) were sometimes a way of his pursuing the goal of including others in the truth, that is, pursuing what I call the caring for others in this more abstract form of fraternity.

But Mehta doesn’t see this. He seems almost to have an anxiety that stressing my ideal of fraternity would somehow cancel out the other form of fraternity, like one radio station jamming another, or ignore it, or downplay it. But nowhere do I suggest any of this. The most I said in this direction is that if one tried to exclude from human relations the ideal of fraternity that I was proposing, one would be left with the familiar pieties of traditional forms of humanism without the muscle and the power that comes from what I think is an indispensable aim of the moral life, the inclusion of all of humanity in something as fundamental as the moral truth. To say that is not to repudiate the more human and familial relations that make for traditional forms of fraternity. It is to say that one diminishes the latter to something less than what they are, if they are not seen as standing side by side with this other equally fundamental ethical goal found in the stance I recommend, a goal which reflects a different way of showing inclusiveness towards all of humanity.

I have said all this by way of saying that my ideal of fraternity is not only fully compatible with but an essential supplement to more traditional forms of fraternity. What I am quite emphatically repudiating is Mehta’s insistence that I need a supplement to make mine the form of fraternity that it, in fact, is. That insistence assumes that I am formulating something that needs us to struggle in some ways that Gandhi did by “giving of himself,” before it can be fraternity or be called “fraternity.” But no such struggle is required for it to be the fraternity I propose. The caring for others that my form of fraternity is defined as, is not defined on struggles of that sort, but in the very wanting to include others in the truth. If, as Gandhi’s life shows, he struggled and gave of himself, to get others to believe the truth to which he subscribed, that is a matter of how he went about trying to include others into the truth that he wanted them to be included in. But, I repeat, it is the wanting to include others in the truth in the first place (unlike the relativist who does not care to include others in the truth—”You can never be my brother,” “You can have your own version of the truth, which by my lights is falsehood”), that exhibits the caring for them which defines the fraternity I have proposed. To deny that this form of caring for others is, in itself or by itself, a form of fraternity just because its sources are more “thin” than the other form of fraternity that Gandhi’s giving of himself manifested, would be sheer prejudice, a hankering to make all fraternity take what I have dubbed the “traditional” or “standard” form. It is a prejudice and a hankering that cannot be attributed to Gandhi without reducing his thought.

The issue is not just one about how to interpret Gandhi. Quite distinct from what one should attribute to Gandhi, is the question whether there is or is not any point in giving the name “fraternity” to a large attitude towards all human others, which has such “thin” or “abstract” sources. There would be some point to Mehta’s qualms—that is, it would not come off as the sheer prejudice it does- if the sources were so thin and abstract that it would take nothing from anybody to succeed in having this attitude of caring that I have been trying to make more fully explicit in this response. Or to put it differently, he would be right to say that we don’t have a normative ideal (of caring, of fraternity) if nobody, at any rate no human being, can fail to live up to the ideal. The possibility of not living up to it is a defining condition of something being an ideal, at least as defining as the possibility of living up to it. So the question is: have I thinned out and abstracted the sources of caring and fraternity so much that they are ideals that are too easy to live up to, and therefore have no bite. Mehta would certainly be right to reject the humanism I offer, if being a humanist in my sense was so easy that it was enough just to be a human being to be one.

But, the entire framework of my essay, in which the humanism was proposed, had identified a looming and (at least in our culture) quite prevalent target that the humanism had defined itself against. And this was the relativist response to subjects in moral and political conflict. So, if you want, in a word, to describe he, who fails to live up this ideal of caring and fraternity, and thereby gives bite to the ideal, it is the relativist. I have expounded this relativism in my paper and earlier in this response, so I won’t recall it again. What I’ve tried to do in that exposition is to make more substantial what relativism is by introducing an ethical issue on which to take a stance, so that relativism, when it takes its stance on it, can no longer be seen as a dry and academic doctrine. It is a matter of ethics and of life. Here then, is the crux: if you actually live the relativism you espouse, if you adopt it as a moral position, you are uncaring. You will, for instance, see someone whom you deeply and irresolubly oppose on some moral issue, as someone merely of anthropological interest, perhaps to be studied from a detached point of view, but not to be engaged with such that perhaps—in a future that history makes possible—you may learn from her, or teach her, the moral truth. It is to that form of uncaring that the caring of my humanism is opposed. And Gandhi, who was constantly anxious that his own denials of universalizability and of an ethics of principles would be confused as a relativist uncaring of others, was strenuously keen to express his humanistic stance against it.

Manifestly, the uncaringness that such a lived relativism displays is not the uncaringness of someone who, say, leaves another to die in a ditch as he walks hurriedly, or nonchalantly, by. We no doubt need thick sources of fraternity and “give something of ourselves” to overcome some of these latter forms of uncaring. We sacrifice our time and expend some effort to help others in these ways. But not all caring and altruism requires sacrifice of that kind on one’s part. Ideals of altruism and caring do not emerge in an actuarial enterprise, where you don’t achieve the ideals without some measurable cost to yourself. Sometimes caring comes from a generosity that has no cost to oneself, at least no such cost as would count as thick. It does not cost me anything in that thick sense of cost, to see someone I deeply oppose on some moral question as belonging to the same moral world as mine, in a way that the relativist refuses to do. It is simply a kind of self-standing generosity of mind that is found in a willingness to engage. It is not easily present in all of us. It is an ethical stance that is difficult and deep, but necessary. The difficulty of taking it, however, is not measurable in any sense that would make us call it “thick” in the cost it lands on us, as Mehta seems to require. And—to return to Gandhi—though he talked much of sacrifice, he talked much of generosities of mind that required no sacrifice, as well. It is a travesty, which Mehta comes close to committing, to see his ideas of sacrifice as a necessary condition for caring and generosity in some sort of a zero-sum game, where you must give something of yourself in some “thick” sense, if you are to be counted as caring and generous.

One last thing. Mehta, towards the end of his essay, says:

When Bilgrami, in the concluding pages of his paper, refers to non-dominating and non-coercive forms of state behavior as following from his quasi-Hegelian humanism, this strikes me as an add-on, for which his thin form of humanism gives little internal warrant.

I don’t recall using the expression “following from” and I don’t have much idea what exactly Mehta means by it.  Still, there are two things that I said which are relevant to this question.

First, my “quasi-Hegelian humanism,” to use his term, is wholly embedded in the idea that we are dependent only on “internal” reasons to get others to share the truth as one sees it, and the idea is that, if at a given time no internal reasons are available, we must await history’s intervention in creating such internal reasons in a subject’s thought. (My example was the Indian constitutionalists” argument that they should put in a temporal proviso which allowed Muslims in India their own personal laws until such time as they, from within their own thinking, came around to a more secular code of family law. The two phrases I have italicized convey the bringing together of the Hegelian historical or diachronic element with the internal reasons element.) This centrality of awaiting something like internal reasons, I had said, “suggested” the relevance of certain non-coercive forms of implementation. Here is the passage:

One half of the idea, here, is that certain forms of justification suggest [italics just added] the relevance of certain forms of implementation. If secularism had an externalist justification, i.e., if secularism could assume that those who oppose it are not merely possessed of different substantive values but are failing by the light of a more general and universal rationality, then a secular state could perhaps regard itself as having more right to proceed in the implementation of secularism, without awaiting the consent of those who oppose it. But if secularism is stuck with only the resources of internal reasons for its justification, i.e., if secularism must acknowledge that those who oppose it may be fully rational from within their own substantive value commitments, then a secular state has greater obligation to exercise more carefully the scruple of seeking first to persuade them with internal reasons before proceeding with its adoption and implementation.

I leave it to Mehta to decide whether “p suggests q” is synonymous with “q follows from p.” “Following from” are his words and he should decide what they mean. Words apart, what he has claimed is that the non-coerciveness I urge is an “add-on,” which presumably means that non-coerciveness in implementation is not even “suggested” by the internalism that I insist on in matters of the justification of secularism.  Well, I have quoted the passage that elaborates what is suggested and why. Since Mehta gives no reason or argument to doubt the suggestion, I don’t know what it is that I am responding to exactly, when he says that my quasi-Hegelian humanism (the doctrine that is embedded in my internalism regarding justification) does not suggest non-coerciveness in implementation, but is an “add-on.” Rather than respond in a void, I had better wait to hear more from him.

Second, here is what I said, when I expounded the humanism that I found implicit in the idea of someone saying “You must be my brother,” with a view to expressing that she refuses (ethically, not predictively, refuses) to see history as doomed to failure in providing internal reasons to subjects she opposes on some political or moral issue (secularism, for instance):

I will admit that the rhetoric of “must” …to express the …values does not present the best option[s]. I did use the flamboyant rhetoric even so and presented the option[s] in…[its] most extreme form, in order to bring [it] out…vividly. To care about the truth, as one sees it and judges it, and to care enough for others who do not see it, to strive to share it with them, need not take on the vocabulary which has it that one thinks that they “must” be one’s brother and embrace the truth we see. But that vocabulary captures something of the caring that I want to stress here against the relativist form of pluralism, which precisely does not care in this way.

It should be obvious to any reader of this very self-consciously constructed passage that the “must” in “You must be my brother” is supposed to express the caring that I define my humanism upon, and not any form of violence or coercion towards those whom one wishes to convince of the truth. If this is obvious, then it requires no gallantry or special sympathy in Mehta, as a reader of “the concluding pages” of my text where he locates this “add-on,” to read it as saying this: if this humanism based on a “must” that indicates no coercive element but rather a keen desire to find internal reasons to change another’s mind grafts upon a diachronic, conception of human subjects, the implementation of a secularism that emerges out of such an internalist and historical process, can’t possibly be envisioned in coercive terms.

“Can’t possibly” is a good conversing expression to be paired with his “following from.” If so, an “add-on” is exactly what it is not.

In my closing section, after having made a certain appeal to an historically constituted Hegelian subject, I had suggested that, for my purposes, such an appeal was insufficient. What is also needed is an ethical stance from which one sees history as necessarily allowing the possibility that internal reasons may in the future be efficacious in changing the minds of those whom one deeply opposes on some moral or political issue, but to whom one has not yet been able to provide any such internal reasons. What makes the adoption of this nested modality (“it is necessary that it is possible that…”) an ethical stance?

The answer, according to me, was that the stance reflected some aspects of an ethics of humanism, in particular its attitude of fraternity or brotherhood towards all human others. Mehta expresses some doubts about whether fraternity could possibly be what is at stake here, without some further supplement.

To understand the issue, one needs to situate the stance I was recommending in the context of what it was a stance against. I was rejecting a certain form of relativism about reasons. Such a relativism says: if there are, at a given time, two irresolubly opposed points of view, there are not sufficient grounds to think that history will necessarily throw up possibilities for either side to change the mind of the other in the future, by producing internal conflict (as Hegel might say) in the other’s point of view.  It may be that the most that history guarantees is that of another kind of nested modality, merely an iterated possibility—“it is possible that it is possible that such an outcome will emerge.” If that is the best one can expect from the appeal to history, a relativism may loom. We might have to say that each side in the moral or political dispute has the truth or the right on its side because there are no internal reasons that either can expect to provide to the other. It was this view, which I thought should be rejected. But my grounds for rejecting it, as I have pointed out in previous responses to comments, were not predictive, not based on some metaphysical understanding of history’s possibilities. It was an ethical stance regarding how to see history’s relevance for reason and for subjectivity.

In a somewhat ostentatious bit of rhetoric to make things vivid, I had expressed the point about humanism and fraternity that attaches to the position I was taking (against those who think we should capitulate in this way to relativism), as follows. When two parties are in a vexed moral or political dispute, there is something more ethically attractive about someone who says, “You must (where this “must” is not backed by sanctions or force or violence or any such thing, but rather is an expression of a deep desire to persuade the other via the providing of internal reasons) be my brother” than someone who says “You can never be my brother.” The relativist is happy to rest with the latter (“You can never be my brother”). I had thought one should insist on the former, that it was ethically the better stance.

As should be obvious, given the sort of philosophical issue that I’ve just expounded in which this rhetorical contrast was made, humanism and brotherhood (or fraternity) were intended very explicitly by me to mean something restricted. It meant that, in a dispute, each party wished to include (via persuasion on the basis of internal reasons) the other and indeed all human beings, in the truth. Like any humanism and ideal of brotherhood it was inclusive of all human beings but not in any other sense than that special and limited sense of inclusiveness that I’ve just italicized. (There are two points that should also be obvious and I will put them down in this parenthesis as asides. One, of course, the truth would be truth by their own lights, there being, for them, as for anyone, no other lights but their own. Two, the sort of truth involved would be something in the political or moral realm since those were the relevant examples for my concerns. So the “truth” I was concerned with was not something remotely theoretical or scientific but was interchangeable with “rightness” and I discussed examples such as the truth or rightness of free speech versus the truth or rightness of censorship, in the face of, say, a “blasphemous” novel.)  The idea is that it is a humanism, a form of fraternity with other human beings, because one cares for them enough to want to include them in something that is important in one’s life: the moral and political truth (of course, as one sees it, but that should go without saying). However, because one wants to include them in something like the truth, I went on to say this:

To many humanists, such talk of brotherhood—flowing as it does from an ideal of caring for something so abstract as truth, and wanting to share that abstract thing with others—will seem too intellectualized a way of talking compared…to the down-to-earth ways in which we talk of the humanist values of brotherhood…

Mehta thinks something like this too of my view, calling its sources of fraternity “thin” compared to the sources of ordinary notions of fraternity that have been with us for a long time. What I was doing in this passage was frankly admitting that this humanism, unlike other more familiar forms of humanism that we also value, is not the inclusiveness of felt solidarities with other human beings which come from, say, compassionate regard for them and supportive relations with them. It comes rather from wanting them to partake in something that one cares for (the moral or political truth). Someone might ask, and given what he says, it might be a question that is nagging Mehta too: Your view may involve a caring for the truth, but why is it any kind of caring for them to want to include them in the truth? The answer to this can be conveyed in many ways. Here is one. One can imagine a father saying to his daughter, who has just told him that she believes something that her friend in school has convinced her of—say, that being cutting and superior towards others will make her attractive to and respected by her circle of friends: “I don’t care what your friend believes, but I do care for you and so I care that you believe what is right, and it is right to be kind to people.” That thought, “I care for you so I want you to believe what is right,” when writ large, i.e., when applied to all of humanity (including those with whom one is deeply disagreed on important matters) rather than just to one’s own child, is the humanism that I am targeting. (The point is not phenomenological. It would be far-fetched to think that the feelings one has for one’s child must carry over to the writ-large ideal of including all of humanity, but we knew that already in the passage we frequently make from such feelings as we have for one’s siblings to talk of the “brotherhood of man.”) So, wanting to include others in the truth does reflect a form of regard and caring for them, in this sense I have just mentioned, but what I was admitting in the passage was that—because the caring comes from such an abstract or “thin” source (wanting them to partake in the truth)—it is very unlike having feelings of compassion for them or actions and relations of support shown towards them.

Mehta asks:

The question I want to raise is whether…his version of humanism can deliver the fraternal caring that he thinks it can without some additional warrant and supplementation.

I must ask in response: if I am to deliver this fraternal caring about which I had made this frank admission explicitly in my essay in the passage just cited, what else, what supplementary thing do I need to do that Mehta is asking of me? I don’t see that I need to do anything other than what I had done in my paper. I had posited a form of humanism that brings one’s caring for other human beings in integrity with one’s caring for something abstract like the truth, by wanting to include other human beings in the truth. So, when asked, how can my humanism deliver caring of this sort, I can only repeat that it is delivered by taking the ethical stance that I think needs to be taken regards how to see the relation between history and subjectivity. I see history as necessarily offering possibilities of opportunity to include in the truth those subjects whom I currently take to be subscribing to something false—unlike the relativist who sees history as not necessarily offering any such possibilities, and who therefore asks me to allow them their own and different truths which, by my lights, are falsehood. Nothing more can be required for its delivery. To take the ethical stance against relativism is to care for others in this way—as possible partners in subscribing to what one takes to be something of great importance, the moral and political truth.

What Mehta misses is that I am multiplying notions (or adding a further notion) of fraternity. I am not holding fast to the familiar (or, if you like, “thickly”-sourced) form of fraternity as the only form there is, and struggling to find a way of supplementing my idea (of caring for others in a way that wants to include them in the truth one cares for) so that I go from this idea to that familiar (or “thickly”-sourced) form of humanism by the further step that the supplement provides. No, I am asserting that my idea, this way of caring for others, is itself a form of humanism, though a distinct form of humanism, not to be conflated with the other more standard form of it that is familiar from a long intellectual history, some parts of which Mehta obviously has at the back of his mind, when he asks whether it is fraternity and caring that I am really tracking.

I think Mehta fails to see this because in some places he writes as if my humanism consists in merely saying that one should care for the truth. That, by itself, can’t possibly be the form of fraternity or humanism I recommend because I myself point out that someone can care for the truth and say, regarding this matter of including others in the truth, “I don’t include you in it and so you can never, in this specific sense, be my brother.” To say this is not necessarily to cease to care for the truth. It can be said with a view to hoard for oneself, the truth that one greatly cares for. That for me is a distinct possibility, a possibility that makes me philosophically anxious, and I take and urge an ethical stance against it. And it is that ethical stance which is a distinct form of humanism, a distinct form of inclusiveness of all human others. To take such a stance is to say “You must be my brother,” it is to care to include all others in the truth. So, as I said above, the humanism consists not just in the caring for the truth but in the bringing together into an integrity the caring for the truth and the caring for others such that one wishes always to include others (whom one cares for) into the truth (which one cares for). There is, therefore, no distance between the ethical stance and the fraternity. I need no supplement.

He says:

Bilgrami is quite clear that in the first instance the caring is for one’s own conception of truth.

I am not at all clear about that because I am not at all sure what these “instances” are supposed to be, such that there is a first and (presumably) a second. I certainly do say that one must care for the truth. But I don’t rest there. So there is no discrete “instant” at which I rest and say: caring for the truth is all of this humanism I am committed to. I repeat that I couldn’t possibly be saying that because it is I who point out that one can care for the truth and yet say “You can never partake of the truth and therefore never be my brother.” I present this as being the denial of the humanism I am commending in these contexts. So there are no two “instances,” one of caring for the truth and the other of caring for others, with the former coming first and constituting all of my humanism, and a supplement needed to get to the second. Both carings form an integrity (that is to say, they are integrated) and that integrity is the non-standard humanism or fraternity I am commending, over and above the standard or traditional or “thickly”-sourced one.

There is another flaw in Mehta’s way of formulating things. In the sentence I cited above, he uses the phrase “the caring is for one’s conception of the truth.” The idea I have in mind can’t be captured in that phrase. From within my point of view, when I speak or think of the truth, it is just the truth. It is not the truth from my point of view, or my conception of the truth. Thus, if it is I who am doing the caring, it is the caring for the truth (of course, “as I see it”—but this proviso “as I see it” should not be part of how the truth that I care for, is characterized). That part is what goes without saying and it is important that one not say it. To actually say it, to make it part of the formulation of the object of my caring, is to misdescribe what it is that I care for. I (like everyone else) care only from within a point of view. And what I care for is, from within that point of view, the truth simpliciter, not the truth as I see it or conceive of it.

It is perhaps this sort of mistake that leads Mehta to say that the truth can be held by someone in a narcissistic and dogmatic way and when it is, wanting others to be included in it, wanting to share it with others, does not reflect any caring for them. I don’t see that this talk of dogmatism and narcissism has any relevance to what I had to say. First of all, I say often in my paper that the truth that I want to share must be something that is a deep and important part of how I conceive of myself—as someone for whom these things are deep and important. It is not lightly held, not an indulgence or fancy, it is what I consider worthy and care for. I suppose that things that go deep in one’s belief and in what one considers worthy can, by some observer’s rational standards or quasi-psychoanalytic lights, be seen as bits of “dogma” or as “narcissistically” held. But from the point of you of someone who has them as deep and heartfelt commitments (something I had insisted on from the outset), they are not any the less his commitments. Take someone who believes deeply in the goodness of his religion’s great prophetic figure. By someone else’s lights (Richard Dawkins’s, say) it may be a very dogmatic belief, or it may be seen by someone (all dressed up in a Kohutian theory of religion) as serving some narcissistic need to project the self-image of his own heroism onto a distant figure of his inherited religious culture. But from within that person’s own point of view it could still be utterly genuine and sincere and deeply held. And if it is not, then it is not what I said it must be in the way I set things up for the humanism and fraternity that I was expounding. So, for one reason or another, all of this talk about the truth being subscribed to in ways that are dogmatic and narcissistic is quite besides the point for what I want to and did say.

It is on the last couple of these issues that my comments will focus. This is a small window through which to enter into Bilgrami’s broad-ranging and powerful arguments. The precise extent to which this point of entry connects with other aspects of his edifice is not entirely obvious to me, though given the tightly connected analytical tissue he presents, it is likely to have some implications on other parts of his argument. The question I want to raise is whether, given Bilgrami’s endorsement of internal reasons as the basis of “one’s truth” as it is relevant to secularism, his version of humanism can deliver the fraternal caring that he thinks it can without some additional warrant and supplementation. This question relates to the issue of the significance of the neutrality of the state and to why Bilgrami thinks the impasse of relativism does not follow from his view of secularism and why it does not disable it—both issues on which he disagrees with Charles Taylor.

Bilgrami sees the special value of humanism in its inclusiveness in the face of “bitter and vexed” disputes, where each party claims internal reasons as the ground for its own truths. When faced with such disputes, and with no external reasons to which to appeal to settle them, humanism as an evaluative position, Bilgrami claims, permits one to embrace one’s bitter foe as a brother. The significance of this fraternal idea is that it allows one to insist on one’s own truth, thus not being hobbled by relativism and its political cognate neutrality, while offering that very insistence on one’s own truth as a mark of one’s care for one’s fraternal foe. Bilgrami is quite clear that in the first instance the caring is for one’s own conception of what is true. There are no fraternal feelings being insisted on towards others beyond the firm conviction that I have in my truth, which I wish him to accept.

The question I want to raise is: Does this form of caring for my own truth imply any other form of caring for my bitter foe, now designated as my brother, or does the conception of caring need to be thickened with something beyond a love of truth that wishes the other to see things my way? Put differently, does caring for my own version of the truth necessarily produce a form of fraternity that deserves the name? Bilgrami admits that his form of humanism and inclusiveness stems from a rather abstract source, namely a commitment to truth based on one’s own internal reasons. But he does not think this invalidates the point he makes and by which he seeks to go beyond relativism and neutrality. I am not entirely convinced. It is not the abstractness of the position that troubles me. Rather, it is the thinness of the resources by which fraternity could in fact be engendered. I think humanism and fraternity require something beyond a conviction in one’s own truth, though I admit such a conviction adds something profound, and perhaps even essential, to both ideas.

My main reasons for not being convinced is that it seems to me there are all sorts of ways in which one could be utterly convinced of one’s own truth, and wish to have it accepted by others, without entailing any care for those who do not share those truths; indeed, in a good many such cases the very basis of one’s subjective certitude makes an uncaringness and moral indifference towards others highly likely. One could, for example, be utterly dogmatic in one’s insistence on one’s truth or one might have a narrowly narcissistic self-certainty, or just be unable to imagine another point of view, but none of these ways of holding to one’s truths is likely to engender a form of caring that deserves the name of fraternity, even though they might all be moved to be wholly inclusive toward others. The epistemological confidence that marks dogmatism or narcissism is not typically leavened by patience, humility, forgiveness, or openness—the sort of values that must make up the content of care and fraternity. Indeed, such confidence often thinks of itself as having reasons for being aggressive and dominating. Those reasons, barring perverse situations where the person is aware of their own dogmatism or narcissism, are likely to be justified by their insistence on or care for the truth. But the fraternity of such ways of holding to the truth gives nothing of itself to others in the putative gesture of inclusion, i.e. its insistence on the truth one wishes the other to hold to. Even when dogmatically or narcissistically held views change on account of incoming information or the broad effects of Hegelian dialectics, that change need not produce an attitudinal change that brings them closer to a genuine care and respect for others. After all, dogmatism and narcissism are both characterized by self-serving forms of forgetting that allow one to overlook the fact that one’s views have in fact changed. It seems to me that this point has a broader application, beyond the instances where the truth is held dogmatically or narcissistically. Self-certainty by itself needs to be leavened by at least humility for it to be able to produce respect for the other, especially if the other is a bitter foe. When Bilgrami, in the concluding pages of his paper, refers to non-dominating and non-coercive forms of state behavior as following from his quasi-Hegelian humanism, this strikes me as an add-on, for which his thin form of humanism gives little internal warrant.

The point I am making can be illustrated by way of considering Mahatma Gandhi’s attitude towards truth and fraternity. Gandhi insisted on the truth—his truth. This was the singular yardstick by which his actions and those whom he led were to be governed and judged. Such an attitude often produced deep conflicts with those who disagreed with him—conflicts with the imperial authorities, Indian nationalists, and various individuals, including members of his own family, such as his wife and sons. In these conflicts Gandhi hardly ever relaxed his commitment to the truth as he took it; nor did he typically invoke an external or neutral vantage point from which to settle these disputes. Moreover, he did not as a general matter advocate resorting to a framework of toleration such as that offered by a neutral state, which he knew could lead to mutual indifference.

Instead, he insisted on the truth and on fraternity. He yoked the two ideas by giving something of himself, which was not simply an extension of his firmness regarding his view of the truth. Gandhi’s response to deep differences went well beyond the avowal of epistemic and moral certainty. He fasted, he gave up cherished foods, he served in wars where the primary threat was to his opponents and not to himself, he welcomed and courted imprisonment, he abjured the use of physical and other forms of violence and domination, and he was prepared to be endlessly patient and take on suffering. In brief, he vouched for his truth in a way that gave a thicker content to the idea of fraternity, which therefore went beyond just vouching for his truth and the inclusiveness that resulted from that alone. It was such acts that allowed him to think that public concerns could still be navigated though a familial ideal such as fraternity. And similarly it was such forms of behavior—some of which were self-referential, such as fasting, others in which he threw in his lot with his opponents, and yet others where he stood his ground and accepted the consequences—that made Gandhi’s humanism genuinely inclusive and more plausibly caring and fraternal. He made himself, as Bilgrami has compellingly argued in another essay, exemplary and through that generated a convivial, one might say fraternal, radiance, which often moved his opponents. Why did it so often move his opponents? I suspect in large measure because they saw in these acts a firmness of conviction that could not plausibly stem from dogmatism, narcissism, or cognitive myopia and because such acts exemplified some additional quality on account of which his opponents were prepared to reconsider their own firmly held truths. By wagering something of himself, he created the ground on which truth and fraternity could both be sustained. This was also Gandhi’s way of going beyond the impasse of relativism and neutrality without having to rely on Hegel’s reason in history to sustain, as in the case of Bilgrami’s humanism, his confidence in secular liberal outcomes.

First, the exposition. Most importantly, (S) is about religion; it is a “stance towards religion,” as Bilgrami puts it. He wants to narrow the concept in order to give it analytic purchase and clarity, and so he distinguishes it from “secularization” and “the secular.” Others have made similar distinctions, of course, but usually in order to identify a range of discourses and practices that are not obviously about religion but nevertheless central to its historical construction: Charles Taylor’s “secular age,” for example, or Talal Asad’s “anthropology of the secular.” Bilgrami goes in the other direction: he knowingly excludes from (S) a whole range of things that might be said to belong to the secular. Meditating, for example, on why some religious communities tend not to speak out against their more extreme fundamentalist elements, Bilgrami writes that:

In the case of Islam, this defensively uncritical psychology has been bred by years of colonial subjugation, by continuing quasi-colonial economic arrangements with American and European corporate exploitation of energy resources of countries with large Muslin populations, by immoral embargoes imposed on these countries that cause untold suffering to ordinary people, by recent invasions of some of these countries by Western powers, and finally by the racialist attitudes towards migrants from these countries in European nations.

Colonialism, neo-colonialism, economic neo-liberalism, and the presumed cultural superiority of the West do not seem unconnected to the history of secularism. Some might add mass incarceration and other forms of state-sponsored violence to the list, techniques of the body and new sensory repertoires, even capitalism itself.

(S) runs directly counter to this discursive expansion of secularism. We might think, Bilgrami writes, that the “rhetoric of ‘secularism’ … plays a role in the anti-Islamist drumbeat of propaganda that accompanies these other factors,” like neo-liberalism and the legacies of colonialism. But even if that is so, he argues, “the right thing to do is not to ask that secularism be redefined, but to demand that one should drop talk of secularism and focus instead on trying to improve matters on what is really at stake: the effects of a colonial past, a commercially exploitative present, unjust wars and embargoes, racial discrimination….” For Bilgrami, to discuss these things under the rubric of secularism is to make a category mistake.

I don’t intend to be making a point of which Bilgrami is unaware. Indeed, the whole goal of his paper is to produce a remarkably modest, minimal account of secularism (a goal not all of the commentators on the paper here on The Immanent Frame seem to have grasped). But it’s important to see what that minimalism entails. Here is Bilgrami’s description of (S):

In a religiously plural society, all religions should have the privilege of free exercise and evenhanded treatment except when a religion’s practices are inconsistent with the ideals that a polity seeks to achieve, in which case there is a lexical ordering in which the political ideals are placed first.

Importantly, (S) does not stipulate what the polity’s substantive ideals are or ought to be; it says only that those ideals have lexical priority over religious ideals when the two come into conflict. Modern democracies will likely tend toward familiar ideals—freedom of speech and association, for example—but other kinds of societies may well place other ideals first. The point is simply that those ideals, whatever they are, come first.

Bilgrami admits that this picture of secularism is “more adversarial” toward religion than Taylor’s multicultural ideal of neutrality. But it is adversarial in a limited sense: (S) only cares about religion “as it affects the polity. It is not dismayed by or concerned with the presence of religiosity in the society at large or in the personal beliefs of the individual citizens.” For (S), private religion is fine: even public religion is fine. Conflict only arises when religion tries to drive policies that run athwart the polity’s ideals. In that case, and only in that case, the lexical ordering kicks in.

Lest this sound imperious, Bilgrami emphasizes that the only reasons for holding (S) in the first place are “internal reasons” (a concept he adapts from Bernard Williams).

Internal reasons are “reasons we give to another that appeal to some of his own values in order to try and persuade him to change his mind.” We are all internally conflicted in some way. This doesn’t mean blatant contradiction, in the sense of believing both p and not-p; it just means that there are tensions among values that an interlocutor can help bring to the surface. In the same fashion, reasons for holding (S) must be “internal”—that is, those reasons cannot be separated from the values and commitments of the individuals or groups holding (S). They are not universal or context-independent. So internal reasons will persuade some people but not others. However, as with John Rawls’s notion of the “overlapping consensus,” Bilgrami suggests that there are plural reasons for holding (S). In a plural society, it is the consensus that overlaps, not the reasons. In the matter at hand, then, secularism should drop talk of universal rights in favor of seeking “local concepts and commitments within the [religious] community … that might put pressure on the community’s own practices.”

This is not only a matter of reasoning with someone in a cognitivist way. For even agents who hold tightly to an apparently unconflicted set of principles are subject to the changes of history: “internal conflicts may be injected by historical developments into moral psychological economies.” Indeed, most successful activist movements work in exactly this way, by bringing to light or making visible a historical change already underway, thereby forcing majorities to confront the historically-bound nature of their own commitments, which they might otherwise have continued to think of as timeless.

Yet the historical record certainly offers plenty of examples of unchanged minds, or of minds that change and then change back, or of minds that change for the worse rather than the better, becoming more entrenched, more dogmatic, and so on. These possibilities don’t register very strongly in Bilgrami’s paper. This is what I meant when I said above that one tonal register of this paper is hope. For Bilgrami has a humanist confidence that the movement of history will eventually force illiberalism to confront its own internal tensions. Here is where he takes an evaluative stand: he believes this not for metaphysical reasons (some grand Theory of History) but because to believe it is to care about the truth in a certain way. To want to argue with someone and convince them that their own deeply held principles are tension-filled and therefore ought to be modified is to care about truth as you see it in such a way that you want others to see things your way too. This is a sign of respect, and it also fosters an ethical project: generating “empathetic attitudes of engagement with the tradition and mentality of those one opposes.”

I like all this very much. It nicely sidesteps much of what is unpalatable or just plain shallow in some fashionable versions of relativism. It proposes a kind of dialogue that is respectful but also deeply committed to getting things right. And its picture of truth is dialectical and internal: we move toward truth through the hard work of examining internal points of tension within our own substantive commitments and moral/psychological principles. (This is why I think Justin Neuman rather misses the point when he writes in his post that Bilgrami is too ready to generalize about groups of people; as I understand it, one primary purpose of Bilgrami’s emphasis on moral psychology is to make it harder to engage in such generalizations.)

And yet it is clear that (S) depends upon a certain historically-specific definition of religion.  It builds on a picture of “religion” as ideally heading towards post-Westphalian Protestantism—a formation that, several historians have plausibly argued, helped to build the modern nation state as we know it. It seems likely that this hopeful trajectory is in some tension with a different theme that emerges in the middle of the paper. Here Bilgrami notes that secularism as a policy is the result and requirement of a post-Westphalian Western Europe, which strove to develop a “feeling for the nation” by identifying internal others (the Jews, the Irish) and thus “inventing” the problem of minorities. For Charles Taylor, those cases in which majorities and minorities are understood in terms of religion demand secularism in the form of neutrality. Bilgrami is skeptical that secularism as neutrality can actually handle the challenge of majoritarianism. When majorities and minorities are defined in terms of religion, he argues, “there inevitably arises a sense that religion itself is the problem, even though the historical source of the problem lies in majoritarianism.” At this point something stronger than neutrality is needed, namely the lexical ordering.

What I am calling the secondary tonality of tragedy enters here, because Bilgrami is clear that it didn’t have to turn out this way. Mohandas Gandhi, for example, tried hard to prevent the development of a situation in India (of nationalism and majoritarianism) that would in turn require secularism. (This argument isn’t really developed in the present paper, but Bilgrami has written of it elsewhere.) In this example, history is not a progressive force that gradually loosens the hold of illiberalism, but actually creates the conditions in which illiberalism can flourish, which in turn brings forth the need for (S) as our best hope in a situation that hasn’t turned out very well.

And, finally, the third tonality. Whether history is ultimately progressive or tragic, it is at least dynamic. Religion, by contrast, seems quite static. In Bilgrami’s schema, secularism points out to religion (or waits for history to do the pointing out) that its picture of things is full of internal tensions; it thereby hopes to convince religion to sign on to (S)’s lexical ordering for reasons that remain religious (that’s the overlapping consensus part of the argument) but have now been pluralized (that’s the moral psychological part of the argument). I don’t get any sense that for Bilgrami the arrow might sometimes point in the other direction. Like Lars Tønder and a few of the other commentators on the paper, I wonder whether this simply reintroduces the conceits of secularism (its confident sense that it is right, and that history is on its side) in more modest garb. Can we really envision, on Bilgrami’s grounds, an engagement that reveals that secularism, too, has internal tensions that should be confronted—a conversation, that is, that actually changes both participants? This is the possibility that William Connolly gestured toward in a brief reading of Søren Kierkegaard in Why I Am Not a Secularist, and that Tønder develops very nicely out of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the “tolerance of the incomplete” in his piece: “rather than beginning with the issue of how to order political ideals,” Tønder writes, “Merleau-Ponty’s dialectic begins in the midst of lived experience, where perceptions, judgments, and ideals have not yet reached the threshold of conceptual clarity….” This would lead to epistemic modesty of a different kind—neither a liberal recommendation of tolerance because we might turn out to be wrong, nor the modesty of the overlapping consensus, but a modesty born of the sense that things are still in flux, still in process, and that all of us find ourselves suddenly in the middle of things and without fully secure footing. Elsewhere I’ve suggested that the romantic theory of the fragment offers a useful way to think about this kind of modesty.

I suspect that Bilgrami would say that I’m missing the point here. (S), he insists at the very beginning of his paper, isn’t a good in itself, and so it can’t be internally conflicted, nor can it be anthropomorphized. (S) merely seeks to promote other kinds of goods (to be established by the polity in question) and it is in order to protect those goods that the requirement of lexical ordering comes into play. Yet there is one good that (S) seems to be not simply protecting but also promoting, and that is the good of helping religions pluralize their own self-conceptions. This is where (S) becomes activist in a way that Bilgrami, I think, doesn’t fully admit. If I may introduce a new term here, we could say that (S) is prophetic in its relation to religion.

There are good reasons to think that religion is more dynamic than Bilgrami’s picture of it allows. Indeed, it seems to me that religion has often been prophetic in its relation to the state—even, perhaps, to the point of convincing it to change its lexical ordering. But that is a topic for another day.

This interview was conducted in conjunction with the SSRC’s project on Religion and International Affairs.—ed.

* * *

NS: After your tenure last year as president of the American Academy of Religion, what do you think are the deepest challenges facing the study of religion today?

MJ: That’s an interesting question, because, in some ways, religion has never been of greater interest to a greater number of people than it is at present. Whenever something blows up, religion seems to be in the news. But, on the other hand, scholars are less and less sure about what religion actually is, and it has become an increasingly problematic subject to study. The self-confidence that an earlier generation had in the ideas of the “secular” and the “religious” has come into question. Because of globalization, we’re intensely aware of all of the diversity of perspectives in the world, and we’re increasingly aware that our perceptions are not necessarily the only ones, the right ones, or the dominant ones. The way we have come to conceive of religion in the post-Enlightenment West—as something reified and essentially different from the secular—is falling apart. Maybe the religious and secular never really existed in quite the ways that we thought about them. Religious studies remains, in large part, what it has always been—the study of religious literature, ritual, organizations, and the like—but at the heart of it, there is the very difficult conceptual question of how to think about religion in a globalized world.

NS: You’ve worked in a number of different departmental settings, including Asian studies, divinity schools, religion departments, and now global studies. Do you think that religion needs its own department? Or can it be addressed, fruitfully, in other contexts?

MJ: The answer is both. It’s like mathematics. You can’t imagine mathematics not having its own department, but you also can’t imagine physics, or accounting, or even political science and sociology without it. In the same way, I think religion has a part to play in other ways of understanding the contemporary world—whether political, anthropological, social, or economic—but there is also the danger that it can become too easily slivered off into pieces. Departments of religion allow people to look at the whole. Not everybody in those departments studies everything, of course, but they’re aware of what one another are doing in a way that they wouldn’t be if they were separated in different departments.

There have been attempts to make religious studies into a discipline or a science, and I’m not sure that has entirely worked. But the same is true about political science and sociology. Academic life is a coffeehouse with a whole bunch of tables, and there are different people sitting around the tables discussing different things, and each table is a field or a discipline. You can pick up and go from one table to another and talk about the same thing but find that you’re in a different conversation. Religious studies deserves its own table.

NS: What, then, can those conversations offer outside of the academic coffeehouse? I remember when Madeleine Albright came to the AAR and said that religion experts should participate more in matters of international policy, for instance.

MJ: I agree. When people like me, who study religion and violence, are called upon to advise an intelligence agency, or the State Department, or people in the military, I think that’s great. But it’s not like I’m telling them something different from what I’m telling anybody else. All I know is what is in my books. I don’t have a treasure chest of secret information that intelligence agency people would want. Probably the most valuable thing I can offer a government agency is an outsider’s perspective about the way in which other people view the world.

NS: Is there a particularly urgent message that you try to convey to them?

MJ: What I’ve found is that I’m most useful for alerting them to the one thing that they don’t have, and don’t want to deal with: a view of America’s role in the world, and the way in which our actions affect the actions of others. People don’t act in a vacuum. They respond to their perceptions of us, and the role that they see us playing in the world. If we’re perceived as the Great Satan—whether we think we are or not—it’s very important to know that, because it helps us understand why people respond to us as if we were. Within their sphere of perception, they’re simply responding to an image that they have of us.

NS: Is this a lesson that you’ve learned from the terrorists and religious militants you’ve talked with over the years?

MJ: Sure. To be a good social scientist, I have to try and understand another person’s frame of reference. My job in those interviews is not just to get information from these people but to try to get into their minds, into their views of the world, into their worldviews. As a sociologist, and also as a religious studies scholar, I’m what Ninian Smart used to call a “worldview analyst.” In the course of a conversation, I try to understand the other person’s frame of reference. I try to find out how they want to present themselves to me. That helps me understand them.

A good example of this is Mahmud Abouhalima, one of the key people in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. I had a series of remarkable interviews with him in prison after he was convicted. He’s an affable, friendly, very talkative fellow. The way he explained the role of religion in his life and in society gave me a profound window into his view of the world. He regarded Islam as having rescued him at a couple of points in his own past—from an aimlessness when he was a kid in Egypt to another aimlessness when he was in Germany and was being wooed by the easy pleasures of Western life and Western women. He was struggling for a sense of identity and coherence in a world that is fractured and immoral. He made an attempt to justify himself—including several horrible murders of Muslim clerics in Brooklyn—by casting himself as a soldier for virtue in a war in which immorality and secular irreligiousness are the great enemy. At one point he leaned over to me and whispered intensely, “Mr. Mark, you just don’t get it. There’s a war going on, Mr. Mark. There’s a battle between good and evil and right and wrong. You just don’t see it!” And so I asked him if that was why people blow buildings up, to try to make that point. And he looked at me and smiled and said, “Well now you see, don’t you? Now you see.” His violence was meant as a demonstration to the world, to make visible for everybody else that we are living in a war and that we need to wake up.

NS: Is such religious violence fundamentally different from violence understood in secular terms? Is it necessary to draw a distinction there?

MJ: I hesitate to use the words “religious violence,” because it sounds as if I’m promoting the idea that religion causes violence. I don’t believe that for a moment. I sometimes have to defend myself and remind people that I don’t say that. I think that violence happens for a complex variety of social and political and economic reasons.

On one level, violence is violence; it is a social phenomenon. What religious images and language can bring to a violent situation, though, is a structure of justification and meaning. It can be an ethical justification, or it can also be a more dramatic, visual one, touching on the symbolism of the cosmic war, the great battle between good and evil, right and wrong, religion and irreligion. I call it “cosmic war” rather than “holy war,” because I mean to imply, not just a fight fought for religious reasons, but the image of a broader conflict between good and evil. Or, in many Eastern traditions, it’s a battle over chaos and order, as in the Mahabharata and the Ramayana.

NS: Religion has become the language of resistance against modern states much more in recent decades than at the height of the Cold War, when secular economic or social theories tended to be structuring the ideologies of resistance movements. What might be the consequences of such a shift from secular to religious ideologies?

MJ: In some cases, as in Egypt, it’s the same people; they just take off their Marxist hats, put on their Muslim hats, and they’re good to go. One needs a great ideological template of moral struggle with which to justify a challenge to power, authority, and order. Marxism supplied that, and so does a certain kind of politicized religious language. They’re both ideologies of order. But the way in which you perceive the nature of a struggle makes a huge difference. If you think of it in religious terms, the timelines can be vast. They can be eternal.

I’ll give you an example. When I was interviewing Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, the political head of the Hamas movement, I brought up the futility of using suicide bombing against the Israelis. I pointed out that Israel has one of the strongest armies in the world, and certainly the strongest in the Middle East. These suicide attacks can certainly annoy them, but it’s not going to topple the political institutions of Israel or create a Palestinian state. He just looked at me and smiled, as if he were speaking to a small child, and said, “Well, maybe not in my lifetime. Maybe not in my children’s lifetime. Maybe not in my children’s children’s lifetime. But in my children’s children’s children’s lifetime, it might succeed. We cannot lose. This is God’s war.” If you think it’s God’s war, then you’re able to put up with temporary failure. If this is God’s war, that changes the whole equation of the struggle. And, of course, cosmic war justifications exist in all religious traditions—you see this difficulty not just on the Muslim side of the contemporary Israeli-Palestinian situation but also on the Jewish side, often with people associated with the settler movement. If you’re a certain kind of messianic, Zionist Jew, your actions, like those of the Muslims on the other side, are for much greater reasons than mere conquest. A temporary setback doesn’t matter because it is an eternal war.

NS: So how does one address another’s cosmic claims? Some want to ignore them and focus on underlying political and economic conditions; others say these people cannot be reasoned with and must be answered with violence.

MJ: There’s a third option: a conversion from within the religious community, one that persuades people that they are not engaged in a cosmic war and should redirect their activities. I think there has to be a combination between the first and the third. Addressing the social and economic issues that help to give rise to tensions in the first place can play a part in disarming the ideology. I have no doubt that if there were to be a solution tomorrow to the Israeli-Palestinian situation, it would deflate a lot of the jihadi rhetoric in the Middle East. Getting the U.S. military out of Iraq and Afghanistan would be an even bigger pin in that bubble, because then you wouldn’t have the same Great Satan doing Great Satanic things. The second choice, which is to fight fire with fire, only magnifies the image of cosmic war.

This is what the “war on terror” did. Even calling it a “war” was a mistake. I’ve gone back to look at the newspapers on 9/11, and none of them used the word “war.” It didn’t appear in the newspapers until the next day, 9/12, in quotation marks: “Acts of war,” said the headlines. That, of course, came from President Bush’s speech. Suddenly, the war against terror became the image that defined our response to the attacks, and that has been driving our foreign policy ever since. My thought was then, and has been ever since: Why on earth are we promoting the ideology of Osama bin Laden? We’re taking that jihadi view of the world and validating it with our own rhetoric and our own actions. If you want to deflate the impression of being an enemy in a cosmic war, there’s a very simple way of doing it: stop acting like the enemy that they think we are. I have no doubt that the whole thing would then begin to collapse. It takes two to do this kind of bellicose tango. Radical religion can dissipate as quickly as it was created, like a summer storm. In that sense, I’m an optimist.

NS: Have you seen this happen in any of the conflicts you’ve studied?

MJ: During the 1980s a spiral of hideous violence arose between young Sikhs and the Indian government. But after a decade, it just unraveled. Yes, the Indian government exerted strong police pressure, as they always had. What really changed in the end, though, was that people in the villages no longer supported the radicals, and the movement fell apart. Just a couple of years later, I went to one of those villages where virtually all of the young people of a certain generation had been wiped out. I asked their families, “What about the cause they were fighting for?” One of the fallen Sikh militant’s brothers, who had become the head of his village, was obviously embarrassed to be talking about it. “What about your dead brother?” I asked. “Oh, we loved him.” he said. “We paid our respects.” Now the surviving brother was busy trying to work with the government to get more benefits for the town, to improve the road—doing all the normal things that people do. And what about the Sikh revolution? It was simply over. It was gone. The image of great warfare had vanished and worldly matters had returned. The same thing could happen with the great jihadi war.

NS: How does your early work on Gandhi and nonviolence affect your analysis of religious violence?

MJ: In several ways. It helps explain why I became interested in violence in the first place. Pacifists like myself are often fascinated with social violence because it seems so odd. What is there in the human imagination that allows us to switch gears so easily between the normalcy of civil society and the overdrive of warfare? I wanted to understand what happens in people’s minds when they’re so seized with passion about a struggle that they’ll go out and kill in such horrible ways.

What I’ve learned most from my understanding of the Gandhian mode of conflict resolution is the importance of trying to understand another’s perspective. For Gandhi, this was the fun of conflict—and I do mean fun, because Gandhi loved conflict. He was a pacifist, but that doesn’t mean he was passive. Conflict, as Gandhi pointed out, is one time when you’re forced to see the world from another person’s point of view. Unless somebody challenges you forcefully, in a way that makes you stop and think, you’ll just go idly about your business. We all know that from our own relationships; it’s not until somebody comes at you from a different point of view, seemingly from left field, that you really begin to question yourself and look carefully at what you’re doing.

I began my work on religion, politics, and violence by trying to understand worldviews that clash with ours—and by that I mean not only theirs but ours as well. I did so with the awareness that my way of seeing the world is not necessarily the only way. It was, in a sense, a Gandhian project.

NS: And you also studied with Reinhold Niebuhr at Union?

MJ: Niebuhr was probably my greatest single influence as a professor. I was literally his last student. My first year at Union was the last year he taught a seminar, and I was in it. The second year, there was a group of us who met in his apartment every Friday afternoon. Then, the third year, the other two had left Union, and I went up there on my own. One of the things that drew me to Niebuhr—though it was his ideas that drew me more than anything else—was that his family and my family came from the same German immigrant community in central Missouri.

NS: He was someone who began as a pacifist but went on to develop a critique of pacifism. How did Niebuhr’s thought play into how you think about violence?

MJ: Well, I disagree with Niebuhr on his analysis of Gandhi. I think he didn’t understand Gandhi. He regarded Gandhi as a sentimentalist, the same way he regarded Marx as a sentimentalist: as someone with vaunted expectations about human nature. But Gandhi was more of a realist than Niebuhr assumed, and his method of conflict resolution involves exerting a certain kind of pressure. This is not exactly the coercion Niebuhr accused him of, because Gandhi tried to make a distinction between coercive and non-coercive force. Force that is coercive doesn’t give you any choice about accepting or not accepting your opponent’s position. Non-coercive force is about making you dramatically aware of a situation while leaving you to make a choice on your own. Gandhi would want concessions to be made out of free will rather than by coercion. Actually, I don’t think that Niebuhr was as different from Gandhi as he thought.

NS: For both, a deep moral sensibility seems to have kept their realism from falling into cynicism.

MJ: That’s what I liked about Niebuhr, of course. He tried to take seriously the moral dimension of public life and to understand where it could come from in a world that is, alas, populated by sinful humans. And, despite his understanding of Original Sin, he knew that we can be capable of fellowship and of selfless love. But collectivities are less morally adept, because they’re never capable of selfless love. A corporation might say it’s sorry, but it would never try to show its contrition in a way that would bring about its own demise. Parents sacrifice for their kids, soldiers perform acts of bravery in warfare, but collectivities can’t do that, and that was Niebuhr’s great insight. He insisted on the necessity for us to create buffers against the power of collectivities like nations and corporations: he thought that we needed structures of justice, on the one hand, and countervailing powers, like labor unions, on the other.

NS: What kinds of things did you talk about with him?

MJ: He told stories about his time in Detroit and what he learned as a pastor there. His last book was on the nature of man and his communities. Niebuhr felt that churches actually have a greater moral capacity than other collectivities do. He tried to make that argument. Sometimes I doubt it, with the way churches eat each other and are, in my mind, subject to the same terrible limitations as other kinds of human enterprise. It’s so depressing to see churches on the wrong side of the moral issues in our day. Occasionally you see them on the right side, and that at least gives me some hope.