Consider, first, the positioning of religion (or her once-young grandmother, Theology) in that primary architectonics of modern knowledge: the frontispiece to Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie.

In a “temple” or “sanctuary” of truth, a host of clever girls clutch a range of instruments and accessories from compasses, set squares, cacti, and microscopes to harps, masks, and puppets. At the top, where all the action takes place, Truth (at the apex) is being attended by crowned Reason and, below her is Philosophy (just below and to theright). Reason is lifting, and Philosophy is arranging, Truth’s diaphanous veil. Awkwardly positioned between the two is Theology. In the words of Diderot’s commentary: “A ses pieds la Théologie agenouillée reçoit sa lumière d’en-haut.” (At her [Truth’s] feet, Theology kneels and receives her [Theology’s] light from above.) The phrase “her light” is pointed. Diplomatically (or tongue-in-cheek) the image at least allows for the possibility that Mademoiselle Théologie’s light converges with, or is at least part of, the general radiance of Truth that, as Diderot says, “disperses the clouds.” Miss Theology is at a tangent and potentially independent from all that is going on around her. There’s a strong possibility that she might dash out of the temple of truth at any moment should she be led to do so by her light.

This is a scene of obfuscation and diplomacy. It is a tableau of the awkward accommodation of religion and an emblem of Modernity’s wager, or double-think, about religion. There is a founding non-synchronicity between Reason and Theology or belief. Theology’s placement is deliberately obfuscated. She is close to the throne of Truth—but also strategically below it. Truth looks at her, as if looking to her or, at the very least, taking her into consideration. Maybe Truth is a consummate politician, making Theology feel important and wanted, if not entirely believed.

At the same time Philosophy, Truth’s deputy or civil servant has an anxious eye and maybe a restraining hand on Theology, as if keeping her under surveillance, as if Philosophy were a prototype of the FBI or MI5. I am reminded of Kant’s image of Philosophy, as “police[man] in the realm of the sciences [die Polizei im Reiche der Wissenschaften].” As a tolerated heteronomy, an awkward surplus to the system, Theology seems to require surveillance more than her sisters. Theology plays no part in the unveiling of Truth, nor does she consult or even acknowledge her sisters. She seems to think it sufficient to “lend an ear to the oracle within oneself [nur das Orakel in sich selbst anhören].” We don’t know if she is going to continue in these private devotions which seem to make her oblivious to everything going on around her. With one hand she clutches her precious biblia: a potentially loose canon. The explicit state-sponsored labor of Theology and Biblical Studies in the modern university will be to discipline this biblia with Wissenschaft—and cajole her light closer to the universally shared light. This is not just a matter of epistemology, but politics. It is a way of bringing potentially diffuse voices of god into a centralized “voice of [the Christian] God,” approximately and vaguely onboard with the structures of the modern state.

But there is no need to get too scared, or alarmist. Miss Theology looks peaceful and passive enough. She is not wearing a burka or carrying a knife. Though antique, she is not atavistic. She is no more retro than her sisters. She is suitably Abendländisch: embodying the foundations of Europe as simultaneously Christian and classical—hence relatively safe. In other words, she is still Theology, not Religion, and not Religions—that more expansive category that includes the darker apparitions of “religion[s]” plural. These will become more “natural” repositories of fanaticism, intolerance, and danger—so saving Christianity by contrast. This tableau of nascent secularism precedes, or brackets out, Gil Anidjar’s important story of how “Christianity invented the distinction between religious and secular” and “made religion,” thereby “making religion the problem—rather than itself.” In Western taxonomies of religion, the other religions (and certain religions in particular) took on the danger that Christianity never internalized, that it coined the “secular”-“religious” distinction to avoid. As Anidjar deftly puts it, the invention of religions and the secular became one of the essential means by which Christianity “failed to criticize itself,” the means by which it “forgot and forgave itself.”

And yet, at the moment when Theology has not yet expanded into those religions which will become repositories and dumping-grounds for danger, we can see very clearly the structural volatility of homegrown Theology’s position. We have no idea what is being transmitted to her through supernatural media, transmitting on an unknown frequency. She incarnates the unknown and the unknowable: no longer the gods, but her belief. Modernity is the time when the mystery goes inside—to the inner sanctum, the core of the person. It is the time when the holy is privatized as “her belief.” If “belief” is the leftover space to describe that which is not of Truth or Reason or Philosophy, then it is potentially ubiquitous—and rampant. Outside the ritualized, determined, self-estranging gestures of Philosophy, all is belief. But then—as if sensing the danger—belief is penned inside the category Theology (or Religion). In the neat segregations of modernity, Theology (and her grand-daughters, the religions) become the special foci and repository for the maverick force of belief.

And in law, belief must be treated as holy—even as we have no way of knowing, or policing, the objects and investments of this chimerical force that we call belief and that we unleash as, by definition, free. All that we can ask—nay, demand, and demand very anxiously—is that Theology will continue to believe it to be possible, and desirable, to perform a double-genuflection to her own light and the general light of the temple of truth; that is, that she will believe submission to her gods to be (loosely) equivalent to submission to parliament and the courts.

This is the hope—the very insistent hope—that contemporary legislation in England and Wales places on that chimera that it calls “religion or belief,” while at the same time instituting a legalized heteronomy, and underwriting the notion of belief as a volatile and always potentially radical force.

In the Employment Equality (Religion or Belief) Regulations of 2003 which were made part of UK employment law in the Equality Act of 2010, belief (now awkwardly secularized) is subjected to the following five criteria:

—The belief must be genuinely held.

—It must be a belief and not an opinion or view based on the present state of information available.

—It must be a belief as to a weighty and substantial aspect of human life.

—It must attain a certain level of cogency, seriousness, cohesion and importance.

—It must be worthy of respect in a democratic society, not incompatible with human dignity and not in conflict with the fundamental rights of others.

The legislation reads as a strangely updated version of the question of the jailer at Phillipi to Paul and Silas (Acts 16:30). In line with the equation of religion and identity or, in British legal terms, a “protected characteristic,” the question is no longer “What must I do to be saved?” or even “What must I do to ‘believe’?”, but rather “What must I do to be publicly recognized ‘to believe’?”

The doubled term “religion or belief” is an attempt to extend the prerogatives of religion in a properly “secularized” democracy. Like that other legal odd-couple “religion and/or philosophy,” “religion or belief” attempts to create legal room for non-religious beliefs (or philosophies). But secularization is uneven, to say the least. Religion remains the primary reference point for, and guardian of, the category of belief. And this can only ever be parsimoniously shared—lest we all become believers and all start suing on grounds of discrimination against our “belief.”

Breaking with disciplinary decorums, and refusing the limits of a purely legal commentary, we can attempt to elucidate the strangeness of “belief.” It defies the laws of physics—which is hardly surprising given that belief was a concept birthed as the other of science and its handmaids, Reason and Philosophy (in the other sense of “philosophy”). In contemporary legislation, belief, by definition, is that which has broken free from the safeguards of the empirical and material. This explains why it breaks the laws of physics—why it can be something absolutely volatile, and absolutely heavy, at one and the same time.

Looking at the first four criteria, we learn that belief is weighty. Belief is substantial. Belief is serious. Belief is heavy. But belief floats. It floats above knowledge or information or the verifiable. If it did not, it would not qualify as belief. In its detachment from, or disdain for, knowledge or the verifiable, belief is like an “opinion.” But it is much heavier, weightier, and denser than an opinion. It has a different mass index to an opinion. An opinion implies diffidence, negotiation. The word itself implies that the thought knows that it could well be otherwise. Belief is distinguished from opinion by the depth to which it goes within the individual. Religion is the guardian of depth, as it is the guardian of belief. We habitually talk of a “deeply held” belief or conviction. In an inbuilt deference to religion among the most ardent secularizers, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens regularly use the phrase “deeply held convictions” or “deeply held belief[s].”

It is not difficult to spot the old Kantian distinctions between believing (glauben), opining (meinen), and knowing (wissen). Religious belief is defined as a process of “holding something to be true” or Fürwahrhalten that is not open to verification. Contemporary legislation relies on a dusty old Kantian script. Belief is a kind of thinking that comes to us as a call, or command. This is why it qualifies as hyperthinking: a thought so strong that it qualifies as an identity category, akin to sexuality or ethnicity, in contemporary British and European law. Belief is conjured as a form of thinking that is entirely spurious and uncontained—but that takes to us as surely as our sexuality or the color of our skin. Belief is a form of thought so strong that it appears that it has chosen us, rather than that we have chosen it.

Belief is a tolerated heteronomy: indeed a heteronomy to be respected and cherished. Heteronomy is enshrined in legislation which admits no other law than constitutional law. No wonder that there continues to be such hysteria about sharia. The threat of sharia crystallizes the institutionalized heteronomy or other law that we have always admitted (without any external provocation) around belief. Massively funded government-led inquiries into “radicalization” neglect to explore how the threat of radicalization is intrinsic to our own conceptualizations of belief.

Belief is a free radical—which by definition can attach itself to anything. The only statements we can make about it with surety are vague ones regarding its volatility and its depth. By definition we cannot secure in advance the objects of belief.

Having unleashed the flighty specter of belief, the fifth criterion (“It must be worthy of respect in a democratic society,” etc.) appears as a hopeful attempt to recapture, or at the very least to manage, the chimera of belief. The first four criteria create and unleash belief as a floating vague force, not answerable to anything. They give belief free reign. Indeed they define belief by this free reign. And then, in a distinctly late modern twist on political theology, they attempt to manage the subject who has become sovereign, in an exceptional relationship to law, by virtue of proven possession of “religion or belief.”

The fifth criterion attempts to squeeze the genie back into the bottle. It attempts to negotiate with the very quality that it has defined as non-negotiable belief. Only if it submits to overriding principles of Würde can belief qualify as belief. One can only hope—or pray—at this point. Clearly the attempt to impose conditions on that which is by definition unconditioned will have limited success. Given the criteria just outlined, it is clear that not all beliefs will agree to submit.

Not surprisingly, the tension between criteria one through four (unleashing belief) and caveat five (imposing conditions on belief), is regularly played out in the courts. In the ongoing battles of our vague, amorphous freedoms, the freedom enshrined in rights and equal rights regularly goes a few rounds with “freedom of belief.” Those beliefs that refuse to aggregate in official and large-sized collectives (the World Class religions, or humanism as the official other) remain outside the compensations of the court. Those that refuse to acknowledge “modern” values are technically outside—though sometimes, and maybe even often, compromises are made (by way of concession to the compulsion of belief). But even those religious beliefs deemed unworthy, on the grounds that they do not sufficiently coincide with Würde, remain entirely inside the court’s absolutely amorphous and unpredictable definition of belief.

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.

MARK JUERGENSMEYER: Today we will be discussing the topic of “Rethinking Secularism in a Global Age.” Bob, the idea is to get around to the contemporary situation, the rise of political Islam, the rise of a new kind of religious politics, the whole issue of what is religious and what is secular in the contemporary world, the rise of global civil society and the role of religion there.

That’s where the conversation is heading, but I thought we would begin way back in the time that you are currently working in, in ancient history, with the development of religion and religious evolution—the Axial Age, on which you have recently written an essay that is going to be a part of your new book, which I think will be out fairly soon, about the transition from theoria (the word from which we get “theory”) as religious practice and religious insight into, in Plato and the Greek philosophers, a different perception, a different kind of discovery, which was more intellectual than it was spiritual.

Is this about religion? Is this about the emergence of secularism in this particular time? Or do you want to just avoid using those terms altogether?

ROBERT BELLAH: I certainly think, at this point, both the word “religion” and the word “secularism” are used in such chaotically diverse ways that they are almost useless.

Nonetheless, I think what you are pointing to is relevant. If you go into the deep evolution of the human species and look for where religion is, you find something that’s quite different from much of what goes on today. Today many people, including the harshest critics of religion, like Dawkins, Hitchens, et cetera, think religion is a theory or a set of theories that are simply wrong: science has disproved those theories; therefore, we don’t need them.

The point of the essay that you are talking about is that theory emerged at a certain moment in human history, and before that, it didn’t exist. We can say it emerged a long time ago, in the middle of the first millennium B.C., about 2,500 years ago. But looking at human evolution, it’s extremely recent; it’s the flick of an eye. Probably between 1 million and 2 million years ago humans communicated entirely with their bodies, what is called mimetic culture. We still do. It is never lost. It’s critical. For religion, it’s absolutely fundamental.

MARK JUERGENSMEYER: But when theoria developed, at least the way you have explained it—the earlier use of the term was related to something we might call religion.

ROBERT BELLAH: Yes, because—again, in this complex use of the word—everything starts with religion. The key to understanding mimetic culture is ritual. I think ritual is the phenomenological basis of all religion. Ritual, of course, is part of our lives. If you live in the university, you are hemmed in by an extremely elaborate set of rituals. We don’t call it that, we don’t remember that, but that’s what it is.

Then, when language emerged around the period—we don’t know for sure—between 50,000 and 120,000 years ago, we get narratives. Narratives add an enormous amount of information to what was communicated through bodily, or mimetic, exchange. Again, we’re still there. Most of our lives are controlled by narratives, not by logical reasoning, not by science. But rational, logical thought emerges at a certain moment, and that is the so-called Axial Age, more or less around 2,500 years ago.

There, too, it comes out of religious experience. The two examples I gave in that little paper are Plato and the Buddha, two of the great rationalists. People who think Buddhism is some kind of crazy mysticism haven’t read very much. The Buddha could give you very definite reasons for everything that he said—he could convince you rationally. He was, of course, coming out of a profound transformative experience that we would call religious.

MARK JUERGENSMEYER: And everything before the Buddha, of course, in the Hindu tradition was ritual, which is about the role of the Brahmins.

ROBERT BELLAH: Well, not everything, because the Upanishads already had the beginnings of something like theoria.

MARK JUERGENSMEYER: Before that, there were the Brahmins and manipulating the gods and the role of—

ROBERT BELLAH: Yes, certainly, before the Upanishads, it’s all ritual. Hinduism is ritual to this day. Of course, all religions are. That’s why refuting religion as if it were a set of theories is not the point, because you are not getting at what religion is all about.

MARK JUERGENSMEYER: But there is ritual without religion. You can say that the way you brush your teeth, the way you comb your hair—

ROBERT BELLAH: Yes.

MARK JUERGENSMEYER: We all live through patterned activity.

ROBERT BELLAH: The way you give a lecture. The academic lecture is one of the most ritualized things in the world, a highly formal ritual.

MARK JUERGENSMEYER: But at what point, then, do you think of ritual in terms of religion? Is it that it is collective or is it the character of a ritual that points to the transcendent? At one point you had a famous quotation about the definition of religion that talked about the transcendent as being an essential character of what we think of as religion.

ROBERT BELLAH: Again, the transcendent—what the hell does that mean?

MARK JUERGENSMEYER: What does it mean? You’re the guy who used it.

ROBERT BELLAH: Yes. I would say this. The religious side of mimetic culture—“ritual culture,” let’s say, which is an easier term than “mimetic”—is that it’s about the most important things. It’s a way of expressing those important things by a group together. But there is a sense in which every form of ritual is quasi-religious. The university is an institution that we believe in. Some of us are ready to lay down our lives for it when it’s under attack. Family ritual is critical—and in danger. The family meal is a central expression of the common life of the family, and it has a religious dimension. The family is an instantiation of a kind of group that, through its deep ties, is tied into and related to some pretty deep meanings. So you are sliding in and out of what is religious and whatever this word “secular” means.

MARK JUERGENSMEYER: Still, despite the fact that you can have sex without marriage, people are getting married.

ROBERT BELLAH: Yes. And now gays want to get married because they want to have that right, too.

MARK JUERGENSMEYER: They want to participate, yes.

ROBERT BELLAH: Yes, they want that as a possible thing to do. In Europe, you have to be married in a secular setting first. Then you can have a church wedding if you want. But in the United States, we think of marriage primarily in a religious context.

MARK JUERGENSMEYER: In the definition of religion that you just used—that is, the kind of patterned activity or thought related to the deepest, most important things in a collective context— marriage, whether you think of it as being religious or not, is religious.

ROBERT BELLAH: It is, yes. I think so. It also, because it’s a powerful force that can compete with other kinds of demands on human beings, can become a negative thing.

MARK JUERGENSMEYER: Right. So now let’s go back to the Greeks. If theoria is now being taken over by the Greek philosophers as a patterned activity regarding thought or ideas, rather than mimetic activity, is this, in a sense, a kind of new religiosity? Classically, we think of the origins of secularism in the Greek philosophers. Yet we had Wilfred Cantwell Smith for a number of years arguing that philosophia—and he went right back to the Greeks, where you do—began essentially as a religious tradition, only not calling it that.

ROBERT BELLAH: It was very convenient for Christians who wanted to adopt a lot of Greek culture to say, “Oh, that’s philosophy, not religion.”

MARK JUERGENSMEYER: Right.

ROBERT BELLAH: But, in fact, of course, it was religious. It always was religious. Pierre Hadot, the great French classicist, speaks of philosophy as a way of life, a total way of life, and certainly always tied into some sense of transcendence. It’s there in Plato centrally, and it’s also there in Aristotle, it’s there in Stoicism. It’s just part of that side of our tradition, and it gets absorbed into Christian theology. Thomas Aquinas, certainly one of the two or three greatest Christian theologians who ever lived, is saturated with Aristotle. So where does philosophy end and religion begin?

MARK JUERGENSMEYER: Right.

ROBERT BELLAH: But theoria, in its pre-philosophic meaning, meant to go and look at a religious spectacle and then come back and tell what you saw. In Plato, it becomes the philosophic quest to actually see the form of the good.

MARK JUERGENSMEYER: Like in the cave.

ROBERT BELLAH: To come out of the cave and see what’s really there, what the truth is, a vision of the truth.

Nonetheless, once you have seen the truth, you look at the normal world in a different way. You see through all of its falsehoods. That gives you the beginning of the chance to use theory in a different way—namely, as a critical form of undercutting accepted beliefs. Certainly, both Plato and Aristotle—Plato was one of the great deconstructionists of all time—he wandered throughout the entire history of Greek culture—Homer, the tragedians, all of Greek poetry—and replaced it with whom? Himself, because he saw the truth and he saw all these people as saying a whole bunch of lies.

That notion of theoria gets into our notion of science. Science takes nothing for granted. It asks questions about everything. There’s nothing that is taboo. We can doubt everything. We can’t doubt everything at once, but at least we can doubt things one at a time. That is a direct inheritance from—the term itself that we use, “scientific theory,” comes from the Greeks.

Download the entire interview here (PDF).

“It’s complicated.” That’s what we, scholars of religion, often say when asked to comment on challenging, possibly unsavory topics like the now over-determined public presence of Palin. We hurriedly, and rightly, remind our audiences that there exists a more modest, respectable religion, one more quotidian than those shrill voices that titillate and terrify liberal bloggers in their rush to link “Christo-fascists” to Palin. In making this point, we fall back on well-worn responses and qualifications, reflexive reminders that identities are contested and traditions diverse. Yet those winks continue. What “fleck of culture” is revealed? Is it Palin’s own, a sign of her magnetic hold on the “commentariat”? Or might it also reveal “specks” of Religious Studies behavior, some of the deepest assumptions underlying our scholarly practice?

Such questions can’t be answered by focusing on what Palin believes or endorses; her winks shouldn’t tempt scholars to indulge in a game of “gotcha!” We distance ourselves from Tina Fey’s and Keith Olbermann’s engagements with Palin’s beliefs in the efficacy of exorcism, the coexistence of humans and dinosaurs in Eden, or the justice of trickle-down economics. Yet while we are right to reject the snarky tone of such engagements, Palin’s ocular flutters reveal something of our own “structures of signification.” Palin has become the ultimate intellectual signifier, a shifting context, a dazzling surface on which manifold projections reflect back to us as confirmed truths. She is a “true feminist,” Clarence Thomas, a “sexy Puritan,” the ultimate creation of the Roveists, or, closer to home, she is a counter-sign to the “respectable” religion we in the field seek to privilege.

Kathryn Lofton, John Schmalzbauer, Randall Stephens, and others have done fine work—often on this very website—in complicating the ways in which Palin’s religiosity is misrepresented. In some ways it is unsurprising that such back and forth exchanges between journalists and professors, that mutual dance around academic “authority,” have proliferated in the wake of the GOP convention. After all, it seems almost impossible, in the years since the panicky post-election spasms of 2004, to talk about political religions without being sucked—often against one’s will—into the insider baseball haranguing about representational violence and evangelicals.

So our public qualifications of Palin-talk are also winks to ourselves about scholarly conventions, specifically proclamations (against all evidence) that the Right is dying (no, really, it’s for real this time), and assertions that, if conservatism lives on it does so as a kind of zombie category, a dead construct of an intransigent critic’s imagination, something far outnumbered by and with far less vitality than moderates and progressives (who presumably will shoot the zombie in the head, figuratively speaking). Writers like E.J. Dionne (whose mid-1990s forecast of a Progressive revival has now reinvented itself as the prediction of a resurgent religious “left”) and Alan Wolfe (who finds that most Americans want a flexible faith, one linked to tolerance and reason) surely have a point, just as the important works done since the 1980s—by George Marsden, Grant Wacker, Nathan Hatch, Mark Noll, and Randall Balmer—have surely taught us all about the complexities of evangelicalisms.

But consider the following “structures of signification.” Nancy Ammerman wrote recently (in “Telling the Old, Old Story”) that “researchers in the evangelical world have listened for a strident hellfire message and heard instead the everyday stories of people who want to be liked and don’t want to make waves, who translate their story about eternal destiny into a more visible story about kindness and honesty.” While no one would disagree with her larger point, the words “in,” “the,” and “instead” wink actively. This point about acknowledging complexity and pluralism seems to smuggle in a singularity: “the evangelical world.”  There may also be an implication that only those commentaries produced by those in this world matter. While those written by researchers outside this world would surely look different—they might not be ethnographic, for example—would they thereby be illegitimate? And what of that tricky word “instead”? No one in the study of American religions would possibly find fault with the notion that “kindness and honesty” are present in the “everyday stories” of many evangelicals. But does this really mean, as the word “instead” suggests, that these are the only qualities generated by the stories? Wouldn’t a more accurate word be “also” rather than “instead”?

There are good reasons for emphasizing stories of kindness and compassion that emerge from a culture so over-determined and frequently mocked. Ammerman, Corwin Smidt, D. Michael Lindsay, Christian Smith, and others have exposed the caricature of an evangelical monolith which is sometimes given pass in national media, seemingly undergirded by the anxiety New York Times readers feel after reading reviews of Jesus Camp. We know, of course, that evangelical identities have always been complicated, and that new evangelical voices are expressed through concerns about the environment and the economy. But there are good reasons, too, to remember that other stories still exist, powerfully nurtured in a political culture shaped by discourses of persecution and combat, and still preoccupied with the imagery of hellfire and the rhetoric of pluralism. Even if we take for granted that the words spoken to researchers are the ones that count (as if there are no back stories), “strident hellfire messages” clearly still exist and one doesn’t have to look very hard to find them. This story must be told as well, for this enduring vein of tropes and criticisms—even as we all know it does not speak for the whole of “the evangelical world”—continues to shape a shared world of politics, religion, and culture.

I am not suggesting that when Palin winks when saying “I am opposed to gay marriage,” she is alerting armies of “theocrats” to readiness. Yet our guild’s sensible point about not collapsing Palin’s policies into a “Pentecostal wink,” or locating them in some mythically antediluvian Christianity, should not lead us to look past the enduring power of conservatism (evangelical and otherwise, in all of their complexity) as a cultural, political, and religious presence. While those of us in the academy know that the gleeful snarkiness of a Salon article on faith healing is off-base as a window onto Palin’s politics, we know too that the mutual resonance of political and religious conservatism remains loud, and we ignore it to our intellectual discredit, and possibly to our political peril as well. There remains much to say about hellfire, after all, once we have all accepted—as we all have long ago—that not every evangelical speaks its language. And there remain a great many stories to tell about it, once we have all accepted—as we all should have done long ago—that not everyone who tells such a story is a Sam Harris, a Christopher Hitchens, or a Richard Dawkins.

So while I don’t necessarily disagree with what Ammerman and others have written (nor am I suggesting they’re engaged in protectionism, false consciousness, or anything of the sort), I invoke their writings as an opportunity to muse on a tendency that may have unconsciously flourished in the field. It is worth engaging in a kind of self-inventory so that, in the name of cautioning against misrepresentation, we don’t narrow our political and intellectual conventions (and integrity) until we are neutered, bland, an immobile knot of endless qualifications of what we want—but cannot bring ourselves—to say: in other words, the very caricature of the professoriat circulated by the likes of Gov. Palin.

Is there more for us to say of winking than simply, “it’s complicated.” Are there new responses that can, or should, be added to the din? Do the winks signify beyond this? If anything, they tell us that Palin represents—whatever else may be made of her “meanings”—the need for fresh narratives of religion in public life, since she vexes and unsettles conventional ways of thinking about political religions. I say this because the reactions she has generated cannot be captured simply by resorting to ideological explanations, no matter how energetically Palin stays on message. Nor is her candidacy simply another occasion to cry wolf before the inevitable triumph of theocracy or to bemoan how the incredulous masses vote against their own interests while in thrall to the passions of identity, to cite Thomas Frank’s widely-known formulation. I say this, too, because despite the evident presence of voter polarization, the ready-to-hand “culture wars” musings do little to clarify what is interesting or politically significant about Palin.

Aside from talking points and party affiliation, Palin is in some ways what I have elsewhere called, building on the work of James Scott, politically illegible. And her complicated, multifarious demonology cannot be adduced to her religious affiliation. She exists in the “viral” dimension of our mediascape as a singular concoction of politics as telegenics (the sportscaster’s zingers recast as political argument), emotional self-creation (Hockey Mom cum canine), frontier survivalist (the Alaska Independence party is almost a distant echo of Gingrich-era conservatism, when separatist militias briefly denounced “socialized” roadwork and the like), and a gifted practitioner of the erotics of fear. So while somewhere a graduate student may be contemplating a thesis comparing Palin’s charisma with Sister Aimee’s, the way she captures some of the darker impulses of our political moment strikes me as having little to do with her religiosity.

So yes, as I and others have suggested in writings about political religion, there are both normative and practical goods to be achieved by evaluating religio-political practitioners according to the policies they favor, or their specific orientations to political life. Meet them on the shared space of politics and demand accountability in political registers, rather than shrieking about the perils of theocracy. All to the good. Yet it is important to keep in mind more than one thought—that conservatism remains powerful, and that it is not ubiquitous, and that Palin’s policy positions are more important than her Pentecostalism—as we consider the opportunities and risks opened up by considerations of political religions.

While the pundits miss the point, perhaps we, the scholars, miss a different kind of point. No academic should feel obligated to criticize Gov. Palin, even if they detest her politics. But, in the name of a much-needed conceptual self-inventory, it is worth wondering if the intellectual and political integrity we seek to defend, calibrated to the lived messiness we claim to document, is well-served if we are lulled into thinking that a lone wink fits all audiences, genres, and occasions.

“How do I know that loving life is not a delusion? How do I know that in hating death I am not like a man who, having left home in his youth, has forgotten the way back?”

- Zhuangzi

Youth Without Youth takes us through a strange loop that demands us both cognitively and visually to ask similar questions about love, memory, and death. The film begins with the familiar image of an anxiety-ridden intellectual who, failing (or finally succeeding?) to fall asleep, enters a dreamlike state that eventually, at the end of the film, culminates in his death. The loop effect is heightened by the film’s frequent use of canted angles, flipped images, deep color contrast, and haunting chants in ancient tongues that leaves us constantly wondering where and when the dream begins and reality ends. In fact, the viewer is never, to my knowledge, reassured that the film did indeed begin with the “real” Dominic Matei, the protagonist, who comes to fantasize about a younger, virile version of himself and his wonderful yet futile quest for the origins of language and consciousness.

Our musings about the “reality” of Dominic are thrown further into a loop as we approach the closing moments of the film. There we find Dominic, back home in Romania, rapidly aging and returning to his old self as he shares his views with us, the viewers, and his old friends about the famous dream of Zhuang Zhou (or Zhuangzi), the man who wasn’t sure whether he was Zhuang Zhou who had dreamt he had been a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming he had become Zhuang Zhou. As if to adumbrate the possibility that Dominic may have awaken from one dream to find himself in another, the film ends with a stunning close up of the third rose—Coppola’s MacGuffin—magically appearing in the hands of the lifeless and “real” Dominic lying face down in the fresh snow. (Two earlier roses, you may recall, were used by the rejuvenated Dominic as a means to test the “reality” of his double, or vice versa.)

These doubts about the neat transition from dream space to the space where the reality principle reigns supreme bring us to an important question: Is Youth Without Youth a tragedy or melodrama? Let us begin with the possibility that Dominic’s death did occur in reality. Many, I suspect, will then be tempted to read into the character of Dominic Matei the desires, aspirations, and existential despair of his creators, Eliade and Coppola. Is it not tempting, for instance, to read Dominic’s failure to complete his life’s work and his lonesome death as an allegory of the tragic fate that awaits all great minds? Conversely, is Dominic’s dream of his rebirth and seeming apotheosis not the fantasy of the obsessive genius (whose only desire is to have a “second chance”) par excellence?

On the other hand, there will also be an equally strong tendency, I think, to offer a more positive, but no less tragic, reading of his death. What Dominic’s decision to forgo his quest for the sake of Laura’s well being—that is, the shift from his symbolic mandate (his life’s work) to the stubborn remainder that resists this mandate (his passionate attachment to or love for Laura)—might represent is Dominic’s freedom from the mandate that compels him to sacrifice everything that he holds dear. His death would, then, be a sign not of the tragic fate of failing to live up to his symbolic mandate but of freedom (a freedom, for Eliade and Coppola, to pursue their idiosyncratic interests without being affected by peer critique). In fact, does it not signify the elevation of Dominic to the status of the detached sage and hopeless romantic of epic proportions (i.e., the perfect historian of religion)?

But whose freedom is in question here? Is it not Laura (now reincarnated as Veronica), rather than Dominic, who is freed from the burden of unlocking the mythic origins of history and thus her immanent death? (Veronica, of course, cannot free herself.) What makes Dominic’s choice to free the rapidly deteriorating and aging Veronica no less tragic (nor more free) is the fact that Dominic—like poor Oedipus—tries to avoid his fate of losing Veronica (or Laura) by escaping to a seaside villa in Malta with her but, in so doing, ironically fulfills his fate and dies alone.

But can we not produce an even more positive and, dare I say, melodramatic reading of Dominic’s death? What if Dominic “awoke” to find himself, though old and senile and on the verge of death, in another dream or fantasy? What if there was no higher purpose, love, or mandate for which Dominic had to sacrifice his attachment to Laura but he did it anyway? This would make his death neither tragic (there is no guilt) nor heroic (there is no justification). Just necessary.

Why necessary? In our film, death seems to serve as the inevitable consequence of revealing the truth (how else are we to understand Veronica’s rapid loss of youth and beauty as she approaches the origins of language and consciousness?). For the truth to be revealed (and for us to awake from Dominic’s dream) someone, in other words, had to die and that someone, needless to say, had to be Dominic.

Allow me to entertain this hypothesis a bit further. Firstly, it must be borne in mind that in our film, History does not necessarily appear where we think it should. It appears not in reality but in fantasy. The cold reality of war, espionage, and science (for which see Kripal’s post) occupy almost every square inch of Dominic’s dream space, and it is only as a temporary escape from this reality that his futile quest for sacred origins (the fantasy within fantasy) has meaning. When Dominic slowly comes to wrestle with the painful truth that there is no escape from this dream (this coincidentia oppositorum)—that he may be a butterfly dreaming he was Dominic—at Cafe Select, surprisingly and in spite of the disbelief of his friends, he does not resist it. He accepts it. (It is, I think, to Coppola’s credit that we find no obvious moment of awakening in the elegiac cafe scene where Dominic comes to identify himself with Zhuang Zhou.)

Secondly, it must also be borne in mind that the truth is repeatedly, in bits and pieces, disclosed in the film as being utterly banal and the only one who seems to be unaware of this fact is Veronica. We see this banality in everything from the Chinese character for dream (meng) floating on the screen and the recitation of the Heart Sutra to the eminent Orientalist polyglot and Fascist sympathizer Giuseppe Tucci’s explanation that māyā (“illusion”) “is not a dream but takes part in the illusory nature of dreaming, because it is the future, therefore time—now time, is par excellence, unreal.” Had Veronica actually traversed far enough back in time to reach the truth, we would have walked away from the film, I think, with the kind of disappointment that we experienced when George Lucas finally revealed the rather profane nature of the Force. (And precisely for this reason I appreciate the harrowing and, admittedly, contrived moaning and groaning—the anamorphic portrait of the truth—performed by Alexandra Maria Lara.)

There is a lesson for us, students of religion and modernity, to learn from the melodramatic performance of Dominic. Knowing full well that awakening is just another dream (that God is dead), we must, like Dominic, carry on with the sacrifice of our most passionate and profane attachments. Doing so, we know, will neither make the truth any less banal nor will it allow us to sit on our moral highhorse and “do the right thing.” But this unconditional sacrifice of the instrumentality of sacrifice (be it of our life’s work or our true love) must be made. Though empty of meaning, the show must go on. Otherwise, we will, I fear, come to share the fate of the undead—consider the “rebirth” of Dominic and Laura—who cannot die, for they can never reach the nonexistent end that will eventually justify their endless sacrifice; hence, I add, the importance of Dominic’s death.

Like Dominic, I would like to close with a quote from the Zhuangzi:

He who dreams of drinking wine may weep when morning comes; he who dreams of weeping may in the morning go off to hunt. While he is dreaming he does not know it is a dream, and in his dream he may even try to interpret a dream. Only after he wakes does he know it was a dream. And someday there will be a great awakening when we know that this is all a great dream. Yet the stupid believe they are awake, busily and brightly assuming they understand things, calling this man ruler, that one herdsman—how dense! Confucius and you are both dreaming! And when I say you are dreaming, I am dreaming, too.

This is not to say that everything must therefore melt into thin air. Melodrama is not moral relativism. Surely, Zhuang Zhou concludes, between himself and the butterfly “there must be some distinction!” This, he claims, “is called the Transformation of Things.” Or, to put it crudely, to awaken to the fact that everything is a dream, a melodrama, makes everything all the more precious, all the more sacred.