Earlier today standing in front of the wonderful altar frieze in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin Joanna asked if the ambition to find an analogue to the kind of integrated aesthetic, moral and political qualities expressed in the altar had even been achieved in German culture. The traditional response to this is to look at Nietszche's Birth of Tragedy so we ended up chatting about that. Just today my own thinking about this book was framed by the debates on the previous day at the really great conference that Mark Somos had organised on secularisation and particularly on a remark made by Pascalis Kitromilides that one of the tragedies of modern politics was the manner in which the nation had, in some cases, become an object of religious energy in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Monotheistic nationalism has been one of the curses of the modern world. The idea that the nation offers a means of saving the individual, giving him or her a cast-iron set of values which meet all the exigencies of modern life, while guaranteeing justice and welfare for the community and the individual, has been a disasterous notion. As the nation has not fulfilled this set of expectations some national communities have taken flight into a fantasy that the problem has been pollution of the nation by heresy and heretics which could and should be eliminated, rather than a recognition that redemption cannot be a political event.
That thought in that place led me to have a better understanding of how poor Nietszche could have been so misunderstood, but also a suggestion for why his project, a this-worldly sufficient worldview, simply could not succeed. A man who was trying to move experience beyond what he saw as the wreckage left behind by the death of God suffered complete misunderstanding by monotheistic nationalists as yet another religious thinker. My suspicion though is that this fate, though unfortunate, was no accident and that such a thorough-going secularisation is impossible. Without religion to offer a rational locus for the hope of redemption of the broken world, that hope finds much less rational places to attach itself to.
To a mind or a community that can conceive of justice, it is intolerable that justice not be done. The village Hampdens cannot be unrecognised, the sparrow that falls must be accounted for. However, such a regime of totality would be unbearable, and the liberal demand that the individual confrontation with their own resolution of these impossible problems be absolutely respected is the core inheritance we take from the Enlightenment. This is the engine that drives secularisation of experience, but this resolution is insufficient. Everyday life without a framing idea of justice is impossible.
This is why my view is that the response to the problem of nationalism, even fundamentalist nationalisms that use religious dogmas as their content, cannot be secularism or total secularisation. The intuition that all is redeemed is fundamentally a religious intuition, and when expressed in that register enables a liberal politics and does not compete with it. Not everyone has to live in the two cities, but both have to be inhabited; we can never feel completely at home in the world and reconciled to it.
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6 comments:
Very nice train of thought. Would a correlation of individualism and secularisation lead to the exact same conclusion? If so (or at least roughly), then are the historical ebbs and flows, and the philosophically necessary incompleteness, of secularisation best explained as epiphenomena of the individualism-nationalism dialectic? And if so, is nationalism different than other groups? Or are in fact the individual-city, and individual-Church, dialectics equally useful frameworks to explain secularisation?
In other words all of us, as individuals, live in both cities. The commute is called secularisation (both ways, to protect both secular and sacred), and Nation, Church and City are the planes, trains and tricycles.
That is a nice idea. The sacred and secular define one another but we can do a history of the institutions/objects that (always unsuccessfully) try to stabilise the relationship. And it really matters what is in the middle bit, as most experience will take place there (in city, nation, church).
I thought we made real progress, and I was overjoyed. But unless we postulate regularly staggered, systemic asynchronicities between individual-group oscillations of secularisation that irreconcilably disharmonious civilisations undergo, we can't explain http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-18030105. Second-generation crusader settlers began to learn languages, intermarry, and pray together. First-, and third-, generation crusaders didn't (viz. Foucher de Chartes, Usamah ibn Munqidh, William of Tyre). Only 1+-generation immigrants become terrorists (Mark Sageman).
In our terms, Christian individuals rally to religious institutions under threat when, despite, because of, and therefore, Muslim individuals do the same, while the institutions bend over backwards to go the other way... What? It really felt like we made progress, but this model of secularisation cannot account for this.
HI Mark. Indeed, but we need to be sure that whatever we are looking at is an effect or an element of secularisation and not an epiphenomenon of something else. If we take as given that the boundary between religion and politics cannot be securely mapped it does not follow that every moment of political thought on religion is primarily about the tensions of secularisation. The one you cite is terrifying but I think has more to do with the the resort to militarised ideas of empire than the US army committing itself to Holy War. Or at least I hope not....
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