Habermas, God, Butler and Israel

Jürgen Habermas is quoted here (via here) as having said this the other day:

For secular citizens, this same ethics of citizenship entails the duty of reciprocal accountability toward all citizens. Reciprocity in this sense also entails not dismissing religious utterances as mere nonsense in the public sphere.

Of course one doesn’t want to get worked up about something reported second hand but if Habermas really said that  it’s very disappointing. The propositional content of religious utterances in the public sphere  - or anywhere else – is indeed mere nonsense. In public discourse it may often be neither polite nor politic to point this out but it’s an option that has to be there. Otherwise we end up either patronizing religious people or shutting up because we are afraid of them.

This doesn’t mean that religious belief can be ignored in public debate. The number of religious people makes this impractical and undesirable. However, their views and demands can’t a priori be given greater weight than that of those of any other group and they must be subject to the same level of scrutiny and criticism. If religious people are willing to say their piece in the public square on that basis then good for them but I suspect that a lot of them are not.

It would also be interesting to know if Habermas was calling for all religious utterances to be treated seriously or only those coming from members of the big religions. If we aren’t going to dismiss Roman Catholicism as  mere nonsense then what are we going to say when the Moonies and Scientologists come looking for respect?

Now something else entirely. Further down in the same article you’ll find this about Judith Butler:

She underscored the multiplicity of Jewish values and experiences and offered a courageous critique of Israeli state violence.

So, a world renowned (God knows why) academic criticizes Israel in an address to an audience of colleagues at NYU and is held to show courage in so doing. In the thrall of what kind of world view would you want to be in order to not to find something odd about that?

Habermas on the crisis

What worries me most is the scandalous social injustice that the most vulnerable social groups will have to bear the brunt of the socialised costs for the market failure. The mass of those who, in any case, are not among the winners of globalisation now have to pick up the tab for the impacts of a predictable dysfunction of the financial system on the real economy. Unlike the shareholders, they will not pay in money values but in the hard currency of their daily existence. Viewed in global terms, this avenging fate is also afflicting the economically weakest countries. That’s the political scandal. Yet pointing the finger at scapegoats strikes me as hypocritical. The speculators, too, were acting consistently within the established legal framework according to the socially recognised logic of profit maximisation. Politics turns itself into a laughing stock when it resorts to moralising instead of relying upon the enforceable law of the democratic legislator. Politics, and not capitalism, is responsible for promoting the common good.

Read the rest here.

There Goes Norman!

Here

A Un Cierto Nivel De Vida…

Encontarse en posesion de la verdad es suficiente para justificar el derecho a un cierto nivel de vida.

Walter Benjamin, citado por Gershom Scholem en Walter Benjamin, Historia de una Amistad. p90

Feinmann Watch VI

More than a year ago I commented on Feinmann’s views about human rights and the police here.  He returns to the topic here saying,

There can, therefore, be no legal basis for talk of the “human rights” of a police officer murdered by a criminal. The police officer is part of the State and it is the State that protects him, that takes care of him.

The problems with this view of human rights are too numerous to cover in a single blog post; I’ll mention just four.

1.

If human rights are to have any serious meaning then they must apply to all humans. No test relating to occupation, religious affiliation or anything else can be imposed to govern access to them.

2.

On what basis are we going to ask the police to respect the human rights of the citizenry if those same rights are not enjoyed by the police themselves?

3.

In Feinmann’s view, the police officer, because she is not the bearer of human rights, must seek the care and protection of the State. She is, therefore, reduced to a sort of slavery. She  gives obedience and, in returm, receives protection. The exchange of obedience for protection sounds alarmingly similar to the implicit philosophy ruling many aspects of our national life already and one that needs to be urgently uprooted.

4.

Feinmann’s view is predicated on the notion of  a pure and innocent civil society confronted by a potentially genocidal State which it has no responsibility for creating. Does that sound anything like any society that has ever existed? Can it be justified with reference to any phase of Argentine history since the introduction of universal suffrage, nearly a century ago?