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?

God

Tom Reynolds makes a good point here

Habermas, Religion And Public Life Redux

I have come across a really good article by Jürgen Habermas which sets out in full opinions I have previously commented on here, on the basis of  a second hand report. The key question the article asks is this,

How should we see ourselves as members of a post-secular society and what must we reciprocally expect from one another in order to ensure that in firmly entrenched nation states, social relations remain civil despite the growth of a plurality of cultures and religious world views?

In the course of answering it he asks another one,

Is a learning process only necessary on the side of religious traditionalism and not on that of secularism, too? Do the selfsame normative expectations that rule an inclusive civil society not prohibit a secularistic devaluation of religion just as they prohibit, for example, the religious rejection of equal rights for men and women?

Which he answers like this,

A complementary learning process is certainly necessary on the secular side unless we confuse the neutrality of a secular state in view of competing religious world views with the purging of the political public sphere of all religious contributions.

I think he’s wrong about this for a number of reasons.  In the first place he assumes that secularism is necessarily the rival of religious traditionalism. This may be true in many cases but there is no reason for it always to be so.  As long as the Methodist, the Jew, the Presbyterian or whoever, has her right to practice her faith protected then there is no necessary reason why she should see secularism as her enemy. Rivalry can only arise when members of a particular faith seek more than the right to practice it themselves but wish some of its tenets, or rules deriving from them, to be applied to others as well.

There’s another problem with Habermas’s view. It’s that many people with strong religious beliefs would not be able to take part in any such mutual learning process in good faith. If you are a Catholic, for example, a cornerstone of your faith, something from which you are not allowed to demur, is that the Catholic Church has access to truth about questions relating to life, the Universe and Everything that is denied to Jews, Druze, Hindus and atheists like me. And I am not just talking about metaphysical stuff that has no impact on everyday life; the claim to have cornered the market in truth applies to such issues as who one may licitly have sex with and to what purpose, how children should be educated and much more besides. And what goes for Catholicism obviously goes for a number of other popular religions too.

Asking such people to engage in a mutual learning process with others they believe to be mired in ignorance, if not actually in league with Satan, amounts to a kind of well-meaning condescension based on the view that they can’t really believe half the mumbo jumbo the profess to.

I return to  the conclusion that I’ve expressed more than once in other posts; the only real way to respect religious people is treat them as equals and take them at their word about their beliefs. That means that they are going to have to come to the table in public policy debates on the same basis as keepers of racing pigeons, Boca Juniors supporters and residents of Barrio Candioti. They cannot expect their interlocutors to be prepared to learn anything from them that they wouldn’t be prepared to learn from any other citizen, or to have their beliefs accorded any kind of respect beyond that which would be shown to those of anyone else.

Men In Skirts Again

I know that I am somewhat (somewhat? Ed.) obsessed with this topic but I agree with every word of Number 2.

Habermas, Religion, Public Life

By way of Norm I’ve come across these opinions attributed to Jürgen Habermas. While keeping in mind Norm’s caveat about their accuracy, I’d like to take issue with a couple of them.

He [Habermas] rejected the argument of secularists who seek to exclude religious discourse from civic discourse, saying that religious faith must inform public life.

I find it hard to think of any decent reason why religious faith must inform public life. Given that a lot of people in a lot of countries have some form of religious belief then it’s likely to have some form of influence on public life. That’s fine but it’s not the same thing.

Muslims in Europe “must not only superficially adjust to a constitutional order. They are expected to appropriate the secular legitimation of constitutional principles under the very premises of their own faith,” Habermas said.

Now I have no insider knowledge of Muslim attitudes but I have plenty with regard to another religion with an important number of followers in Europe, namely Roman Catholicism, and I can state quite categorically that the adhesion of the Catholic Church to the man-made constitutional order is indeed superficial and that the Catholic Church believes that its own social doctrine should be the basis of law, binding on believer and and non-believer alike. Anyone who doesn’t want to rely on my intuitions in this matter should check out the behaviour of the bishops in Spain during the recent election campaign there.

So what right does anyone have to ask Catholics or Muslims to root around in the premises of their faith for legitimation of, not just acquiescence to, the democratic constitutional order? I´d say, none at all. What they can be asked to do is assent to the democratic constitutional order on the grounds that it offers them the best chance to practice their beliefs in liberty.

And that’s as good as it gets; there can be no truck with special claims arising from the supposedly distinctive nature of religious belief and there’s no intrinsic reason why religious belief should inform public life anymore than than any other sort.