From: MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Fri Mar 26 2004 - 22:47:53 GMT
Sam,
Let me first say how pleasurable this conversation has been. You're one of my favorite interlocuters, and I must thank you for wading through my obtuse, soapboxing when it occurs.
So, I think it is safe to say that we agree in broad terms on Millian, Enlightenment liberalism. However, I don't think you're owning up to the consequences of this agreement. I'll take up the second, and as you say more important and interesting, tension you address first and comment on the first tension in passing later.
Sam said:
I want to know how it is possible to reconsider the basic tenets of [liberalism] without engaging in fundamental considerations or articulations of the Good or Quality (which I think count as 'religious' on a family resemblance understanding). These would seem to be disqualified by your comment that "The only sense in which religious discourse is illegitimate in a democracy is the sense in which religious discourse poses as political discourse." I just don't see the division between the two vocabularies that you do; in fact I think it is that division which you are trying to enforce as a pragmatic 'add-on' to classical liberalism, and which I think is unjustified. You seem to want to make political discourse purely technocratic, ie 'how can we best achieve X', when I think an essential part of political discourse is 'what X should we achieve'. So you're making a political point under philosophical disguise. I don't think that latter question (what X should we achieve) can be
answered except through the use of non-pragmatic language, both in the simple sense of 'where should we go' but also in the profound sense of 'lets leave room for debating whether liberalism is the best system we can have'. In other words, even if we're debating about health care, I don't think we can escape ultimate questions of the good. (Perhaps we could focus on that?)
Matt:
I think you are absolutely right, I am "making a political point under philosophical disguise," except that I don't think I've ever hidden this fact. I think this stance is encapsulated by Rorty's Deweyan remark about the "priority of democracy to philosophy." And, in your terms, I think you are right: what I take the mark of a fully fleshed out liberalism, taking the consequences of Mill and Dewey to its end point, is to think of politics as "purely technocratic, ie 'how can we best achieve X?'"
The division you're not seeing between "the basic tenets liberalism" and "conceptions of the good," between what I earlier called political discourse and religious discourse, respectively, is purely a practical division, a political point, not a philosophical point. If I were making a philosophical division between political discourse and religious discourse, between public and private, I would start sounding a lot more like the earlier Rawls, or I would start saying stuff like "the uncovering of the true human spirit" and "the emancipation of humanity," I would talk about how the distinction is based in the ontology of the universe. As a good pragmatist, I don't think any of these things. I think the division is there solely for practical purposes of getting good things done.
The problem I think you have is: what are these good things? How can we get these "good things" done if we aren't allowed to talk about what things count as good?
My reply moreorless follows from Rorty's off-hand remark, "Of course our private beliefs influence our public beliefs." The way I see it, what things we count as good are hashed out somewhere other than on the Senate floor. As agreement increases as to what things are good, then it becomes more plausible to "get them done" via the medium of politics. For instance, what we are doing here, right now in this discussion group. We are hashing out our conceptions of the good, and not on the Senate floor. I think this is wonderful and perfect. It allows us to think things through. It allows us to get our act together so we don't waste the Senate's time.
That, in a nutshell, is my conception of liberalism and how it functions. Our private beliefs are what inform our public beliefs and the political process is one instrument, one medium, one tool in many to get good things done.
What I guess I still don't understand about your objection, Sam, is what's left of liberalism to criticize and reconsider that I'm disbarring once we agree that the "JS Mill style tradition [of] freedom of religious belief is a high quality static pattern, one of the highest, which needs to be preserved and defended from lower quality static patterns which might undermine it." More to the point, I don't understand how you can combine this liberalism with your further horn-grabbing admission that you "DO want to debate God on the Senate floor." The only reason I can see to debate anything on the Senate floor is if you want a law enacted about it. The only reason to debate God on the Senate floor is if you want a national mandate about God, one way or the other. But you are disbarred from wanting a national law about God because of the freedom of religion. So what is the use of debating God on the Senate floor? Is it consciousness-raising? If so, then it's _wasting our
time_. Not because consciousness-raising in this regard isn't much needed, but because nobody watches C-SPAN. The goal of something that reaches the Senate floor is to reach commensuration. But we've disbarred ourselves from reaching political commensuration on the issue of religion because we've disbarred the gov't from passing laws about it. I'm not curtailing free speech on religion; it is _because_ of my desire for free speech on religion that we don't talk about it on the Senate floor.
Given that this is how I understand the issue, what's the deal, how are you coming at this thing? I see the political process as a technocratic tool, not because I think that's all there is to life, but because the promise of liberalism is the freedom to decide for ourselves what more there is to life. The public/private distinction that I see as a definitive mark of liberalism is the practical, blurry, moveable marker that we use to differentiate between things we can legislate about and things we can't. That's why when people say there is no such thing, the only way I can read this is as a desire to legislate about whatever you want. But I know inheiritors of the Western tradition don't want this. So what are you talking about?
I think you don't see the division between public and private, between political discourse and religious discourse, for the same reason that I don't see divisions between natural kinds of any kind. We are both, moreorless, pragmatists, post-Modern and antiessentialist enough to not see these neat, easy, there-since-the-beginning-of-time divisions in essence. But after we accept this antiessentialist point, I still think its useful to make distinctions between different kinds of discourse, between say, physics and ethics. Pirsig's brilliant move was to blur the difference between physics and ethics, same as the pragmatists. But there are obvious, practical differences between what people using a particle accelerator are doing and what people at Church are doing. If there weren't, then why haven't the two collapsed into each other yet?
You also say that our conceptions of the good cannot be formulated "except through the use of non-pragmatic language." This I think is false and goes back to our long-ago discussion of Lyotard. To assume that conceptions of the good can only be formulated in non-pragmatic terms is to assume that you need a metanarrative to contextualize your thoughts. Antiessentialists aren't allowed this move, nor do they need it. Pragmatists can contextualize their conceptions of the good just fine using regular, plain ole' narratives. When you say that "even if we're debating about health care, I don't think we can escape ultimate questions of the good," I think A) we should for reasons of efficiency and efficacy (debate about God has lasted 2500+ years with no sign of let up) and B) we don't even need to talk about "ultimate" questions of the good, we can just focus on ordinary questions of the good. I think whether these questions are "ultimate" or not is an extra add on, one you
don't have to make if you don't want to.
So, ultimately, I think you are right, practically there may only be a small difference between our views. However, I still haven't the foggiest idea what this practical difference is if we both accept religious freedom. I'm not saying that we shouldn't talk about our conceptions of the good, I'm saying that we need to do it before we get to the Senate floor. As far as I can see, you're performing the same kind of conceptual stretch that Wim and others keep performing on me: making all talk about X, Y kind of discourse. It seemed to me that Wim wanted to stretch metaphysics to mean something like "beliefs about the world," and it seems to me that you might be trying to stretch "religious language" to mean something like "all talk of values and norms." If you do that, then you certainly won't see the divisions I keep making. But then I think you have to reformulate the distinctions I'm making into something like "conceptions of the good the gov't can pass laws about" an
d "conceptions of the good the gov't can't pass laws about."
Okay, as for the first tension you pointed out I have two comments: A) True, lately the religious right has infected American political speech with a lot more God talk lately, but the point of secularity is that you still won't see "God" in a piece of legislation. If you do, America is in a lot bigger trouble than I thought. B) When you say that "political debate is the language of values," I agree, but fail to see what the tension is because while I agree that political language is necessarily normative, I still see the government as a technocratic tool, not as an open forum to sound off whenever we feel like it. We have Cable Access for that. When you say that "people are debating Quality in political terms," you are performing a redescription of political discourse into your own private vocabulary. I see it as very important that you say "in political terms," because this is part of what I mean about a difference between political discourse and religious discourse.
The other part is that I think there is a large portion of our conceptions of the good, like whether we believe in God or not, that political deliberation has no say in.
Matt
MOQ.ORG - http://www.moq.org
Mail Archives:
Aug '98 - Oct '02 - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/
Nov '02 Onward - http://www.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/summary.html
MD Queries - horse@darkstar.uk.net
To unsubscribe from moq_discuss follow the instructions at:
http://www.moq.org/md/subscribe.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Mar 26 2004 - 22:49:08 GMT