Over at the New York Times “Room for Debate” page, Tim Shah and Tom Farr observe that our liberal counterparts are often tempted to define democratic culture as, well, liberals talking the way liberals talk.
Drawing from Barack Obama’s meditations on the role of faith in public life, they give us his conclusion: “What our deliberative, pluralistic democracy demands is that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values.”
It’s the standard Rawlsian boilerplate: universal values, public reason, and so forth. I can understand the impulse. Civic responsibility seeks to promote the common good, not private interests, and the common good is, well, common, and in that sense universal. But it’s a mistake to translate a virtue—civic responsibility—into an epistemological principle or criterion.
It’s a mistake because the principle or criterion that promises to be formal—only universal truths, only public reasons—ends up being substantive. By the reasoning of nearly all Catholic thinkers, the existence of God and the immortality of the soul are universal truths accessible to natural reason. Thus a good Rawlsian should allow me to make public policy arguments based on these universal truths: obligatory philosophy of religion classes in high school, for example.
That I don’t make these arguments stems from my prudential judgment that such policies would be either ineffective or counter-productive, which is to say contrary to the common good. It’s these sorts of judgments—we all make them all the time—that makes public advocacy responsible and appropriate for a democratic society.
In some circumstances an explicitly Christian and theological argument serves the common good. Martin Luther King, Jr., provides the most obvious recent example, with Lincoln’s Second Inaugural providing another. In other circumstances the most responsible arguments are empirical—the debate leading up to the Welfare Reform Act in the 1990s provides a good example. In still others it’s a philosophical argument that serves the common good, the pro-life argument being a current example. There is not formula, no criterion, not principle that can tell us what bests promotes the common good. That requires good judgment, which is a virtue.
December 29th, 2011 | 2:53 pm
“By the reasoning of nearly all Catholic thinkers, the existence of God and the immortality of the soul are universal truths accessible to natural reason. Thus a good Rawlsian should allow me to make public policy arguments based on these universal truths: obligatory philosophy of religion classes in high school, for example.”
I want to thank Reno for pushing this point. We seem tragically incapable of articulating, let alone defending, a “public metaphysics” of this kind. As a result, any attempt to ground morality in God is understood to be an appeal to special revelation.
December 29th, 2011 | 3:04 pm
Although it’s a subject of embarrassment now for many Catholic thinkers, Pius X’s *Doctoris Angelici* served an essential function in the Church’s intellectual life. It secured a shared vocabulary, grammar and conceptual scheme.
Reno laments our inability to talk about natural reason in ways that aren’t Rawlsian. I would submit that Pius X feared just that sort of future. Here’s what he proposed:
http://www.catholicapologetics.info/catholicteaching/philosophy/thomast.htm
December 29th, 2011 | 9:59 pm
There’s nothing in Rawls that would speak against making an argument based in reason for universal religious education. Nothing at all.
From Political Liberalism:
“[L]et’s consider the question of school prayer. It might be thought that a liberal position on this question would deny its admissibility in public schools. But why so? We have to consider all the political values that can be invoked to settle this question and which side the decisive reasons fall. The famous debates in 1784-1785 between Patrick Henry and James Madison over the establishment of the Anglican Church in Virginia and involving religion in the schools was argued almost entirely by reference to political values alone.” pg. 476.
December 29th, 2011 | 10:35 pm
I’d also like to protest — who the heck are these people to tell me what sorts of arguments I may and may not use? There are four somewhat overlapping possibilities, as I see them:
Arguments based on, let’s say, Scripture would be unwise because they would be ineffectual;
Arguments based on Scripture would be wise because they would be effectual;
Arguments based on Scripture would be effectual, but would be wrong and destructive of democracy;
Arguments based on Scripture would be effectual and would help to build up democracy.
If somebody believes the first, I say, “Well, pal, that’s my lookout. You try it your way, I’ll try it mine.” I somebody believes the third, I say, “You prove it. You show me how democracy can possibly flourish in the absence of a genuine culture; and how there can be a genuine culture without a shared faith. You show me a single place where faith has been driven into the closet, and the people have NOT ended up with the state as the almighty deity. Note that I have on my side all of the Founders, including the few deistical ones; and all of the great moral reformers, such as Rev. King; and all the great pagan jurists, etc. You have John Dewey, destroyer of American education.”
If somebody believes the second, I say, “Well, you may be right, but there are times to be as cunning as serpents, and then there are times when one just has to tell the truth, come what may. I won’t always base the form of my argument on what I think will gain for me the biggest audience. Sometimes I will, but sometimes I won’t.”
Then there is the fourth position, held by people like Chesterton and Dawson and Maritain.
I am absolutely persuaded that the academic Left doesn’t want such arguments to be made because they fear that they will unite people — that they will be powerful arguments, and foundation stones for a real self-government.
December 30th, 2011 | 11:25 am
Esolen nails it.
Rawls contends that the creed of political liberalism will unite people. Seriously, what a genius. Do you know what other creed will unite people? JUST ABOUT ANY OTHER CREED.
December 30th, 2011 | 11:37 am
A most interesting discussion that should become more public, but the media won’t let it.
Prof. Esolen is correct that the academic left fears that the public from which it is so alienated might come together on ideas the left rejects. It reminds me of the situation in Spain before the civil war: the liberal cities vs. the conservative and Catholic peasants. Because “dialogue” was impossible both sides resorted to violence. Let it not happen here.
My sense is that this argument could well be decided on the basis of material interests–specifically the public’s. The real appeal of the secularist platitudes is that they seem to underlie our (fading) prosperity. Show (or argue) that instead they are causing our decline and the argument will wake up and heat up fast. I believe this economic problem is a real opportunity for believers. The old order is on the skids, but does not yet realize it.
December 30th, 2011 | 2:30 pm
It’s a pity, and also a mystery to me, that Rawls doesn’t attract more in the way of responsible conservative criticism. This is particularly true of the Rawls of Political Liberalism, and of conservative Catholics of the sort associated with First Things. Rawls himself noted certain parallels with his ideas of public reason and the line of argument offered earlier by John Courtney Murray in ‘We Holds These Truths’. Rawlsian arguments are readily available to counter the more aggressive kinds of secularism resisted by religious thinkers on the right. One would think there’d be a lot of work to do in comparing Rawls’ public reason and the kind of natural law Murray proposed as liberalism’s ‘public philosophy’, with some serious argument as to the limits of the former and advantages of the latter. Instead, alas, we get more often than not caricature and derision. As Bob G. says, it could be an interesting discussion.
December 30th, 2011 | 10:51 pm
Tony Esolen,
I’m not sure what you mean when you say that real self-government relies on a genuine culture that is created out of a shared faith. Whatever golden age you miss seems mythological.
December 30th, 2011 | 10:58 pm
Kev,
Every creed separates insiders/believers from outsiders/nonbelievers. Rawls thought liberalism could make more people insiders than other creeds could by not requiring that they give up other things they believed. You might think he was wrong, but he was merely as stupid as your last comment would imply.
December 31st, 2011 | 5:22 am
As Pascal noted in his Art of Persuasion, we cannot prove all our propositions, which would involve us in a perpetual regress, nor can we define all our terms, which would lead to circularity. In any rational argument, the parties must agree on the premises or axioms. Any syllogism can be rebutted by a denial of the major premise.
What, in any given community, constitutes the body of agreed premises will, inevitably, determine what counts as a reason. In the absence of such agreed premises, there is no appeal but to the sword. Liberalism arose in 17th century Europe precisely because there was a widespread recognition that religious differences arising from the Reformation appeared permanent and ineradicable and that some other basis of civil consensus had to be sought.
Of course, one can argue that the quest is illusory: thus, “Lamennais argued that without authority there could be no religion, that it was the foundation of all society and morality, and that it alone enfranchised man by making him obedient, so harmonizing all intelligences and wills. And thus the Church, as the supreme authority, became the principle of order, the centre of political as well as religious stability; the only divine rights were those she sanctioned, in her strength kings reigned, and through obedience to her man was happy and God honoured.”
December 31st, 2011 | 11:35 am
Michael,
But any creed that’s put forward as merely “public” could do the job. I could say “In the public realm, we act according to the norms of Rastafarianism, which we all recognize as having only a conventional authority over our public lives.”
Rawls’ Political Liberalism is a view as substantive as any other.
December 31st, 2011 | 4:17 pm
The question, Fr. Kevin, is whether you could offer anything resembling an argument for such a claim. Ignore it if you like, but don’t pretend Rawls didn’t offer a rigorous defense of his position.
December 31st, 2011 | 6:10 pm
Kev,
I can’t be Hindu and a Rastafarian. Rawls lets a Hindu remain a Hindu.
January 1st, 2012 | 1:26 pm
Michael writes:
Whatever golden age you [Esolen] miss seems mythological.
*************
Since Esolen mentions Chesterton, Christopher Dawson and Maritain as comprising a “fourth position” — although just how Mr. C’s distributism, Mr. D’s “corporativism” and Mr. M’s integralisme could together constitute a coherent “position” is left unspoken — perhaps the “Golden Age” would be the interwar period wherein these men were more or less interacting contemporaries (1919-1939). If so, this is not necessarily a move towards myth or myth-making; however, it’s certainly an odd choice on Esolen’s part that raises more questions than it answers…
&&&
Michael PS quotes Andrew Fairbairn who wrote, long ago, that:
“Lamennais argued that without authority there could be no religion…”
*************
I love the multiple ironies here! I’m sure Fairbairn and John Henry Newman would be as amused as I am.
January 1st, 2012 | 6:07 pm
I teach in a public university. I make pro-life and pro-God arguments quite a bit in class, for precisely the reasons given in R.R. Reno’s original post. This past year, I had a pro-choice lesbian even thank me after such a class; it was the first time she had ever heard a defense of the pro-life position, and it gave her food for thought.
I recognize, however, that teachers in other institutions might have to be considerably more careful. This is especially true in the before-college levels, which quite often today don’t even give a nod to freedom of discussion.
January 2nd, 2012 | 7:09 am
Benighted Savage
The whole Counter-Revolutionary school embraced views similar to Lammanais, Joseph de Maistre being the best-known example.
A secular version of it can be found in the “Catholic Atheism” of Charles Maurras, which led to a spirited altercation between Maurras’s Jesuit defender, Pedro Descoqs and the Oratorian, Laberthonnière, in Maurice Blondel’s periodical, L’Annales de philosophie chrétienne.
Laberthonnière shrewdly accused Maurras of seeing the Church as shoring up society against “the anarchy he saw as inherent in Christianity itself.”
Blondel accused him of proposing “A Catholicism without Christianity, submissiveness without thought, an authority without love, a Church that would rejoice at the insulting tributes paid to the virtuosity of her interpretative and repressive system… To accept all from God except God, all from Christ except His Spirit, to preserve in Catholicism only a residue that is aristocratic and soothing for the privileged and beguiling or threatening for the lower classes—is not all this, under the pretext perhaps of thinking only about religion, really a matter of pursuing only politics?”
January 2nd, 2012 | 10:54 am
I’m fully aware of what you call the Counter-revolutionary school of French reactionary “conservatism.” It’s this awareness that informs my view that your use of a quotation from Fairbairn’s polemic, coupled with Fairbairn’s ironic use of Lamennais as an example of what he calls the “Continental Catholic revival,” is itself highly ironic. Otherwise, why use Fairbairn?
Hmmmm…when I think of Maurras and the AF, what first comes to mind is their proto-fascism, monarchism, anti-modernism and anti-semitism. The factor of Maurras’ agnosticism/atheism that you mention seems just a nasty caboose at the end of a train of rather unsavory reactionary sentiment. I don’t know much about the Blondel/Descoqs debate, but Bernardi’s book looks promising.
January 2nd, 2012 | 1:20 pm
Craig Payne,
I’m surprised to learn that universities can be a place where ideas can be freely discussed, and I’m even more surprised to learn that lesbians can be anything other than closed-minded ideologues, automatons of the feminist and gay agendas.
I’m being sarcastic, of course, but amid all of the nasty exaggerations found on this site, I enjoyed hearing you describe the obvious, which is that students (and other Americans for that matter) are interested in a variety of ideas and perspectives.
January 2nd, 2012 | 1:51 pm
Komonchak is rather good on this: “For Blondel nature was made for the supernatural, and a failure to recognize that sublime destiny could not leave one’s analysis of the natural laws of society unaffected. He called himself an “integrist” precisely because religion is comprehensively, inclusively pertinent to the human condition.”
Descoqs, a follower of Suarez’s interpretation of St Thomas had allowed the political sphere a wide degree of autonomy and he was prepared to detach “political society” from “religious society,” with its own “natural” end or purpose.
Laberthonnière retaliated by accusing Descoqs of being influenced by “a false theological notion of some state of pure nature and therefore imagined the state could be self-sufficient in the sense that it could be properly independent of any specifically Christian sense of justice.”
“The Church,” said Laberthonnière, “does not issue words of command, backed up by menaces or favours; she raises souls to the life above and causes a supernatural obligation to be born and cultivated in the conscience…” Hence is utter rejection of any sort of “state religion,” which Maurras proposed and Descoqs (and many other Catholics) welcomed.
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