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How adequate is secularism as a basis for liberal education?
Sam Speers, the versatile and knowledgeable director of religious and spiritual life at Vassar College and I have been corresponding about the adequacy of the secular as a basis for liberal education. It's a crucial question, I believe, especially for any one interested in the Big Questions issue we've been exploring through my liblog and elsewhere. Here's the current state of play between us.
Sam writes:
...the underlying issue to me is to find ways that my office, and offices like mine, can create a new a sense of partnership with the inquiry of a liberal arts education. Most simply put, the challenge and reward of my work is finding ways to integrate religious and spiritual life into the public and intellectual fabric of campus life. I’ve come to think that one of the MOST significant challenges here has to do with how much religious life at liberal arts campuses is still shaped by Enlightenment debates about revelation and reason. We speak (often rightly) of the ways that engaging our religious diversity can help revitalize religious life and campus life more generally. But this turn to religious pluralism needs to reckon with the ways that the encounter with secular commitments is also a defining experience of a liberal arts education. For the important Enlightenment suspicions of authority continue to frame our work. Practically speaking, religious life and practice (in all its richly discordant diversity) still tends to get lumped together as the “revealed” that can’t be empirically verified. In such a context, it’s difficult to link religious life into the campus’ intellectual life. Anecdotal evidence of such liberal assumptions includes the student at a recent discussion here who said, “it almost contradicts what the college stands for to be religious—which is doing what someone else tells you to do.”
Working from this analysis about the Enlightenment’s continuing legacy, I’ve been drawn to the questions Talal Asad’s work (see especially Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003) raises about how rational, stable, and ample a container the secular is for our liberal arts education. In part, this turn to critiques of the secular is a strategy—a pragmatic way of opening up space for including religious insights and practices at the liberal arts table. But here, briefly, are some aspects of Asad’s argument I find most intriguing and helpful. To begin with, his work helps move beyond the ways we too readily polarize the religious and secular. He’s not so much interested in the critiques “believers” are now glad to level at (Godless) secularists, as he is inquiring about the secular as a “cultural concept”(17). He wants to analyze critically how we have come to think of the secular in the ways that we do—thus he calls his book “an anthropology of secularism.” He notes that the “familiar oppositions [of] belief and knowledge, reason and imagination, history and fiction, symbol and allegory, natural and supernatural, sacred and profane [are] binaries that pervade modern secular discourse, especially in its polemical mode” (23). He calls his analysis “a counter to the triumphalist history of the secular” (25), signaling his interest in thinking outside of the progressivist categories of the “binaries” just listed. He describes his inquiry into the discourse of the secular as showing how “the sacred and secular depend on each other” (26), are historically entangled with one another, and are themselves evolving constructive terms.
In a recent review of Formations of the Secular, James Smith helpfully summarizes a key strand of Asad’s argument:
“So we might say that Asad wants a secularism without the secular; that is, he is clearly concerned about the consequences of theocracy (particularly given his experience in the Muslim world), and is thus a staunch defender of secularism and a certain de-theologization of political discourse and procedures. However he (rightly) questions the notion of a neutral secular reason that has traditionally undergirded secularism as a political doctrine.”[1]
We could note, of course, that Asad’s critique of neutral secular reason not only applies to political doctrine but also to our notions of the liberal arts. His project is of obvious interest to higher education institutions that will and must remain secularist even as they respond creatively to these critiques of secular reason as the neutral arbiter of our educational mission. Put another way, Asad is one of a number of contemporary scholars whose work helps open up critical discussion about the place of the sacred in secular modernity. [2]
One example Asad gives of the “interdependence of religious and secular elements” (65) in political philosophy is his summary of Margaret Canovan’s defense of liberalism. Here too his argument is of obvious interest to our thinking about the mission of higher education. Canovan calls upon liberalism to “give up its illusion of being the party of reason [so that] it will be better placed to defend its political values against its conservative and radical critics” (57). Thus Canovan writes, “liberalism never has been an account of the world, but a project to be realized” (59). Asad summarizes Canovan’s argument: “The essence of the myth of liberalism—its imaginary construction—is to assert human rights precisely because they are not built into the structure of the universe” (59). As Asad points out, Canovan re-describes liberalism’s project in mythic terms, employing a kind of secularized sacred rhetoric: “It is more like making a garden in a jungle that is continually encroaching. . . The world is a dark place, which needs redemption by the light of a myth” (59).
Asad’s interest in such inter-connections of secular and sacred discourses makes him an important conversation partner for re-thinking the mission of a liberal arts education in light of the now widely contested ways we have equated secularism and modernity. He is certainly one scholar to draw upon in trying to come to terms, as I’ve talked about with you before, with the ways both secular and religious traditions are under challenge and in need of portions of one another.
NOTES
[1] James K.A. Smith, “Secularity, Religion, and the Politics of Ambiguity.” Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory vol. 6 no. 3 (Fall 2005). Smith finds Asad an ally in a world where the Enlightenment principles that have shaped modern secular understandings of liberal democracy are now to be “rightly jettisoned” (1). It’s not clear to me that Asad shares Smith’s polemic with Enlightenment values—at times Smith’s review serves to polarize the religious and secular discourses that Asad’s inquiry reveals as depending upon each other.
[2] When President Rebecca Chopp of Colgate University, came to speak at Vassar last year on the changing role of religious life in a secular liberal arts college, the chair of the Philosophy Department, Mitch Miller, wrote me the following note expressing his department’s interest in sponsoring Chopp’s talk: “Identifying and understanding the places and forms of the sacred in the secular, that is, in our ethical imaginations, in our art and culture, and in our life choices, is a philosophical task. Several years ago Jurgen Habermas gave us a seminar paper on the project of retrieving religious language not, of course, for proselytization but for the articulation of the spiritual depths of our common political culture. This was thoughtful, horizon-opening work…” Other important conversation partners to this work of understanding the interdependence of religious and secular insights include Charles Taylor and Dipesh Chakrabarty.
Here's my response to Sam's essay:
Sam: This is stimulating, important, provocative. As a classicist I know how deeply inscribed in Western thought are dichotomies such as the ones to which Asad calls attention. They go right back to the structure of ancient Greek language and thought, and hence are well entrenched in all of us who, whether we know it or not, have been shaped by that thought. They were reinforced in the eighteenth century, but they are not a product of the Enlightenment, nor a monopoly of secularists. In fact, many Christians, especially the clergy, have found some of those dichotomies very convenient. Reason vs. Revelation, for example, is very handy for both secularists and believers. It allows the secularist to enthrone Reason, as the French revolutionaries did, and to marginalize not only religious doctrine but also religious practice. For the believer, the dichotomy can also be very useful. It keeps Faith safe from Reason's assaults. All one has to do is affirm that one's creed is “revealed truth,” not subject to logical refutation. Very convenient, but the price is high—it enthrones Reason at the center of liberal education, indeed higher education as a whole, and sends Religion a-packing, off to the boonies somewhere, near the Counseling Center, I bet, for in this view, Religion is, at best, “moralistic therapeutic deism,” to use Chris Smith's phrase. It may help a troubled kid now and then, but it better not try to do much else.
But wait a minute, is the goal, or the essence, of a liberal education really reason? Suppose one challenged that premise. Suppose one started with something like the goal of the education WE are offering is “to live in accord with nature,” or “happiness” or “to love my neighbor as myself”? Each would have a powerful intellectual tradition behind it; more importantly, any of these (and many others, I bet) would immediately subvert the dichotomous thought to which Asad refers. Seen in this light, reason would not be the idol we enthrone and worship in the secularized cathedrals of learning, but an immensely valuable tool, a means to an end. Prayer, meditation, worship, for some people at least, might be other means to that same end. Faith might turn out not to be a set of doctrines that drive non-believers into outer darkness, but a bungee cord around the waist, something that gives us the courage to take a leap into the unknown. These sacred things, in other words, might turn out to be deeply compatible, in some cases at least with a rigorous secularism.
How would that affect liberal education, and the challenge you face of integrating the sacred and the secular? How would it affect “liberalism” more generally, for liberalism and liberal education may be more intimately connected than we dare to admit in the current political climate. What do you think?
Bob Connor
November 19, 2005
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