07.17.08
Posted in Culture Wars, 2008 Campaign, Church & State - The Debate, An Informed Mind and Conscience, Romney - Not McCain at 10:20 am by Brian Schuettler
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121625042990560111.html?mod=rss_opinion_main
The judiciary is becoming an important election issue. John McCain is warning conservatives that control of today’s finely balanced Supreme Court depends on his election. Unfortunately, his jurisprudence is likely to be anything but conservative.
The idea of a “living Constitution” long has been popular on the political left. Conservatives routinely dismiss such result-oriented justice, denouncing “judicial activism” and proclaiming their fidelity to “original intent.” However, many Republicans, like Mr. McCain, are just as result-oriented as their Democratic opponents. They only disagree over the result desired.
Judge-made rights are wrong because there is no constitutional warrant behind them. The Constitution leaves most decisions up to the normal political process.
However, the Constitution sometimes requires decisions or action by judges – “judicial activism,” if you will – to ensure the country’s fundamental law is followed. Thus, for example, if government improperly restricts free speech – think the McCain-Feingold law’s ban on issue ads – the courts have an obligation to void the law. The same goes for efforts by government to ban firearms ownership, as the Court ruled this term in striking down the District of Columbia gun ban.
Yet even as Republicans support and defend the Second Amendment, they ignore the Constitution when it says that only Congress can suspend habeas corpus, and then only in event of an invasion or rebellion. And if a president says we are “at war,” Republicans believe he can ignore laws passed by Congress.
Mr. McCain is a convenient convert to the cause of sound judicial appointments. He has never paid much attention to judicial philosophy, backing both Clinton Supreme Court nominees – Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. He also participated in the so-called “Gang of 14,” which favored centrist over conservative nominees as part of a compromise between President George W. Bush and Senate Democrats.
What’s more, Republican Court appointments have often turned liberal. Earl Warren, William Brennan and Harry Blackmun were GOP appointees to the high court. So are “liberals” John Paul Stevens and David Souter, as well as centrists Anthony Kennedy and former Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. There is no reason to believe that a President McCain, once freed from the need to seek conservative support, would support more philosophically sound candidates. Even if he did, he would not likely prevail against a Democratic Senate majority.
Nor is it obvious that Barack Obama would attempt to pack the court with left-wing ideologues. He shocked some of his supporters by endorsing the ruling that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to own firearms, and criticizing the recent decision overturning the death penalty for a child rapist. With the three members most likely to leave the Supreme Court in the near future occupying the more liberal side of the bench, the next appointments probably won’t much change the Court’s balance.
But even if a President McCain were to influence the court, it would not likely be in a genuinely conservative direction. His jurisprudence is not conservative.
For instance, most conservatives believe that the First Amendment safeguards political speech. Mr. McCain does not. Indeed, it is the liberal bloc which upheld McCain-Feingold’s restrictions on ads criticizing incumbent politicians, while the conservative members, led by Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, forged a more recent majority overturning parts of McCain-Feingold.
In his May 2008 speech on judges at Wake Forest University, Mr. McCain talked about the importance of “the constitutional restraint on power,” but in practice he recognizes no limits on government or executive-branch authority. In fact, if Mr. McCain nominated someone in his own image, the appointee would disagree with not only the doctrine of enumerated powers, which limits the federal government to only those tasks explicitly authorized by the Constitution, but also the Constitution’s system of checks and balances, and even its explicit grant of the law-making power to Congress.
Mr. McCain has endorsed, in action if not rhetoric, the theory of the “unitary executive,” which leaves the president unconstrained by Congress or the courts. Republicans like Mr. McCain believe the president as commander in chief of the military can do almost anything, including deny Americans arrested in America protection of the Constitution and access to the courts.
It is important to choose judicial nominees carefully. But that is no reason for conservatives to vote for Mr. McCain. He has demonstrated no more interest in “conserving” the Constitution, and its principles of limited government and individual liberty, than has Mr. Obama.
The best way to get better judges is to expand candidate choice beyond the Republicans and Democrats. Supporting the political status quo guarantees more jurisprudence based on political convenience, not constitutional principle.
Mr. Barr is the Libertarian Party’s candidate for president.
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07.05.08
Posted in Belief and Disbelief-The Debate, Culture Wars, Modernism Discussion, Critical Thinking at 9:14 am by Brian Schuettler
Randal Marlin at Mercator : http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/a_secular_age/A Secular Age is a huge and hugely interesting work by Charles Taylor, a Canadian who has been called ” the most interesting and important philosopher writing in English today”. It deals with some of the most important issues of our time. What place is there for the contribution of religious ideas, notably belief in God and God’s word, to our public discourse about social policy? It is a feature of contemporary existence that arguments based on biblical sources or pronouncements from the Vatican tend to be treated today as more or less inadmissible in serious academic discussion. They may be used for adornment, but not as proper authority standing alone; serious work has to be couched in secular language.
I have certainly found in a lifetime spent in academic philosophy that professional manners require that while faith can serve as inspiration, whatever it inspires has to pass through a secularising filter before it can be acceptable as a contribution to philosophy. So, for example, arguments about ethics and social policies relating to abortion cannot, in serious discussion, rest on religious authority.
But is it right that this should be so?
Charles Taylor’s book does not, as far as I can tell, give a direct negative answer to this question, but in a magisterial tracing of the many currents of thought that have led to our “secular age” he does retrieve the sense that this might be an open question. The central aim of his book, as he himself expresses it, is “to study the fate in the modern West of religious faith in the strong sense… the belief in transcendent reality, on the one hand, and the connected aspiration to a transformation which goes beyond ordinary human flourishing on the other.”
Books attacking belief in God are best-sellers, and religious belief and practice have been on the defensive for many decades. What Taylor argues well is that the current impulses toward the marginalising of religion stem from a distorted idea of the respective roles of religion and science in the development of our current mind-set, or more particularly, our “social imaginary”, which he defines as the set of shared ideas that tell us how to relate to others and what things are possible to be accomplished.
According to the simplistic narrative he attacks, science has been responsible for all that is good and progressive in the modern world, while religion has offered a series of superstitions and roadblocks in the way of science. Opposition to Copernicus and Darwin are only two of the more conspicuous examples.
This narrative obscures many vital pieces of a more complicated, but more accurate, story of the roles of religion and science in the path from an age of faith to that of secularised reason. The fuller narrative, Taylor argues, needs to take account of the way in which religious belief inspired the search for scientific truth, and the way in which both religious and atheistic thinking produced internal struggles, strands of which impacted on the other group.
Fundamentalist Christianity has its counterpart in fundamentalist atheism, each side convinced of its own truth and closed off from admitting any possibility of truth on the part of the other view. Yet when their truth claims are put under the microscope neither side is entitled to the certainty it professes.
Taylor gives many examples of atheistic dogmatism from French and Russian revolutionaries, but I’ll add to his collection the brouhaha over the famous 1925 Scopes “Monkey” trial (to which Taylor alludes, though without developing the example) in which a biology teacher in Tennessee was prosecuted (successfully) for violating a statute against the teaching of evolution. Secular thinkers cheered the defeat accorded fundamentalist Christianity in the court of public opinion. But few of the cheerers know that the book at the centre of the debate, A Civic Biology was gravely defective in treating as scientific fact the superiority of the Caucasian race and promoting eugenic views based on bad science.
Among the especially valuable concepts Taylor employs, I would highlight his expression “exclusive humanism”. All too often, we accept the term “humanism” to mean ethics without God, and since one can have a highly laudable ethical set of views while not including belief in God, this acceptance seems reasonable.
But Taylor rightly notes that for the most part what is laudable in humanism is also compatible with belief in God. Moreover, belief in God gives a special incentive to love and make sacrifices for our neighbour. So we need to distinguish a humanism that includes belief in God from one that doesn’t, instead of freighting theism with all the bad things that have come out of it, while according it none of the good.Once we focus on the question: “What is it that disbelief in God makes possible that belief will not allow?” we may find that the humanism in question becomes less appealing. Using the word “humanism” to describe beliefs that more accurately warrant the term “exclusive humanism,” gives an unwarranted advantage to the unbeliever.
Throughout the book, Taylor produces arguments to show that ethical advances have been generated by religious believers and are not simply the result of atheistic materialism.
We moderns are able to think about our individuality and our autonomy differently from the world before Rene Descartes and the rise of rationalism. Hence God is often viewed as subject to laws perceived as necessary by the rational self. The God of Abraham yields to scientific necessity, and Deism results. The world is created like clockwork. It’s not a great step from there to wondering why God is needed at all, if science can tell us all we need to know.
Taylor traces many strands of thinking that result in our contemporary outlook. He is particularly interested in how it came to be that debatable matters came to be one-sidedly settled, not only in the minds of the intellectual elite, but also in the thinking of the masses. Those with a Christian training will recognise the old phenomenon of believing what one wants to believe, captured in Luther’s notorious saying, “reason is a whore.” Popular culture extols the kinds of things and way of life that Christianity treats as turning us away from God.
Atheism leaves us with a bleak world when we contemplate our death. Scientific materialism gives us a disenchanted world, along with the benefits of removing superstitions. Some poets sought refuge in nature and beauty. The French writer Albert Camus gives us one outlook in the stubborn refusal to accept the comforts that belief in transcendence provides. Taylor looks at many of the different responses to both theism and atheism in a sympathetic way, but always with sufficient appreciation for the attendant difficulties so that no final answer to the meaning of life emerges.
A recent visit to St Petersburg and the wealth of inspired art in the basilicas, particularly the Church of the Saviour of Spilt Blood, has reinforced my impression that Taylor has his finger on the pulse of our times. Russia has lived through an atheistic Communist phase and has rediscovered its inspirational roots with a new reverence for the treasures of its Orthodox past. Reverting to the name St Petersburg is one indication of this. But the Russian Museum also emphasises religious themes. It acknowledges the oppression of the serfs, but avoids any sense that the Revolution brought a new lasting vision. The invasion of capitalism has not succeeded any better, and one senses a search for a new vision, combined with an openness not seen for a long time.
This is a magnificent, very important study. It has its drawbacks, such as untranslated words, repetition, presumptions about the reader’s background knowledge, etc. The length is daunting but there is an excellent index, and Google can help a lot with the rest. There are so many sources enriching this work that it may be idiosyncratic to suggest some absences, but I did feel the book would have profited from a glance or two at Kierkegaard, Levinas and Jacques Ellul. There’s also a letter by Nietzsche in which he confesses to admiration of Christianity but finds it too difficult. These other sources would reinforce Taylor’s history of our social imaginary. The upshot is that this social imaginary needs to be examined and re-examined in the light of how it came to be what it is and where it is.
Randal Marlin teaches philosophy at Carleton University in Ottawa.
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06.23.08
Posted in Culture Wars, Religion In America, Reviews, An Informed Mind and Conscience, Recovering Founding Principles at 3:49 pm by Brian Schuettler
A review of A Secular Age, by Charles Taylor
Everyone knows that we live in a secular age. But what exactly does it mean to say that our age is marked by a decline in religious belief and practice? What brought about faith’s decline? What has become of the spiritual needs to which religion once provided an answer? How does a secular age affect our understanding of human nature and human flourishing? Has the decline in religious belief and practice liberated and enriched, or narrowed and impoverished, the human spirit? And what has been its impact on the religions that have survived, indeed multiplied, in our time?
Merely to ask such questions is to cast doubt on the conventional wisdom that represents secularism as the triumph of morality and reason over priestly authority and popular superstition. It is to admit that our secular age may not be the solution to the human predicament or the highest and final stage of human progress. But if secularism is none of the things it is so confidently asserted to be, then what is it?
One could hardly find a better guide to such timely questions than 2007 Templeton Prize winner Charles Taylor. It’s true, also, that his extraordinary new book, A Secular Age, is dauntingly long and suffers from loose organization. It visits too many out of the way places and lingers there too often. It roams and rambles. And yet with Taylor’s easy conversational prose, wealth of learning, openness to life’s ends, capacity to distill philosophical controversies, and ability to render striking judgments, thoughtful readers will recognize their interest in forging through to the final page. A Secular Age is one of those rare books that put familiar and defining features of our world in a better, brighter light.
In a sense, he has been writing this book all his professional life. One of our greatest living philosophers, Taylor, now 76, is a professor of philosophy at Northwestern University and a professor emeritus at McGill University in Montreal. Before that, in the 1970s and 1980s, he taught moral and political philosophy at Oxford. Throughout his career, he has defended claims of classical philosophy and religious faith against the criticism of modern philosophy, and he has defended modern claims against the criticisms of classical philosophy and religious faith. He seeks a philosophical account that gives all parties their due in the great debates about human nature and the good life.
His early writings include seminal papers criticizing the social sciences and exploring the limits of the liberal tradition. In 1975 he published a long, sweeping volume, Hegel, which examined the ideas and sentiments behind the great philosophical synthesizer’s work. That book was followed by a short, focused one, Hegel and Modern Society, spelling out the significance of Hegel’s political and social doctrines. In 1989 Taylor published Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, a formidable volume tracing many of modernity’s proudest achievements back to pre-modern religious sources. A few years later, his brief The Ethics of Authenticity defended individual freedom but insisted that the self’s satisfactions in choosing its own ends and fashioning its own life were inextricably tied to goods found in community and beliefs about transcendence that modernity sought vigorously to suppress. One hopes that Taylor will soon follow up A Secular Age with a more succinct work that makes explicit the nerve of the argument.
* * *
In the meantime, his new book, an outgrowth of his 1999 Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh, provides an excellent point of departure for future thinking about morality, politics, and religion. Taylor begins with a straightforward question: “Why was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in, say, 1500 in our Western society, while in 2000 many of us find this not only easy, but even inescapable?” Although the pre-modern unification of religion and politics greatly assisted religious belief, Taylor is not concerned really with explaining the separation of church and state. Rather, his interest is in “the conditions of belief,” or the “move from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed, unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among others.” The aim is to reconstruct and assess the “whole context of understanding in which our moral, spiritual or religious experience and search takes place.”
According to the conventional account, the rise of secularism is simple to explain: modern science refuted religious belief, fair and square. But the theories of Newton, Darwin, and Einstein, monumental achievements though they are, tell us nothing about what, if anything, lies beyond the natural world, argues Taylor. Extraordinary experiences of wholeness or harmony, of joy or exaltation, remain available to believers and unbelievers alike. And nothing we have learned from the natural sciences, according to Taylor, prevents believers from interpreting these experiences as gifts that come from a power outside of nature or beyond the self. At the same time, they know that otherwise reasonable and decent people will reject this interpretation as self-deluded or worse.
* * *
In contrast, before 1500 in Latin Christendom and stretching back throughout the history of mankind, belief was the default option; the natural world was assumed to be shot through with spiritual causes. Since 1500, unbelief has become the presumption, or at least the default option. That story is familiar enough. What distinguishes Taylor’s analysis is his exploration of modern unbelief’s roots in, and persisting dependence upon, pre-modern belief, and his illumination of the opportunities for faith to which modern freedom and pluralism give rise.
“Exclusive humanism” is the name that Taylor gives to the form that unbelief takes now in Western civilization. A crucial early step towards it was the overthrow of the Aristotelian understanding of the cosmos as an ordered whole. Another closely related step was the development of modern science, driven by the ambition to master and control nature, to purge nature of the spiritual and reduce the world to the natural.
While science is typically seen as responsible for, in Weber’s famous phrase, the “disenchantment of the world,” Taylor emphasizes instead the new ethical stance that emerged as both a cause and effect of modernity. In the modern dispensation, reason is disinterested, disengaged, and merely instrumental. Though incapable of authoritatively ranking ends, reason is able—and declares it obligatory—to construct a political order that recognizes the right of all citizens to pursue their self-chosen ends, provided that they respect the right of others to engage in the same pursuit. Reason presses also for increasingly inclusive definitions of citizenship. This is part of its larger demand for laws that recognize the freedom shared equally by all humanity. And thanks to the uses to which individuals put their newfound freedom, many understandings of human flourishing proliferate. Nevertheless, exclusive humanism recognizes limits: it resolutely understands freedom in this-worldly terms.
Taylor shows brilliantly that the modern conceptions of reason and the modern moral order stem partly from the Protestant Reformation. Though a believing Catholic, Taylor insists that the Reformation responded to genuine problems arising out of the division between a cloistered clergy and a lax laity. By rejecting Church-sanctioned hierarchy, proclaiming a priesthood of all believers, and discovering religious significance in the ordinary life of work and family, production and reproduction, Protestantism laid the foundations for modern morality. It also brought Catholicism into closer harmony with the original Christian promise of a humanity transformed by agape—the love of God that is inseparable from love for our fellow human beings.
Exclusive humanism, however, long ago lost sight of its religious spirit. Once the individual had been liberated from the Church’s authority, modern philosophy turned its sights on all forms of belief that might limit the individual’s complete freedom to define his own happiness in this world. Thus as the recent bestselling polemics in praise of atheism by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens have illustrated, exclusive humanism, in its current incarnation, seeks to wipe out faith in all forms. Emblematic of this determination is the progressive Left’s fascination with Nietzsche, whom they often revere as the supreme authority on the critique of religion.
Read the full review at the Claremont Institute >>>>> http://www.claremont.org/publications/crb/id.1521/article_detail.asp
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