On Rawls's failure to preserve genuine (freedom of) religion more

On Rawls’s failure to preserve genuine (freedom of) religion: confessions of an unreasonable religionist Introduction John Rawls is the central figure in the political philosophy of liberalism, in turn the dominant political philosophy of our time. I shall suggest in what follows that the key to understanding Rawls’s political philosophy is to see it as a generalisation of his attractive seeming-preservation of freedom of religion. In other words, to see Rawls as aiming to achieve the full legacy of liberalism, which began in the (at first very grudging) pluralism implicit in a non-fundamentalist Protestantism(s).i As extrapolating a principle of religious tolerance that is at the root of liberal political philosophy (beginning perhaps with Locke) to such matters as political liberty and distributive justice, matters which are the principle subjects of Rawls’s famed first and second principles of justice. I believe that the best way of understanding the absolutely fundamental plank of Rawls’s philosophy (its ‘Archimedean point’, if you wish) -- namely, liberal ‘neutrality’ between conceptions of the good -- is as a generalisation of the principle of religious toleration, conceived of now as right, and not merely as pragmatically sensible, to avoid oppression or mutual slaughter. If this is correct -- if the origin and ‘telos’ of Rawls’s political philosophy is indeed relevantly taken to be at the very heart in his meditations on religious tolerance and its analogues in the recent and contemporary world -- then the topic of this paper is of more general significance for liberal political philosophy than might at first have seemed evident from its title. And what I shall also suggest is that there is a big clue in Rawls’s rhetoric around religion to the hidden reality of liberalism’s attitude towards it – which, I shall suggest, is in actuality unremittingly hostile. Rawls seeks in the first instance both to make religious belief safe from majoritarian intolerance and to make general liberty of conscience safe from religious intolerance. Above, I called his way of doing so ‘attractive’, because I think that most (usually not-very-religious) contemporary intellectuals find the saving of general liberty of conscience from religious intolerance -- e.g., from theocracy -- a very attractive idea. Indeed, I do too feel its attractions; but I believe that they are liable to blind one to what I shall suggest is the true status of religion under (Rawlsian) liberalism: a neutered, culturally-, socially- and politically- insignificant force. I suspect that many religiously-inclined persons are far less likely to be so blinded, and that in fact liberalism’s covert neutering of religion may be an agent in the fomentation of extremist, ‘fundamentalist’, intolerant or theocratic versions and visions of religion, in the world today. Thus the topic of this paper may turn out to be of broad contemporary political/ public significance, not merely of narrow academic or philosophical interest. My suspicion is that the attitude of liberalism toward religion, found in highly-focussed form in Rawls’s discussion of ‘Equal liberty of conscience’, in his epochal Theory of Justice,ii may well now be a cause of rather than a palliative to the ‘clash of fundamentalisms’ writ large in the world today.iii Or indeed, if slightly paradoxically and surprisingly: that one of the two chief clashing fundamentalisms ought properly to be understood to be liberalism. I shall argue this case first with regard to the early Rawls (the Rawls of A Theory of Justice), and then with regard to the later Rawls (from Political Liberalism on). A Theory of Justice The basic argument in Rawls for freedom of religious conscience runs roughly as follows: Suppose I consider a choice between a conception of justice that does not guarantee liberty of conscience and freedom of worship to all and a conception that does. If I choose one that does not, then whether or not I receive protection will depend on whether I am in the religious majority or religious minority. If I choose one that does, then I am protected either way. Now reasoning under the veil of ignorance, I have no basis for assigning a likelihood to my being in the group whose liberties would be protected rather than in the group whose liberties would be suppressed. // But liberty of conscience is required for me to keep the commitments assigned to me by religious or moral convictions, assuming I have them. Thus, if I have a religious outlook, then I will understand that this view assigns to me as adherent certain basic obligations such as to day and manner of worship. And having religious liberties will be required for the fulfillment of those obligations. To be sure I do not know if I have a religious outlook, but I might have one, or I might have a more secular moral outlook that also assigns me fundamental obligations. And that suffices to make liberty of conscience a fundamental primary good and provide[s] a compelling reason for choosing the conception of justice that ensures its protection.iv I will being by remarking that there is a quite problematic and odd use of ‘the precautionary principle’ at work here, in this presentation (as perhaps in all presentations) of ‘the veil of ignorance’. Must I assign equal likelihood to my believing in Christianity as to my believing in The Giant Pumpkin? But perhaps this does not greatly matter; the point is that, according to Rawlsian liberalism, one needs to protect oneself against the possibility that one’s faith, whatever its content, might be held profane rather than sacred by one’s society or government. More consequentially, then: why must I not assign equal likelihood to my believing in a cult of sacred paedophilia? Yet such a cult is either somehow to be ruled out of one’s imaginings in the original position, or to fall victim to liberal intolerance of religion. Not only a cult of paedophilia, though, of course: closer examination of this passage easily reveals that the freedom that is to be allowed to religion, following Rawls, is only a freedom to believe things and do things that have no consequences at all vis-a-vis the ‘ordering’, in Rawls’s sense of that (for him, crucial and central) term,v of society. So Rawlsian doctrine permits one (for instance) to find what day one worships on sacred; but it does not, presumably, permit one to find paedophilia sacred; nor (presumably) peace, nor the Earth, nor equality of outcome. It does not permit one either not to permit homosexuality; nor (presumably) not to permit private property, wage-slavery, or meat-eating. Liberalism allows ‘freedom of religious belief’ at the cost of neutering religion of consequences beyond a tightly-constrained ‘harmless’ band of activities that are, as one might sum it up, merely cerebral and/or ceremonial. Behind the veil of ignorance, one has no religion, no spirituality. But is this not in effect already a substantive decision to privilege one particular orientation toward spirituality and religion -- namely, the orientation according to which these are not fundamentals of/to human beings, but are somehow dispensable, or secondary to oneself vi -- over all others? (We shall return to this point, to see whether liberal ‘neutrality’ as toward religion is in fact a covert substantive (non-neutral) decision that religion cannot be essential to human identity, individually or in general.) Why should a denizen of the original position not say, ‘It would not be a ‘basic’ obligation, it would not be genuine ‘religious commitment’, if I were to give up the possibility of my religion having consequences beyond these relatively trivial matters that you Rawlsians say I should be satisfied with: namely, the character of my ceremonies, and my (un-acted-on) conscience. So: I shall rather take the risk of allowing religions to be intolerant of one another. For at least that way I have some chance of ending up in a society that is genuinely committed to God; whereas, on liberal principles, I have no chance of ending up in such a society. The only religion your ‘religiously tolerant’ society promises is a kind of charade. It would be intolerable to live in such a way, to live without any moment in which freedom to be genuinely religious -and thus any moment in which freedom of religion -- were granted me; I would rather take the risk of being persecuted for my beliefs...’. Such a one might even add, ‘...Indeed, to be persecuted for my beliefs would itself be a kind of proof of and test of the power of my faith; whereas the ‘tolerant’ liberal society has rather a kind of patronising attitude of virtually ignoring my beliefs, of bracketing them off as of no significance beyond what I choose to do in the privacy as it were of my own church. They are merely considered to be among my ‘interests’, rather than in any way fundamental to who I am!’ vii Rawls remarks that “An individual recognizing religious and moral obligations regards them as binding absolutely in the sense that he cannot qualify his fulfillment of them for the sake of greater means for promoting his other interests.” (ToJ, p.207). But to characterize what ‘binds absolutely’ as merely the idea that one has oneself to engage in certain ceremonies is a drastically impoverished view of religion. This is a tremendously important point… This can be easily seen by contrasting Rawls’s emphasis on the forms of religion with a serious account of religion that understands its true nature. As we saw above, Rawls’s follower Joshua Cohen writes, interpreting Rawls: “if I have a religious outlook, then I will understand that this view assigns to me as adherent certain basic obligations such as to day and manner of worship.” viii He, following Rawls, takes this to be fundamental to religion. Now contrast Leo Tolstoy’s interpretation of Jesus’s words: “The Sabbath is a human institution. That man shall live in the spirit is more important than all religious ceremonies. // …God demands, not outside cleanliness, but only, pity and love toward men. // …Men need not worship God in any particular place, but they must worship him in spirit and in act.” ix The failure of liberals to understand the real nature of real religion is telling: it tells us that liberalism can only afford to tolerate the outward forms of religion, not its inner essence, and especially not that inner essence inasmuch as it seeks expression in life-changing and worldchanging action. Returning now to Rawls’s text. Rawls writes that “An individual recognizing religious and moral obligations regards them as binding absolutely in the sense that he cannot qualify his fulfillment of them for the sake of greater means for promoting his other interests… Even granting (what may be questioned) that it is more probable than not that one will turn out to belong to the majority (if a majority exists), to gamble in this way would show that one did not take one’s religious or moral convictions seriously.” (ToJ, p.207, emphasis added). To which I now reply: On the contrary (and as sketched above) ... to take one’s religious etc. convictions seriously is precisely to be ready to stand up for them, come what may. ...It is absolutely and grotesquely false to say that true freedom of religion is preserved by means of avoiding any gamble over whether one will have to suffer for one’s beliefs. This is really the nub of the matter, and the heart of my claim in this paper: Rawls’s statement just quoted is the inverse of the truth. It is proof that one does not take one’s religious or moral convictions seriously, if one is ready to compromise them completely or almost so, so as to avoid the liberal state finding them to go beyond the de facto narrow bounds of what is to be tolerated. From religion within the limits of reason alone, to religion within the limits of liberalism alone... Religion with no consequences, no public prohibitions, no public sacrednesses; and religion without any faith-inaction, save for the private and inconsequential. Indeed, Kierkegaard, surely the greatest modern philosopher of faith, would go further still. He would say that anyone who is seriously religious will be ready to gamble all on the chance -- the possibility -- of real religion being attainable. Not being prepared to gamble all -- letalone the mere risk of persecution for one’s beliefs -- is arguably a sure sign that one has (and is interested in) no serious religious beliefs worth holding a candle to. The later Rawls The above seems to me a devastating and decisive criticism of (the early) Rawls. But assume that my arguments thus far are somehow ineffective; or assume at least that, even if they are effective, they are somehow not of great significance to the overall thrust political philosophy of liberalism, as expressed in A Theory of Justice. For my opening ‘speculation’ concerning Rawls’s thinking -- that it can profitably be seen as throughout founded upon the attractions of developing an account of toleration not merely as a modus vivendi but as yielding or modelling stability of a society for the right reasons (which is the central topic of Part III of ToJ) -- might be claimed to be only a hermeneutic orientation-device or ‘heuristic’ for our enquires, and moreover a contestable one. I would beg to differ; but assume that my begging somehow fails, for now. Still, there is very good reason to believe that the thrust of the argument given thus is fatally applicable to Rawls’s philosophy, and is so at its heart... How so? Firstly, because Rawls himself came to believe that ToJ was seriously flawed by its failure to actually yield an account of how a society, even a society actually operating according to liberal principles of justice, could be stable for the right reasons.x And secondly, because, in his effort to remedy that flaw, he himself foregrounded absolutely centrally the case of religious toleration. In short: Rawls himself gives us good reason to believe that (what he took to be) the gravest flaw in ToJ is remediable only by means of preserving religious liberty and by means of centring one’s political philosophy on the means by which one does so. It is not a matter of interpretation, as it is with early Rawls, whether or not ‘the religious question’ is basic to his (later) thought: it is, I submit, simply a matter of fact that it is.xi (This fact becomes staringly obvious to any reader of ‘the final Rawls’: the Rawls of the new Introduction he penned for the paperback edition of Political Liberalism, and especially of ‘The idea of public reason revisited’ (henceforth IPRR). This essay, arguably xii the definitive final paper, the cumulation and climax of Rawls’s thought, is still more explicitly religion-focussed than any other significant paper that Rawls ever wrote.) The later Rawls’s philosophy is constructed in response to Rawls’s realisation that the claim he had made that his liberal society could and would be stable was ill-founded, in that that society could not cope with non-liberal doctrines being ongoingly adhered to, and could not exempt itself from being seen to be a comprehensive doctrine, a (contestable) philosophy. Unless one was prepared to respond to non-liberal doctrines oppressively -- which would itself seemingly directly contradict a central mission of a liberal polity, namely freedom of thought etc. -- then the expectation of a stable society believing in liberalism would be in vain. So Rawls came to think that the ‘fact of reasonable pluralism’ -- the fact that, in a liberal society, it was inevitable that some citizens would not believe in liberal political doctrines for liberal reasons, but would believe in such doctrines (if at all) because of their belief in some (e.g.) religious conception that nevertheless urged respect for those with different beliefs (i.e. urged belief in liberal institutions, but not simply (or not at all) because of adherence to a comprehensive liberal philosophy) -- was of the essence, and that a new more ‘limited’ conception of liberalism (than that which he had propounded in ToJ) was called for. He argued that an ‘overlapping consensus’ could be established around a political conception of liberalism alone. In other words, that citizens with quite different philosophical outlooks could come to agree with one another on one crucial area where their thoughts would ‘overlap’: on a merely political liberalism. Thus the following is said by Rawls himself to be a piquant formulation of the central question of Political Liberalism: ‘How is it possible for those affirming a religious doctrine that is based on religious authority, for example the Church or the Bible, also to hold a reasonable political conception that supports a just democratic regime?’ (PL, xxxix). Rawls tries to show that and how it is. The central problem that emerges with Rawls’s undertaking, in the midst of his efforts, is however basically the same problem as I described in discussing ToJ, above. But this time, it not only arguably but evidently cuts through the whole of Rawls’s thinking. The problem is this: How it is possible for those affirming a religious doctrine to take seriously their right to uphold that doctrine, if they are deemed unreasonable as soon as they try to actually do anything that will directly affect the regime or its policies? How can they be expected to treat as just a regime that will oppress them as soon as they threaten to countermand ‘neutrality’ xiii between conceptions of the good? Rawls claims that he is, in PL, giving more space to religion to flourish (or to decline -whichever occurs, the state has no interest in the matter) than he did in ToJ, let alone than Enlightenment liberalism did. Enlightenment liberalism typically endorsed anticlericalism, fought against (established) religion(s) (especially), and explicitly purveyed its own alternative comprehensive philosophy. ToJ allegedly did neither of the first two things (see above for my suggestions as to why it in fact did do them); but later Rawls came to see that it did nevertheless constitute a comprehensive philosophical doctrine, and one that many in society could not reasonably be expected to share. Arguably, this is tantamount to admitting that such comprehensive liberalism is not neutral between conceptions of the good, after all. So Rawls needed a way to reinstate the famed neutrality of liberalism between different worldviews, a way suited to our allegedly particularly pluralistic contemporary world, with its wide range of faiths and ‘non-faiths’, etc. . Within the agreed, assumed framework of a constitutionalist democratic society, no longer pretending to deduce from first (rational) principles the preferability of such a society, Rawls claimed in PL to have found out how to reinstate that neutrality: via his political (not metaphysical, not ‘comprehensive’) conception of liberalism. Here is what Rawls states about what he thinks he has thus achieved, in the Conclusion to his concluding essay, IPRR: ‘Throughout, I have been concerned with a torturing question in the contemporary world, namely: Can democracy and comprehensive doctrines, religious or non-religious, be compatible? And if so, how? At the moment a number of conflicts between religion and democracy raise this question. To answer it political liberalism makes the distinction between a self-standing political conception of justice and a comprehensive doctrine. A religious doctrine resting on the authority of the Church or the Bible is not, of course, a liberal comprehensive doctrine: its leading religious and moral values are not those, say, of Kant or Mill. Nevertheless, it may endorse a constitutional democratic society and recognize its public reason. Here it is basic that public reason is a political idea and belongs to the category of the political. Its content is given by the family of (liberal) political conceptions of justice satisfying the criterion of reciprocity. It does not trespass upon religious beliefs and injunctions insofar as these are consistent with the essential constitutional liberties, including the freedom of religion and liberty of conscience. There is, or need be, no war between religion and democracy. In this respect political liberalism is sharply different from and rejects Enlightenment Liberalism, which historically attacked orthodox Christianity.’ (IPRR, p.611; emphases added) Following the line already intimated in my discussion of ToJ, above, I would respond to these claims in this way: ‘Political liberalism’ is more hostile to religion than was even dreampt possible in the philosophy of Enlightenment Liberalism. For it refuses point-blank ever to engage in serious debate with it. It considers it of no consequence. (And this is a potentially-fatal insult to religion. A religion can bear being hated; it cannot bear being deflated into an insignificant matter of merely ceremonial interest, with no ringing meaning for all, no ethical depth or action-oriented message.) PL insists that religion be ‘translated’ into the thin discourse of ‘public reason’, for it to be of any consequence.xiv ‘Political liberalism’ negates or nihilates religion: all that it is prepared to call ‘reasonable’ religion is mere ceremony or epiphenomen;xv and all that it is prepared to call ‘unreasonable’ it is quite prepared ruthlessly to suppress, the moment the latter shows any sign of threatening the neutrality (letalone the power or stability) of the liberal state or ‘civil society’.xvi For what, after all, does the religion that one is free to practice under political liberalism amount to? A full account would take a long time; but it will be useful to mention a (useful) distinction made by some sociologists and psychologists of religion: “At a minimum, critical distinctions need to be made between extrinsic (religion as a means to an end) and intrinsic (religion as a way of life) religiousness.” xvii Which is closer to religion a la Rawls? ‘Intrinsic’ religion consists of searching for unity and for connectedness, practicing what one preaches, changing one’s life to mesh with one’s seeking and one’s faith, and doing all these things along with others because they are intrinsically right and (ceteris paribus) one wants as many others as possible to join in with doing them.xviii ‘Extrinsic’ religion consists of extrinsic manifestations or acoutrements of religion, such as worshipping on a particular day, in a particular form, and referring explicitly to a particular Book or person as authoritative. Anyone who has studied Rawls on religion even a little knows which of these two characterisations is closer to what is allowed under ‘religious liberty’: it is the ‘extrinsic’ characterisation. Rawls repeatedly talks about political liberalism leaving religious persons to have their ceremonies in places and at times and in forms of their choosing (religious requirements merely on “day and manner of worship” is what he takes to be crucial, in the quotation we examined earlier). He never discusses the taking up of an entire changed way of life as a religious matter: except occasionally to warn against the ways of life of ‘fundamentalists’ and their historical predecessors, as potentially mortal threats to the liberal state. Now, it is true that Rawls tends to emphasise also religion as a matter of private conscience, of freedom of thought, and this might (superficially) be thought as much ‘intrinsic’ as ‘extrinsic’ -- but it is ‘unreasonable’, following Rawls, for religious persons to act on such conscience in public affairs (that is why it is relevantly ‘private’!).xix So the truly religious way of life is closed to one, under political liberalism: unless it happens to be the case that one’s religion offers no challenge to the political status quo... In which case, conveniently, one can have one’s intrinsic cake and eat one’s extrinsic cake too. But what is of some at least considerable passing interest here is that “....measures of [extrinsic religion] generally show...negative correlations with well-being and measures of [intrinsic religion] show...positive correlations with well-being.” xx In short, there is even some decent empirical evidence xxi to support the view that, alone, the ‘extrinsic’ aspects of religion -the Church-attendance, creed-annunciation, doctrine-purveyance etc. (going through the motions, to put it cynically) -- that Rawls stresses as fundamental to religious liberty are harmful to human well-being, while the ‘intrinsic’ aspects of religion -- the passion, the change in one’s life, the call to act in others’ lives -- that Rawls would ban from public life as soon as they gained any collective or institutional momentum, are beneficial to human well-being... I submit that Rawls’s attempt to re-find an essential neutrality, a new style of ‘Archimedean point’ in a certain sense which all can rest on and work with/in, in political liberalism is no more effective than was the parallel effort in A theory of justice. For the religion that Rawls urges liberal society to tolerate, under ‘neutral’ political liberalism, is entirely neutered. It is merely the shadow, not the substance; the form, not the content. Political liberalism put into practice entirely would mean that religion no longer in any meaningful sense even existed. The later Rawls as rhetorician and politician An unnoted but (I think) critically important part of Rawls’s ‘political rhetoric’, the rhetoric that smooths the path of his later philosophy toward apparent-acceptability, and tends to shield from his readers’ perception the line of objection and critique that I laid out in the previous section, is this: While Rawls repeatedly cites positive examples of religious leaders/thinkers reasoning in ways that are compatible with public reason, he virtually never cites examples of religious leaders/thinking reasoning in ways that are incompatible with public reason except for examples that are calculated/intended to scare. In other words, Rawls’s invocation of ‘unreasonable’ religion is always of religion that he has reason to believe that his audience -- mostly, Western liberal intellectuals -- will see as little better than ‘bogeymen’. Here are two representative passages: ‘Perhaps the doctrine of free faith developed because it is difficult, if not impossible, to believe in the damnation of those with whom we have, with trust and confidence, long and fruitfully cooperated in maintaining a just society.’ (PL, xxvii, emphasis added) ‘[C]omprehensive doctrines that cannot support...a democratic society are not reasonable. Their principles and ideals do not satisfy the criterion of reciprocity, and in various ways they fail to establish the equal basic liberties. As examples, consider the many fundamentalist doctrines, the doctrine of the divine right of monarchs and the various forms of aristocracy, and, not to be overlooked, the many instances of autocracy and dictatorship.’ (IPRR, p.609; emphasis added) With enemies like those, one needs friends: and there is political liberalism, ready to fit the bill, seemingly one’s best recourse to avoid these (indeed generally) dreadful non-democratic options. The deck has hardly been evenly cut; Rawls has not mentioned, and he virtually never does mention, the possibility that there might be ‘unreasonable’ comprehensive doctrines that are not fundamentally undemocratic, or that, even if they are, are in other ways genuinely very attractive. Nor does he mention in quotes like these (with which his later work is replete) the possibility of ‘unreasonable’ religious doctrines that do not damn unbelievers. Rawls’s rhetorical positioning of political liberalism as the only alternative to pretty patently undesirable forms of religious belief and undemocracy is, I submit, highly suspect. Consider now some passages in which the same move is made, with regard to various more or less non-religious views or practices that are sure to strike Rawls’s main/implied audience as self-evidently undesirable. Notice the way that Rawls positions liberalism as the only obvious alternative to these, and these as the only obvious alternatives to liberalism: ‘The wars of [the 20th] century with their extreme violence and increasing destructiveness, culminating in the manic evil of the Holocaust, raise in an acute way the question whether political relations must be governed by power and coercion alone. If a reasonably just society that subordinates power to its aims is not possible and people are largely amoral, if not incurably cynical and self-centered, one might ask with Kant whether it is worthwhile for human beings to live on the earth? We must start with the assumption that a reasonably just political society is possible, and for it to be possible, human beings must have a moral nature, not of course a perfect such nature, yet one that can understand, act on, and be sufficiently moved by a reasonable political conception of right and justice to support a society guided by its ideals and principles. ToJ and PL try to sketch what the more reasonable conceptions of justice for a democratic regime are and to present a candidate for the most reasonable.’ (PL lxii) No other options are considered, besides the most appalling tyranny on the one hand, and liberal governance on the other. There is no question of people being self-organizing (as in anarchism (compare the mode of life described by George Orwell in Homage to Catalonia) and in some kibbutzim in the past, for instance), and/or living on the basis (say) of love rather than justice. Rawls’s political rhetoric, presenting a Manichean choice between the justice of a liberal regime on the one hand and the road to the Holocaust and the Gulag on the other, is subtly politicallymanipulative -- and, once one has started to take its measure, unimpressive. Once one has picked how Rawls’s rhetoric functions, Rawls starts to seem on the one hand good-hearted to the point of naivety (in his expectation of a clean moral politics in ‘liberal democracies’ supposedly based on justice, the rule of law, and ‘public reason’); but on the other hand, question-begging and self-contradictory (in its claim to ‘neutrality’); and, crucially, elitist (in his shallow and narrow understanding of ‘deliberative democracy’ as nothing more than our current ‘democratic’ system with some campaign-finance-reform thrown in). Rawls’s rhetoric is cheap: it is little more than a thinly-disguised economism combined with a scare-mongering attempt to drown out the voices, the possibility, of any and all alternatives to his vision of politics -- and in the name, God help us, of freedom (at least of thought) and pluralism! Lest it be thought that I am over-interpreting Rawls’s flights of rhetoric, let me point out that at some key points in his discussion, Rawls is quite explicit about the Manichean dimension of his thought. Speaking of the new historical circumstance of the Reformation, out of which experience liberalism was born, Rawls writes, ‘What is new about [the clash between rival salvationist, creedal, and expansionist versions of Christianity in the Reformation] is that it introduces into people’s conceptions of their good a transcendent element not admitting of compromise. This element forces either mortal conflict moderated only by circumstance and exhaustion, or equal liberty of conscience and freedom of thought. ... Political liberalism starts by taking to heart the absolute depth of that irreconcilable...conflict.’ (PL xxviii, emphases added). I shall shortly come to the alternatives ignored, shielded from view, by this formulation of Rawls’s. But I hope that it is immediately evident that, (even) if one were to accept the conceptual possibility of Rawls’s preferred option here -- i.e. if one buys into the possibility of liberal ‘neutrality’, the possibility of true freedom of conscience existing under liberalism -- then one should certainly consider the possibility that there may be other methods of faith, other rules of conflict, than pure mortal combat.xxii Lest it be thought that I have still simply offered too narrow a diet of examples from Rawls, here is yet another telling example, this time from IPPR (p.596): “[I] assume that as children we grow up in a small intimate group in which elders (normally parents) have a certain moral and social authority.xxiii // In order for public reason to apply to the family, it must be seen in part at least, as a matter for political justice. It may be thought that this is not so, that the principles of justice do not apply to the family and hence those principles do not secure equal justice for women and their children. This is a misconception...”. The aspect of this quote that especially interests me is that once again only the negative possibility (of the role which an institution like the family might play, morally) is considered / mentioned. Liberalism comes in to the rescue of the oppressed women and children -- rather than (as it actually threatens to do) gradually contractualising this generally wonderful (albeit very various) thing, the family, out of existence. Or compare this passage: “[V]arious religious sects oppose the culture of the modern world and wish to lead their common life apart from its foreign influences.”xxiv Well; I oppose the ‘culture of the modern world’, insofar as it is individualistic, exploitative, craven in its kow-towing to commerce, philistinic, etc. (i.e.: pretty far). But once more, the kind of positively-altered education system that someone like me would want to encourage be put in place (drawing on actually-existing institutions, such as Quaker schools for instance) does not get considered nor even alluded to by Rawls: only the negative case of the madrassas, etc. . Rawls presumes that his readers will have a negative image of and instinctive reaction against ‘sects’ which ‘oppose the culture of the modern world.’ This, I suggest, is a very telling presumption. Rawls is best-known as a political philosopher. I am arguing -- and this is hardly an original thought -- that there is something very fishy about Rawls’s producing a substantive (as opposed to a merely procedural) theory of justice xxv from out of a conceptual analysis.xxvi I am arguing this -- and this is rather more original -- by means of paying close attention to ‘hidden’ dimensions of Rawls’s treatment of religion: specifically, to his implicit elimination of religion as a serious category of life, under liberalism -- and to the repeated rhetorical manoeuvres which facilitate this. These manoeuvres show Rawls as often more a mere politician than a statesman, or sage, or philosopher. The unmentioned alternative: genuinely attractive ‘unreasonable’ comprehensive doctrines Well, but what exactly is the alternative to liberalism, you might ask? Perhaps Rawls is not stacking the deck, but only looking reasonably objectively at the cards which are actually available to be dealt in the first place? Perhaps there is no choice but liberalism or barbarism? I think otherwise. Let me explain why. I have offered some hints already as to possible comprehensive doctrines that could be real alternatives, and not just bogeymen. Part of my particular interest in all this is simply this: I am a member of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). In respect of that commitment, I believe it to be a religious duty not to engage in violence. According to Rawls, in the Law of Peoples, this renders me unfit for high office in a ‘liberal democracy’.xxvii I reject that suggestion.xxviii I think it follows only if one believes -- as Rawlsians do -- that society will be juster if it is run according to the Rawlsian principle of religious ‘tolerance’ -- i.e. the neutering of religion.xxix For the same reason, I reject Rawls’s argument, in “The idea of public reason revisited”, that a society may be ‘fully just’ xxx and yet that Quakers et al may reasonably continue to need to bear ‘witness’ to its... to its ... what are we to call them? From a Quaker perspective, a quite reasonable word to use (of war, e.g.) would be, its injustices. But Rawls of course cannot, ex hypothesi, allow Quaker non-violent witness to count as being in the cause of justice. Justice is only for political liberals to decide. I am also a practicing Zen Buddhist. I am an ‘engaged’ Buddhist: I believe that one is most unlikely actually to be truly a Buddhist at all unless one both practices meditation and seeks to live one’s life in (i.e. ‘engaged’ in / with) the world, as a moral and political animal, for the benefit and enlightenment of -- with compassion for -- all beings. (These -- seeing deeply in contemplation on the one hand, and acting selflessly on the other, are, I believe (along with many many others), simply two sides of the same coin.) Although Rawls does not in his corpus specifically discuss such increasingly-important xxxi cases as the engaged Buddhisms, I think that, by parity of reasoning with his arguments concerning the Quakers, he would certainly not allow that my ‘comprehensive’ moral and religious doctrine could rightly be upheld by an elected representative in a liberal democracy, let alone be implemented by a state or be the basis of a just democracy. This is interesting, in part because there are extant historical examples of states xxxii which, while they have certainly not perfectly achieved the status of being an engaged and just Buddhist democracy, have at least pointed in that direction.xxxiii Examples like these could be multiplied (at least, from other’s beliefs if not from my own.xxxiv ). For instance, it would be extremely interesting to consider the spirituality of Gaia-worship, increasingly-popular in some parts of the West today, in relation to Rawls’s strictures. Contemporary Earth-worshippers, following James Lovelock, tend to believe that the Earth (including here of course the entire ecosphere) is literally alive, and that we are but a tiny fragment of that Earth, of that extraordinary creation. Some of them bow before graven images of the Earth, as well as before trees, etc. . I do not share these beliefs, but I find them impressive, a near-live possibility for me, a far more rich and intriguing candidate for belief-in-action than theisms. (Such ‘Earth religion’ might yet even save our species, which is at present running headlong into the brick-wall of manmade climate change, under the ‘leadership’ of the institutions of ‘liberal democracy’ and the concomitant global dominance of neo-liberal economics.) These engaged religions/spiritualities are, like familiar Christian, Muslim and Judaic ‘fundamentalisms’, unwilling to be delimited and contained by the liberal state’s ‘religious tolerance’. Unlike most of those ‘fundamentalisms’,xxxv however, they are genuinely ethically and spiritually attractive and healthy. Or, more modestly put: I, at least, as an intellectual and as (I hope) a rounded human being, find them so. I suspect that the intellectual attraction of Rawlsian views on religion stems in large part from intellectuals, when thinking of religion, being more likely to think of monotheistic fundamentalisms than of engaged non-theistic (or polytheistic or pantheistic) spiritualities. And therein lies a grave danger. The danger is that the baby of such spiritualities will be neutered along with the bathwater of familiar fundamentalisms, when the latter are ejected from the liberal democratic polity as unacceptably going beyond the permitted -- tolerated -- limits of (neutered) religious belief. But lumping such spiritualities in with Fundamentalisms -- as Rawlsian thought does --, while accurate in the particular regard of perceiving their incompatibilty with liberalism, is otherwise like lumping in Quaker non-violent civil disobedience with religiously-motivated non-state terrorism.xxxvi This may itself be an active ingredient in the process of convincing disaffected citizens, unhappy with the neutering of any belief that presents any threat of significant change to actually-existing-liberal-democracy, that their only reasonable option lies in one variety or another of implicitly or explicitly violentlyself-defending and/or aggressive fundamentalist extremism (e.g. ‘Christian militias’, Al-Qaida, etc). This danger is liable to be particularly pronounced if one believes, as I do, following ‘communitarian’ criticisms of Rawls (such as Sandel’s, and also green/environmentalist critiques), that it is fakery in the first place to pretend that liberalism has or can possibly intelligibly aspire to the kind of neutrality between conceptions of the good that Rawls makes central to his thinking. Why, exactly? A key reason why I do not believe in such neutrality is that I believe that spirituality is indissoluble from politics (as well as ethics and morality). I think that any political philosophy is, consciously or unconsciously, a spirituality (or an antispirituality) too.xxxvii I believe that religious/spiritual commitment -- and the political commitment from which it cannot properly be disentangled -- is essential to the identity of human beings, from a young age. For me, to be asked to go behind a veil of ignorance such that I did not have a faith any more would be like being asked to give up my species. It just doesn’t mean anything, to make the proposal. If one takes spirituality to be of the essence, if one finds spirituality and political philosophy to be in principle and thoroughoingly inseparable, such that (for instance) not to commit violence and not to hold property if others are in need of that ‘property’ are spiritual callings that one believes all human beings should heed, then one will necessarily radically disagree with Rawls’s narrow version of ‘freedom of religious conscience’, which precisely forbids religion as such from having practical political effects, and bans spiritual and religious concepts from playing (in their own name) a part in the discourse of public reason. To reiterate: liberalism can tolerate religions only if they either strip themselves of ‘intrinsic’ aspects (i.e. are no longer truly a way of life, and are therefore in the end of no deep significance for their practitioners), or if their ‘intrinsic’ aspects are basically unthreatening to liberalism (e.g. if they preach simply ‘withdrawal’ from the public world, to the extent permitted by law). If one believes that true religion, true spirituality, is necessarily engaged,xxxviii then one will accept neither of these. Again, that goes just as much for many (I would claim) desperately-needed and positive life-affirming religions and spiritualities -- that Rawls says virtually nothing about -such as Zen or engaged Buddhisms and Quakerism, as it does for the religious fundamentalisms that Rawls scares his readers by repeatedly invoking seemingly as the only alternative to his ‘impartial’/‘neutral’ approach. But this only works if it is true that liberalism is in any meaningful sense neutral between conceptions of the good. I have suggested that it is not. In my view, powerful evidence that that suggestion is correct, comes in the verdict of two liberal-leaning philosophers who are supporters of Rawls against the claims of communitarianism, but who yet provide a devastating verdict against his claim to such neutrality. I am referring to Mulhall and Swift. Having worked through Rawls’s coming to see that his early philosophy itself constituted a comprehensive doctrine, their final evaluation of Rawls’s claim for political liberalism, that it does not, and so achieves the desired neutrality as a framework, is as follows: “[T]he issue that most concerns us is whether [Rawls’s argument in PL] provides him with a purely political defence of the normal priority of political over non-political values, one that will be effective against those who reject it for reasons rooted in their non-liberal comprehensive conceptions. The results of our exploration suggest that it does not. Since Rawls’s conception of what a reasonable response to the burdens of judgement might be is morally rather than epistemologically determined, and acceptable only to those who already view society and its citizens in the way defended by political liberalism, his defensive strategy certainly seems to be purely political in nature; but, for that very reason, it will carry no conviction with those who are in effect denying the validity of that vision of self and society. Indeed, since mounting even this defence implies – on Rawls’s own admission – denying the truth of any comprehensive convictions that contest the reality of significance of the fact of reasonable pluralism, it appears that how we acknowledge the burdens of judgement is in fact a function of our own comprehensive convictions. In that case, Rawls’s latest defence of the limits of the political itself fails to respect those limits; the purely political Rawlsian state must inevitably base itself upon elements of a comprehensive doctrine, and so fails to live up to its own claims to neutrality.” xxxix From friends of liberalism, this is as I say a devastating judgement. By my lights, what this really means is that liberalism itself is, far from being impartial, is actually in an important sense itself a fundamentalism. Whether in Rawls early or late, it is a comprehensive doctrine – but in both early and later Rawls, it fails to recognize its own nature as such. Its religiosity, we might say, is repressed, and returns with a vengeance. Its pseudo-non-religious character profoundly masks its absolutely imperial reach. Liberalism’s claim to neutrality, which has made liberal political philosophy appear as if it is the only game in town in the contemporary Englishspeaking academic world, is an ideological charade, masking its now fully-global ambition for spiritual and political dominance.xl I therefore reject liberalism as a deeply-dangerous (as well as self-contradictory) philosophy. And I say that, at the same time as being an avid believer in most substantive civil liberties (liberties which our ‘leading’ Western ‘liberal’ states are currently discarding with remarkable speed and near-alacrity), in real freedom of expression and a wellinformed citizenry (incompatible with a capitalist ‘free’ press), in a genuine democracy (rather than a merely formal freedom to vote), and in equality (rather than the inegalitarianism made manifest in ‘the difference principle’). One does not have to endorse liberal principles of political philosophy, in order to believe in these things. In fact, it might even be that there is little chance of these things being preserved or ever achieved, unless we discard the un-selfaware fundamentalism that is liberalism, and embrace instead a frankly and openly non-‘neutral’, spiritually-rich, green and localised vision for humankindxli a vision on which the siren call of religious fundamentalism can be resisted, not, except in true extremis, through being intolerated,xlii but through the explicit putting forth of a rival conception of the human good, that might actually win the battle for the hearts and souls and minds of the peoples of the Earth, in the ‘marketplace of ideas’... And, if possible, through providing such a conception with substantial state funding, with a key role in the education system...xliii and with a number of other things that liberalism would deny it... It will be objected that my advocacy of civil liberties surely cannot extend to freedom of religion, for by allowing religion or spirituality into the substantive (and explicitly non-neutral) decisions and policies of my proposed state, I am allowing that full freedom of religion might (will) cease. I will consider this objection in more detail below, but for now, I will allow that it is accurate, at least in this respect: while I criticise liberalism for not fostering ‘genuine freedom of religion’, contra its own claims, I admit that I would not foster it (either). Like liberal states, I would not allow genuine freedom of religion to Wahabbism or even to Mormonism, for instance. The point is, as I hope to have intimated above: genuine universal full freedom of religion lasting over time is a conceptual absurdity. Hard choices have to be made. And I would likely choose a state with self-admitted/proclaimed religious or spiritual ‘foundations’ rather than one without. A genuinely Buddhist or Christian state/nation would be likely to be a far better place than a Rawlsian liberal society that freely granted its near-meaningless ‘freedom to worship’ and ‘freedom of religious conscience’. Rawls is optimistic enough to suggest that a ‘reasonably just political society is possible’ (PLlxii), and as more than just a modus vivendi. We should not pessimistically assume that a spiritually-motivated state or even a theocratic state need be a place of harsh intolerance, a place of general unfreedom and of poor levels of human well-being. We should bite on the bullet, and consider seriously the possibility that the ‘kingdom of ends’ is most likely in a spiritually non-neutral republic.xliv We should consider the possibility that most key human values and ends can only be realised in a society that enables their realisation through the deliberate collective promotion of a spiritual/religious/ethical agenda. We should, in short question our widely-shared (liberal) presumption that it could not possibly be just and right to have a genuinely established religion, and that this is what the struggle for religious toleration teaches. Maybe all that that struggle teaches is that it is not right and good to have the wrong religion genuinely established. The flowering of human reason that Rawls claims to champion will not, I submit, issue in an endlessly-deferred ‘choice’ as to what is true religion or spirituality and what is not. On the contrary, a true flowering of human reason will involve a gradual realisation by human beings that the good life for human beings, our true vocation, is one thing rather than another.xlv And the polity will be adjusted accordingly, and will not seek to remain forever undecided, forever neutral. In Conclusion Rawls seeks an easy way out of the dilemmas of modern ‘pluralistic’ societies. He, along with a good number of effectively-secularised ‘moderate’ religious leaders/writers, says that we can have it all: we can have religions, and an impartial state guaranteeing a ‘liberal’ polity, too. But it isn’t true that one can have it all, in that fashion. There is no way for a state to avoid choosing a conception(s) of the good. Either you choose the religion of liberalism -- and even ‘political liberalism’ xlvi is still in an important respect a religion, with its (Rawlsian) submerged conception of the good, of ‘liberal’ culture as more than a modus vivendi, but a way of life (allegedly) chosen by the ‘religious’ and the ‘secular’ alike -- or you choose some other religion; or you choose a mere modus vivendi. You can’t have it all, as Rawlsian liberalism fantasises you can, at terrible cost to -- both the terrible (life-denying, body-despising) and the beautiful/hopeful/life-enhancing -- real, self-aware, spiritually and morally serious religions. By Rawls’s lights, of course, I am ‘unreasonable’ in saying and believing all this.xlvii It is unreasonable of me to want the state to put in place measures that would make the world a more...tolerable place. Measures such as teaching children to love one another, and the Earth; or teaching them that they are born good rather than born bad or neutral/indifferent;xlviii or teaching meditation as a good in itself, a part of the higher calling of humankind; or banning war. Very well then: let this be unreason. One person’s modus ponens is another’s modus tollens: if this be unreason, then I say that reason, liberal public reason, stands condemned by its denial. If it is ‘unreasonable’ to want to discriminate, in the fabric of society’s ‘basic structure’, in favour of love, peace and survival,xlix then so much the worse for ‘reason’... If the genuinely attractive comprehensive doctrines I sketched above are ‘unreasonable’, then the enterprise the later Rawls especially was engaged in -- the enterprise of ‘working out’ l what ‘public reason’ is -- loses a great deal of its apparent interest. By my lights, ‘Liberalism and barbarism’ (or even perhaps ‘Liberalism is barbarism -- and it’s the only game in town’) is the true motto of such ‘reason’... Whereas religion gives one hope. Think for instance of the remarkable overtaking of the Roman Empire and of many of the ‘barbarian’ tribes by Christianity, in the 1st millennium C.E.; religion can accomplish extraordinary transformative good things. We may need such power at full-power on our side, if we are to save ourselves and our common future. The centrality of the case and nature and meaning of religious toleration and ‘religious liberty’ is obvious to any attentive reader of later Rawls. My paper, if there is any value in the arguments herein, is thus clearly of major import to such a reader, and should be of import to liberals in general. It is also important, I have suggested, to readers of early Rawls, for I hope to have shown early in this paper that the fundamental ideas that have concerned me throughout this paper are already present, and already significant as structuring devices for Rawls’s thinking, even in ToJ. Liberalism, we might say, once its obfuscatory rhetoric is swept away, actually pronounces this doctrine: there is no God but Liberalism. All else is either mere ceremony and privatised conscience, or should be banned. When the holy book is ToJ, comprehensive liberalism doesn’t explicitly discuss religion much, but is already committed to this doctrine: comprehensive liberalism is explicitly ‘imperialistic’ in its reach. When the holy book switches to being Political Liberalism, which foregrounds religion, then adherents simply practice the quasi-religion of liberalism, keeping quiet about what it as they are doing so: Political liberalism pretends not to be comprehensive in its doctrines. But that is, as I hope to have shown above, in the end merely a pretence. In any case, if in conclusion we leave beside the subtleties of Rawls’s career, the fact remains that I have in this paper pursued and exposed the perils of (Rawlsian) liberalism’s attitude toward religion. I could have made my case easier, by simply considering the case of strong moral/ethical convictions which the liberal state cannot countenance as public reasons or as calls to justice. I chose to focus on religion, because it is in consideration thereof that Rawls’s central arguments are born, and because it is there that they are most ostensibly attractive. They are attractive, that is, until one realizes that they are attractive only at the cost, in effect, of neutering religion. If, then, as I have argued, Rawls’s position even with regard to religion is quite hopelessly inadequate, then how much more so on the easier (for me) terrain of morality and ethics, where it is rather clearer that any such neutering is completely unacceptable.li My attack has been on Rawls on his strongest possible ground – on religion. He chose that ground to fight on, in my view, for rhetorical reasons – because it would make his fight easiest; because there he could best make propaganda for his ultimately unattractive view. If he is defeated even there, he is defeated everywhere. The grounds that Rawls chose to fight on is a tacit sign of his own perception of the weakness of his position. Taking one’s moral convictions seriously,lii taking seriously for instance one’s sense of fundamental moral obligation,liii is I think pretty plainly incompatible with the narrow limits of Rawlsian liberalism’s tolerance of many such convictions.liv To say that ‘gambling’ on ending up in a society on which one’s strong moral convictions -- concerning for instance the need for human beings to love another -- are in the ascendancy is not to take one’s moral convictions seriously is pretty plainly just a bizarre, virtually self-contradictory thing to say. Not to be willing to be persecuted for believing in the power and centrality to a genuinely human existence of (say) duty, or love, or the ordinary virtues, or of whatever one’s deepest moral convictions are, precisely contra Rawls, just is not to have strong moral convictions. The idea that one could privatise and thoroughgoingly domesticate one’s moral convictions, as Rawlsians want one to do with one’s religious beliefs, is just a failure to understand what deep moral convictions are. Return explicitly for a moment to the quote from Joshua Cohen, sympathetically paraphrasing Rawls, with which we opened our discussion of Rawls, above: ‘I might have a more secular moral outlook that also assigns me fundamental obligations’ (emphasis added). To say that I merely might have a moral outlook that assigns me fundamental obligations -- and thus to imply that I might as it were ‘choose’ to have no such obligations at all -- is catastrophically to misunderstand and under-interpret the nature and meaning of morality. To be a human being is to have fundamental obligations;lv in making such obligations optional, merely one ‘interest’ or another that a given liberal individual might ‘turn out’ to have, Rawls grievously degrades the purport of morality, and indeed of moral philosophy. And all this makes it somewhat odd that Rawls is quite often said to have been the premier moral and political philosopher of the twentieth century.lvi Rawls is by all accounts the leading philosopher of liberalism. The argument that this paper has made therefore constitutes a fundamental challenge to philosophical and political liberalism. Coda: Rawls at and as dusk, not dawn Let me end with a speculation on the misfortune of Rawls’s historical placement. Rawls wrote at a time of increasing liberal individualism, consumerism and diminished community bonds. It has been argued by some, very plausibly in my view, that Rawls’s philosophy unawarely reflects the ideology of the society he wrote in. His individualism is a mirror of the conditions of production of and the (more or less consequent) implicit/explicit ideology of the ‘market-driven liberal democracies’ lvii of the twentieth century, especially the post-War United States. The change in Rawls philosophy from ‘early’ to ‘later’ is not then, as some have thought, a concession to communitarianism, insofar as Rawls backs away from some of the more universalistic claims for the liberal political philosophy of ToJ: this in fact is, I submit, the reverse of the truth. Rawls’s philosophy becomes more individualistic, his envisaged society becomes less held together, less unifed, as a reflection, I submit of the increasing atomism of the society around him that he was legitimating. (And meanwhile the reach of his philosophy widens, to grip within it not just a comprehensive liberal doctrine, but all doctrines that are to be permitted in his ‘politically liberal’ society.) This is all very fine if one thinks that such society is good, or at least inevitable. But what if one thinks it pathological? What if one finds the loosening of communal bonds to be a bad? Even, to be perhaps fatal for humankind? Rawls’s later writing in effect conceives of greater ‘pluralism’ (i.e. individualism, the inability of any group to have any very meaningful letalone constitutive influence over its members or adherents) as a good, as the inevitable outcome of the flowering of human reason. He rules out the possibility of a religion, such as even the ‘religion’ of Rawlsian political philosophy (a ‘comprehensive’ Liberal philosophy) as promulgated in ToJ, from ruling the day. But this is to promote -- in fact, to institutionalise, to make compulsory -- a still subtler and thereby potentially more perniciously culturally-imperialist ‘religion’, the ‘religion’ of ‘pluralist’ individualist (and more or less materialist) liberalism. And it is to eliminate from the field of competition more severely even than did ToJ those religions which, for instance, I favour: engaged Buddhism, Quakerism, perhaps Earth-spirituality. Culture abhors a vacuum. Fundamentalisms will trickle or flood into the space left permanently empty by liberalism,lviii the gap it strictly maintains where religion was and where a richly nourishing engaged spirituality might be. ...Unless liberalism itself is evicted. And so: If one thinks that the claims of community, non-violence and ecology, for well-being, equity and survival,lix are essential, and if one believes therefore in such engaged spiritualities, and in their potential to transform the world, if they are permitted to flourish and perhaps to ‘take power’, then one must reject Rawls’s rejection of any genuine freedom of religion. One must take the risk of forbidding oneself the easy ‘liberal’ (sic.) proscription of fundamentalisms etc, and embrace instead the possibility that there is indeed one true religion. One must hope that that religion is a religion of compassionate action, of love, of fellowship, of peace -- not of hate; nor of a fake ‘neutrality’. One must work for the republic of such religion, such true spirituality, to be established on Earth.lx Does this sound unattractively ‘fundamentalist’? But liberalism is, I believe, for the reasons explored in the preceding section, in an important sense the most extreme fundamentalism of them all: in that, in the act of proclaiming itself to be a merely neutral arbiter, it bans all rival views from having any substantive role in society, and castigates as fundamentalist the very lines of thought and action -- e.g. those that I have explicitly recommended, in this paper -- that have the best chance of yielding a good fulfilling life for human beings. What liberalism does to real religion is the model of what liberalism does everywhere: it treats substantive claims (e.g. claims as to the nature of the good for humans, or indeed of the Good simpliciter) as mere ‘interests’,lxi and tolerates them, as such, as mere private lxii opinions or more-or-less meaningless rituals. But that is not how the claims (ethical, spiritual, religious etc.) were intended. Liberalism forbids religion from being (considered as) central to human identity, and thus proscribes in advance for instance the important possibility that we might find a shared core to (some, perhaps nearly all) different religions, a shared core religionspirituality of love and compassionate action. This, that John Deweylxiii called a common faith, a faith that goes beyond and behind the particular religious vernaculars that different religions employ,lxiv and that explicitly champions a relatively-thick conception of the good, is far more likely, I submit, to provide a genuine glue for modern society than is the weak fare -- the thin gruel -- of ‘public reason’.lxv This is an extremely important point, and one that Rawls nowhere considers: perhaps a shared religion (which as yet perhaps lacks a name) rather than a shared political conception (‘public reason’) is attainable, and necessary. Rather than resorting to ‘public reason’ and ‘political liberalism’ as a would-be lowest common denominator in a fractured society, why not look to build a highest common denominator (or: highest common multiple might be a truer metaphor…) religion/spirituality? This would be a real alternative to liberalism – exactly the alternative, I submit, that our times demand. I think we can see the already outlines of such a common faith in the Tolstoyan gospel, and/or in some engaged Buddhist practice (such as that of Thich Nhat Hanh). If one believes that the individualism of our times, and the lack of a widespread sensibility, specifically educated for, of love for thy neighbour, is a disease, then one will in the end see Rawlsian liberalism’s thinking on religion (and his anti-religious rhetoric) as a manifestation of that disease, a legitimation of it, and a recipe for its being made more severe, more chronic -- and, through being perhaps less obvious, more dangerous. Rawls wrote ToJ for an age in which goods, in the economist’s sense of that word, were scarce, and where their production and ‘fair’ distribution was the pre-eminent question of political philosophy; and he wrote PL for an age whose central political problem was how to tolerate mutually-conflicting beliefs and how to reason across the divide between those beliefs and thus genuinely (‘legitimately’) hold society together. But those ages are not in the end, I contend, our age – what our age can be, and must be. Rawls’s insistences upon the state’s ‘neutrality’ between conceptions of the good, and upon pluralism and ‘genuine’ tolerance of religions, are latter-day attempts to come to terms with a loss of shared ‘meta-narratives’ in Modern times, but such attempts to engender justice and legitimacy from a society composed in effect of homos economicus -- i.e. people whose values and wants are above judgement, and with respect to which the state must remain ‘neutral’ -- are doomed simply to reinforce and deepen that loss. Our age, the age that has dawned over the last generation (especially in the West / the North, which is where Rawls is mostly writing for) is an age in which material abundance has fostered a vast spiritual crisis, a crisis of emptiness in which the consumer -- a vast unquenchable open mouth, whose desires are continually re-created and expanded by marketing /advertising -- is the most potent icon of the times. Such an age is not one in which ‘neutrality’ between conceptions of the good is desirable, or even tolerable -- for such ‘neutrality’ fuels the continued dominance of market logic, the dominance of the ‘choice’ of the consumer (It is of course no coincidence that neo-liberal politicians the world over idolise and utilise the word ‘choice’ above all others). Rawls’s later philosophy, more still than his early philosophy, is a philosophy for a society of atomised individuals, who are united only by their adherence to a ‘philosophy’ of reasoning and buying and selling with other such individuals... But if one believes that such atomisation is precisely the social disease which is a central feature of the greatest threat facing our civilisation, then it will hardly seem to one that Rawls has left open any real cultural space for the kind of spiritual regeneration which real religion has as its central concern. Rawls’s philosophies will then appear to one not only as dangerous legitimations of an unstable and undesirable status quo, but also as painfully vulnerable to what one might call (with a twist on Hegel) the ‘Minervan’ objection: Rawls expressed the ideology of an age, but did not respond to the real needs of that age as those were emerging. He offered, just as Hegel himself did, an apologia for the dominant political institutions / structures of his times; but those times actually (and increasingly) needed something very different. The liberal ideology is in fact a leading obstacle to starting to deal with the real needs of our time, a time crying out for spiritual reawakening and engaged religious leadership. A time crying out for a path or paths beyond materialism, economism and the ‘rationality’ of these and of associated forms of individualism. Rawls’s political philosophy has taken wing in the last generation -- has flown to great heights, has achieved an extraordinary level of dominance of the discipline, and beyond lxvi -- because, I suggest, it reflects the dominant political and economic power-realities of our time, and paints them with a nice patina of justice; but night will fall fast on this philosophy, I submit, because it will (and I think, has) exacerbate(d) the very diseases it was supposed to cure (to salve, to solve). If one believes the kind of thing that I suggest in the paragraph above, then Rawls’s failure to preserve genuine freedom of religion lxvii will surely appear to one as a cutting off from the human race of perhaps the one chance it has to save itself from a descent into a nihilistic and barbarous future, a world of selfish capitalism and consumerism that will have no spiritual bulwarks left intact lxviii with which to stem the present movement toward societal disintegration and ecological catastrophe.lxix I believe passionately that we need precisely a re-enchantment of ourselves and of our planetary home -- we need a ‘comprehensive doctrine’ or philosophy that self-consciously rejects the self-denying ordinances that Rawlsian thinking places upon public philosophies -- if we are to avoid such a fate. And what I hope to have shown here is that Rawls’s misleading rhetoric provides a vital clue to this. If we are to see our way beyond the aridity of liberal political philosophy, the first thing that we are going to have to do is give up a sterilely Manichean attitude toward religion. We are going to have to be prepared to find in religion not merely the extreme, but also the sensible, and the necessary. Dare I say it, even: the genuinely reasonable. To close then, with a last word about the real politics of this… It is in my view a very good thing that people are not as prejudiced against gays etc as they used to be. But is this because people are becoming more liberal (more tolerant, more... indifferent?), or because they are becoming more thoughtful and caring? I hope it is because of the latter. Liberalism / liberality points toward societal disintegration. A more caring society, more capacity to think and imagine yourself into the shoes of others, points toward societal integration. A society that leaves people free to do whatever they want so long as it doesn't directly harm other autonomous people is a liberal society; but that way lies nemesis. For society, and the ecosystem... Religions such as (to take a few for-instances, some of which have been touched on above) Quakerism, major forms of Buddhism, much of the Church of England nowadays, liberation theology, Gandhian Hinduism, Creation Spirituality, the 'Creation Care' movement, the Mennonites, the Catholic Worker movement, the Bruderhof, and much paganism ought not to be wished away by progressives. Real communities welcome and aim to build positive, caring, life-affirming religious organisations. Perhaps, into the very fabric of their states. Rather than Rawls’s lowest common denominator ‘proviso’, such states might look to the highest common multiple of a common faith as their telos. (Inasmuch as) Rawlsian liberalism fails to preserve this, and indeed actively opposes it… it stands condemned, as I have argued above, and contra what it itself claims, as an inveterate opponent of real religion. So much the worse for liberalism.lxx i See e.g. PL xxviii. All references are to the first edition, Oxford: OUP, 1971. Henceforth “ToJ”. In going along with the notion of the ‘clash of fundamentalisms’, I need to raise two provisos: (1) I do not ii iii believe that most of the ‘fundamentalist terrorism’ in the world today is primarily religiously rather than politically motivated: i.e. I think that Christian (and Judaic) fundamentalism is not as significant as geo-political strategy and capitalist imperatives in motivating the state terrorist foreign policy of the U.S.A. (and Israel); and I think that Islamic fundamentalism is not as significant as anger at Western foreign policy, at the belittling and oppressing of the Arab world and Arab peoples, etc, in motivating atrocities such as September 11 2001 and the Summer 2005 London bombings. Evidence for the latter view can be found in bin Laden’s publicly-available statements on the motivations for his ‘jihad’ (the treatment of Iraq, the treatment of the Palestinians, and the occupation of Saudi Arabia) and also in the extant evidence (also publicly available) on the Iraq-related motivations of the London bombers. (2) In a certain sense, the most significant fundamentalism of them all may turn out to be liberalism itself. I explain this remark, below. iv This perspicuous quotation is in fact from Joshua Cohen’s friendly presentation of Rawls, on pp.104-5 of his “For a democratic society”, in The Cambridge Companion to Rawls (Cambridge: CUP, 2003). v Rawls is interested in the form and ‘foundations’ of what he calls a well-ordered society. See below (e.g. n.49) for a doubt as to whether being ‘stable’ / ‘well-ordered’ in Rawls’s sense is actually desirable. vi Metaphorically, one might remark: they are more like one’s clothing than one’s body. A somewhat similar argument is made by Thomas C. Grey, in his consideration of what choices about vii religion and religious freedom it would be rational to make in the original position: “[T]here is some element of a gamble in allowing suppression of heresy. One may turn out to be a heretic when the veil [of ignorance] is lifted. … // What is not true is that there is no similar gamble if one opts for the principles of toleration. Here, the situation is simply reversed. One wins if one is in a minority; one loses if one is in a majority and detests – or worse, has a religious obligation to suppress – heresy. // …We may suppose that, in the original position, the parties know that people do take religious obligations seriously; perhaps that is part of what it means to call an obligation religious. But the seriousness of religious obligation cuts both ways. In the original position, the content of such obligations cannot be known. They may include a most serious obligation to suppress heresy. If one opts for a principle of religious liberty in the original position, does not one show that one is not taking this (potential) obligation seriously?” (Pp.313-4 of “The first virtue” (Stanford Law Review 25:2 (Jan. 1973), pp. 286327.) I cannot see any conceivable way around these arguments that would enable a liberal to take religion genuinely seriously. viii This quote is from105 of his “For a democratic society”, in The Cambridge Companion to Rawls (Cambridge: CUP, 2003). ix P. 139 of The gospel in brief (Mineola: Dover, 2008 (1893), transl. Isabel Hapgood). Tolstoy adds, in his own voice: “[Jesus] taught that all such external ceremonies were harmful, and that the church tradition itself was an evil.” Whereas, roughly speaking, Rawlsian liberalism sees the church tradition as the entirety of religion. x See e.g. Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia, 1993; Henceforth PL) p.37. It is a matter of great regret that Rawls never conceded that the central reason for the instability of a Rawlsian liberal society would in all likelihood rather be its decay at the hands of the possessive individualism embedded in markets, and in particular in the difference principle and the envy it would spawn. On this, see Jerry Cohen’s work, and my “Three strikes against the difference principle”, forthcoming. xi For confirmation, and amplification of the emergence of liberalism out of religious toleration, as a tradition which Rawls of course hopes to crown in this age, see p.412 of “Justice as fairness: political not metaphysical” (in Rawls’s Collected Papers (Cambridge: Harvard, 1999; ed. Sam Freeman)). xii One who has explicitly so argued is Burton Dreben, the later Rawls’s closest working colleague and perhaps his most acute sympathetic interpreter. See for instance p.320 of his “On Rawls and Political Liberalism” (in Freeman (ed.), op.cit). xiii The word typically used by later Rawls is “impartial”: see e.g. p.xxiff. of PL. See also PL xl, for the spelling out of how ‘neutrality’ is understood, in the later Rawls. xiv See the discussions of ‘the proviso’ at p.584 and p.591-3 of IPPR. (‘The proviso’ is that religious discourse, to have any standing in “public reason”, must be translatable without residue into purely political discourse.) In my view, this actually distracts attention from what is pretty obviously the main reason why religious people typically actually do use “public reason” or something roughly resembling it, when they do: namely, so as to be in purely practical/pragmatic terms persuasive towards those who do not necessarily share their (or any) religion. For further support for my point here, see p.175 of Nicholas Wolterstorff’s “Why we should reject what liberalism tells us about speaking and acting in public for religious reasons” (pp. 160-179 in Wolterstorff and P.J. Weiman (eds.) Religion and Contemporary Liberalism (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press,1997). xv In the sense that ‘the proviso’ renders religious discourse, doctrine etc. entirely epiphenomenal to “public reason”. xvi See e.g. p.xix of PL: with regard to “unreasonable” doctrines, “the problem is to contain them so that they do not undermine the unity and justice of society.” See also p.93 of “Constitutional Liberty and the concept of justice” (in his Collected Papers), for Rawls’s licencing of the right -- indeed, the duty -- to suppress any “sect” which actually poses a threat to liberalism. Pp. 344, 346 & 348 of PL argue in effect likewise that one can engage in “subversive advocacy” so long as one has no chance whatsoever of success. The moment one has any hope of threatening the liberal state, one’s fundamental rights before the law are null and void. xvii Robert Emmons, Chi Cheung and Keivan Tehrani, “Assessing spirituality through personal goals: implications for research on religion and subjective well-being”, Social Indicators Research 45 (1998); p.404. xviii See also Clive Hamilton’s more detailed discussion, from which I have profitted, in Growth Fetish (Pluto: London, 2003). xix It is unreasonable, unless one can satisfy the ‘proviso’. Rawls frequently claims that Martin Luther King and even the abolitionists could do so; these claims seem to me highly-suspect (and to Sandel – see his penetrating criticisms of Rawls’s claims along these lines, in the central portions of his “[Review Essay]: Political Liberalism”, Harvard Law Review 107 (1994), pp.1765-1794). If what Rawls claims appears to be so, I suspect that that will be not because their religiously-liberatory ideas, or those of the liberation theologians in South and Central America (who offer even more challenging cases for Rawls’s account -- and who Rawls nowhere discusses), can be translated into the merely political language of public reason, but because their ideas manifest a common faith that goes beyond the particular religious venracular they employed. See further discussion of this point towards the close of this paper, below. xx Emmons et al, p.404. xxi And Rawls cannot just slough this off, for he makes very clear in ToJ that he respects and indeed depends on, as denizens of ‘the original position’ do, the good empirical offices of ‘social science’, to assist in his/their ‘theorizing’. xxii One might, for instance, think that someone sorely impressed by the systematic evils of the 20th century could have saved some space at a moment like this in his text for one of the great systematic goods of the 20the century; namely, the development and mass application of satygraha, the true, spiritual-political understanding of the method of Gandhian non-violence. But there is no space for such a possibility in Rawls’s Manichean schema: he can only make alleged (and, I suggest, traductive) sense of Gandhi as himself an exponent of ‘public reason’: see n.11 of my “Refusing to hear the refuseniks”, in Practical Philosophy 10:1 (Nov. 2009), pp. 56-63. ...Once again, it seems that Rawls suffers from his narrow diet of examples: he seems only to be thinking of the ‘religions of the book’, the monotheisms. This forgets that non-theisms and polytheisms across the world have almost as many adherents. xxiii It is peculiar that Rawls thinks himself entitled to make such ‘conservative’ assumptions. This suggests what I explore elsewhere (especially towards the end of my “Contractarian liberalism cannot take future generations seriously”, forthcoming): that Rawls is on some respects too prone to take into his ‘theory’ unconsciously what are in fact temporally-specific and ideologically-charged assumptions. (Bear in mind also the contrary risk, which I believe Rawls also very much encounters or manifests, e.g. in the remainder of this quote (see discussion of the quote, in the text above): that of in effect abolishing the rights or removing the status of many institutions (e.g. the family), because of their conflicting with liberal ‘neutrality’ between conceptions of the good.) xxiv P.464 of “The priority of the right and ideas of the good”, in Collected Papers. Compare also the case on p.461-2: Rawls is looking for examples of “the encouraging or discouraging of comprehensive doctrines”. No examples of ‘encouragement’, of course, are given: ‘encouragement’ is incompatible with “the priority of the right” in liberalism. The example of such doctrines being “in direct conflict with the principles of justice” that Rawls goes on to give is “illustrated by a conception of the good requiring the repression or degradation of certain persons on, say, racial, ethnic or perfectionist grounds, for example slavery in ancient Athens or in the antebellum South.” Again, a brace of prejudicial examples, hardly designed to elicit the sympathy of readers for (other parts of) the spectrum of comprehensive doctrines that would conflict with Rawlsian thinking. For better examples, see for instance p.1777f. of M. Sandel’s “[Review Essay]: Political Liberalism”, Harvard Law Review 107 (1994), pp.1765-1794. xxv Which Political Liberalism remains, on Rawls’s own account (see e.g. p.421ff.): only it is no longer meant to be a comprehensive theory of justice (though I dispute that: see below). xxvi See p.322 of his Dreben’s “Rawls and political liberalism”; also p.338. See p.105. I reject it both in theory and in practice, being an elected Green Party politician (I sit on Norwich City xxvii xxviii Council). However, I should make clear that I accept Rawls’s reasons, on his own terms, for making this case. His reasons are very revealing: what is revealed in this moment in Rawls’s text is the narrow limits of liberal toleration, the repression that lurks just beneath the civility of Rawlsian rhetoric. xxix Quakers also believe in a form of democracy that far surpasses at least Rawls’s own accounts of ‘deliberative democracy’, in its degree of genuinely egalitarian, thought-through, and consensus-oriented decision-making. But it would take us too far afield in the present context to discuss this interesting point further. xxx See n.57, p.594, of Rawls’s Collected Papers (Harvard: H.U.P, 2001). Because increasingly influential: Thich Nhat Hanh and the 14th Dalia Lama are among the most famous xxxi spiritual teachers in the world today. xxxii Or, rather, ‘pure lands’. For some examples and discussion, see David Brazier, The new Buddhism (London: Constable, 2001), xxxiii especially chapters 2, 3, 5 and 14. xxxiv Examples I shall not discuss, but that would I think excellently repay discussion, include the Mennonites, the Bruderhof, some of the Amish, some Seventh Day Adventists, many Gandhian groups (and more or less related strands in Hindu mysticism), some important strands in the contemporary peace movement, and some radical women’s groups, both with ‘maternalist’ and pacifist orientations, and with pagan or wicca aspects. xxxv I say ‘most of’, because there is an intriguing growth in recent years of elements of fundamentalist evangelical Christianity which are for example devoted with deep seriousness to the preservation of the Creation, to ecological thinking etc. . The ‘Creation care’ movement upsets the standard liberal pre-conception that Fundamentalism must be opposed to Environmentalism. See e.g. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21656644/ Also very well worth listening to is ‘the Green Patriarch’, Bartholomew 1st, the spiritual leader of the 300 million Orthodox Church Christians. See e.g. http://www.sltrib.com/faith/ci_13826924 xxxvi Not coincidentally, perhaps, our ‘liberal’ states such as Britain and the U.S. increasingly do lump in any form of non-electoral protest or dissent with which they are uncomfortable or which they worry might be effective with ‘[non-state] terrorism’. xxxvii Similarly, I think that any spirituality or religion must be and necessarily is engaged, in the above sense, even if the form of that engagement is: complete retreat, would-be-total disengagement. Obviously, many religious practitioners would disagree with me on this point, including many mainstream ‘Christians’ and ‘Buddhists’. In a longer presentation, I would call upon the history and teachings of Christ and Buddha to argue my corner, on this front. These two would have known which side they were on in, for instance, the struggle to rid the world of nuclear weapons through non-violent direct action. Or, more prosaically, think of the successful recent campaign asking the question, “What would Jesus drive?” (the suggested answer being: certainly NOT a 4 by 4 / SUV). xxxviii For an argument that this is so, see my “Rings, Power, Fear and Politics”, chapter 8 of my Philosophy for life (London: Continuumn, 2007; ed. M. Lavery), and my “The fantasy of safety through power: a psychophilosophical reading of The Lord of the Rings” (forthcoming), in which I suggest that any notion of religion as a retreat from the world, other than in the very -- necessarily -- temporary sense of going on a retreat, is in fact unspiritual and psychologically-harmful. xxxix Italics added; p.245 of S. Mulhall and A.Swift, Liberals and Communitarians (Oxford:Blackwell, 1996 (2nd ed)). For detail on the nature of the ‘burdens of judgement’ argument mentioned here, cf. pp.237-9 of their text, which are equally devastating for Rawlsian claims to neutrality and to avoidance of a comprehensive doctrine in PL. Cf. also pp.152-3 of PL - and Section III of Sandel’s op.cit., which works through important cases such as those of religious abolitionists which are incompatible with Rawls’s ‘proviso’. xl On which, see Tom Young’s powerful “ ‘A project to be realised’: Global liberalism and contemporary Africa”, Millenium: Journal of International Studies 24:3 (1995), 527-546. xli In other words, I envision my non-liberal (yet deeply pro-most-civil-liberties) vision being achievable through a re-localisation of the world, through its being the basis of more and more inter-dependent and yet autonomous communities of faith and practice. xlii Rawls suggests (IPPR p.589) that religions which do not accept the fact of reasonable pluralism would impose their own religious doctrine upon all, as “the sole admissible faith”, should they fully gain their way. But this does not follow at all, and is again I suspect a scare-tactic designed to prevent the reader from realising the possibility of an ‘evangelical’ and non-pluralistic faith that nonetheless does not wish to impose its doctrines upon all. For instance, one might believe that to impose one’s faith on others was unethical, or simply ineffective, or both. Rawls does not consider the possibility, important in relation to the history of Quakerism for instance, that a religion might consider itself the true comprehensive doctrine, which all should uphold, and yet refrain from imposing its doctrine upon others even when having the opportunity of doing so, preferring persuasion and conversion in good faith. I believe strongly in Non-Violent Communication, a practice attractive to Quakers, Gandhians, etc., which refuses to impose by force upon others even in one’s words. This belief is itself quasi-religious, and partly purely pragmatic. xliii How should we bring up our children? To love one another, to meditate, to practice non-violence, to have deep and meaningful spiritual lives... none of this brooks ‘neutrality’. Compare and contrast p.464 of Rawls’s Collected Papers (“The priority of the right and ideas of the good”). xliv Perhaps in what Philip Pullman calls ‘the republic of heaven’, made on Earth. In this regard, the inheritance of Wittgenstein that Dreben seeks for Rawls (see p.346 of his op.cit.) will go xlv rather to (some of) those alternative voices that I championed above. Liberalism, even political liberalism, is a metaphysics that gets in the way of humans working out what the good life amounts to, and championing it. And a metaphysics gone underground, repressed, unaware of itself, is of course the most dangerous kind. xlvi There is an at least partial analogy here with the way in which, in a bygone era Communism was somewhat accurately said to be a religion. Some would say that the analogy is only partial, because liberalism ostensibly does not aim to be a comprehensive philosophy. However, I have now suggested that this appearance is deceptive: political liberalism is a comprehensive philosophy with substantive political and ethical commitments built into it, just by virtue of its ‘agenda-setting’ properties, the way it makes certain ways of life impossible, and ultimately perhaps inconceivable. xlvii See e.g. pp.xviii-xix of PL: ‘Of course a society may...contain unreasonable, irrational, and even mad comprehensive doctrines. In their case the problem is to contain them so that they do not undermine the unity and justice of society.” By Rawls’s lights, my views would be unreasonable, as would those of ‘religious fundamentalisms’ -- though perhaps there remains a difference in that possibly Rawls would characterise some of the latter as simply “mad” (I would). xlviii I am thinking here of ‘Creation Spirituality’ (as opposed to old-time Christianity), and liberalism, respectively. For my arguments that Rawlsian liberalism is an apologetics for an economic system and a growth- xlix imperative that is destroying the ecosphere, and thus wreaking a terrible fate on future generations, see for instance my “Contractarian liberalism cannot take future generations seriously: A new argument for egalitarianism”, forthcoming. l This is the extremely fishy term that Dreben stresses as a “key” to Rawls’s entire philosophy (see pp.322-3 of his “Rawls and political liberalism”). In ToJ, Rawls “works out” what justice means: it turns out to mean the two principles, etc. . Likewise perhaps, R.M. Hare’s long career in moral philosophy consisted in ‘working out’ what moral thinking amounted to: it turned out to amount to utilitarianism. That’s the trouble with such ‘conceptual analyses’ in moral and political philosophy: there is no guarantee that they won’t start from common premises and end up at diammetrically-opposed conclusions... li Compare here the intriguing remarks of Paul Treanor, at http://web.inter.nl.net/users/Paul.Treanor/rawls.html : “Rawls is presenting what he often claims to avoid: a comprehensive quasi-religious doctrine. It is politically a conservative doctrine. It has two underlying principles: that stability is good in itself, and that society should be structured to avoid civil strife, and promote stability. Ultimately, Rawls says, it may be necessary to enforce such a doctrine - which he himself does not see as a 'doctrine'. His examples are from religious belief, but they could apply to any political or social ideal... “This happens whenever someone insists, for example, that certain questions are so fundamental that to ensure their being rightly settled justifies civil strife.” (“The idea of an overlapping consensus”, p. 14) I do insist that. Class inequality in death rates is an issue so important, that it justifies civil strife. That 14 million people die each year of treatable diseases, while western countries can afford to treat them many times over that justifies civil strife. So do many other issues. And I am not the only person who thinks like this. Of course John Rawls disagrees, and so do many liberals. Historically, liberalism emerged in reaction to the wars of religion in early-modern Europe, as Rawls correctly comments: “Thus, the historical origin of political liberalism (and of liberalism more generally) is the Reformation and its aftermath, with the long controversies over religious toleration in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.” (Political Liberalism, Introduction, pp. xiv-xxiv.) The European wars of religion are the liberal dystopia. Not just Rawls, but the liberal tradition in general, wishes to structure society, so as to avoid civil strife. But that is a political preference of liberals, not a self-evident truth. From a political philosopher who is writing justifications, I expect some justification of his value system. Why is civil strife wrong? Rawls implies that civil strife is the greatest evil for a society. Are there no greater evils? Is inequality not a greater evil than civil strife? Is avoidable mass death not a greater evil than civil strife? Rawls says explicitly that some persons must be prevented from starting civil strife to settle fundamental questions. Is that wrong? Why is it wrong? Rawls does not even consider the questions: he gives the impression that they never entered his head. In fact his work gives the impression of a born conservative, mindlessly dedicated to stability and public order. Although Rawls repeatedly implies that 'civil strife' refers to the European wars of religion, it also of course includes revolutions, including future revolutions. It is a typical Rawlsian trick: to win sympathy for his conservative distaste of revolutions, for his anti-revolutionary liberalism, he disguises it as opposition to ancient religious fanaticism. It is a standard line of liberal propaganda. A typical liberal thinks that the starving poor of Africa should be prevented from looting Bill Gates mansion - that would infringe property rights. However, it makes bad propaganda to shout: "Support Bill Gates, let the Africans starve!" So instead they say something like: "Let us join together in condemning all forms of fanatical social action, as exemplified by religious zealotry." It sounds so much more reasonable, and that is how to make propaganda. The Inquisition is an easy target, but it distracts people from the political reality:... The 'civil strife' that Rawls fears, is probably more like the Bolshevik revolution, than a repeat of the Protestant-Catholic wars of religion.” lii See the quotation from Rawls, above. See the quotation from Joshua Cohen, above. No matter whether one has a religion, or believes that spirituality and politics are intertwined, or not. This idea is explored in its actual implementation throughout the practice of ‘ethnomethodology’, a liii liv lv philosophically-sophisticated branch of sociology. lvi Compare for instance this bald -- and, in my view, unwisely bold -- statement, on the back jacket of the Cambridge Companion to Rawls: “John Rawls is the most significant and influential political and moral philosopher of the twentieth century”. lvii For exposition, see Colin Leys’s powerful Market-driven politics (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003). Cf. Wolterstorff (op.cit.), p.177, for a slightly different view, but one very compatible in broad terms with my lviii analysis: “What has rushed in to fill the void is not noble discussions about principles of justice which have been extracted in Rawlsian fashion from the consensus populi. What has rushed in to fill the void is mainly considerations of economic self-interest, of privatism, and of nationalism.” lix For justification of these remarks, see my “Contractarian liberalism cannot take future generations seriously”, forthcoming. lx As Heidegger famously remarked, toward the end of his life, “Only a God can save us now.” Crucially, Rawlsian liberalism equates one’s conception of the good with one’s ‘interests. (See e.g. p.16 of lxi “The basic liberties and their priority”, The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, delivered at U. Michigan, April 10 1981 (accessible at http://www.tannerlectures.utah.edu/lectures/documents/rawls82.pdf ).) This means that, barring justice, all further ideas of religion, morality etc are for Rawls cashed out as nothing other than my selfperceived rational advantage / ‘interest(s)’. It is this debasement of religion (and ethics etc.), of course, that I am profoundly contesting, in this paper. lxii For amplification and useful thought-provocative discussion, see again Paul Treanor on this (http://web.inter.nl.net/users/Paul.Treanor/rawls.html ): “Rawls suggests that acceptance of the liberal conception of justice might evolve, from acquiescence in a 'modus vivendi', to a genuine overlapping consensus. However, that logically requires the abandonment of the ideals [that could bring civil strife], the ones people are prepared to kill for, or at least those which conflict with the overlapping consensus itself. Rawls is suggesting a long-term process of abandonment of ideals. Ideals in the political sense, public ideals: the liberal system would allow them to be retained as private belief. Their status would be like, for instance, Roman Catholic devotion to the Virgin Mary. Although some Catholics still seek to legally enforce their beliefs, especially on abortion, devotion to the Virgin Mary has become a purely private affair. Not even the most fundamentalist Catholics suggest that the State should erect public statues of the Virgin Mary - and compel citizens to kneel and recite the Ave Maria. In other words, Catholic devotion to the Virgin Mary fits the liberal ideal of purely private religion: liberals will be satisfied with this development. Now what would happen, if all ideals acquired that status? Take for instance the ideal of equality. What would happen, if no person in a society seriously believed in any enforcement of any kind of equality - not by the state, not by social pressures, not by education? In such a society, how would inequality then be challenged? The logical answer is, it would not be challenged, and the society would probably be characterised by great inequality. Rawls implicitly divides ideals into two categories: those which lead to civil strife, and those which do not. But ideals which are fundamentally rejected by the power-holders in a society are (almost by definition) potential sources of civil strife. In other words, Rawls is suggesting that a large number of ideals - including many proposals for reform and innovation - should be abandoned. He has inverted the idea of historical progress: for Rawls, progress is the successive abandonment of all controversial proposals and ideals, not their implementation. The end result is a society in which there are no radicals, no innovators, no-one who can think of anything which might generate civil strife. This is the nature of the "freedom" which he proposes...” lxiii Political Liberalism, the holy book of the cult of later Rawls, is in fact the fourth John Dewey Lectures in Philosophy. It is a matter of regret that Rawls did not see fit to learn from his great ‘liberal’ predecessor that perhaps there might be a common core to the religions that Rawls is always emphasizing the differences between. There is no reference to Dewey anywhere in the body of PL. On another occasion, I hope to consider whether Deweyan radical liberalism is in part at least invulnerable to the criticisms I make here of contemporary -- Rawlsian -- liberalism. lxiv The idea that there is such a thing as a common faith which we are all striving for, or that is present in all religions, is a very influential idea among most religions, though you would not know it from liberal discussions that emphasize intolerance and the difficult task of tolerance amidst pluralism. The idea is strongly present in Islam, for instance, in the veneration of the Judaic and Christian prophets. The idea is constitutive of the Bah’ai faith. It is if anything even more important among explicitly engaged spiritualities. Here for instance is a central maxim of contemporary engaged Buddhist leader Christopher Titmuss: “Truth expresses itself as authentic and dedicated action. It cuts through the harmful and breaks with teh painful past. There is one ethic -- to stay within the power of Truth.” (From his “Ten points to remember for those who work for peace and justice”, cited on p.7 of Indra’s Net : The journal of the network of Engaged Buddhists 37 (Autumn 2005). lxv Compare and contrast p.592 (and p.586, and p.607) of IPPR, which is a discussion of Rawls’s “proviso”. When the proviso is satisfied, is it so because what is in common is political, is a deliberation of political liberalism through public reason? Or is it rather that what can be satisfied by various faiths according to the proviso (or at least: what can be shoehorned into the proviso) is the substance of a common faith? Is the appearance of the possibility of various religions being able (as “reasonable political conceptions”) to satisfy the proviso and thus be tolerated by political liberalism actually a deeply-misleading one, a combination of the purely pragmatic tendency of religious leaders often to use non-religious language (so as to convince others who do not share their faith), and the deeply-significant tendency of many religions and spiritualities (not all!) to agree on some key things as a consequence of their precisely sharing a substantive conception of what the good for human beings is, and of what the most important parts and meanings of life are? lxvi In Britain, for instance, Labour politicians never talk any more of equality; only of helping the poorest, via judicious employment and encouragement of private capital, etc. . lxvii It might be objected once more that I do not preserve genuine freedom of religion either, as, in my imagined ‘utopic’ alternative society to Rawls’s, it is quite feasible that one religion may gain sway over the rest, and over the land. This might be true; although my remarks, above, about the common core arguably shared by (the good side of) the great religions, and my reminding the reader of (and my advocacy of) religions or spiritualities which tend to be reasonably tolerant of other religions (except of religions that actually should be intolerated, such as militaristic Fundamentalism and devil-worship), point up other, positive, possibilities. But even in such a case, at least there will have been a time when genuine religious freedom was possible, and that time might come again. In any case, my fundamental objection to liberalism is that it rules out in advance the very possibility of religion, except of the most anodyne, non-status-quo-threatening religions (and of itself). lxviii For liberalism will neutralise them -- see again e.g. Young (op.cit.). Compare also this very interesting set of remarks from p.178 of Wolterstorff (op.cit.): “Adherence to the neutrality postulate has a debasing effect on religion…What we are witnessing today on the American scene, as the utterly natural and predictable response of religious people to the silencing of religion in the public space, is outbursts of resentment. We had better expect such outbursts to continue. Many religious people feel profoundly that their voice is not being heard – as of course it isn’t. But an outburst of resentment is very different from a reasoned and civil discussion. Yet how are religious communities supposed to develop a reasoned voice on political matters when the neutrality postulate is in full sway? In their churches and synagogues and mosques? Does anybody seriously believe that churches, synagogues and mosques can possibly engage in the reflection of a depth which could compete with the sustained reflection that takes place in the public academies of the land? The only thing that can compete with the academy is the academy. But when it comes to the academy, we must note that though no one raises an eyebrow when those who are committed to comprehensive utilitarianism [or indeed, comprehensive liberalism – RR] use the resources of the public academy to work out the political implications of their view, a similar use of the resources of the academy by Christians, Jews or Muslims would raise an uproar. This is the effect of the liberal silencing of religion in the public square, coupled with the tag-end of the Enlightenment view, that while religion is irrational, utilitarianism and such like, though they may be mistaken, are eminently rational, and thus appropriate for the public academy.” lxix Compare for instance p.109 of Hamilton’s Growth Fetish: “Post-war rebellions against oppression have worked in the interests of consumer capitalism because they have swept away ancient cultural and religious barriers to the most insidious form of oppression. This is the oppression implicit in sublimation of the self in pursuit of wealth, fame and social success, a form of oppression that is readily embraced. In the end, liberation is denied those who invest their lives in external reward.” The concepts of liberalism and liberation are, I suggest, poles apart. lxx Thanks to Phil Hutchinson, Stephen Mulhall and Christopher Titmuss for comments. These colleagues do not however necessarily agree with what I have written, and so should certainly not be held responsible for any of it!