#secular reason

            How could we think these ideas out loud into public discourse? We have seen that the liberal God of the Exodus, the prophets, and the life of Jesus cannot become good news for all the people unless publicly engaged, unless projected into the air we breathe and written into the social contract. God is waiting for human collaboration. The liberal God must be invited to dinner, entertained, and become part of the table talk. The point of discussing reason and rationality now is to see to it that human reason, under secular auspices, is not employed to thwart God’s dreams aligning with human hope. But it is common among public intellectuals and developers of public policy to argue that a secular-rational discourse should be the only lingua franca allowed in the commons. At first glance, this is not a silly or intolerant argument, since presumably everyone speaks this language, and the multiplicities of religious views are more likely to produce division than unity. The European Union manages to conduct itself in English as a purely utilitarian measure, without implying any denigration of the multiple vernaculars that flourish within its boundaries.

            But a second look notices the questionable implications of the decree that in the public square of an exceedingly complex multi-culture, only one network-standard, familiarly accented voice is permitted to speak. Imagine someone coming to speak before a city council hearing, or in a national debate, or in a letter to the editor, or at a hospital ethics committee and be explicitly disallowed to draw arguments or insights from the religious worldview that encompasses everything that is most important and deeply felt—the fullest meaning of that person’s life. If varying worldviews produce vernaculars unique to themselves because they are specially honed carriers of meaning, they are on notice that, when in public, only the voice of one worldview is permitted—and that an Enlightenment worldview that has come under radical postmodern questioning. Let there be no denial that different cultures and genders and orientations and religions speak specially nuanced languages, which have grown out of them organically. There are no dis-interested voices, including that of the Enlightenment. Every voice comes encumbered with culture, economics, politics, and power. Every voice arrives trailing its own claims, its own stake-holders, its own occupation in a worldview.

The idea that the voice of secular rationality is sufficient to speak for all kinds and conditions and times of human life and that it therefore can readily be enforced without harm to anyone will not bear close examination. Such an argument must go the way of the argument that the masculine pronoun actually includes all or that whiteness is a useful short-circuit to all of humanity. We have long come to see that civic meals may not be so hearty or so tasty without multiple ingredients. The heart, too, may have reasons that lucid rationality cannot express. Champions of reason must consider a long line of detractors, beginning in the modern age with the Romantics, who challenge their triumphalism.

Two further clarifications are necessary. Rationality is a wider term than often admitted and it cannot be reduced to rationalism. Religious assertions or ethical reflection cannot automatically be construed as irrational. Most theology, though perhaps not most mysticism, speaks in rational sentences and uses rational arguments when constructing a convincing worldview. The issue here is a particular kind of rationality that comes locked in the assumptions of an entire secular worldview, which may imply the exclusion of religion or feeling or even, in the case of “rational choice theory,” non-capitalist assumptions. The other issue is that religious people, or others who speak in their most meaningful vernaculars, may still, from time to time, deliberately choose to confine themselves to the lingua franca of secular rationality. They may do this for strategic reasons, for example, to win over the largest possible sympathetic audiences. But they should not be required to switch to this language, not required to dispense with being true to their own inner voices. Telling the religious to keep silent belongs in the same category as telling women, or blacks, or the southern hemisphere, or non property-owners, to keep silent.

            A mono-culture of purely rational discourse has other problems, too. It isn’t just that although secular discourse is the most unchallengeable way of speaking, we must also honor diversity. It is also the case that this very dominating language comes with its own dubious history. Post-modernism celebrates diversity and is suspicious of the totalizing unity of single, universally imposed grand narratives. The much vaunted lucid rationality of the Enlightenment is not without its downside. This was the language that prevailed in and was used to justify the world of colonialism. This kind of language does not readily acknowledge the larger nuances of human life and provides the grating voice for rational choice theorists with their grossly simplified picture of social reality and human psychology.  When it prevails as the law of the market and the hegemony of global capitalism, it eliminates, on principle, indigenous voices and compels all to speak in the network standard of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund and Wall Street bankers.

            Romantic, post-colonialist, post-Marxian, post-Freudian, feminist, and queer modes of discourse have all mounted their critiques of excessive Enlightenment self-congratulation and questioned the hegemony of Western, secular reason. Religion, too, has of course joined in this critique. Some Christian philosophical traditions have risen to argue that a full account of humanity must always include head and heart. Religion is more likely to see reason as the servant of the heart, not its displacement. Religion has joined the social sciences in the insight that there are no impartial or value-free claims that exist without presuppositions. Every social unit, including modern science, operates according to and in the interests of some ideology. No doubt the Enlightenment and the French Revolution joined hands in the proclamation of the sovereignty of reason as a triumph over ancient orders and practices. No doubt this diminished the life of other spheres, at least for a time, and perhaps shattered social bonds in the name of a new ethic of individualism and self-interest. No doubt the back and forth among great ideas will continue.