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December 14, 2006
Does the Australian tradition of democracy entail the exclusion of religion from political life? Do we conflate democracy with secularism? If so should this conflation be contested? Could we say that democracy does not necessarily equal securalism? Do we we have Athens and Jerusalem, as Leo Strauss would put it? Is it a case of Athens or Jerusalem?
Though a democratic culture has undergone a "secularization" of political discourse, in which liberalism has separated church and state and made religion a private matter, religion has increasingly entered into public discourse in the last decade or so in the name of values. It has done so from both the right and left. The Right are even talking in terms of Australia being a Christian nation ---implying that Christianty underpins the constitution.
So what are we to make of this? What is its significance? Should we be concerned? Is the public reason of a liberal political culture under threat?
Jeffrey Stout addresses these issues in his Democracy and Tradition.
Stout says that modern democratic societies appear to lack any ethical unifying framework:
In the eyes of many observers they seem to be inherently at odds with the substantive, comprehensive visions of the religious traditions. The perception of modern democratic societies as morally and spiritually empty is hardly confined to the Amish and similarly isolated sects. It is the common link among the various types of antimodern traditionalism that have appeared in countless times and places throughout the modern era. Edmund Burke, Pope Pius IX, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, René Guénon, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Ananda Coomaraswamy, and many others have voiced the same complaint. Since 1980, that complaint has made new gains among religious intellectuals in America, primarily under the influence of Stanley Hauerwas, a Methodist theologian, Alasdair MacIntyre, a Roman Catholic philosopher, and John Milbank, an Anglican theologian. I will call the movement they represent the "new traditionalism .
This lack of ethical substance--nihilism--- is a common theme amongst conservatives in Australia. Religion gives us ethical values is the argument.It is then added that religion is the foundation without which democratic discourse is bound to collapse.
Stout adds that Liberal philosophers--he has in mind John Rawls--- have often reinforced the traditionalist critique of modern democracy in two ways:
First, they have endorsed a theory of the modern nation-state as ideally neutral with respect to comprehensive conceptions of the good. Second, they have proposed to establish political deliberation on a common basis of free public reason, independent of reliance on tradition. Not all liberal philosophers have committed themselves to these doctrines, but traditionalists have been quick to take them as definitive of modern democracy--and then to denounce modern democratic societies as embodiments of doctrinal error and secularism.
Stout 's response to this is the right one. He argues that democracy is a tradition in that it inculcates certain habits of reasoning, certain attitudes toward deference and authority in political discussion, and love for certain goods and virtues, as well as a disposition to respond to certain types of actions, events, or persons with admiration, pity, or horror.
This tradition is anything but empty. Its ethical substance, however, is more a matter of enduring attitudes, concerns, dispositions, and patterns of conduct than it is a matter of agreement on a conception of justice in Rawls's sense. The notion of state neutrality and the reason-tradition dichotomy should not be seen as its defining marks. Rawlsian liberalism should not be seen as its official mouthpiece.
Stout focuses on the activities held in common as constitutive of the political community--- activities in which normative commitments are embedded as well as discussed. The commitments are substantive. They guide the discussion, but they are also constantly in dispute, subject to revision, and not fully determinate.
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