I Wanna Hold My Hand
Ritual, Discipline, Practice And the Social Integration of Post-Secular Societies
Matteo Bortolini
University of Padova, Italy
Abstract
In his most recent work on “post-secular societies” Jürgen Habermas has argued for a renewed understanding of the social and political relationships between religious and secular citizens. He has argued in favor of establishing a reciprocal dialogue between believers and non-believers aimed at strengthening social and societal integration and constantly rejuvenate the moral bases of modern political and juridical institutions. According to Habermas’s proposal, the dialogue between religious and secular citizens should focus on the translation of the varied and deep symbolic heritage of religious traditions into rational, non-religious.Habermas has also analyzed the social functions of rituals and has rejected any Durkheimian understanding of public rituals as mechanisms for fostering social integration. In this paper, I (1) summarize Habermas’s early foray on the problem of “the place of religion in the public sphere,” and (2) assess his recent shift in the direction of an appreciation of the ritual and practical dimensions of religious life. I thensingle out the “Habermas dilemma” about religious rituals and try to find a way to go beyond it. After proposing a (paradoxical) point of view on (3)“religion” as both a form of hesitation and a search for transcendence, I argue that the most precious heritage of religious traditions is the panoply of techniques for the elevation of individual human beings—Michel Foucault’s “techniques of the self.” I conclude with a brief remark (4) on the translation of religious and secular “anthropotechnics” and the prospected role of critical social scientists.
I Wanna Hold My Hand
Ritual, Discipline, Practice And the Social Integration of Post-Secular Societies
Matteo Bortolini
University of Padova, Italy
The main interest in life andwork is to
become someone elsethat you were
not in thebeginning
Michel Foucault
In his most recent work Jürgen Habermas has traveled far from the classic Enlightenment-ispired critical outlook on the place and the function of religion in modern and contemporary societies, and has envisioned a renewed understanding of the social and political relationships between religious and secular citizens. He has argued in favor of establishing a reciprocal and continuous dialogue between believers and non-believers aimed at strengthening social and societal integration and constantly rejuvenate the moral bases of modern political and juridical institutions. According to Habermas’s proposal, dialogue between religious and secular citizens should focus on the translation of the varied and deep symbolic heritage of religious traditions into rational, non-religious arguments that could be, in principle, become a common, shared moral heritage for pluralist societies. Habermas has famously termed this outlook a proposal for a “post-secular society.”
In his latest publications on religion, strongly inspired by the work of Charles Taylor and Robert Bellah on the continuities between the so-called Axial societies and our own, Habermas has analyzed the social functions of rituals and has rejected any Durkheimian understanding of public rituals as mechanisms for fostering social integration—in his view, rituals are the heritage of specific religious traditions that can be neither generalized nor “secularized” at the advantage of pluralistic societies. In this paper, I first (1) summarize Habermas’s early foray on the problem of the place of religion in the public sphere, founded on a cognitive and normative understanding of religion, and(2) assesshis recent shift in the direction of an appreciation of the ritual and practical dimensions of religious life and their effectson the social integration of contemporary societies. I then single out what I call the “Habermas dilemma” about religious rituals and try to find a way to go beyond it.
After proposing a (paradoxical) point of view on (3) (Axial) “religion” as both a form of hesitation and a search for transcendence, Iargue that the most precious heritage of all Western and Eastern religious traditions is to be foound in the panoplyof techniques for the elevation and the individuation of human beings—what Michel Foucault called “techniques of the self.”I conclude with a brief remark (4) on the process of translation and diffusion of religious and secular “anthropotechnics” and the role social scientists (and intellectuals in general) might, and should, play within it.
1. Jürgen Habermas On Religion, Take One
Habermas’ groundbreaking work on post-secular societies first emerged in the context of a prolonged debate on the pre-political foundationsof contemporary liberal states.In his discussion with Joseph Ratzinger in 2004, Habermas started from Ernst W. Böckenförde’s“dilemma” on the solidary bases of constitutional states and proposed to see social and cultural secularization “as a twofold learning process that compels the traditions of the Enlightenment and religious teaching to reflect on each other’s limits” and to engage in a reciprocal dialogue aimed at creatingspecific practices of translation[1].
Habermas first accepted Böckenförde’s dictum that on its motivational side,— and especially on the side of the citizen seen as “the author,” and not only the subject, of law,—social integration in contemporary societies depends on specific resources that the constitutional state cannot produce nor reproduce; solidarity has to be found, so to say, “ready made”within civil society and in the mores of a citzenry socialized and “habituated” into “the practices and attitudes of a liberal political culture.”[2] In accepting the sociological argument, and in trying to find a sociological and normative way to guarantee this general solidarity, avoiding the progressive atomization of the citizens of liberal societies into “isolated, self-interested monads,”[3] Habermasgot interested in religious traditions and communities of faith.
His point of entry, here, was the relationship between Western philosophy and its religious sources. Pointing to the work of Walter Benjamin, among others, Habermas called our attention to that continuous work of translation and adaptation by way of which classical European philosophy assimilated and absorbed the heritage of the Western Christian tradition. He saw this process as both continuous and unending:
Althought philosophy transformed the original religious meanings of these terms, it did not deflate them and exhaust their meaning. The translation of the theological doctrine of creation in God’s image into the idea of the equal and unconditional dignity of human beings constitutes one such conserving translation[4].
At that point, Habermas defined a“post-secular society” as a complex, multicultural society where not only the presence of religious communities in public life is fully recognized, butwhere a normative insightabout the contribution and the value of religious traditions for the reproduction of the prepolitical foundations of its solidarity is commonly accepted.[5]
Accordingly, Habermas proposedto forge a new relationship between secular and religious citizens as a reciprocal and complementary learning process, in which both groups should be ready to learn from each other and, in order to do so, should be ready to consider each other’s “comprehensive doctrines” as something worthy in itself and never as “irrationalnonsense.” On the part of both categories of citizens, in other words, a process of deep self-reflexivity about the limits of one’s own worldview is necessary in order to welcome, so to say, what others have to say. In the case of “religiously tone-deaf citizens” this means adopting “a critical stance toward the limits of Enlightenment.”[6]
In his much discussed “Religion in the Public Sphere,”[7] Habermas refined this model in a close confrontation with John Rawls’s conception of the “public use of reason.” He argued, on the one hand,that it is perfectly legitimate for religious citizens and communities to voice their concerns, ideas, and political proposals in the general public sphere of free interpersonal and mass communication.On the other hand, since the secular, liberal state depends on neutral and strictly political principles, and since secular reason is the capstone of modern democratic institutions, the restricted public sphere of government—that is, where laws are made and administrative decisions are taken—can only accept proposalsand argumentscast into the neutral language of secular reason.
The main point—one that was hugely controversial[8]—was that in his discussion Habermas somehow accepted a neo-Durkheimian argument about the “integral role,” or “the seat,” that religion plays in the life of religious citizens:
A devout person conducts her daily existence on the basis of her faith. Genuine faith is not merely a doctrine, something believed, but is also a source of energy that the person of faith taps into performatively to nurture her whole life.[9]
If we accept this argument, we are forced to reflect normatively on the burden that the “splitting” of one’s life into a public, neutral self and a private, religious one puts on the shoulders of religious citizens. From here, Habermas extracts two different principles.
On the one hand, “the necessary institutional separation between religion and politics” should not be transformed into “an unreasonable mental and psychological burden” for the religious citizen.[10] In other words, the strict use of neutral, secular arguments and justifications should be mandatory only for state officials and those who administer the public good. All other citizens should be free to voice their concerns in their own vocabulary.
This first principle is also justified on functional grounds: the liberal state has an interest in letting, so to say, “a hundred flowers bloom” in order to renew its sources of meaning and identity. As we said, religious traditions have a “special power to articulate moral intuitions”[11] and possess a depository of images, symbols, and arguments that has not been exhausted by two thousand years of translations and re-definitions on the part of philosophy and science. Since listening to, understanding, and “using” these images, symbols, and arguments is in the interest of all citizens, both secular and religious, who accept the authority of the neutral liberal state and aim to contribute to the creation of constitutionally-valid and politically legitimate laws and decisions, the translation of religious traditions into the language of secular, neutral reason cannot be left to religious citizens alone. That would put another “asymmetrical burden” on their shoulders.
Rather, the process of translation should be a cooperative effort which asks both categories of citizens a serious existential effort. On the part of religious citizens, this entails the acceptance of a self-reflexive epistemic stance toward the relationship between their own tradition, other religious traditions, modern science, and secular reason within the political arena.[12]In a nutshell, this means accepting the authority of “fallible reason” in mundane matters.[13]On the part of secular citizens, this entails a deep change in mentality, that is the acceptance of both the continued existence of religious communities and the fact that they may give a decisive contribution to the self-clarification of the polity[14]. On their part, in other words, secular citizens should “understand their non-agreement with religious conceptions as a disagreement that it is reasonable to expect.”[15]
2. Ritual, Solidarity, and the Habermas Dilemma
Habermas’sfirst approach to the problem of post-secular societies was, by all measures, a remarkable shift in the understanding of importance of religion in our contemporary world. At the same time, however, though Habermasalways spokeof “religious traditions and communities of faith”[16] it seems that his workon the place of religion in the public sphere shares an understanding of “what religionis”which carries a specific, and in my viewsociologically(and normatively)[17]unacceptable, overtone.
The very concept of religion we find in these early Habermasian writingson religion and the public sphere has a strong Western and Christian (in fact, Protestant) bias.This ishow Robert A. Orsi, an American sociologist specialized in the ethnography of Roman Catholics, describedhow “(true) religion” has been defined by the sciences of religion in the 19th and 20th century:
True religion, then, is epistemologically and ethically singular. It is rational, respectful of persons, noncoercive, mature, non anthropomorphic in its higher form, mystical (as opposed to ritualistic), unmediated and agreeable to democracy (…) emotionally controlled, a reality of mind and spirit not body and matter. It is concerned with ideal essences not actual things.[18]
On his part, Ivan Strenskisingled out “six clichés” about religion which may contribute to our understanding of this biased definition of religion: according to the “standard view,” religion is always good or bad by default; it is pure belief, and mostly a belief in God; it is a deeply personal and spiritual matter which can be easily separated from political concerns.[19] Strenski calls this understanding of religion “confessionalism.” According to it, “religion” can be almost reduced to a set of interconnected beliefs which might be expressedas propositions. These beliefs are an object of identification and the “believer” is expected to admit/declare (that is, to confess) her adherence to them.[20] “Religion” is thus a deeply intimate matter, a inner belief which might control and direct the life of the individual in a powerful and sometimes ultimate way.
Last but not least, the British sociologist, Richard King, has characterized thisvery understanding of “religion” as follows:
[It places] a great deal of emphasisupon a faithful (sic) adherence to doctrine as indicative of religious allegiance, upon sacred texts as of a central importance to religious communities and to questions of truth and falsity as of paramount importance to the religious adherent or ‘believer.’[21]
According to King, this conception has serious flaws that might be synthesized as follows: (a)takes for granted the existence of some “religion” in each culture; (b)has a literary bias in favour of written texts as thelocus of religion; (c)coming from a Protestant conception of what “religion” is, it ends up considering Christianity as the prototype of every religions.[22]
In other words, he who thinks of “religion” according to this disembodied, cognitive, idealistic conception is destined to transform it into a “book of ideas” or symbols, which might be used for understanding, comfort, or inspiration. The recognition of the power which “religion” might have on the individual and collective lives of its adherents remains strictly bound to the content of these ideas, and systematic theology is considered as the avantgarde, and the best representation, of “religion” itself.Closer to our theme, he who embraces this understanding can only frame the problemof “the place of religion in the public sphere”—itself an aspect of the problem of the social integration of complex, liberal societies—as (1) giving existing religious traditions the rightto voice their ideas and values and (2) finding the way to let those ideas and values circulate in the public sphere so that they can foster mutual understanding between different worldviews, whether religious or not.
It is my contention that Habermas’ first foray into the problem of religion in the public sphereshared this modern, Protestant understading of religion and could only deal with its cognitive and argumentative sides.[23]The fact is, as the sociologists we cited, among many others, have remembered us, there’s much more in religion than ideas, texts, and symbols.
What is lacking in our modern, Protestant understanding of “religion” is practices, that is, rituals. This Durkheimian intuition has been developed by a minority strain of the sociology and the sciences of religion in three different,albeitinterwined, directions. First, on a descriptive level, sociologists in this tradition have emphasized the deeply practical, “immediate,” non-argumentative e non-verbalside of religion, pointing their attention on those shared practices that, in the everyday life of religious communities, cannot be translated into symbols, propositions, and “theologies.” New theories of ritual as the construction of common subjunctive, “as if” worlds meant to tame disorder and ambiguity, such as that proposed by Adam Seligman and Robert Weller point to this direction.[24]Second, Durkheim’s functional hypothesis on the production and renovation of social solidarity has been developed in a host of different directions. Whether it has become a praise of everyday micro-ceremonies or the search for secular public and meso-level rituals, the solidary-building function of rituals has become a cornerstone of practice-oriented sociologies.[25] Through rituals,social conventions are affirmed, morality is renewed, social bonds are restated, and the sense of “the sacred” is heightened.Third, another Durkheimian intuition, that about what Robert Bellah called “the ritual roots of society and culture,” has been explored in a more cautious, but also a more interdisciplinary way. Here the point is to hypothesizethe role played by religious rituals in the primeval emergence of language, music, social conventions, and morals.Sure enough, this outlook is both evolutionary and highly hypothetical, and sociology is supplemented by archaeology, evolutionary psychology, and material and cultural anthropology. The work of Merlin Donald and Bellah’s most recent Religion in Human Evolution are examples of this third strain of research.[26]
Interestingly enough, we find these three strains in Habermas’ most recent work on religion.As his take on our third problem, the ritual roots of society and culture, is, in my view, his most radical thesis, it is appropriate to start from there. Habermasre-phrases the question of “ritual roots” as an analysis of the role played by ritual in the solution of a general social problem, the strains that the very use of symbolic communication and language opens between the individual as a speaker and other social actors. Ritual is thus seen as a response to the fragility that emerges when a new kind of socialization is “injected” in human interaction by the use of intersubjectively shared, conventional symbols.[27]In brief, the egocentrism or solipsism of even the most advanced primates is surpassed when the use of shared symbols allows a more complex level of coordination and cooperation, which raises a peculiar problem:
The cognitive challenge goes hand in hand with a psychodynamic challenge:In the course of the revolution in the individual’s relations to his social environment, the egocentric consciousness succumbs to the pull of a communicative socialization of individuals who become aware of their own intentionality.
This first experience of individuation, along with the renewed dynamics of cooperation,however, would not be possible without a firmer normative basis, one that cannot be “extracted” from, or guaranteed by,symbols and language alone. This normative basis—created in interaction and internalized as socially-produced motivational structures[28]—has to be renewed from time to time, as the unstable balance between individualization and socialization can never be completed once for all.