Социология религии_материалы / Towards_Postsecular_Sociology

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Towards Postsecular Sociology?

Gregor McLennan

Sociology 2007; 41; 857

DOI: 10.1177/0038038507080441

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S o c i o l o g y

Copyright © 2007

BSA Publications Ltd®

Volume 41(5): 857–870

DOI: 10.1177/0038038507080441

SAGE Publications

Los Angeles, London,

New Delhi and Singapore

Towards Postsecular Sociology?

■Gregor McLennan

University of Bristol

ABSTRACT

This article identifies four articulations of the growing ‘postsecular’ condition of social and political thought, and places the idea of sociology in relation to them. I identify and critically engage with those aspects of poststructuralist vitalism, transcendental realism, multiculturalist thinking, and the recent ‘dialogical’ sentiments of Habermas that might undermine sociology’s definitive (but broadly conceived) secularism/naturalism. This implies that if we are concerned about advancing the role of ‘public sociology’ then we should be actively engaged in countering anti- secular and anti-naturalistic elements of the postsecular climate.Yet we must avoid anthropomorphizing sociology as a public player, and accept too that the postsecular reconsideration of ‘faith versus reason’ stretches beyond the confines of epistemological and explanatory considerations per se.

KEY WORDS

Habermas / multiculturalism / naturalism / postsecular / public sociology / realism

Secularism and the ‘Public Sociology’ Debates

n all the recent exchanges around themes relevant to this special issue – on Ipublic sociology (Burawoy, 2005), on British sociology and public intellectuals (Turner, 2006), on the University as a public good supporting critical sociological thinking (Calhoun, 2006), and on cosmopolitan sociology (Beck, 2006) – one issue has remained significantly understated. This is the question of how definitively secular in character sociology is, and how necessarily secular in character are the public spaces and agencies that various commentators in those debates seek to uphold, such as civil society, critical social philosophy, the interests of humanity, reflexive pluralism, and so on. We could note, for

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example, that even in the formulations of cosmopolitanism, which most obviously sit at a distance from that specific sense of secularism associated with the political authority of the nation state, a) no convincing argument is made that the state form is likely to be superseded as such, and b) a general secular public ethos of democratic reasonableness is consistently intimated.

But if attachment to secularism in these debates takes an understated form, secularism is no longer taken for granted in social theory. By contrast with previous decades, there seems to be a new ambivalence or reticence about secularism, certainly a difficulty. ‘In its origins,’ Michael Burawoy asserts, ‘sociology was inherently public’, and now what is needed is ‘a 21st century public sociology of global dimensions’ (Burawoy, 2005: 281–2). However, the sense of uplifting continuity that is conveyed here cannot be assumed to secure agreement. This is because, in Charles Taylor’s (2004) terms, Burawoy is invoking as normatively appropriate for both sociological phases the kind of ‘metatopical space’ – the public sphere – and the kind of ‘metatopical agency’ – the people

– that have been central to the deep-lying ‘social imaginary’ of Western modernity. Yet this social imaginary and its meta-topics are now, in an age of postcolonial multicultural reflexivity and apparently resurgent religiosity, being subjected to intense scrutiny. It is this gathering force of questioning that I am designating as the ‘postsecular’ moment.

In this understanding, the ‘reach’ of secularism cannot be confined to conceptions and norms of public spaces or agencies. Taylor, for his part, construes a social imaginary as ‘our grasp on the wider predicament: how we continuously stand in relation to others and to power’ (2004: 27), and he asserts that the modern social imaginary is based on ‘radical secularity’, not only in the sense of effecting the ‘removal of God or religion from public space’, but also in its most general presumption that the very constitution of society lies in common social action and nothing else besides, that is, nothing at all transcendent (2004: 93).

These theoretical strokes are undoubtedly very broad brushed. Is there really a necessary connection, we might ask, between political secularism – some notion of civil society and government free of domination by any particular religion – and the general mode of social understanding to which Taylor refers? And is secularism really the most appropriate term for convening the various ‘this-worldly’ approaches to the dynamics of the social world – realism, positivism, naturalism, humanism, and so on? Nonetheless, there remains something compelling and contemporary about framing such matters under the rubric of secularism and its discontents. For one thing, it encourages sociologists explicitly to address, in their own way, the implications of the Dawkins Debate (Dawkins, 2006): is the sociologist’s job, for example, exclusively to track and comprehend the state of religious social and intellectual solidarities today, or should we also be exposing the ‘delusions’ – or singing the praises – of the religious consciousness itself? Moreover, as mentioned, the question of secularism enters directly into the feasibility of ‘provincializing’ Western sociology by establishing a cultural plurality of sociological publics.

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Arguably, though, the historic institution of secularism and the attitude of social naturalism are so core to the very idea of sociology that they simply cannot be provincialized in that way. Arguably, if naturalism and humanism in secular vein cannot be made to travel across many provinces, or held to trump other social imaginaries, then any ‘project’ of global public sociology is entirely chimerical. Burawoy’s vision, for example, driven initially by Leftist inclinations, becomes increasingly fuzzy and all-purpose as the logic of cultural pluralism takes hold. This leads him to embrace at least two controversial postsecular suggestions: that ‘organic sociologists’ can be found embedded in ‘communities of faith’, and that public sociology is capable of supporting ‘Christian Fundamentalism’ (2005: 264, 266).

To take these themes further, I want to indicate how the issue of secularism/postsecularism has become pivotal to four different areas of social theory. In interpreting these developments, I challenge the ease with which some postsecularists move from observations on the social role of faith or spirituality to intellectual endorsements of faith-led perspectives on social life. From any generally naturalistic perspective on the idea of sociology (e.g. McLennan, 2006), the strains of fideism and obscurantism that surface in these literatures give cause for concern. Thus, when Burawoy rousingly announces that sociology today must show its public face by defending civil society and the interests of humanity against the tyrannies of the market and the state, it is becoming important to add … ‘and against the encroachments of religiosity too’. This does not mean that sociologists cannot be religious; it just means that their religiosity comes into play when, for whatever reason, their sociology ceases to provide the answers they seek.

Expressions of Postsecularism: Poststructuralist Vitalism

As with the term postmodern, the ‘post’ in postsecular need not automatically signal anti-secularism, or what comes after or instead of secularism. For many, the key postsecular move is simply to question and probe the concept of the secular, and to re-interrogate the whole ‘faith versus reason’ problematic that has so consistently punctuated modern thought. This probing seems timely, not least because under postpositivist lights, mainstream philosophical thought is now fairly comfortable about looking at modern science itself as a kind of ‘web of belief’. Accordingly, little is to be gained by harking back to rigidly scientistic models for sociological epistemology. Even so, it remains hard to see how sociology can be other than ‘on the side of science’, and the postsecular move to surpass the antinomy between (religious) faith and (naturalistic) reason turns out to be much easier said than done.

Let me exemplify this claim by examining one ‘postmodernist’ expression of postsecularism, noting first that several prominent figures within poststructuralist social theory (Virilio, Kristeva, de Certeau, Agamben) have pointed to new forms of ‘re-enchantment’ in the world, or highlighted the sacred forms of

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‘bare life’, or insisted that the received view of modernity itself as being thoroughly disenchanted is plain mistaken (Bennett, 2001). Derrida (2001), for his part, has been developing something like ‘religion beyond religion’, while Rorty is trying to square his erstwhile secular postmodern pragmatism with Vattimo’s idea that secularization itself is our contemporary way of following the religious life (Rorty and Vattimo, 2005). Finally, Zizek (2003) has been arguing that in a secular world that is hardly ‘beyond belief’, the JudeoChristian heritage must be defended for the sake of Leninist politics. All these expressions of postsecular theory are interesting; but too complex and cryptic for our purposes. More amenable to summary treatment is political theorist William Connolly’s manifesto Why I am Not a Secularist (1999), which also reveals something of the current renaissance of vitalism.

Connolly insists that the kinds of distinctions that are characteristic of secular social thought, such as that between public and private, and between reason, emotion and morality, have completely broken down. Secularists, he says, uphold such distinctions mainly in order to screen out any ‘metaphysics of the supersensible’, and so those distinctions themselves stand, precisely, as metaphysical commitments. And viewed in that light, secular philosophies can then be regarded, and pitied, as essentially ‘winter’ doctrines, formulae in search of an impossible moral stabilization and cognitive purity. But if instead we develop an ‘impious reverence for life’, embracing rather than disavowing desire, the visceral and the impure, and accepting wholeheartedly the mixedness of modes of apprehension whereby we grasp the ‘protean energies’ that flow through the organization of all things, then we are better placed to avoid the political exclusionism that necessarily results whenever the ‘irrational’ is intellectually stigmatized or empirically ignored. What then emerges is a more pluralistic, open, life-enhancing ethical stance, one that requires us to abjure altogether the traditional opposition of social science to religious worldviews. Instead, a conscious embrace of ‘multiple loyalties’ should be cultivated, a spiritual openness that might be regarded as nothing less than the very soul of the ‘democratic adventure’ (Connolly, 1999: 24, 54, 88, 95).

There are two main problems with this apparently refreshingly innocent outlook. The first is that this kind of discourse is characteristically expressive and philosophical rather than social scientific, and whilst many of us would insist that these two facets of social understanding are closely interwoven, they are not identical. One need not follow Goldthorpe (2004) in dismissing the kind of general debates that I listed at the head of this article, and no doubt this particular discussion of postsecularism too, as nothing but ‘pretend social science’ to grow weary of indeterminate reflexive speculation, untrammelled by empirical positivity and systematic propositional thinking. Thus, leaving aside the question of how good it is as philosophy, it is not obvious that Connolly’s freewheeling postsecularism could ground any public sociology as such, rather than serving as one kind of straw in the wind.

But in any case, secondly, it remains unclear how deeply postsecular Connolly’s discourse actually is, and how far it is particularly encouraging of

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those who take their religious faith seriously. As one observant reviewer on an Islamicist web journal noted,1 the whole framework of argument that Connolly constructs, and the agonistic moral pose adopted, are ‘only intelligible within a secularist worldview’. Notably, he ‘does not deliver a single confessional reflection’, and exudes merely ‘a dogmatic claim of uncertainty’ that genuine believers can only experience as thoroughly disingenuous. This is germane, because the moralistic tone that is evident in Connolly’s discourse gains much of its strength from the implication that his ‘open’ perspective on the plenitude of social being would be something that the faithful would thank him for bringing to their attention. No wonder, then, that as his discussion wears on, Connolly spins his stance in rather different terms, naming it finally as one of ‘ironic evangelical atheism’, signalling a spirit of ‘nontheistic gratitude for the … plurivocity of being’ (1999: 159). Secularism may well be in question here, but it has hardly been negated.

Transcendental Realism

My second instance of postsecularism highlights the way in which authors within the critical realist movement have moved steadily away from their 1970s’ concern to be specifically ‘for science in the social sciences’ (Papineau, 1978) to embark upon spiritually transcendent quests. Critics always suspected realism of being overly metaphysical, proliferating theses about the nature and levels of being that were strictly surplus to investigative requirements. And realism, internally, was from the start somewhat divided between naturalist and anti-naturalist strands (Benton, 1981). But now Roy Bhaskar, its leading theorist over the years, has developed critical realism into a cosmic speculative philosophy that is increasingly dislocated from social science explanatory practice.

Bhaskarian realism now claims directly to access, and to name, in a series of extravagant hypostatizations, the essential objects of understanding – ‘the transcendent’, the ‘ultimatum’, ‘the absolute simpliciter’, and ‘the categorical structure of the world’. This is no longer a project to establish the plain old truth, but an immanent unveiling of what realists now call the ‘alethic’ truth, a kind of really true truth, sometimes rendered as ‘the self-grounding ground of all being’, or, in simple terms, God (Bhaskar, 2000: 31). By way of such spiralling equations (man=God=unconditional love/joy=the cosmic envelope), all remnants of analytical precision and empirical constraint are thrown to the winds. But it gets worse, because a foolish piece of intellectual blackmail is thrown in for good measure: if you choose to be sceptical about all this, then you are ‘in denial’, victim of the ‘cardinal error of Western philosophy’, namely seeking and proposing a purely ‘positive’ account of being that falsely ‘absents’ the fundamental category of ‘absence’ itself (Bhaskar, 2000: 7–8). In trying to come to terms with this inflated, reifying, entirely self-sustaining run of thought, Popper’s notion of falsifiability once again comes to mind as a useful criterion of assessment.

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The sociological theorist Margaret Archer can no longer quite follow Bhaskar in his ‘odyssey’, but she too increasingly seeks to find within both realism and sociology an essentially religious rationale. For Archer and her co-authors, the driving idea is to correct the previous secular bias within realist circles by establishing a ‘level playing field’ between atheistic realists and those who are believers (Archer et al., 2004: x). To that end, the argument is put forward that we can be realist ‘about God’ in just the same way that we can be realist about other deep-lying forces and powers, the exact nature of whose existence typically escapes the everchanging state of empirical knowledge. Realism, after all, enables us to hold our ontological commitments steady, even when a large degree of epistemic relativism is inescapable. God’s existence can therefore be rationally debated, and credible points can be made on both sides. Belief and disbelief in God are thus both held to be rational responses. It follows that ‘the objective arguments for and against God’s existence are equally strong, or weak’ (Archer et al., 2004: 3).

But this train of argument is flawed. Realism, in the first place, is not, or at least should not be, the kind of philosophy that enjoins us to be realist ‘about’ anything in particular. Originally, the realist project was to give an ontological overview of the different levels of structure and appearance involved in any substantive process of knowledge, but the nature and identity of any specific existents and generative mechanisms were strictly the business of the specific sciences. What specific investigative practice, it needs to be asked, informs us of the nature and existence of God? Moreover, conclusions about what happens to exist, and in what relations to other forces, are arrived at within the special sciences only after painstaking, systematic, and publicly available empirical evidence and theoretical reasoning concerning generative mechanisms and developmental patterns. Yet the ‘knowledge’ that we have of God is accepted to be simply not of this kind, being chiefly a matter of revelation. In that sense, the contemporary ‘realist’ debate about God is no further forward than the one about the status of personal testimony concerning miracles that pitted David Hume against George Campbell 250 years ago. We have good grounds, then, to think that being realist ‘about’ God is not a viable or productive posture for (scientific) realists to adopt, or one that is in any tangible way related to questions of substantive social investigation.

Notice, in addition, the conceptual slippage that marks Archer’s argument. People do indeed have reasons for believing in God, and in that sense there is no problem about thinking of the debate about God as ‘rational’ in a broad sense. But it does not follow from the holding of reasons on both sides, that belief and disbelief are equally rational responses. And even if they were considered equally rational responses, that would not justify the conclusion that equally objective arguments existed on both sides, nor would it mitigate the peculiarity of the idea that objective arguments come in various strengths, ranging from ‘weak’ to ‘strong’.

Archer’s more sociological efforts to establish parity for religious consciousness are blocked by parallel non-sequiturs. In Being Human (2000) – much of which I find valuable – Archer specifies our ‘triune’ social environment as comprising the ‘practical order’, the ‘natural order’ and the ‘social order’, and each of

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these is said to possess a distinctive logic. Definitive of the practical order, Archer insists, is that its modes of knowledge and personal orientation are nothing like ‘applied’ rational understanding, nor can they be regarded as the consequences of sociality and solidarity per se. Rather, the logic of practice is a matter of embodied, experiential, ritualized, illuminated comprehension, and religious practice stands as the quintessential example of this (Archer, 2000: 184–6). As a sui generis form of practical action, this is deemed to be not (just) a matter of social routine, but of genuine knowledge, specifically religious knowledge, in which emotionality and understanding are too closely fused together, and too close to the lived discipline of ecstasy, to be analysed in a superficially ‘rational’ way. What is going on is a unique experience of, and formation of unity with, the divine. ‘Hence, the appropriate response to divinity is love, love of the Transcendent itself’.

But this is not sociological thinking. As it develops, we move from an analytical stance that is poised between the inside and the outside of the phenomenon under examination, to an insider’s standpoint only. Nothing in Archer’s initially suggestive account of what people do and think and feel when they are involved in intense, dense, affective practical routines sanctions in any way her theologico-moralistic conclusion about what the divine requires by way of ‘appropriate response’. Similarly, nothing whatever can be reasoned about the existence of God or the divine or the transcendent from the (social) fact that people display astonishingly rich and varied ways of expressing their personal and collective commitments to such things.

In similar manner, Philip Mellor in Religion, Realism and Social Theory turns on its head Durkheim’s definitively social understanding of what religious collective effervescence represents. From the perfectly proper, or at least interesting, sociological claim that religion can be seen as ‘a phenomenon that expresses, through actions and beliefs, a collective engagement with the possibility of transcendence emergent from the contingencies, potentialities and limitations of embodied human life’, the proposition is steadily contrived that society itself can be seen as ‘the creative force through which humanity realizes its deepest, most profound levels of being’, in particular ‘hyper-spirituality’ (Mellor, 2004: 19, 67 and passim). But clearly there is a mutation going on here, and an illegitimate one, such that religious hyper-spirituality, which stands as the explanandum of the first thought, becomes the veritable explanans in the second. From a collective engagement with the possibility of transcendence, we get transcendence itself working in and through collective strivings. This is straightforward religious essentialism, something that goes decisively beyond anything that can be taken even from appreciative analysts of religion like Durkheim or William James.

Multiculturalism

My third ‘case’ of postsecular argumentation is multiculturalism. Proponents of multiculturalism in the North (e.g. Modood, 2005: chap. 7; Parekh, 2000:

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chap. 10) now frequently maintain that secularism in theory and practice is no longer ‘off limits’. Indeed it is contended that ‘radical secularism’, with its firm distinction between the public and the private realms, and its supposition that rational knowledge holds a monopoly on social and personal wisdom, must now be reckoned to be the principal obstacle to the multicultural project. Meanwhile, in the South, some scholars regard the transportation of secular political ethics as a disastrous cultural category mistake. In the case of India, for example, the very nature of secularism as a Western ethnocentric construction is thought to make its adaptation there nothing less than ‘impossible, impractical and impotent’ (Madan, 1998: 298). And multiculturalism, of course, has made considerable inroads into the heartland of liberal political philosophy itself. Amongst the latter’s notable exponents, Rawls (2001) altered his ‘original position’ in recognition of cultural value-diversity amongst comprehensive theories of the good, while Brian Barry (2001), staunchly critical of multiculturalism, was taken severely to task in several reviews for his apparently offensive tone as well as his unreconstructed egalitarianism.

Such developments rightly forefront basic questions about the appropriate form(s) of global social enquiry and debate. But it is vital to avoid false optimism about the easy availability of any ‘critical’ consensus. For example, multiculturalist authors frequently posit an intimate connection between humanism and secularism, and take that combination to pose a problem for the realization of the kind of multiculturalism that will be appreciative of religious identities and understandings. This sense of close connection between humanism and secularism is correct. Whilst many religious people are decent humanists, and all the main religions come in versions that can be interpreted as soft on humanism, the great bulk are required to regard their humanism as derivative rather than primary, since human dignity and equality do not come as stand-alone facts about the human condition in itself, but only by way of God’s will. For humanists, by contrast, ‘there are no supernatural or super-human beings to tell us how to live’ (Norman, 2004: 15), and so humanism is radically ‘secular’ just in so far as it requires a thoroughly naturalistic understanding of the state of the world, and a truly egalitarian vision of the good society. Quite obviously, humanists also regard a secular polity as preferable over one that is orientated around religious identities or theocratic aspirations.

Multiculturalists raise a number of points that they think will be decisive against secularism: that the origins of ‘the secular’ lie in the Christian tradition; that the organization and operation of modern secular states are never completely separate from either their established religions or their otherwise ‘biased’ cultural formations; and that it is perfectly legitimate for religious people publicly to voice their religious reasons for adopting whatever political position they happen to hold. In fact, secular humanists can readily accept all these points, up to a point. But it does not follow that the meaning and use of secularism is determined and tainted by its own religious origins (the ‘genetic fallacy’ is a constant danger in multiculturalist polemic), or that the steady sacralization of political discussion and social identity is necessarily a progressive development, or that

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there should be institutional equalization of religious participation in politics and education rather than a reduction of all forms of special treatment for particular faiths.

The multiculturalist rejoinder then typically arises: is not humanism in any developed form itself a faith, just like all the other faiths it seems intent on diminishing? This riposte, however, is a mere contrivance. There are few grounds for faith in ‘humanity’ as such, if the lessons of history are anything to go by, and meanwhile what motivates the rejection of religious views of our human situation is simply the overwhelming balance of evidence and argument. In insisting that what exists, and what we should morally value, are matters that are materially independent of any reference to the work, influence or goodness of any deity or divine principle hardly amounts to an attempt to replace one sort of religious belief by another – curiously non-religious – sort.

Bhikhu Parekh and Tariq Modood are particularly keen to drive a wedge between ‘moderate’ secularism, of which they approve, and ‘radical’ secularism, which is said to be extreme and ‘ideological’ (Modood, 2005: 142). Moderate secularism allows and perhaps encourages people to bring their religious motivation into play as they pursue their political views and goals. Secularism still holds sway, though, because those views and goals must pertain to political matters involving the representation of the demos as a whole. Above all, the offices, legislation and conduct of state must remain free of excessive religious commitment or influence. Immoderate secularism, on the other hand, requires that only secular reasons can ever be given for political thought, action, and change (Parekh, 2000: 322).

The rhetorical strategy here is to make the distance between secular and non-secular ‘moderates’ or ‘pragmatists’ on opposed sides appear narrower than the gap between moderates and the ‘ideological’ radicals on the same side. Yet this is a dubious equation, recalling tactics by Cold War liberals to ward off Left-democratic challenges to their intellectual authority. In so far as secularism is ‘ideological’, this is just to say that secularists take their commitments seriously, meaning that they would feel obliged to oppose non-secular opinions and actions that sought to dominate the agora on the basis of religious identification. Moreover, for secular humanists, democratic debate in the public sphere of civil society is an end in itself: its virtue and worth are sanctioned by no external authority, nor serve any higher purpose. This is just what the ideas of secularism and humanism mean.

We might even wonder whether such a thing as ‘radical’ secularism can be coherently formulated. Normatively, no doubt, secularists probably wish to argue that humanity would be better served if people stopped thinking, feeling and acting as though supernaturally guided or tested, and they would prefer religious allegiance, where it exists, to remain a largely personal matter. But very few strong normative secularists would advocate preventing non-secular people from publicly airing their views, or expressing religious motivation for their preferred political measures. This is because secularists are usually committed democrats as a matter of principle, which involves embracing the possibility that views to

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