American Secularism vs. Islam as a Way of Life

In this article Stanley Fish accomplishes two important tasks: (1)defines ‘Postmodernism’ so that it is a useful tool to (2) understand the ‘Religious War’ that is hiding inside of the ‘War on Terror’. In a nutshell, it is the modern American ‘religion’ of Secularism, the seperation of private and public vs. Islam as a way of life.

Islamism is a set of political ideologies that hold that Islam is not only a religion, but also a political system that governs the legal, economic and social imperatives of the state according to its interpretation of Islamic Law.

This usage is controversial. Islamists themselves may oppose the term because it suggests their philosophy to be a political extrapolation from Islam rather than a straightforward expression of Islam as a way of life. Some Muslims find it troublesome that a word derived from “Islam” is applied to organizations they consider radical and extreme. The terms “Islamist” and “Islamism” are used often in several publications within some Muslim countries to describe domestic and trans-national organizations seeking to implement Islamic law. The English website for Al Jazeera, for example, uses these terms frequently.

-wikipedia

Postmodern Warfare
The ignorance of our warrior intellectuals
by Stanley Fish
from Harpers Magazine, July 2002

Postmodernism
Who would have thought, in those first few minutes, hours, days, that what we now call 9/11 was to become an event in the Culture Wars? Today, more than nine months later, nothing could be clearer, though it was only on September 22 that the first sign appeared, in a New York Times opinion piece written by Edward Rothstein and entitled “Attacks on U.S. Challenge the Perspectives of Postmodern True Believers.” A few days later (on September 27), Julia Keller wrote a smaller piece in the Chicago Tribune; her title (no doubt the contribution of a staffer): “After the attack, postmodernism loses its glib grip.” In the September 24 issues of Time, Roger Rosenblatt announced “The end of the age of irony” and predicted that “ the good folks in charge of America’s intellectual life” would now have to change their tune and no longer say that “nothing was real” or that “nothing was to be believed in or taken seriously.” And on October 1, Hohn Leo, in a piece entitled “Campus hand-wringing is not a pretty sight, “blamed just about everything on the “very dangerous ideas” that have captured our “campus culture”; to wit, “radical cultural relativism, nonjudgementalism, and a postmodern conviction that there are no moral norms or truths worth defending.”

Well, that certainly sounds bad—no truths, no knowledge, no reality, no morality, no judgements, no objectivity ­and if postmodenists are saying that, they are not so much dangerous as silly. Luckily, however, postmodernists say no such thing, and what they do say, if it is understood at all, is unlikely to provoke either the anger or the alarm of our modern Paul Reveres. A full account of an even definition of postmodernism would be out of place here, but it may be enough for our purposes to look at one offered by Rothstein, who begins by saying that “Postmodernists challenge assertions that truth and ethical judgment have any objective validity.” Well, it depends on what you mean by “objective.” If you mean a standard of validity and value that is independent of any historically emergent and therefore revisable system of thought and practice, then it is true that many postmodernists would deny that any such standard is or could ever be available. But if by “objective” one means a standard of validity and value that is backed up by the tried-and-true procedures and protocols of a well-developed practice or discipline­—history, physics, economics, psychology, etc. then such standards are all around us, and we make use of them all the time without any metaphysical anxiety.

As Richard Rorty, one of Rothstein’s targets, is fond of saying, “Objectivity is the kind of thing we do around here.” Historians draw conclusions about the meaning of events, astronomers present models of planetary movements, psychologists offer accounts of the reading process, consumers make decisions about which product is best, parents choose schools for their children­­—all of these things and many more are done with varying degrees of confidence, and in no case is the confidence rooted in a conviction that the actor is in possession of some independent standard of objectivity. Rather, the actor, you or I or anyone, begins in some context of practice, with its received authorities, sacred texts, exemplary achievements, and generally accepted benchmarks, and from within the perspective of that context—thick, interpersonal, densely elaborated—judges something to be true or inaccurate, reasonable or irrational, and so on.

It seems then, that the unavailability of absolutely objective standards­—the thesis Rothstein finds repugnant and dangerous­—doesn’t take anything away from us. If, as postmodernists assert, objective standards of a publicly verifiable kind are unavailable, they are so only in the sense that they a have always been unavailable (this is not, in other words, a condition postmodernism has caused), and we have always managed to get along without them, doing a great many things despite the fact that we might be unable to shore them up in accordance with the most rigorous philosophical demands. One of the things we might be doing, for instance, when we’re not doing philosophy, is condemning someone or some group, though Rothstein seems to think that we can’t do that unless we have all our philosophical ducks in a row—and in the right row. Thus, he says, given postmodernist assumptions, “one culture, particularly the West, cannot reliably condemn another,” which means, according to him, that we in the United States cannot reliably condemn those who attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Again, it depends on what you mean by ‘reliably,’ a word that takes us right back to “objective” and to the argument I have been making. If by “a reliable condemnation” you mean a condemnation rooted in a strong sense of values, priorities, goals, and a conviction of right and wrong, then such a condemnation is available to most if not all of us all of the time. But if by “a reliable condemnation” you mean a condemnation rooted in values, priorities, and a sense of right and wrong that no one would dispute and everyone accepts, then there is no such condemnation, for the simple reason that there are no such universally accepted values, priorities, and moral convictions. If there were, there would be no deep disputes.

Now, I would not be misunderstood. I am not saying that there are no universal values or no truths independent of particular perspectives. I affirm both. When I offer a reading of a poem or pronounce on a case in First Amendment law, I do so with no epistemological reservations. I regard my reading as true—not provisionally true, or true for my reference group only, but true. I am as certain of that as I am of the fact that I may very well be unable to persuade others, no less educated or credentialed than I, of the truth so perspicuous to me. And here is a point that is often missed, the independence from each other, and therefore the compatibility, of two assertions thought to be contradictory when made by the same person: (1) I believe X to be true and (2) I believe that there is no mechanism, procedure, calculus, test, by which the truth of X can be necessarily demonstrated to any sane person who has come to a different conclusion (not that such a demonstration can never be successful, only that its success is contingent and not necessary). In order to assert something and mean it without qualification, I of course have to believe that it is true, but I don’t have to believe that I could demonstrate its truth to all rational persons. The claim that something is universal and the acknowledgment that I couldn’t necessarily prove it are logically independent of each other. The second does not undermine the first.

(If you allowed the second to undermine the first, you would never be justified for action, which is absurd. Never the less, this is the condition in which truths live. We have been getting along for eons without truths rooted in values, priorities, and a sense of right and wrong that no one would dispute and everyone accepts.)

Once again, then, a postmodern argument turns out to be without any disastorous consequences (it is also without any positive consequences, but that is another story), and it certainly does not stand in the way of condemning those who have proven themselves to be our enemies in words and deeds. Nor should this be surprising, for, after all, postmodernism is a series of arguments, not a way of life or a recipe for action. Your belief of disbelief in postmodern tenets is independent of your beliefs and commitments in any other area of your life. You may believe that objectivity of an absolute kind is possible or you may believe that it is not, but when you have to decide wether a particular thing is true or false, neither belief will hinder or help you. What will help you are archives, exemplary achievements, revered authorities, official bodies of evidence, relevant analogies, suggestive metaphors­—all available to all persons independently of their philosophical convictions, or of the fact that they do or do not have any.

Religious War
In the end, the post-9/11 flap about postmodernism is the blowing of so much smoke, sound and fury signifying very little apart from the ignorance of those who produced it. There’s no there there. This is not true, however, of what succeeded that flap in the popular and semi-popular media, the question of whether this is or is not a religious war. That question was asked against the backdrop of the Bush Administration’s desire that the war not be characterized as a religious one. Any public embrace of Samuel Huntington’s clash-of-civilizations thesis would have at least three bad consequences.

First, key Islamic nations could not be persuaded to support, or at least to refrain from denouncing, U.S. military operations.

Second, millions of U.S. citizens of the Islamic faith would be come the large core of an antiwar coalition.

And lastly, the United Nations would become polarized along religious lines, with the possible result that any U.S. attack would be censured.

In the context of these and related anxieties, the official party line emerged almost immediately: Although Al Qaeda said that its warriors did what they did in the service of Allah, theirs was a perverted version of the Islamic faith, and therefore their claim to be acting in its name was false and illegitimate; they simply did not represent Islam and had misread its sacred texts.

If you think about it for a moment, this is an amazing line of argument that begs the questions contained in its assertions. Who is it that is authorized to determine which version of Islam is the true one? What religious faith has ever looked outside the articles of its creed for guidance and correction? What is the difference between the confident pronouncements that the Al Qaeda brand of Islam is a deviant one and the excommunications and counter-excommunications of Catholics and Protestants, and within Protestantism of Baptists, Anglicans, Lutherans, not to mention Jehovah’s Witnesses, Seventh-Say Adventists, Mormons, and Mennonites? Merely to pose these questions is to realize that the specification of what a religion is and the identification of the actions that may or may not be taken in its name are entirely internal matters. This is , after all, the point of a religion: to follow a vision the source of which is revelation, ecclesiastical authority, a sacred book, a revered person. One who adheres to that vision does no accept descriptions or evaluations of it from non-adherents citing other revelations, authorities, and texts; and the fact that non-adherents regard some of the convictions at the heart of the vision as bizarre, and regard the actions generated by those convictions as inadvisable or even evil, is merely confirmation, again from the inside, of the extent to which these poor lost souls are in the grip of error and too blind to see. What this means (and here we link up with the worries over post-modernism) is that in matters of religion—and I would say in any matter­ there is no public space, complete with definitions, standards, norms, criteria, etc., to which one can have recourse in order to separate out the true from the false, the revolutionary from the criminal. And what that means is that there is no common ground, at least no common ground on which a partisan flag has not already been planted, that would allow someone or some body to render an independent judgment on the legitimacy of the declarations that issue from Bin Laden and his followers about the religious bases of their actions.

Indeed, only if there were such a public space or common ground could the question “Is this a religious war?” be a real question, as opposed to a tendentious thesis pretending to be a question, which it is. That is to say, the question “Is this a religious war?” is not a question about the war; it is the question that is the war. For the question makes assumptions Al Qaeda members are bound to reject and indeed are warring against: that it is possible to distinguish between religious and no-religious acts from a perspective uninflected by an religion or ideology; or, to put it another way, that there is a perspective detached from and above all religions, from the vantage point of which objective judgments about what is and is not properly religious could be handed down; or that it is possible to distinguish between the obligations one takes on as a person of faith and the obligations one takes on in one’s capacity as a citizen; i.e., that it is possible to go out into the world and perform actions that are not related, either positively or negatively, to your religious convictions. And these assumptions make sense only in the context of another: that religion is essentially a private transaction between you and your God and therefore is, at least in principle, independent of your actions in the public sphere, where the imperatives you follow might be political, economic, philanthropic, environmental—imperatives that could be affirmed or rejected by persons independently of their religious convictions or of their lack of religious convictions.

What I have rehearsed for you, in a nutshell, is the core of what has been called America’s “Civic Religion,” a faith (if that is the word) founded on the twin rocks of Locke’s declaration that “the business of laws is not to provide for the truth of opinions, but for the safety and security of the commonwealth: and Jefferson’s more colloquial version of the same point: “It does no injury for my neighbor to say that there are twenty Gods or no Gods; it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” Jefferson’s further contribution is the famous “Wall of Separation,” a metaphor that has lent constitutional force to the separation of church and state, even though its not in the Constitution. In combination, these now canonical statements give us the key distinction between the private and the public, which in turn gives us the American creed of tolerance. It goes like this: If you leave me free to believe whatever I like, I’ll leave you free to believe whatever you like, even though in our respective hearts we regard each other’s beliefs as false and ungodly. We can argue about it or privately condemn each other, but our differences of belief shouldn’t mean, that we try to disenfranchise or imprison or kill each other or refrain from entering into relationships of commercial and social cooperation. Let’s live and let live. Let’s obey the civil, nonsectarian laws and leave the sorting out of big theological questions to God and eternity.

All of that is precisely what adherents of the Al Qaeda version of Islam hate and categorically deny, which is why the question ”Is this a religious war?” will make no sense to them, or, rather, will make only the sense of a question issuing from an infidel who is by definition wrong and an enemy. Not only do Bin Laden and company fail to make the distinction between religious and civil acts; they regard those who do make it as persons without a true religion. If you’re really religious, you’re religious all the time, and no act you perform even the act of having or not having a beard—is without religious significance and justification. It is the dividing of one’s life into the separate realms of the public and private that leads, say the militants, to a society bereft of a moral center and populated by citizens incapable of resisting the siren call of excess and sin.

The refusal of Al Qadea style Islam to honor the public/private distinction is the essence of that faith, and not some incidental feature of it that can be dispensed with or moderated. Commentators who pronounced on the question “Is this a religious war?: tended to see this and not see is at the same time. They noted the fact but then contrived to turn it into a correctable mistake, either by using words like “criminal”, “fanatic”, and “extremist” or by implying that the non-emergence of the public/private distinction is some kind of evolutionary failure; they want to be like us, but they don’t yet know how to do it. Thus R. Scott Appleby, a professor at Notre Dame and an expert on religion and violence, notes (in November 2001 issue of Lingua Franca), with an apparently straight face, that “Islam has been remarkably resistant to the differentiation and privatization of religion that often accompanies secularization…and has not undergone a reformation like the one experienced by Christianity, which led to a pronounced separation of sacred and secular.” (“What’s the matter with these guy’s? Why can’t they get with the program?”) but of course there is nothing remarkable in a faith’s refusal of a transformation that would undo it. Privatization and secularization are not goals that Islam has yet to achieve; they are specters that Islam (or some versions of it ) pushes away as one would push away death.

Appleby’s characterization of Islam as a religion stuck in some stage of arrested development and self-blocked from reaching maturity is matched by Andrew Sullivan’s condescending description of Islam (in the October 7 issue of the The New York Times Magazine) as “a great religion that is extremely inexperienced in the toleration of other ascendant and more powerful faiths.” Presumably, a good dose of John Stuart Mill or John Rawls would do the trick and move Islam along on the way to health and modernization.

When Sullivan says of Islam that it is “a great religion,” he means a potentially great religion. Islam will be fine when it rids itself of its impurities, the chief impurity being a stubborn insistence on a fidelity to a set of particular beliefs. In the morality Sullivan shares with Appleby, particularity is a sin, because it sets up barriers between persons devoted to different particulars. The better way is the way of generality, of a religious sense so large and capacious that anything and everything can be accommodated within it. The only problem with such a religion would be its total lack of content, but as it turns out that is just what Appleby, Sullivan, and company really want. It is instructive to watch them as they take the heart out of religion in the name of religion—or, as they put it, “true religion.” Of course you can’t have a true religion without a false religion. Jane Eisner tells us in the Philadelphia Inquirer of October 14, Islam is a religion that has “failed to master modernity,” and the sign of this failure is its insistence on a single creed in an age of pluralism. The true religion is what Eisner calls “the American national religion,” which she describes as “our nonsectarian belief in the freedom of the individual to think, speak, and act in his or her best interests.” Here Eisner is either disingenuous or unaware of the implications of her own language. By nonsectarian belief she would seem to mean, and probably thinks she means, belief not limited to any particular religious denomination; but what the phrase really means in the context of her essay is a belief in the evil of any sectarian belief whatsoever, of any belief that asserts itself strongly and is jealous of its priority. She is not, as she would have it, defending all beliefs against an intolerant exclusionism but attacking belief in general, at least as it commits you to the truth of a conviction or the imperative of an action. The only good belief is the belief you can wear lightly and shrug off when you leave home and stride into the public sphere.

This is surely what Sullivan means (whether he knows it or not) when he declares that this “is a war of fundamentalism against faiths of all kinds that are at peace with freedom and modernity.” A faith at peace with freedom and modernity is a faith that has given up its franchise and has made itself into something occasional and cosmetic. It is only in the name of such a faith—emptied of all content and committing you to nothing but the gospel of noncommitment—that Sullivan can say, again with a straight face, that by denying “the ultimate claims of religion” we “preserve true religion itself”; that is, we preserve this vague, nonbinding, light-as-air spirituality, the chief characteristic of which is that it claims­­—and believes—nothing.

Although it may not at first be obvious, the substitution for real religions of a religion drained of particulars is of a piece with the desire to exorcise postmodernism. In both instances, what is feared is the absence of a public space or common ground in relation to which judgements and determinations of value can be made with no reference to the religious, ethnic, racial, or national identities of the persons to whom they apply. It should, to Sullivan’s way of thinking, be obvious to all, including those Muslims not blinded by fanaticism, that Bin Laden and his followers are criminal terrorists and not religious freedom fighters; and if they quote the Koran at us and rehearse histories in which we are the oppressors and villains, that just means that they are misreading their own scripture and distorting their own history, and we have the experts at Johns Hopkins, George Washington, and Yale universities to prove it. This can’t be a religious war. It must be a war of common sense of common ground against the fanatical and the irrational.

What must be protected, then, is the general, the possibility of making pronouncements from a perspective at once detached from and superior to the sectarian perspectives of particular national interests, ethnic concerns, and religious obligations; and the threat to the general is posed by postmodernism and strong religiosity alike, post-modernism because its critique of master narratives deprives us of a mechanism for determining which of two of more fiercely held beliefs is true (which is not to deny the category of true belief, just the possibility of identifying it uncontroversially), strong religiosity because it insists on its own norms and refuses correction from the outside. The antidote to both is the separation of the private from the public, the establishing of a public sphere to which all could have recourse and to the judgments of which all, who are not criminal or insane, would assent. The point of the public sphere is obvious: it is supposed to be the location of those standards and measures that belong to no one but apply to everyone. It is to be the location of the universal. The problem is not that there is no universal­—the universal, the absolutely true, exists, and I know what it is. The problem is that you know, too, and that we know different things, which puts us right back where we were a few sentences ago, armed with universal judgments that are irreconcilable, all dressed up and nowhere to go for an authoritative adjudication.

What to do? Well, you do the only thing you can do, the only honest thing: your assert that your universal is the true one, even though your adversaries clearly do not accept it, and you do not attribute their recalcitrance to insanity or mere criminality—the desired public categories of condemnation—but to the fact, regrettable as it may be, that they are in the grip of a set of beliefs that is false. And there you have to leave it, because the next step, the step of proving the falseness of their beliefs to everyone, including those in their grip, is not a step available to us as finite situated human beings. We have to live with the knowledge of two things: that we are absolutely right and that there is not generally accepted measure by wich our rightness can be independently validated. That’s just the way it is, and we should just get on with it, acting in accordance with our true beliefs (what else could we do?) without expecting that some God will descend, like the duck in the old Groucho Marx TV show, and tell us that we have uttered the true and secret word.