Jeune Street

Some unexpected and welcome recognition for Exceptional People just arrived in the form of a PROSE award from the Association of American Publishers. Here is the description of the award from the Oxford Martin School website:

The 2011 PROSE Awards received 512 entries – more than ever before in its 36-year history – from more than 60 professional and scholarly publishers across the US. The PROSE Awards, organised by The Association of American Publishers, annually recognize the best in professional and scholarly publishing by bringing attention to distinguished books, journals and electronic content in over 40 categories. They are judged by peer publishers, librarians, and medical professionals and recognise pioneering works of research contributing to the conception, production and design of landmark works in their fields.

This looks like a fascinating new book, by Brad S. Gregory, in which with one paragraph he manages to precisely diagnose the core problematic of modern Western societies: what happens to liberal social arrangements when the tacit agreement that sustains them is quietly eroded as Christianity recedes to the margins? Well, if you thought that was a complex sentence, you'll have to read the paragraph below ... a couple times:

A centrally important, paradoxical characteristic of modern liberalism is that it does not prescribe what citizens should believe, how they should live, or what they should care about, but it nonetheless depends for the social cohesion and political vitality of the regimes it informs on the voluntary acceptance of widely shared beliefs, values, and priorities that motivate people’s actions. Otherwise liberal states have to become more legalistic and coercive in order to insure stability and security. In the West, many of those basic beliefs, values, and priorities—including self-discipline, self-denial, self-sacrifice, ethical responsibility for others, duty to one’s community, commitment to one’s spouse and children—derive most influentially in the modern Western world from Christianity and were shared across confessional lines in early modern Europe. Advanced secularization, precipitated partly by the capitalism and consumerism encouraged by liberal states, has considerably eroded them in the past several decades and thus placed increasing pressures on public life through the social fragmentation and political apathy of increasing numbers of citizens who exercise their rights to live for themselves and to ignore politics. This is one way in which modernity’s failure is under way, a symptom of which is the constant stream of (thus far, ineffectual) proposals about how to reinvigorate democracy, restore public civility, get citizens to care about politics, and so forth. More abstractly but important in different ways, the ideological secularism of the public sphere and the naturalist metaphysical assumptions of academic life, combined with the state of philosophy and the explanatory successes of the natural sciences, prevent the articulation of any intellectually persuasive warrant for believing in the realities presupposed by liberal political discourse and the institutional arrangements of modernity: that there are such things as persons, and that they have such things as rights. Secularization and scientism are thus subverting modernity’s most fundamental assumptions from within, developments that are facilitated by the same institutional arrangements of liberalism that solved early modern Europe’s problem of religious coexistence.

I once attended a lecture about 'the new atheism,' in which the speaker likened growing up in a modern western society to the experience of waking up in a room in which the gas supplying heat has just been exhausted. The room is still warm, and the visitor could be forgiven for thinking that this was its natural condition. But inevitably the heat dissipates and room again becomes cold. The gas must be refilled. The analogy, of course, was about the role of religion in society: that it is the invisible source of the values underlying our social institutions. What happens when it's gone? I think that's a really interesting question to ask, and I'm not sure what the answer is.

Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks takes down atheism:

I never understood why it should be considered more courageous to despair than to hope. It takes courage to hope; it doesn't take courage to despair. Freud said that religious faith is the illusion — the comforting illusion — that there is a father figure. But a religious believer could say to Freud that atheism is the comforting illusion that there is no father figure and you can get away with whatever you feel like doing. So I don't know why atheism is somehow considered more heroic than theism; I call that an adolescent dream.

And then he proceeds to give a poignant defense of religion as something more than right living:

I once defined faith as the redemption of solitude. It sanctifies relationships, builds communities, and turns our gaze outward from self to other, giving emotional resonance to altruism and energising the better angels of our nature. These are some of the gifts of our encounter with transcendence, and whether it is love of humanity that leads to the love of God or the other way round, it remains the necessary gravitational force that keeps us, each, from spinning off into independent orbits, binding us instead into the myriad forms of collective beatitude. A society without faith is like one without art, music, beauty or grace, and no society without faith can endure for long.

The enduring value of religion is not that it helps us to live better lives as individuals. (There have been plenty of virtuous non-believers). It is that it helps us to live better lives together.

Amartya Sen offers a fascinating take on a little-known aspect of David Hume's thought on the subject of justice. He picks out the following passage from a 1751 essay by Hume:

Again suppose, that several distinct societies maintain a kind of intercourse for mutual convenience and advantage, the boundaries of justice still grow larger, in proportion to the largeness of men’s views, and the force of their mutual connexions. History, experience, reason sufficiently instruct us in this natural progress of human sentiments, and in the gradual enlargement of our regards to justice, in proportion as we become acquainted with the extensive utility of that virtue.

And Sen carries on comment:

The underlying approach to justice here contrasts with the influential view of Hobbes, according to which there has to be a sovereign state for us to entertain any coherent idea of justice. Hobbes was moved by the idea that institutional demands of justice can be met only within the limits of a functioning sovereign state, which is needed to establish and support the required institutions. While Hume was deeply concerned about the importance of institutions, on which he made many penetrating observations, he was reluctant to allow the idea of justice to be narrowed by the boundaries of sovereignty, as if there were no issues of global justice that could take us beyond our national borders.

One has the sense that the world is retreating from the impulse to global justice, so strong after World War II and again after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The perceived failure of high minded initiatives and the renewed assertion of sovereignty associated with the rise of the emerging powers (China, India, Brazil, and co) highlights how far we have to travel from the well instituationalized nation-state to effective global governance. And yet, we remain irreversibly conscious of the oneness of humanity, by virtue of our personal experience and the reach of media and commerce, and we still cannot ignore its implications for global justice. Hume saw this dawning consciousness some 250 years ago.

The Mark has just posted a piece I wrote on the value of international religious freedom. A snapshot is below, but you can read the whole article here.

Religious freedom is not only a basic right, it is a human value that requires consultation and practical action to bring into reality. Some of the issues that arise in conversations regarding religious freedom are not easy to resolve – typically, issues related to the public manifestation of belief through teaching, practice, or worship. The freedom to hold or change one’s belief, for example, relates directly to the freedom to share these beliefs with others. However, some states criminalize the teaching of religions in the name of protecting "morality" or "maintaining public order." While extreme measures such as incitement to hatred and violence should be condemned, people need to otherwise remain free to be exposed to new ideas and to share information.