More ruminations: religion and privacy

Lately I've been working through four books more or less simultaneously: first, Religion and the Domestication of Dissent: Or, How to Live in a Less Than Perfect Nationby Russell McCutcheon (I mentioned this earlier; my review of this is now officially late); second, in connection with a student's ongoing research project, Jessica Stern's Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill; third, out of purely personal interest, They Only Look Dead by E.J. Dionne (I snaked this off an old roommate when he was getting ready to throw it out, and it's been sitting on my shelf for probably almost ten years); and fourth, even more random, Bruno Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment. One might wonder what ties all four of these books together, and in a way the connection is kind of strained, but I think there is one. (On the other hand, if you were a seriously rabid conservative, you might see a fairly direct connection between progressive politics -- that's Dionne -- terrorism -- that's Stern -- and fairy tales -- Bettelheim.) There are some interesting links, though, and I wanted to write about them a little bit before going to bed.

So, I read McCutcheon's most recent work a while ago, and because I am a lazy son-of-a-bitch, I have not yet sat down to write my review. Now, though, reflecting on it in tranquility, one thing really sticks out, namely that McCutcheon is not really that interested in what most of us think of as religion. This isn't a bad thing, of course. I like the fact that Russell is increasingly bending the disciplinary boundaries of what religious studies can and ought to be. And I think that with each new book his work gets more sweeping, and, in a way, more honest -- at least in the sense that he is tipping his hand more and more about his real underlying interests and preoccupations. A trite way of summing up what the book is about would be to say that he is not interested in religion, but in 'religion'. As I believe McCutcheon quotes Foucault as saying, "the quotation marks are of a certain importance." He's entirely uninterested in religion qua essence (indeed, he rejects any notion that religion qua essence might even exist; religion is purely a taxon, a classificatory strategy employed by human beings to organize their social experiences), and interested only in "religion" as an artificial conception that we use for dividing up the world. His question is not so much, what is religion, as it is, why would anyone want to call something "religion" (or "religious") anyhow? The weird thing for the reader (that is, for me) is, of course, that as soon as you start asking that particular question, all hell breaks loose, conceptually speaking, and you begin tripping all over your own thinking. I say all this by way of preface. The point being, though, primarily, that McCutcheon seems to me most interested in all concepts that have to do with our current, very slippery notion of interiority. He follows Chomsky (I think) in believing that modern society is atomizing and isolating, and that the historical construction of the private self is something that, rather than being innocuous or even "natural" and inevitable, rather serves the interests of the nation-state fairly directly. I'm struck by the way in which he makes the turn in this book to media criticism. He talks about television, celebrity politics, and sports an awful lot. Anyhow, he believes, if I'm not mistaken, that the idea that there is an intrinsic separation between public and private is a highly effective mechanism of social control. (Stated this way, I'm not sure this is such a controversial thesis after all.)

In other words, the public/private distinction is the key issue. In my own research, this comes up most clearly in one particular archival source that I came across in the Dresden privy archive: the letter to the senate of Magdeburg from Duke Maurice's diplomats, telling them to relinquish their stubborn resistance to the Duke and Emperor and to drop the pretence of having a religious justification for their actions, since "the true word of God is preserved, miraculously, in human hearts, while in all other matters we must be obedient to the proper authorities." This is a good example in which political resistance is effectively denatured, rhetorically at least, by the discursive creation of a distinction between public and private spheres of human activity -- and then by relegating the resistance to the latter. It's OK to resist the king, as long as that resistance is confined to a carefully delineated sphere in which it will be practically ineffective (i.e., it's OK to about the ruler, as long as you don't act on those thoughts). This way of thinking is so deeply ingrained into the American consciousness that we tend to accept it as second nature, but any brief excursion into medieval political thought will show that things weren't always this way -- indeed, spend enough time looking at medieval thinking and our way of doing things starts to seem very counterintuitive and even disingenuous. It should be pretty clear then how this connects with the notion of religion. Religiously-justified resistance to authority, if you accept this version of the public-private distinction, becomes ipso facto irrational, because the religious sphere is defined as private and interior (and by extension, for most of us, pure and timeless) while the world of political action is public, rule-goverened, conventional, contingent, messy, and ever-changing. McCutcheon likes to cite Burton Mack's concept of a "myth of innocence" in this connection -- this being another idea that I need to research a little more thoroughly. This past spring I corresponded very briefly with a doctoral candidate at Syracuse who is working on a similar set of issues in his dissertation. He outlined a key piece of his argument to me as follows (I'm changing it around a lot, making it more abstract): On the one hand, "liberal" advocates of "tolerance" (especially, but not only, religious tolerance) want to extend rights to all members of a society On the other hand, adherents of certain highly particularistic religious communities -- let's just say, conservative Christians -- would oppose such a move, e.g. if it were seen as offering approval to acts they found morally repugnant or religiously objectionable, such as abortion, or homosexual acts. The liberal rejoinder is typically that religious conservatives ought to refrain from imposing their religious values on the rest of society. In practice, this means that they are free to think what they want privately about abortion or homosexuality, but, as citizens and political agents, they should refrain from acting publicly on the basis of those beliefs. My correspondent points out that there's a certain inconsistency here: liberals want gay people to be able to act publicly on the basis of their gay identity, but want religious conservatives to repress (keep private) the objectionable aspects of their religious identity. Personally, I have no problem with asking religious conservatives to do this ... I've always liked that bumper sticker that says, "Against Abortion? Don't Have One," which implicitly argues: let people decide privately how they're going to run their lives. However, I don't see a compelling response to this guy's argument. It suggests that the public/private distinction, at least in this context, is tendentious and artificial, and it is effectively used to camouflage various arbitrary preferences enshrined in the form of principle.

A couple comments on Dionne and Stern. I've never read much Dionne before, but he kind of blows me away as a very perspicacious observer of American electoral politics. (It kind of reminds me of one of the best political/cultural memoirs I've ever read, namely the inexplicably out-of-print In the New World by Lawrence Wright. I can't comment on it now -- but read it. It's great.) Dionne fits into this set of problems I'm thinking about because he begins his book by musing on the great American confusion of public and private. In other words, where McCutcheon lambastes contemporary (not exclusively, but typically, North American) ways of thinking for postulating an arbitrary and disingenuous public/private distinction, Dionne pegs the collapse of much of contemporary American poltical life on people's failure to distinguish the public and private spheres. He even cites de Tocqueville to back him up! I guess a Democracy in America reference is de rigueur if you want to be a reflective American political commentator. He's thinking of Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky in particular, where the government was practically brought to a standstill by the president's sexual capers (giving rise, incidentally, to the organization "Censure and Move On," now better known as MoveOn.org). What I've been wondering is, can McCutcheon and Dionne both be right? The superficial answer is, of course they can, because they are talking about such very different things. In fact they may even agree, finally. Dionne says that political culture in the U.S. depends on the public/private distinction, while McCutcheon says that the public/private distinction (which I will abbreviate as P/PD from now on) serves particular political purposes. But on another level, their orientations are at variance with one another -- McCutcheon seems to think that the P/PD is a somewhat sinister tool for preserving the status quo, while Dionne thinks it is a good thing, necessary for keeping people from confusing important issues with trivialities. McCutcheon would probably take issue with Dionne for seeming to propose that there is an absolute, ultimate difference between the kind of political issue represented by welfare reform or U.S. policy towards Somalia, on the one hand, and the kind of political issue involved in the question of whether or not Clinton put a cigar in Lewinsky's nether regions or whether he spooged on her dress, on the other. One might argue that if you are a conservative Christian, the latter kind of question is more fundamentally important than the former, or even that they're basically the same, since they both involve character, integrity, and moral choice.

Hell, I've been working on this post for days, and it's already way too long. I'm going to bed, it's nearly two a.m. But I have to say one thing about Stern's . McCutcheon takes Stern to task, briefly, for implying a highly normative view of religion. Stern starts out her book by saying that we have to empathize with the terrorists if we ever plan on understanding, and thus preventing, terrorism. A reasonable position if you ask me. But the question then remains: how do you empathize with a terrorist, or with anyone for that matter? Can you actually get inside someone else's head? It would seem that the answer, even for Stern, is ultimately no, because -- at least this is what my student tells me, I haven't gotten to the end yet -- she ends up concluding that while terrorists are motivated at a primary level by suffering and pain, their most heinous actions are largely determined by the manipulative distortions of charismatic leaders, who "use" religion for their own nefarious ends. Use religion. This is an important idea. Were the leaders of the Crusades using religion? I think the answer is definitely no -- they were acting on genuine religious conviction, even if it's a kind of conviction we find reprehensible. Stern seems to take us through a whirlwind journey of interviews and meetings and adventures, only to bring us back to where we started: the process of getting inside someone else's "private" beliefs leads to the conclusion that those beliefs are simply mistaken!

Finally, there's Bruno Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment. I got all fascinated by this because he has a chapter called "The Child's Need for Magic" or something along those lines. In his view, it's a big mistake to think that children should be exposed to what he rather sneeringly refers to as "modern, realistic" stories. Fairy tales are better because the magical element speaks directly to the child's level of development. If children need magic, then maybe adults need something like magic in order to be sane, too. This is the kind of thing that makes me suspicious of McCutcheon's, Bruce Lincoln's, and J.Z. Smith's skeptical, debunking stance towards the "dominant paradigm" (i.e. Eliade) in religious studies. Peter Homans takes a different tack, seeing religious studies psychoanalytically as a form of "mourning" for a lost world of secure certainties and organic wholeness. The fact that this lost world may never have existed is irrelevant, of course -- the point is to approach religious people, not to mention the benighted scholars who do this kind of work, with a certain degree of compassion, rather than hostility).