Stanley Fish relates the late-in-life, still conflicted, bending toward religious truth of Jurgen Habermas, a German political philosopher devoted to Marxian pragmatism and critical theory.
Does Reason Know What It Is Missing?
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In his earlier work, Habermas believed, as many did, that the ambition of religion to provide a foundation of social cohesion and normative guidance could now, in the Modern Age, be fulfilled by the full development of human rational capacities harnessed to a “discourse ethics” that admitted into the conversation only propositions vying for the status of “better reasons,” with “better” being determined by a free and open process rather than by presupposed ideological or religious commitments: “…the authority of the holy,” he once declared, “is gradually replaced by the authority of an achieved consensus.”
In recent years, however, Habermas’s stance toward religion has changed. First, he now believes that religion is not going away and that it will continue to play a large and indispensable part in many societies and social movements. And second, he believes that in a post-secular age — an age that recognizes the inability of the secular to go it alone — some form of interaction with religion is necessary: “Among the modern societies, only those that are able to introduce into the secular domain the essential contents of their religious traditions which point beyond the merely human realm will also be able to rescue the substance of the human.”
Judeo-Christian spiritual religion, the substance of Western civilization, does considerably more than provide a “foundation of social cohesion and normative guidance.” It is the bulwark to preserve individual political liberty and to forestall secularity’s unavoidable tendency toward political dictatorship.
The initial stages of tyranny, as Habermas implicitly acknowledges, come with secular intellectuals’ destruction, in the name of the rational human mind, of society’s devotion to, and awareness of transcendent power and moral authority of Divine Being. In the free-for-all that follows, as in Weimar Germany of the 1920s or the United States today, social, economic, and political bonds disintegrate, leaving a demoralized citizenry, who welcome the emergence of a Napoleon, Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao - any strong man who promises to restore order. Without a higher law, a timeless set of moral principles which a society accepts as divinely ordained, such secular rulers have no limits upon their ruthless, tyrannical exercise of arbitrary power.
For a more extensive treatment of the assertion that morality and the rule of law cannot exist unless resting upon the foundation of revealed, Divinely inspired religion, see Can You be Moral and Ethical without being Religious?
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