Whistling past the graveyard

Why is public debate so shallow, impoverished and pointless? A new book contends that reason has been exiled and replaced by mere reasonableness.

Twenty-five years ago, Neil Postman wrote an incisive book entitled Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. It argued that in modern America communication must be cast as entertaining and amusing in order to be heard. This imperative applies to news, politics, education and even religion.

With information reduced to sound bites and punch lines, obviously something of value is lost. Public discourse is trivialized. If anything, of course, the new information technologies have accentuated the problem.

Earlier, Alasdair MacIntyre had written After Virtue (1981), a great book on moral philosophy, which argued that disagreement about moral principle is endemic to modern life, and that people no longer speak a common ethical language. Our moral discourse is impoverished, as we talk past each other. He says we need a new, doubtless quite different, Saint Benedict to construct new forms of communities that can sustain civility and the tradition of the virtues. The barbarians are not just at the gates. “They have been already been governing us for quite some time.”

Now Steven D. Smith, Warren Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of San Diego, has written The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse, published by Harvard University Press (2010), which is a critical examination of much that passes for public discourse in the wake of John Rawls’ influential 1971 Theory of Justice, also published by Harvard University Press. Among other things, Rawls argued that “public reason” requires citizens to “refrain from invoking or acting on their… deepest convictions about what is really true—and consent to work only with a scaled-down set of beliefs or methods that claim the support of an ostensible ‘overlapping consensus.’”.

Smith’s thesis is that “on so many matters of importance, the general quality of discussion does indeed seem disappointingly shallow.” Even in legal disputes decided by the Supreme Court, “the actual quality of reasoning is almost invariably thin, conclusory and disappointing.” So much for the US Supreme Court being an exemplar of John Rawl’s “public reason”! “In sum, if our public discourse on matters of political morality seems degraded, that lamentable condition is not limited to the sort of ‘sound bite’ talk that we encounter in a presidential campaign or on Fox News or MSNBC. The problems runs deeper.”  

According to Smith, Reason (the ruling ethos of the Enlightenment era in which America was founded), “is displaced by ‘reasonableness’—which in effect amounts to a willingness not to ask too much of, or to assign too much responsibility to, reason.” Rather than blame “poor schools or profit-driven media or evangelical religion” for our shallow discourse, “we can notice the way in which shallowness… is actually prescribed by some of the most influential political thought of our time” (Rawls and Dworkin & Co).  

Goodbye, Enlightenment. Hello, stripped-down secular chatter. Natural sciences and maybe economics, with its utilitarian assumptions, may flourish in this universe -- though the recent economic meltdown gives one pause -- but normative commitments (eg, to God, virtue, objective morality, country, marriage and family) translate poorly into the secular discourse of economics or rational choice theory.

Of course, practical issues arise that need to be resolved. Often, they are framed as issues of freedom and/or equality, which are deeply shared constitutional values in our society. While feigning neutrality, the recurring temptation is to smuggle into arguments about liberty and equality deeper presuppositions and commitments that were supposedly left behind. Smith contends that “conversations in the secular cage could not proceed very far without smuggling.”

This is what he means by the disenchantment of secular discourse. When there is no real, robust confidence in Faith and Reason, we are left with shallow public arguments which constantly smuggle in unacknowledged premises.

Most of the book illustrates Smith’s thesis. His idea is to “realistically try to show smuggling on the part of particular modern thinkers or movements.” He considers the debate over “assisted suicide”, the famous “harm principle” of John Stuart Mill, religious freedom and the “wall of separation between church and state”, and Martha Nussbaum’s “capabilities approach” to human rights. Read the book for the compelling detail.

I think Steven Smith is substantially right. Just recently Judge Tauro of the US District Court in Boston declared the federal Defense of Marriage Act unconstitutional. The Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) says that marriage under federal law—federal tax, immigration, military, and social security matters—is only between a man and a woman. Tauro says that’s unconstitutional because it violates equal protection of the laws. In other words, DOMA treats “married” same-sex couples in Massachusetts, for purposes of federal law, differently than married opposite-sex couples.

But as Professor Hadley Arkes aptly noted, “Tauro simply begins by presupposing the legitimacy of same-sex marriage and the ‘irrational prejudice’ of anyone who would deny it. As Bertrand Russell once said, presupposing has every advantage over demonstration that theft has over honest labor.”

Arguments over abortion or assisted suicide or same-sex marriage usually revolve around some claim of liberty or equality. But in all honesty there is no side-stepping the issue of what constitutes human life, or what makes a marriage. If human life consists in some form of higher consciousness, then abortion and euthanasia are acceptable. If marriage is nothing more than some kind of friendship recognized by the police (to use Robert Louis Stevenson’s phrase), then people of the same sex can get married to each other.

But first you have to smuggle in those controverted (and deeply mistaken) premises. If, as both my reason and my faith indicate, human life begins at conception and ends at natural death, then anti-life practices are simply homicidal. If marriage is (as it always has been understood to be throughout history until quite recently) a complementary commitment between a man and a woman which is intrinsically ordered to the procreation and education of children, then same-sex couples cannot be married.

As Abraham Lincoln once said, even if you call a calf’s tail a leg, the calf still has only four legs: calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it one.

In the area of religious freedom and the separation of church and state, Smith shows how the original notion of the secular arose in a Christian context of distinguishing between the two realms of the sacred and the secular, what pertains to God from what pertains to Caesar, which is a jurisdictional issue.

But lately, it has come to mean “not religious,” and “the sorts of theological or biblical arguments that once dominated discussion of the proper relations between church and state will now seem suspect or inadmissible.” The result? “What has deteriorated, it seems, is not so much our commitment to church-state separation and freedom of conscience as our ability to justify and expound those commitments in public discourse. Nomi Stolzenberg observes the ‘modern cultural deformity that finds expression in frightening levels of mutual incomprehension between “the religious” and “the secular” that we see today.’”

In his concluding chapter, Smith disputes the commonplace view that “meaningful public discourse must be confined to the secular domain, and that non-secular contributions—in particular religious contributions—would necessarily operate as a ‘conversation-stopper.’” His view is that artificial constraints on discourse stifle conversation. The real conversation-stopper, then, other than religious fundamentalism, is the disenchanted discourse of secularism.

Interestingly, Pope Benedict XVI made a similar point in his famous Regensburg address in 2006 (a day after the fifth anniversary of 9/11). There he said, “In the Western world it is widely held that only positivistic reason and the forms of philosophy based on it are universally valid. Yet the world's profoundly religious cultures see this exclusion of the divine from the universality of reason as an attack on their most profound convictions. A reason which is deaf to the divine and which relegates religion into the realm of subcultures is incapable of entering into the dialogue of cultures.”

Of course, if we can’t talk about the issues that divide us, then the only way left to resolve them is force. Which would be (has been) bad.

Dwight G. Duncan is professor at the University of Massachusetts School of Law Dartmouth, where he teaches courses in Constitutional Law, Religion and the Law, and Bioethics and the Law.