Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World

Reinhabiting Civil Disobedience

Reinhabiting Civil Disobedience Bhrigupati Singh To clarify it again, what, then, is the difference between religion and philosophy? A core distinction would be that the latter can subsist without a conception of the divine. In other words, philosophy does not necessitate a conception of another, higher world, with which to slander or to beautify, or to authorize its work in this world. It need not traffic in super-earthly hopes. Of what consequence then, is this emergent conception of a ‘‘post-secular’’ world where it is religion that is (so much stronger? or only more distinctly?) an intervening force in the practical affairs of this world, enmeshed in public-creating technologies of such recent origin? Take another aspect of this question: What space do these same technologies grant to philosophy? Contemporary communication media such as newspapers or television are hardly a forum for philosophical disputation. Indeed, an argument about the concept of being as a current affairs TV program would be comical. The market would hardly desire it. So then, philosophical problems are not current affairs. And religious problems are? Or is it that these issues, reported as such, actually have nothing to do with religion at all? As for philosophy, I can neither doubt nor prove that there have been few points in human history when philosophical speculation, variably defined to include both mystics and scholastics, has been considered as unnecessary or out of place an occupation as it is today in neo-liberal societies. Is this a secular or a theological development? As regards the contemporary world, we are urged to speak on supposedly more important matters, such as globalization or terrorism. For anyone wanting to approach these discussions with a philosophical step, there is cause for much diffidence, both about the quality of the ensuing conversation and about the question of what a specifically philosophical contribution to it might look like (as distinct from say, the need for historical analysis to diffuse some of the hyper-presentness surrounding 3 65 BHRIGUPATI SINGH terms such as globalization and terrorism). Surrounded by such blurry, opinionated terms, the first question would be: How can one set oneself a topic? Keep in mind that thinkers as different as Thoreau, Marx, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Gandhi all warn against reading the newspaper every day. The first step might be to listen: Is philosophy even being referred to, anywhere at all? In fact, it is, both within the academy and outside. In recent years a request for philosophical perspective has begun to be heard from people from a wide spectrum of political leanings and denominations, and conceptual inquiry seems vaguely relevant again, even in the public domain. Charitably worded, many people are of the opinion: ‘‘After the events of September 11 and the return of religion, it has become increasingly crucial to reconsider (to revise/reject/reinforce) the heritage of the Enlightenment.’’ For all its well-intentioned self-reflexivity (or not), the violence of this correlation immediately erases all differences internal to cultures and selves, wholly obscuring the constitutive heterogeneity of the Enlightenment itself, falsely bridging the Atlantic gap between America and Europe, a move that fantastically places Immanuel Kant and George W. Bush in the same camp, even as it sustains, in however harsh or mild a form, the pernicious thesis of the ‘‘clash of civilizations.’’ Such a thesis, with its concomitantly false call to philosophy, is equally upheld by many of those who claim to speak with some intellectual authority on the ‘‘non-West,’’ conceived as such only through poor, negative, and resentful conceptions of identity and difference. A note for progressives and for conservatives: what seems like a battle against a single Goliath can also yield a harvest of false Davids. In a discussion framed as such (‘‘Enlightenment versus the non-West,’’ or ‘‘religion in the post-9/11 era,’’ or the ‘‘return’’ of religion—where had it gone?), it might be bolder to remain silent. This is not to deny the importance of such discussions, but rather to reexamine our angle of participation in them. In other words, the terms on which we accept this urgency, since to think again, in crisis, is indeed to reexamine the ways in which we are both joined and separate, to others and to ourselves. This last sentence takes us toward the domain of ethics, which we might count as another step, since this is one of the few terms from academic philosophy that still seems to resonate in...