The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse (review)

In The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse, Steven D. Smith sets out to answer a question likely familiar and interesting to readers of Rhetoric & Public Affairs: why is contemporary U.S. public discourse superficial? Affirming the litany of discontent coming from critics, such as Susan Jacoby and Ronald Dworkin, Smith begins with the premise that “on so many matters of importance, the general quality of discussion does indeed seem disappointingly shallow.” Smith acknowledges the usual sources of blame for this anemic public discourse—education, the media, politics, fundamentalist religion—but he offers an alternative explanation: our relentless commitment to secularism deprives public discourse of the resources necessary to resolve our most pressing issues.

Smith contrasts our contemporary public discourse with the vital practices of reasoning that he asserts were operative in the founders’ era. He claims we have lost their faith in the “uninhibited exercise in reason,” which could afford answers to the great questions about the cosmos, morality, and human nature. Instead, we have substituted “reasonableness,” which, in line with John Rawls, insists that we make our decisions based in “public reason,” the common premises upon which all members of a pluralistic society can agree. This reasonableness effectively serves as a check on the practice of reasoning that the founders celebrated. Moreover, we have lost the Enlightenment era’s faith in a normative or purposeful universe.

Smith’s narrative of decline is simplistic, and he may draw the contrast between the founding generation and our own too sharply, but he arrives at a provocative claim nonetheless: as long as we exist in a “secular cage,” we lack resources for addressing our deepest moral dilemmas. We are thus reduced to the practice of “smuggling,” subversively introducing moral or religious frameworks into public deliberation. According to Smith, “the secular vocabulary within which public discourse is constrained to operate today is insufficient to convey our full set of normative convictions and commitments. We manage to debate normative matters anyway—but only by smuggling in notions that are officially inadmissible, and hence that cannot be openly acknowledged or adverted to” (39).

Smith’s evidence for this practice of smuggling comes through four successive case studies: the debate over physician-assisted suicide, the use of John Stuart Mill’s “harm principle” in contemporary jurisprudence, the separation of church and state, and Martha Nussbaum’s appeal for the “capabilities approach” to human rights law. In each case, he identifies some level of incoherence within the contemporary debate or jurisprudence, and he suggests that this incoherence results from the determination to exclude normative commitments from debates that implicate our deepest values. He shows how rhetors “smuggle” moral and religious frameworks into these debates, but the illicit character of those frameworks ultimately leaves the debates wanting.

This argument can be exemplified by Smith’s treatment of the debate over physician-assisted suicide. In that case, the incoherence stems from the distinction between a patient’s right to refuse life-sustaining treatments and that patient’s right to have a doctor assist with suicide. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the former right in Cruzan v. Missouri Department of Health. Two separate federal appeals court cases upheld the latter right (Washington v. Glucksberg and Vacco v. Quill), but the Court reversed those decisions. As a result, the Court has affirmed patients’ right to refuse life-sustaining treatment but not their right to physician-assisted suicide. Smith’s analysis explains these mixed decisions by looking to the debate and the decisions for the premise or value “that was not openly acknowledged” and that was instead “somehow smuggled into the debates” (45). He surveys two popular rationales for the distinction between refusing life-sustaining treatment and seeking physician-assisted suicide: the “causation” rationale, which suggests that refusing treatment does not cause death (instead, malnutrition or the disease itself causes the patient’s death), whereas physician-assisted suicide does cause the death; and the “intent” rationale, which says that refusing treatment may only intend avoiding unnecessary treatment, and death is...