Autor: Gregory, Brad S.

Buch: The Unintended Reformation

Titel: The Unintended Reformation

Stichwort: Moderne: Verlauf d. Geschichte wider alle Versuche von Kontrolle und Planung (Z. Bauman); Versagen d. Liberalismus; Säkularisierung: kontingentes geschichtliches Ereignis; Aufforderung an Wissenschaftler: Eingeständnis eigener metaphysischer Annahmen

Kurzinhalt: ... liberalism is failing in multiple respects. It lacks the intellectual resources to resolve any real-life moral disagreements, to provide any substantive social cohesion, or even to justify its most basic assumptions.

Textausschnitt: 381b I wish this book could have had a happier ending. But that would have happened only if the world in which we are living today were different. And our present world would be different only if the past had not been what it was, because the past made the present what it is. At the outset of the twentieth century Lenin asked, “What is to be done?” His answers turned out to be disastrous. I am not among those who believe in comprehensive blueprints for human social engineering backed by political power. That has tended not to go so well, especially in the past century. Nor do I have any illusions about what academic books can achieve in light of the powers that rule the world. Intellectuals per se have only their arguments, not billions of dollars in capital or arsenals of sophisticated military weaponry. Still, if the analysis of this book is near the mark, some things might be done in the small world of higher education and research universities, on its terms and yet in ways that could (and in terms of what is intellectually justified, should) shift some of its assumptions. (Fs)

382a Zygmunt Bauman has recently written that “for the past two or three centuries since that great leap to human autonomy and self-management variously called ‘Enlightenment’ or ‘the advent of the modern era,’ history has run in a direction no one planned, no one anticipated, and no one wished it to take.” That seems incontestable. He adds: “What makes this course so astonishing and such a challenge to our understanding is that these two to three centuries started with the human resolve to take history under human administration and control—deploying for that purpose reason, believed to be the most powerful among human weapons (indeed, a flawless human facility to know, to predict, to calculate, and so to raise the ‘is’ to the level of the ‘ought’)—and were filled throughout with zealous and ingenious human effort to act on that resolve.”1 But what if that faith in reason alone, however it appeared to many protagonists in the Enlightenment, was actually a major misstep rather than the progressive panacea it appeared to be? If this were true, it might change one’s historical perspective considerably. Rather than being astonished and confronted with “such a challenge to our understanding,” we might instead have discovered something that would explain much about the course of Western history since the mid-seventeenth century. Yet by itself such a hypothesis, even if it were true, would still be incomplete, because its chronological compass would be insufficient to explain the character of the present world in which we are living. (Fs) (notabene)

382b Not only present-day champions of the Enlightenment and its legacy but also the large majority of postmodern critics of modernity and the Enlightenment assume a supersessionist notion of history. They presume we can account for the Western world as it is today by largely ignoring the Reformation era and the Middle Ages, which belong, so they think, to a premodern past that was ostensibly transcended and left behind beginning in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Enlightenment reason having now failed, so the thinking goes among its postmodern critics, we are left only with skeptical shards and individualistic bricolage. This book has sought to show both that such supersessionist assumptions are mistaken and that their correlative, allegedly unavoidable skeptical conclusions are by no means necessary. It has also sought to show something of why this is so. The world Westerners are living in today cannot be understood without seeing the deep ways in which it is an unintended extension and continuation of late medieval and Reformation-era developments that are not dead and gone, but remain influential in the early twenty-first century. Nor are the only intellectually viable options today the rationalist or skeptical ones circumscribed by metaphysical naturalism. But these are the only sorts permitted in the secularized academy. (Fs)

383a The genealogical analysis presented here provides the intellectual basis for an interpretation of Western modernity and the ways in which it is failing that differs from the diagnoses of postmodern secular critics. It also differs from the ongoing efforts of those secular believers who seek to defend and somehow salvage Enlightened modernity’s beleaguered presuppositions. To be sure, modern Western liberalism solved the serious problem of religio-political disruption in early modern Europe, and modern Western states extended religious liberty and other individual rights in ways that were not true of early modern confessional regimes. But the failure of modern philosophy to provide a convincing rational substitute for religion with respect to the Life Questions suggests that there is no reason to believe modern claims about the supersessionist triumph of secular reason over religion per se. On the contrary, the failure strongly implies that philosophical efforts to contrive a universal, self-sufficient, rational replacement for religion, for all their historical intelligibility and desirability in the context of early modern Christian doctrinal controversies, were self-deceived from the outset, and that those intellectuals who continue today to carry on likewise are engaged in a similarly self-deceived enterprise. At the same time, the rejection of historical supersessionism as a mistaken view of Western history since the Middle Ages permits a candid recognition of the fact that intellectually sophisticated expressions of religious worldviews exist today as part of Western hyperpluralism. They have not been “left behind” or “overturned” by “modernity” or “reason.” They have been institutionally excluded and ideologically denounced, not disproven. Their dismissal out of hand by most scholars seems less a function of familiarity with relevant intellectual realities than of the fact that secular research universities have banished theology from among the academic disciplines, permitting most scholars to pretend as though intellectually serious theology, philosophy of religion, and nonskeptical yet historicist biblical scholarship do not exist. But they do. And perhaps some religious truth claims really are true, and maybe their rejection helps to explain both why Western history has unfolded as it has in the past half millennium and why modernity is now failing. Perhaps the baby of religion, once invented to cope with the unwanted and unintended effects of the Reformation, has been rashly thrown out with the bathwater of its past political perversions and social failures. (Fs)

384a The natural world investigated by the sciences has always been and continues to be understood by Jews, Christians, and Muslims as God’s creation. Modern science is widely thought to have falsified this notion or at least made it utterly implausible to the well educated. But as the contemporary social fact of intellectually sophisticated religious believers demonstrates, it has not, it need not, and this is not what happened historically. Rather, Reformation-era theological disagreements rendered newly important in the seventeenth century the widespread metaphysical univocity inherited from the late Middle Ages, which reinforced the default influence of ordinary linguistic grammar on discourse about God. Neo-Scotist univocity plus Occam’s razor as it was applied to an either-or understanding of “natural” and “supernatural” are still widely (if unself-consciously) assumed and taken for granted today. This explains the common category mistake among the theologically ill-informed that God, if real, must be some sort of entity “out there” in the universe and must be discoverable through the empirical methods of scientific investigation. Most of those who unknowingly conflate their metaphysical assumptions with the findings of the natural sciences regard the relationship between science and religion as a competitive, zero-sum game. Thus they confuse success in explaining natural regularities with the allegedly diminished plausibility of the claims of any and all revealed religions. In fact, any and all possible discoveries of the natural sciences are compatible with the reality of a transcendent creator-God understood in non-univocal terms, whether in Judaism, Christianity, or Islam. It is unsurprising that this recognition is not widely understood, given the sociological fact that most scholars and scientists tend to be notably (but explicably) lacking in theological sophistication and self-awareness of their own metaphysical beliefs. (Fs)

384b Contrary to widespread assumptions, the findings of the natural sciences accordingly provide no legitimate intellectual grounds for an a priori exclusion of all religious truth claims from academic discourse. It all depends on what the claims are. In practical moral terms, however, eliminating any consideration of a creator-God who will judge human beings means unburdening human life of restrictions on human desires. That is important. It protects our hyperpluralism from the unbearably invasive claim that some widely held beliefs and widely enacted behaviors might be objectively detrimental to human flourishing as such, indeed from the similarly outrageous implication that there is such a thing as “human flourishing as such” to which anything could be “objectively detrimental.” Such notions are intolerable. So “God” (for those who choose to be religious believers) can only be what individuals individually want “God” to be. That way, “God” cannot cause trouble and we can each individually get on with our lives as we please within the state’s institutions and legal stipulations. This line of thought suggests one important reason for wanting to keep religious discourse out of the public sphere and the secularized academy: it protects one sort of substantive challenge to late Western modernity’s core ideology of the liberated and autonomous self. No matter what, each neo-Protagorean individual must be the sovereign of his or her own Cartesianized universe, determining his or her own truths, making his or her own meanings, and following his or her own desires. This is a non-negotiable sine qua non of Western modernity in its current forms. It is also a major reason why it is failing. (Fs)

385a The processes by which theology and the consideration of religious truth claims were excluded from universities between the late eighteenth and the early twentieth centuries made sense at the time. Few theologians possessed the intellectual wherewithal to engage with the burgeoning findings of the emergent academic disciplines within modern research universities, and those who did tended to assume uncritically the unavoidability of a post-Kantian philosophical framework, itself premised on a strictly deterministic Newtonian universe of invariable natural laws from which the possibility of miracles had been excluded. In addition, many religious claims were made in nineteenth-century academic settings with nonchalant complacency, and thus deserved to be excluded from institutions devoted to the pursuit of knowledge in the absence of serious arguments about why such claims belonged. Moreover, in the nineteenth century it seemed to many learned observers not only that the natural sciences and philosophy were progressive, but that both were helping progressively to pave the high road to human happiness through the beneficent spread of global civilization with a colonizing Western face. Then came the twentieth century. (Fs)

385b Our situation now is different, with the intellectual tables turned. Now some intellectually sophisticated postmodern critics who are religious believers have gotten behind and underneath modernity’s secularist assumptions and offered explanatorily powerful interpretations of their implications. The governing modern ideology of liberalism is failing in multiple respects. It lacks the intellectual resources to resolve any real-life moral disagreements, to provide any substantive social cohesion, or even to justify its most basic assumptions. In a reversal of the situation common in the nineteenth century, now it is many secular academics who tend to be uncritically complacent about the historical genesis of and intellectual grounds for their beliefs, oblivious of what Steven Smith has recently exposed as their “smuggling” of premises and assumptions insupportable within naturalist assumptions.1 Therefore, consistent with the academy’s commitments to the open pursuit of intellectual inquiry without ideological restrictions, to critical rationality, to the importance of rethinking and reconsidering, to the questioning of assumptions, to academic freedom, and motivated by the desire to shed light on our current problems and to seek more fruitful ways to address them, the contemporary academy should unsecularize itself. It should become less ideologically narrow and closed-minded, opening up the Weberian “iron cage of secular discourse.”2 Those who bring religious perspectives to bear must be prepared to argue for their claims in intellectually coherent ways and based on knowledge of the assumptions and findings of the academic disciplines with which they engage. But the a priori exclusion of religious truth claims from research universities is no longer intellectually justifiable and might well be closing off potentially important avenues for addressing some of our many contemporary problems. (Fs)

386a Unsecularizing the academy would require, of course, an intellectual openness on the part of scholars and scientists sufficient to end the longstanding modern charade in which naturalism has been assumed to be demonstrated, evident, self-evident, ideologically neutral, or something arrived at on the basis of impartial inquiry. It would require all academics—not only those with religious commitments—to acknowledge their metaphysical beliefs as beliefs rather than to keep pretending that naturalist beliefs are something more or skeptical beliefs are something else. The secularization of knowledge was a historically contingent process that derives from the religious disagreements of the Reformation era, even though it has been for a century or so an ideological imperialism masquerading as an intellectual inevitability. Future scholars and scientists are socialized into its assumptions as they pass through its institutionalized portal in the graduate schools of research universities. Facing up to these things is bound to be unnerving and is sure to be resisted, because confronting challenges to cherished beliefs and seemingly settled assumptions is rarely a cause for comfort. (Fs)

386b Preferential “usable pasts” aside, the actual past made the real present in which we are living. It continues to affect us whether or not we understand how. And the abiding influence of the Reformation era on the real present cannot be understood unless supersessionist conceptions of history are corrected and conventional historical periodization is challenged. For all the putative encouragement of original thought in the academy, in fact we are generally expected to accept the scholarly division of labor we have inherited and the assumptions that govern it. Subversive ideas and unsettling research that threaten seemingly settled foundational assumptions are just as likely to be welcomed now as they were in the late Middle Ages—that is, not at all. Along with other scholars in their respective disciplines and specializations, we are supposed to stick to established genres, cleave to discretely circumscribed intellectual goals, and follow well-established methods. These are different things: to study the distant past, to show how the distant past continues to inform the present, to explore the intellectual formation of the assumptions that govern historical inquiry, to analyze central problems of the contemporary Western world, and to critique the presuppositions within which modern knowledge across the disciplines is pursued and transmitted. But aren’t all these things parts of a single complex story? (E15; 24.06.2015)