24 | September | 2020 | When All Is Said and Dunn

What Cultures Can & Can’t Share

*Can’t we all just get along?*
*[Tag Line: Rodney King, circa 1992]*
[Painting: “Peaceable Kingdom”, Edward Hick, circa 1834]

If God exists, then God is good, and we, as his creatures, are bound to aim to be good as well, however hard that may be at times.
If God does not exist, then, as we are social animals capable of reasoning, we must also be good, both because the best lives are lived among a community of reasonable creatures recognizing each other’s rights and because to do otherwise wastes vast human potential. For in rights-based communities human beings can better trust one another and better collaborate to develop each other’s potential through continual interaction. Within such communities, human beings can build a homes rather than fortresses.
The explanation relying on God is simpler. This broadens its appeal, its reach, and the breadth of its popular support (a significant advantage).
It’s simpler, however, because it leaves unsaid much of what it means. Explaining is always harder than proclaiming.
The discipline of reasoning is hard, but the yoke of authority is easy.
Nevertheless, civil society requires that moral reasoning be more comprehensive than the moral reasoning of religion.
Creating a shared moral reasoning, through the rule of law and constitutionally limited powers, is the great social project of classical liberalism, and in all its modern forms but the most radical.
The purpose of liberalism’s separation of church and state, enshrined in the 1st Amendment, is to enforce a shared public morality, embodied in the constitution and the laws of the public sphere, which all citizens share as citizens of one nation, while reserving religiously-defined moral codes to the private sphere, where each can order and practice their own beliefs in their own way, without impinging on the public sphere, or on the rights of others to their own practices.

*Religion is beyond politics, and is most radiant when kept out of it.*

But if sectarian moral codes — the kinds that divide Catholic from Protestant, Sunni from Shia, Christian from Jew from Muslim, and each of these from any other — come to dominate in the public sphere, those differences will bleed into the public space and become entangled in the normal political struggle for power.
But, by adding absolutist beliefs that brook no compromise to the normal disputes about the distribution of benefits and costs, they shift politics from matters where differences can be negotiated — where rival parties can split the difference, each getting part of what they want — to matters where compromise satisfies no one.
This lays the ground for unending ill will, for such struggles can cease only with the political suppression of one side or the other.
Religion does not purify politics but divides populations into warring schisms.
Religion never purifies politics; politics always corrupts religion.
That is why liberalism invented the private sphere in the first place, as a safe space to practice one’s own religion in one’s own way.
If we cannot find our way to a non-denominational, shared morality, then we are doomed to sectarian conflict. Each of the three Abrahamic faiths has shown that it can be both infected by and cured of this contagion:
- Jihad means struggle, but not primarily in the sense that jihadists understand it. In mainstream Islam it means the struggle of conscience against temptation, also prominent in Christian thought. But politicized Islam, like politicized Christianity, currently expects shared law to reflect their sectarian beliefs and formerly used conquest to spread the faith.
- The Crusades and the colonialist pairing of conquest and proselytization, the Inquisition and the pogroms, show this militant side of Christianity.
- Judaism has the Promised Land (inconveniently occupied by others, which required a great deal of smiting), and its modern reprise, militant Zionism.
But each of the three has also shown an ecumenical spirit in which they have emphasized the common underpinnings shared by all.
- In medieval times, that appeared in the trans-cultural reach of Aristotelian ethics and politics, in the Muslim philosophies of Al-Farabi, Avicenna, and Averroes, in the Christian philosophy of Aquinas, and in the Judaic philosophy of Maimonides.
- In our times, world ecumenical councils occur with increasing frequency.
There are grounds for hope as well as grounds for despair. Glass half-full, glass half-empty.