I see the general emphasis on liberty as being ruled out from the picture gradually. I am interested to know what other people on this forum think about liberty in the present time. — Jack Cummins
Western secularity, including its capitalist economy, originated as the result of an unlikely concatenation of circumstances. To survive within the Roman Empire, early Christianity had to render unto Caesar what was Caesar’s, and keep a low profile that did not challenge the state; spiritual concerns were necessarily distinguished from political issues. Later struggles between the Emperor and the Papacy tended to reinforce that distinction. By making private and regular confession compulsory, the late medieval Church also promoted the development of a subjective interiority that encouraged more personal religiosity. New technologies such as the printing press made widespread literacy and hence more individualistic religion possible.
All that made the Reformation possible. By privatizing an unmediated relationship between more individualized Christians and a more transcendent God, Luther’s emphasis on salvation-by-faith-alone eliminated the intricate web of mediation – priests, sacraments, canon law, pilgrimages, public penances, etc. – that in effect had constituted the sacred dimension of this world. The religiously-saturated medieval continuity between the natural and the supernatural was sundered by internalizing faith and projecting the spiritual realm far above our struggles in this world.
The newly-liberated space between them generated something new: the secular (from the Latin saeculum, “generation, age,” thus the temporal world of birth and death). The inner freedom of conscience was distinguished from our outer bondage to secular authorities. “These realms, which contained respectively religion and the world, were hermetically sealed from each other as though constituting separate universes”. The sharp distinction between them was a radical break with the past, and it led to a new kind of person. The medieval understanding of our life as a cycle of sin and repentance was replaced by the more disciplined character-structure required in the modern world, sustained by a more internalized conscience that did not accept the need for external mediation or the validation of priests.
As God slowly disappeared above the clouds, the secular became increasingly dynamic, accelerating into the creative destruction that today we must keep readjusting to. What we tend to forget in the process is that the distinction between sacred and secular was originally a religious distinction, devised to empower a new type of Protestant spirituality: that is, a more privatized way to address our sense of lack and fill up the God-shaped hole.
By allowing the sacred pole to fade away, however, we have lost the original religious raison d’etre for that distinction. That evaporation of the sacred has left us with the secular by itself, bereft of the spiritual resources originally designed to cope with it, because secular life is increasingly liberated from any religious perspective or supervision.
Does this historical understanding give us the context we need to understand the much-maligned shari’a of Islamic law? Like the Judaic emphasis on ritual law (dietary prohibitions, etc.), its primary purpose is not punitive. Both are designed as ways to sacralize everyday life, by instilling patterns of behavior that work to infuse this world with a sense of the divine.
We may want to question how successful some of those ways remain today, but the Judaic and Islamic approach is to structure our life-in-the-world with rituals that remind us of the sacred and offer us ceremonial access to it.
By privatizing religious commitment and practice as something that occurs primarily “inside” us, modern Christianity encourages the public/private split and aggravates the alienation of subject from object. When religion is understood as an individual process of inner faith-commitment, we are more likely to accede to a diminished understanding of the objective world “outside” us, denuding the secular realm of any sacred dimension. With fewer and fewer spiritual identity-markers left outside our own psyches, we are supposed to find or construct an identity “inside,” a challenge not easy to meet:
“On the one hand, modern identity is open-ended, transitory, liable to ongoing change. On the other hand, a subjective realm of identity is the individual’s main foothold in reality. Something that is constantly changing is supposed to be the ens realissimum.”
The basic problem with the sacred/secular bifurcation has become more evident as the sacred has evaporated. The sacral provided not only ritual and morality but a grounding identity that explained the meaning of our life-in-the-world.
Whether or not we now believe this meaning to be fictitious makes no difference to the metaphysical security and ultimate foundation that it was felt to provide. A solution was provided for death and our God-shaped sense of lack, which located them within a larger spiritual context and therefore made it possible to endure them. Human striving and suffering gained meaning; they were not accidental or irrelevant but served a vital role within the grand structure of things. — David Loy
I don't understand how that bit of praxis relates to issues of "culture" as a thing. — Valentinus
I am sure that I wrote the thread today because I moved into a shared house with a group of strangers. I am forced to spend time in shared spaces with these people and this seems indefinite because I believe lockdown of indoor venues is likely to last into spring or summer. I go out but can't even find anywhere to read a book because it is bad weather. — Jack Cummins
Yuval Noah Harari suggests that,
'The liberal story cherishes human liberty as its number-one value. It argues that all authority stems from the free will of individual human, as it is expressed in their feelings, desires and choices. In politics, liberalism believes that that the voter knows best. It therefore upholds democratic elections. In economics, liberalism encourages that the customer is always right. It therefore hails free-market principles. In personal matters, liberalism encourages people to listen to themselves, be true to themselves, be true to themselves and follow their own hearts- as long as they do not infringe on their on the liberties of others. This personal freedom is enshrined in human rights.' — Jack Cummins
↪Nikolas
I am in England, not America, but I presume that the same principles apply. How do you believe that the idea of 'might makes right' as a replacement for the idea of liberty will translate in practice? — Jack Cummins
I read the article on Sorokin, thanks. I had not come across him but it does seem that he has some useful ideas — Jack Cummins
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