A question that has been puzzling me for too many days now: Is modern European secularism a refigured and (partially) demythologised restatement of Christian supersessionism?
I know that it will never only be this, but is there anything to the obvious historical continuities between the narrative strategies of supercession and modernity?
Any thoughts would be appreciated
Eric,
What an intriguing question. Why the qualifier that it will never only be this? If it’s an economic supersessionism, then the “only” might apply. And it sure beats the tired old term, “paradigm shift.”
I would invite you to explore this. I think it has possibilities.
rick
Rick,
Thanks. I do need to think on this. I was just hoping someone else would do it for me.
Nothing in history is ever ‘only’ one thing, whether it be economic, religious, aesthetic, etc.
Eric
But isn’t supersessionism more of an umbrella term than a real cause/effect thing? I was thinking less in reductionist terms and more in terms of metanarrative. Just like “evolution” doesn’t really explain anything but serves as a framework for hanging explanations, supersessionism seems like an interesting transposition.
Fair enough.
I am largely suspicious of explanation anyway – I think I’ve read way too much Jean Baudrillard at this point to be otherwise.
Alas.
Are you now?
Are you as suspicious of evolution as the explanation for diversity of species as creationism?
Are you as suspicious of human causation for global warming as of the those that deny it?
I can only hope so. It’s fun querying the assumptions of the fundamentalists, whether they be Christian or Atheistic.
Based on my training as a scientist I tend to hold all explanations tentatively based on available data. But then, that’s an explanation, isn’t it?
Recursion is so fun.
Of course not all explanations are of equal value. Just because all answers are tentative does not mean that they are on the same footing. As I am sure you know, this is one of the most popular strategies used by moral absolutists to lambaste anyone of relativistic persuasion for preparing the world for a total moral and ethical breakdown.
This is also what is behind the sort of shallow thinking that says things like ‘There is no God, so do whatever you want’, ignoring the real complexity of a properly thought-out atheism (I’ve written on this in a few other places one the site if you’re curious – see https://dunedinschool.wordpress.com/2009/10/30/a-modest-plea-for-a-historically-responsible-atheism/ and https://dunedinschool.wordpress.com/2009/12/17/family-first-nz-jokes-about-jesus-still-not-funny/).
Creationism, on any logic other than irrerrancy – which is not really any kind of logic at all – is a vastly inferior explanatory system, or operational fiction, to that of evolutionary biology. Likewise, climate change is at the very least partially caused or exacerbated by human action and inaction (including mine). It is also, as the great John Grey once wrote, very likely going to be one of the ways that the ecosystem is going to solve its ‘human problem’.
I should probably clarify a point here: I am far more suspicious of explanations in the social sphere than in the physical sciences. I am thinking here, for example, of anyone who wants to explain the phenomenon of religious violence by making anyone who participates in such violence into an irrational, even mentally ill person. On this reading, no other evidence – history, economic oppression, political manipulation – is admissible, or even necessary.
Eric, it is the fact that you don’t give lazy atheism that pass that persuaded me to subscribe to this blog. Your scathing (and spot-on) critique of Avatar drew me here, but your Family First NZ Jokes About Jesus Still Not Funny was what convinced me to sign on.
As for me, I am a self-described “recovering fundamentalist” Christian who has little patience for Christians who would be offended by the billboard. Sacred cows, imo, make the best hamburger.
As for being less critical of the physical sciences than the social, I would agree, even to the point of sneering at what supposedly passes for “social science” wholesale as it too closely approximates religious thought, at least from my perspective of being raised in a religious setting. However, that doesn’t mean we need to ease up on the physical sciences, especially when their “findings” somehow require actions in the realm of the social, namely the economic and political, since empiricism has a hard time extending its usefulness to human behavior.
Thanks for the kind words.
As an occasional professional in the social sciences, I’ve always thought calling social sciences ‘sciences’ does a disservice to both the idea of science and the true complexity of human cultures.
Sociology as we know it grew out of religion, or at least out of an opposition to religion as narrowly defined as church-going Christianity, and there is a good deal of truth about your last few comments, especially when we consider that people like Comte saw social science as a way to replace (or supercede, if I may) the explanations of human behaviour that were for centuries the domain of theology.
You can subscribe to this thing? Cool. I had no idea.
It seems the answer to this question is contingent upon the historical narrative underlying such “secularism.” Charles Taylor eviscerated “subtraction theories” of secularization contending that we’re somehow stripping off accrued layers to get back to something more ultimately “human.” This approach reminds me of the Protestant polemic about “the Catholic detour” to which such post-Reformation Christians return to something more authentically “Christian.”
More preferable in Taylor’s (and my) eyes is that we understand contemporary secularity (whatever that might be) as a development itself that marks another (value-neutral?) historically-contingent ideology.
Actually, Taylor was the one who got me thinking on this a while back – though I didn’t really know it at the time.
What brought it into my head is a lecture I am working on about Islam and how many of the problems that Europe has had with the Muslim world of late grows out the fact that many people still view European modernity as somehow inevitable and that anyone who doesn’t think this is in some senses believing something objectively outdated or backwards.
Sounds pretty damn interesting. I hope you blog it (or a shortened version of it) when you finish up.
I’ll be tautological, but I think its the only answer I can provide: a discourse is a discourse is a discourse is a discourse.
But on a more serious note, I think there is evidence that Enlightenment’s truths are reverting to myth. Market fundamentalism coupled with the very arbitrary foundations of the modern state (i.e. every facet of our neo-liberal governmentality) form quite a hegemonic political spirituality supported by indexes, hard facts, et cetera, don’t they?
The technocrat is the pastor.
“All this has happened before, and all of it will happen again.”
– Leoben Conoy (Number Two)
Is that what they all meant by that?
Actually, given the allegory, it actually would make sense if it were true.
Um, H & A with Gretel.
Roland,
I hate to admit my ignorance, but I have no idea (none) what this one might mean.
Eric
Home and Away. But I don’t get the significance. Must be some aussie in-joke.