Life after secularism

Secular India (Namita Devidayal, water colour)

Life

By life I mean what life forms are predicated on. A life form is a complex of practices, values, reasons, and beliefs etc. that picks out a group as a people, or more or less characterizes a group as a people. Life forms may be seen as expressions of life .i.e. life is expressed in life forms. Life forms are our modes of understanding life. Thus at any given moment there is only one life, but many life forms. As modes of understanding life, life forms have a tendency to proliferate and present mutually exclusive (or apparently so) pictures of life. There is, however, no life other than what finds expressions in life forms. Between life and its expressions there is a relation of under-determination. Life forms are desperately underdetermined by life. Therefore, as modes of understanding life they are equally good and bad. Though different life forms may be mutually exclusive, any one of them does not determine life exclusively. In other words, features of life as found expressions in different life forms are not limited to any particular expression of them in life forms. Nor is a feature of life exhausted by variegated expressions of it. If one feature is expressed in many forms of life differently, then each of them is determined by that feature. This means that the feature in question under-determines the several expressions of it in life forms. This makes life forms more like works of art than a truthful model of life.  All the life forms can coexist with out antagonisms. Another implication of underdetermination is the openness of life forms. This openness probably originates from the vagueness of the expressions of life, because it may not be made clear whether a particular expression applies on any given occasion. That is, an expression, describing another life form, can apply equally well on such occasion. It is not ironical to find the ways in which death of the other accommodated greatly varied from people to people while death remains stoically one. The openness of a life form may also come from the internal vagueness of its expressions, because with in the same life form it can not be made clear whether any given single expression captures the feature of life it is supposed to be an expression of, or captures that feature fully. Every single expression leaves the possibilities or intimations of new one. That is, with in the same life form, expression extends vertically and horizontally, without the need of consolidation.  A life form is competent enough to intimate changes from within .Diverging and evolving expressions with in one single life form and differences between distinct life forms speaks of the richness of life. Therefore, when expression of a life form does not exhaust the richness of life, it remains open and not closed. This gives all life forms a natural sense of humility within and across. There is something really wanting in all forms of life. Hearkening to the silence, feeling the void ness and seeing the unseen in the expressions are sometimes ways in which life forms intimate themselves about their limits. Putting a closure to this movement of life is what I call in this context determining. A mind regime that regulates or controls the expressions of life, and thereby limits the possibilities of the life form is determining. If a religion or an ideology envelopes or manages the whole of life form, then it is determinant of life. It is then an instance of mind regime.

Secularism

Secularism is part of a package deal. When you accept secularism other terms in the deal, as a matter of course, comes binding on you. As most of us know, the word secularism is derived from the Latin word ‘secularis’ meaning ‘worldly’, ‘temporal’ etc. ‘Secular’ is an attribute of civil institutions –educational, judiciary, state etc. ’Secular’ describes an institution correctly when that institution conducts its activities without reference to a religious decree, or a system of unquestionable faith followed by a people. Naturally, ‘secular’ is not an attribute of a person, whereas a person is a secularist if she holds that the institutions people engage in for conducting their day to day activities in order to satisfy their material needs should be secular. Secularity prevails in a social world when it is largely characterized by secular institutions.

What are the other terms in the deal? Let me consider a few of them briefly here. They are principles that make certain kind of activities possible and regulate them by providing criteria for judging them. 1.In the first place there is what may be called the rationality principle, reconstructed from what is perceived to be the scientific rationality, which in turn is modeled after a conception of how claims are validated in science. Thus, claims in the public realm need to be substantiated through a procedure, in which reasons are made public and debated and checked against facts. Parliamentary forms of government, modern judiciary and educational practices etc. reflect this principle. 2. The second theme that informs the content of secularism as a world view is the principle of utility. In simple terms, this is a method of judging the outcome of an action. Judging an action as efficient or not, partly proceeds from this principle. Consequently, this principle enables a set of agents to predict the behavior of another set of agents. A calculation in quantitative terms ensures the objectivity of this prediction, a calculation legitimized only by the utility principle. Market centered production and consumption in the modern era epitomizes this principle. Such calculations also follow the model of a reconstruction of scientific rationality. Utility principle in fact tends to extend to all kinds of exchanges in the social world in modern times. Therefore, it makes the behavior of people generally predictable in the modern world. 3. The third component of the world view we discuss is the projection of state as a neutral arbiter. In Europe the presence of secularism is generally seen as an outcome of the problem of boundary adjustment between the overarching authority of church and the state. I would like to represent the conflict as not one between church and state, but between church and the then emerging bourgeoisie. Modern market, advances in transportation and communication etc. signaled the emerging into prominence of two new estates in Europe: commons and media. Commons are represented by the bourgeoisie who controlled production and consumption, the economy at large. State itself was not pitted against the church. The new state emerged as a neutral arbiter for the adjustment of power between the church and the king on the one hand and the third and fourth estates on the other. This event tells us the story of a power shift that has a chain reaction in the whole of European world. State is like a transparent container that reflects the hands of those who handle it. Why is the idea and practice of the state as a neutral arbiter an essential component of a world view in which secularism also figures as one? There need to be such a neutral arbiter to ensure there is no other force that intervene in the market centered production and conception. Henceforward values are created in the market. Life forms have to conform to this mechanism of the market. 4. A fourth principle that goes in tune with the other three mentioned earlier is that of value neutrality. For the other three principles to apply the fourth one is a precondition. Rationality principle ensures that reasoning should be maximally formal, so that values do not determine or validate our beliefs. Values are treated like objects which are not allowed to intervene in the form of the argument. Similarly, utility principle keeps values from its acts of calculation. Values do not bear deontological markings now. Values became a place marker for admitting what has a utility. The utility principle shifts the burden of value from the virtues one holds in an ideal time to that which satisfies one’s wants or needs in real time. Neutrality of value in this sense is a displacement or dispensability of value.

These principles together worked to imagine a disenchanted world. What is conventionally known as secularism, in the strong sense of the word, forms only a part of a world view that is largely defined by these principles. Secularism in the strong sense is a misrecognition of the historical process by the agents who were the products of the same process. The separation of powers is not so much between that of church and the state as between a regime in which values are closed and one in which values are displaced. Secularism in the weak sense is a world view the aspects of which we have just discussed. In the strong sense it is a misrecognition by the western world about a part of their own history. In both the senses, weak and strong, secularism is a happening peculiar to the west.

Life after secularism

What can one say about life in relation to secularism as a world view in the weak sense of the term? Secularism realized as a world regime is determinative with respect to life in the sense of decisively fixing the expressions of life. When life forms are left to themselves they result from free and indeterminate expressions of life. Secularism understood in the sense above does not allow free expressions of life. Rationality principle for example expects uniform results when applied to affairs of social life. If people are rational they come to agree on matters affect them as they live together. Differences among life forms have an irrational basis. Life is some thing that can be represented in quantitative terms and its movements can be predicted. If we know correctly how life works then we can control it and each expression of it is what we decide it to have. We do not violate laws of life, but only cooperate with them. But when we consider what we make of life when we rationally determine its course it becomes clear that the utility principle shapes our projects involving life which cannot be separated from human agents who are actively engaged in productive life society for their material benefits. The rationality principle that characterizes secularism as a world view has deep and far reaching consequences for the movement of life. That is why we say that it is life-determining. Where as life forms unregulated by any ambitious regimes are slow and indeterminate with regard to life expressions they gather into their body.

As a world view secularism is as proselytizing as other religions like Christianity and Islam. Though it is open in some sense in contrast to religions in general, this openness is unidirectional or closed openness. Organized religions, when ambitious, show a tendency to manage or supervise the life form by closing the latter to the freely evolving patterns with in the life form. Similarly, secularism as a world perspective assumes the role of a life form and closes it to any internally intimated alternatives. 20th century experienced the secularist world view in the weak sense mentioned closing in on the enormously rich life forms all over the world. By 1920s about 84 % of the earth came under the rule of a few western countries. To my mind the west, despite the decolonization, has succeeded in conquering the whole of earth through the spread of secularist world view in the weak sense. Viewed from this angle one sees the life-determining movement of secularism. It has created its own opposition, in a logically contradictory manner, i.e. the non-secular, indicating an absolute opposition.

However, the world view of which secularism in the strong sense is only a part and which we have called weak secularism does not function integrally to characterize the life form of populations. The underlying principles of such a world view apply in the life of people as relatively independent modules but connected together in a subtle and unrecognized manner. Thus, utility principle is a crossover reason that finds a place across different life forms. Same is the case with rationality and value neutrality. They eat into other life forms. These principles are internalized by life forms which are mutually exclusive and professedly non-secular. This has the consequence of weak secularism being unrecognized as a competing world view by its traditional opposites. Weak secularism is like a Trojan horse, weak in form for it to be clearly recognized but strong in destructive power. Having internalized basic principles of weak secularist perspective, life forms no longer see any opposition in this world view when it is spelt out. However, the mind regimes which tend to organize life forms into closed systems are wary of such principles, but only bend them to their advantage. This means that under secularist spell, life forms do not disappear but reorganized and get hardened under mind regimes, such as we come across the globe today, which absorb shocks the secular movements send in to it by simply mutating.

As an independent module of weak secularism the strong secularist position of which the principle of state as the neutral arbiter is the only significant pretension, is strong in appearance and weak in content. It is strong in appearance because the mind regimes of life form in the contemporary world aim to totalize their regimes by removing the neutrality from the arbiter-ship of the state. The apparent strength of the principle of neutral arbiter in fact derives from its being perceived as the last bastion of secularism by the mind regimes. It is weak in content because there is no support of any life form for neutral state to fight its last battle, because what ought to have been the constituents of its life form ( if it pretends to be one ) have already been eaten up by other life forms. Therefore, it has no cause to fight for. This also exposes the weakness of formal democracy which apparently support and institutionalize neutrality principle of state. This is because formal democracy cannot prevent life forms as mind regimes from legally claiming the arbiter-ship of the state thereby ending its neutrality. This is exactly what happens to life after secularism, i.e. when secularism retired from the scene. Arbitrariness of the state will then reappear in a new form.