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The secular Conscience: Why Belief Belongs in Public Life
Humanist, May-June, 2008 by Kenneth W. Krause
The Secular Conscience: Why Belief Belongs in Public Life
By Austin Dacey
(Prometheus, 2008)
240 pp.; $24.95
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IN AMERICA, self-anointed "values voters" receive an intellectual pass every election year. Rarely, if ever, are furious or alternately teary-eyed pro-lifers-asked to publicly and rationally defend their bald claims that non-feeling, non-sentient fetuses (and, in some cases, even 150-cell blastocysts) possess rights superior to those of hopeful billions who are conscious of themselves and their world and, in fact, can sense the pain and despair with which all people should be able to empathize.
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Surely, secularists must realize that in a wild, standard-free struggle between emotionally charged sound bites, "pro-choice" can never triumph over "pro-life." Indeed, were the issues that uncomplicated, it should not. But the technical and societal details of these matters easily favor both legal abortion and generous public support for embryonic stem cell research. So why do most secularists refuse to argue the salient facts to the common American voter?
Throughout the world, Islamist terrorists issue death sentences to authors and apostates, support so-called "honor-killings" and bomb innocent civilians consistent with their perceived duties to God. Although secular world leaders and news organizations rightly condemn the perpetrators as individual fanatics, they seldom dare to so much as question the religious motivations behind such fanaticism. Instead, Islam is ever so diplomatically dubbed "a religion of peace." Why not at least acknowledge the apparent correlations between religious conviction and senseless violence?
Because secularism has "lost its soul" replies Austin Dacey, professor of humanities and United Nations representative for the Center for Inquiry Transnational. In his new book, The Secular Conscience, Dacey asserts that in the modern, post-Enlightenment era secularism has, ironically, been undermined primarily from within. Although the American model of secular government was premised on open and vigorous competition between numerous philosophies and religious sects in the free marketplace of moral visions, American citizens of all persuasions have since deeply internalized at least two logical fallacies that have prevented them from achieving that ideal.
The Privacy Fallacy, Dacey instructs, decrees that all matters of conscience--secular or religious--are utterly personal and, hence, forbidden subjects for public discourse. So long as beliefs are not "imposed" on others, this hopelessly regressive mantra goes, every person has a "right" to believe as she will without interference of any kind. Enter the Liberty Fallacy, which mistakenly concludes that because conscience must not be coerced, it is equally immune to reasoned critique and objective intellectual and moral standards.
But unlimited deference to others' beliefs, consistent with the Privacy and Liberty Fallacies, does not constitute respect for those beliefs, but instead only blind, blanket acceptance of or careless indifference to them. Respect for truth and decency, by contrast, necessarily entails serious consideration, scrutiny, and when appropriate, direct public criticism. Despite prevailing opinion, anything less would be both undemocratic and uncivilized insofar as a given society values moral progress.
History assures us, however, that the ascendancy of these modern fallacies was anything but inevitable. Indeed, Dacey argues, the architects of secular liberalism would scarcely recognize their descendants today because they would never have tolerated, much less recommended, political neutrality regarding matters of conscience. When in 1670 Baruch Spinoza identified the most tyrannical government as "one where the individual is denied the freedom to express and to communicate to others what he thinks," he by no means proposed to deny the state its right--indeed, its responsibility--to enforce a non-denominational civic religion upon its citizens.
Although Spinoza's ideal government would never impose sectarian dogma or ritual, Dacey continues, it was nonetheless obliged to ensure obedience to an undeniably rational and universal set of principles consisting of justice and charity toward others. Spinoza's mix of theological skepticism and catholic piety was undoubtedly reflected in the American founders' deism, as well as their First Amendment to the United States Constitution that was at once both strictly prohibitive and unconventionally liberal.
But Enlightenment thinkers never envisioned the public square as an exclusive, conscience-free zone. In distinguishing a Liberty Principle from the Liberty Fallacy, Dacey invokes the much-celebrated writings of utilitarian John Stuart Mill, who in his 1859 essay, On Liberty, observed of government, "It is not by wearing down into uniformity all that is individual in themselves, but by cultivating it and calling it forth ... that human beings become a noble and beautiful object of contemplation" Thus, only specific compulsion from above is prohibited by the Liberty Principle; lateral persuasion among peers, by contrast, is encouraged. Freedom of conscience, Dacey adds, was not intended as an end in itself, but only as a means of achieving a more elevated existence for all.
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