Radical democracy, radical ecclesiology

Cross Currents, Wntr, 2006 by Peter Dula, Alex Sider

In March 2005, it seemed like every newspaper and news magazine in Europe and the US was talking about "Beirut Spring," asking "Was Bush right?" and cheerleading the glimmers of "democratic" transformation in Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria and Egypt. Perhaps you had to be among the jaded cynics to not find the crowds in the streets of Beirut inspiring. But you didn't have to be a cynic to think that more people should have been asking, "If this is democracy, what was going in the spring of 2003?" Similar crowds gathered in the streets of cities across the Western "democracies." But they had no effect on the governments in the US, Great Britain, Spain, Italy and Australia, among others, who were not deterred from invading Iraq.

George Orwell had this sort of irony in mind when, almost sixty years ago, he argued that the word "democracy" had become meaningless, and, moreover, that its very meaninglessness was what made it so useful. Its elusiveness, coupled with the aura of congratulation that accompanies it, made it too important to discard and too important to define. Since "political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible ... political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness." (1)

We also resist an attempt to provide a "definition," but for different reasons than the ones Orwell worried about. Our reasons are coupled to hope in addition to cynicism-hope that "democracy" may be elusive in part because it bristles with promise, cynicism because we are aware that promises too may be made "useful" as ideology.

As the keystone of his argument with John Rawls, Stanley Cavell offers the closing scene of Ibsen's A Doll's House as one image of a democratic moment. Perhaps a democratic moment whose promise is squandered or denied, but a democratic moment nonetheless. The play closes with Nora leaving her husband, Torvald. In a scene of frightening intensity, Nora comes to see that her marriage to Torvald has never been the relationship of openness, mutuality, trust and generosity that she had led herself to believe it was. Shortly before she leaves him she says,

        
    			
       
		
        			
		
	
    
    
    
    
    NORA: (After a short pause.) Doesn't something strike you, sitting

        
    
    
    
    
    here like this?     HELMER: What's that?     NORA: We've been married for eight years now. Hasn't it struck you     that this is the first time that you and I, husband and wife, have     talked seriously to each other?     HELMER: "Seriously"?--What does that mean? (2) 

Torvald's incomprehension of Nora's protest is evident throughout the scene. She articulates her reasons for leaving as best she can: not only have they never had a serious conversation until today, but he has treated her like a doll-wife, just as she was "Papa's doll-child at home"; they are strangers to each other; she has yet to become human. The bewildered Torvald responds by calling her "unreasonable," "ungrateful," saying, "You're ill," and "I almost believe you are out of your senses." He reminds her of her "most sacred duty" as wife and mother. (3) Because Nora is unable to speak in terms that Torvald understands, you might say that he identifies her, correctly, as outside of a particular moral consensus of reasonable adults. And, Nora herself admits as much: "I know that most people will say you're right, Torvald, and that it says something like that in all the books." Furthermore, Torvald identifies her out-sideness as stupid, childish, irrational and even mad. (4) For Torvald, marriage is an institution governed by specific rules. If he does not cheat on her, provides for her food and shelter, does not beat her, and so on, he is beyond reproach. It isn't simply that Nora's complaints are wrong, but that they don't fit his terms. Therefore, they have never, as she puts it, "exchanged a serious word on any serious subject." (5)

Democracies, liberal and radical, like friendships and marriages, are filled with Torvalds and Noras. Cavell argues that the guardians of liberal democracy--in Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome the guardian is Rawls--function as Torvald's equivalent. Rawls doesn't use words like "stupid" and "monstrous." His prose matches the decorum of his politics. (6) His favored epithet is "unreasonable," a word that carries enormous weight in his texts. "Public reason," on Cavell's reading, is Rawls's phrase for the consensus Torvald represents. As opposed to reason merely exercised in public, "public reason" for Rawls functions as a limiting concept and answers two related questions: To what kinds of reason giving can we (reasonably) hold others accountable? What happens when another's reason giving fails to measure up to the standard of reasons to which we can hold others accountable? Apart from the specific answers to these questions that Rawls's concept of public reason gives, its purpose is to set boundaries on what constitutes the political. Outside those boundaries, speech will seem "mad" and "irresponsible"; it will (in Rawls's terms) have become "metaphysical not political." Just as Torvald represents more than the refusal to talk with Nora, to see and treat and take her as a person, so also Rawls's public reason represents more than a delimited political sphere. More than this, both refuse to talk in a way that demonstrates a self-expanding willingness to transgress the limits of the project they take themselves to be engaged in. For both Torvald and Rawls, the problem lies in the other, not also in the self.