Not shockingly, considering her latest book concerns "the renegade Jew who gave us modernity" (not Freud, who maybe ended modernity, but Spinoza -- though both made their contributions by first becoming post-Jews), Rebecca Newberger Goldstein captures in two paragraphs the hinge upon which all our debates about modernity turn.
What normative conclusions does Lilla draw from his illuminating historical description? The fact that he acknowledges the profundity, both psychological and philosophical, of the religious impulse does not, in the end, undermine his commitment to the Enlightenment’s prying apart of theology and politics — at least for the West. But he cautions against drawing up universal prescriptions: “Time and again we must remind ourselves that we are living an experiment, that we are the exceptions. We have little reason to expect other civilizations to follow our unusual path, which was opened up by a unique theological-political crisis within Christendom.”
Some readers may want to challenge Lilla’s inference regarding Christian specificity and the limits of the lessons of the Enlightenment. Contemporary Japan and India, among other non-Christian countries, have also embraced the Great Separation. It’s not so clear that the Christian West is exceptional in anything except for first proposing the answer that has gradually gained momentum almost everywhere except in the Islamic Middle East. Lilla offers a cogent explanation for why Christian Europe got to the Enlightenment first. It doesn’t follow that the Enlightenment’s solution to the political problems religion universally poses is not a thing to be universally recommended. Nor does it follow that particular historical contingencies are a necessary feature of the solution. One can read Lilla’s story and draw precisely the opposite normative conclusions from the ones he asks us to draw: that the West’s experimental testing and retesting of political theology, trying to see if there is any safe way of mixing politics and religion, has delivered an answer from which all may learn. Separating church and state works; mixing them tends toward disaster.
Here, specifically and poignantly, we have an unflinching modern denying the two things that Leo Strauss (another post-Jew, in his way), for instance, characterized as the two great and horrible legacies of modern intellectual thought in the west: historicism and value relativism. Strauss in fact described Spinoza as the intellectual father of not one but two prominent movements "to solve the Jewish problem by purely human means" (both "ended in failure"): a political Zionism that would substitute for "the miracle of redemption," and an assimilationism that would replace the religion of the Jews with a sort of publicly decent common faith in which Christians could share. One could read the narrative of modernity as the attempt of (mainly European) Christians to follow the lead of post-Jews into a post-Christendom managed, if not governed, by political solutions to the problems of cultural assimilation.
But it's awfully neoconservative of Goldstein to state flatly that the separation of church and state is an unmitigated good -- a truth of political philosophy -- and that the rest of the world would in fact be better off embracing and employing that truth as we have learned clumsily to do. And thus it is hilarious to see a clearly very modern and probably post-Judaic female author insinuating that we would be both stupid and rather mean to sit back and refuse to help the world toward the truth that our political philosophy has uncovered, in clear opposition to Strauss' attack on modernity -- Strauss being supposedly the intellectual father of the neoconservative principle that we must bring the truth of political freedom to the darkened and dangerous world.
Nonetheless modernity's forked path remains insular on the one hand and evangelical on the right. Though domestically arguments can be made that bureaucratic management has harmful and freedom-destroying components which we should dismantle and prevent, the argument against political management becomes harder to make at the level of foreign policy simply because there is more chaos at the international level than the domestic level and as a practical matter the affairs of state must be attended to by a select number of persons chosen for that task. Ironically, the urge to meddle is greater and more constant abroad for us than even it is at home -- because the stakes could be higher, the differences between ideal and unpleasant starker, the political consensus far more frayed or altogether absent. Those in possession of the truth must uncover a second-order truth as to in what relation to others they now stand on account of that truth -- as to the obligations of that truth's instrumentality.
This is so much bigger than a neocon/non-neocon debate that I hope we all can manage to see it for what it is before the 2008 election rolls around. But the odds on a nationwide discussion about the fundamental tension of American exceptionalism seem, at least for now, not so hot. Any takers?
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