Rowan Williams & Charles Taylor on a Multicultural Society
Rowan Williams, formerly Archbishop of Canterbury, serves as Honorary Professor of Contemporary Christian Thought for Magdalene College, Cambridge. In his book Faith in The Public Square, which is a collection of lectures and essays, Williams seeks
to address a similar set of concerns to those of Charles Taylor.
The twenty-six essays in William's book address various issues. However, present through many of them is the
concern for a society which can accommodate a plurality of cultures and
religions.
Williams assumes the present reality of a plurality of cultures and religions, and addresses how a
modern democratic society can function in such circumstances. Williams attempts such an address because there are those for whom plurality is threatening. Those who find themselves in a philosophical position which Williams terms 'programmatic scularism' is the particular group which he has in mind. In this position, one desires to make all
sectors of society neutral and free with regard to religion.
This version of secularism “defines an exclusive public orthodoxy of a
new kind, and works on the assumption that only one sort of loyalty is really
possible. Loyalty to your faith will be
a matter of private preference…but cannot stand alongside loyalty to the state,
to the supposedly neutral public order of rational persons.”[1] Programmatic secularism sees at least two threats in
religion to rational discourse and social cohesion. The first threat of religion is to rational discourse in a society. The logic of religion appeals to an authority that is not contained in the state, but is transcendent and makes claims over and above the state. This leads to the second threat, which is to social cohesion in a society. The fact that religion directs the loyalty of its adherents to a transcendent reality makes loyalty to the state relative and secondary.
Williams’ response is multilayered. First, he notes that religious communities
can react inappropriately to pluralism and thereby be a threat to a society. A religious community can retreat into
fundamentalism and fight against any admittance of 'the other' in a society. Williams discerns in this sort of move an intellectual arrogance as the religious community claims to known all that can be known of the world and its god, without the need for these foreign interlopers. Williams argues that this is, ironically, to
secularize religious faith by fully immanentizing religion, closing it off to
the transcendent and divine.[2] It is to occupy a faith position “in which
nothing remains to be discovered about human nature and the possibilities of
human relationships and language.”[3] Religious communities are thus called by Williams to recognize
the fact of plurality, and to not see it as a threat> Rather, religions communities should value this environment as one that brings about the possibility of conversation and discussion about important, eternal, and ultimate matters. If evaluated in this light, pluralism is seen as an opportunity to both share the good that a religious community has as well as to refine their own understanding of this good in dialogue with others.
The state faces a similar call in response to the reality of pluralism. A welcoming stance toward in in the case of the state is based upon both the fact that this is the reality of the world (to deny it would do no good), but also because of the history of modern democratic liberalism. Indeed, Williams argues, one of the insights of liberalism is that all cultures are
in progress, working themselves out in continual conversation with other cultures and claims. This should not be seen as a threat, but a
condition which allow liberal states to embody the liberal ideal of freedom of
conscience. Liberalism was born in a
rejection of authoritarian tradition which claimed to put certain policies and
methods out of bounds of rational discourse, i.e. the magisterium of the medieval Catholic church, or the divine right of kings.
Against this, liberalism desired a context in which people were free to
engage in enquiry of how best to live as individuals and as a society, leading
to a public square which was free from coercive authorities. The irony of liberalism in our own day is
that it can settle for this neutral space as an accepted accomplishment, an end
of this history of development, and exile any religious commitments from it. In doing so, the liberal state becomes the tyrant
it originally opposed. The
result of such a settling would be to make “public reasoning [as opposed to authoritarian dictates]…purely instrumental; it is what
goes on in the public sphere simply to test more and less administratively
successful methods of continuing the provision of undisturbed public
order. In other words, there is nothing
fundamental to argue about in public.”[4] Surely this is not what was envisioned by the
early advocates of the Enlightenment. Those who made up this intellectual endeavor were deeply influenced by the Christian faith’s ‘eschatological reserve’ which
questioned any political settlement as final.
Such a position led to the questioning of the claims of princes and
popes, and it should also continue to question the claims of modern states.
The solution, for Williams, is messy; “a crowded and
argumentative public square” in which religious and non-religious are freely
engaged in discussions of deep convictions for what is best for human life.[5] The state is to recognize and welcome the
critical role provided by religious communities, in which “it is always
possible to challenge accounts of political reasoning that take no account of
solidarities beyond those of the state.”[6] This is not to unduly single out religious
communities and their attendant commitment to a vision of the good life;
Williams also calls out other interest groups, the cooperation of which is in
the state’s best interest. The role of
the state then becomes twofold; to secure “the liberty of groups to pursue
their own social goods” and to build “in to its own processes a set of cautions
and defences against absolutism.”[7] Only by doing so can liberalism’s vision
continue to be realized in a world of increasing variety and plurality.
Charles Taylor also addresses how best to respond to the
reality of pluralism; two such places are an earlier essay entitled “The
Politics of Recognition”[8] and in various places of A Secular Age.[9] In his essay, Taylor traces the philosophical
developments that have led to the emergence of various identities in a society,
leading to a pluralism not simply external to a culture (i.e., there are many cultures around us), but internal to what
may have previously appeared to be cohesive and homogeneous (i.e., new and different ways of conceiving family relationships within a culture). Taylor identifies two major changes which
have affected this outcome: a shift from social relationships based upon honor
to one of dignity, and the development of the modern notion of identity which
is individual and necessitates authenticity.
These two have brought about two kinds of politics which exist in an
uneasy tension. The first is the politics of universal dignity, in which everyone must be
accorded equal value. The second kind is the politics of difference, in which people and
cultures must be recognized for their own particularity and honored as
such. The tension is clearly seen in a
multicultural setting, in which a cultural group seeks acknowledgement and
space to practice its own customs which may be at odds with the wider society,
and may even place requirements on the individual members of the group. According to politics of difference, the
group should be recognized and allowed to operate in its own way. However, to the politics of dignity, this sounds
like special treatment, and therefore is anathema; each person must be allowed
their own choice and be given equal treatment under the law. To illustrate such a conflict, Taylor points
to Quebec’s resistance to Canada’s Charter of Rights because of Quebec’s
particular francophone culture and its desire to maintain such a culture for
the future. Quebec’s legal code placed
requirements on individuals regarding where they could send their children to
school, or what language had to be used in businesses. Where this clashed with Canada’s Charter,
should the enshrined individual rights of the Charter prevail or the distinct
society of Quebec?
In response to such a situation, Taylor argues for a
model which allows for cultural distinctiveness, and even an officially
sanctioned vision of the good life so long as it allows for minorities. “A society with strong collective goals can
be liberal, on this view, provided it is also capable of respecting diversity,
especially when dealing with those who don’t share its common goals; and
provided it can offer adequate safeguards for fundamental rights.”[10] Taylor acknowledges that this is not an easy
position to be in, but neither is a more common conception of liberalism which
inevitable faces conflict between liberty and equality or prosperity and
justice. To use Williams’ phrase, Taylor
calls for “a crowded and argumentative public square”[11] in which conflicts of
values are acknowledged and engaged.
Both the proposals of Williams and Taylor ask for a
refinement of the modern focus on rights in a society. Taylor argues that state’s must distinguish
“fundamental rights from the broad range of immunities and presumptions of
uniform treatment that have sprung up in modern cultures of judicial review.”[12] Taylor particularly criticizes to the American process of judicial review, in which the Supreme Court reviews the constitutional validity of a legislative act. In Taylor's view, such a process vitiates against
cultural harmony, as it is a winner-take-all system in which one party is
pronounced right and the other wrong. With such a decision, there remains little room for parties to continue to contend with one another, compromise, and come to an agreeable consensus.
Williams
provides more commentary on this refocusing of the definition of rights. He proposes that “the irreducible
core of human rights is the liberty to make sense as a bodily subject; which
means that the inviolability of the body itself is where we should start in
thinking about rights.”[13] Williams is wary of a view of
rights which seeks to catalog human capabilities that should be upheld. Such an approach to rights risks dehumanizing those who for some reason lack these capabilities (children
or the disabled, for example). It also makes rights a matter of legal
positivism (that it is a right because we have proposed it as one), which is contradictory to the very notion of a right. Rather, Williams would refocus our understanding of
rights as fundamentally centered on the fact of our bodily existence. We have rights because we exists as embodied persons. Rights are based upon this, a crucial aspect of which is the
human ability to communicate (both verbally and non-verbally) which then
extends these rights beyond the individual to relationships between embodied
persons in a society, mutually recognizing and understanding one another. The law’s role is to step in to rectify a
situation in which this mutual recognition and discourse cannot occur because
of a systemic issue, i.e. institutional slavery or segregation. This echoes Taylor’s illustration for his own
arguments, in which he writes of women and minority students seeking changes in
school curriculum “in order to give due recognition to the hitherto excluded.”[14]
Taylor also shares Williams’ concern for the effects of
immanentization (that is, the complete cutting off of the transcendent/eternal from our concepts and considerations) on the secular and religious.
Where Williams speaks of both secular states and religious groups
running the risk of claiming “the possibility of historical closure and
exhaustion,”[15]
Taylor speaks of closed world structures.
Taylor defines these as “ways of restricting our grasp of things which
are not recognized as such.”[16] Such structures are closed to the
transcendent, and they can be both secular and religious. Secular closed world structures are based
upon an Enlightenment epistemology which prioritizes knowledge of self and external
objects. Descartes' infamous dictum "I think, therefore I am" illustrates this priority; what I can know is founded first on my knowledge of myself as a thinking being. The knower moves from this secure position to other external objects that can be verified by the mind. When it comes to the
transcendent, “it is obvious that the inference to the transcendent is at the
extreme and most fragile end of a chain of inferences; it is the most
epistemically questionable” and commands the least consensus.[17] As this is the case, the transcendent is then rejected as an untenable position; it is better to face the world as it is and
how we know it. Taylor also speaks of a
believer’s closed world structures, which sees the world as a settled reality
with battle lines firmly drawn. The
closed stance is evidenced by the strand of religion which is hostile to the
world. “We have only to think of Pius
IX, fulminating in his Syllabus of
1864 against all the errors of the modern world.”[18] As with the secularist, here the fundamentalist
believers sees the world as being divided clearly between two camps, the
godless and the faithful. The faithful
have the truth in its fullness and do battle against the enemy. Taylor argues that many of these
fundamentalists operate in the same epistemological structures and methods of
argumentation as the secularists; they are simply more willing to argue for
those parts of the chain of inferences which seemed untenable to others. And neither secular nor the religious closed
world structures expect to find or experience God in the world; the secular
because God was simply never there, and the religious because God is confined either
to their past or to their camp.
In summary, both Rowan Williams and Charles Taylor seek to address how a society can function in an environment which contains a plurality of cultures, religions, and visions of the good. They both would advocate an hospitable stance toward this for both the state and religious believers, although much of the above discussion has focused on implications for the state. This call does necessitate a reconsideration of the place of rights, and their definition, within society. Without this, however, states face the possibility of descended into tyranny.
[1] Rowan Williams, Faith in the Public Square (Bloomsbury:
London, 2012), 3.
[2] Williams, Faith, 18.
[3] Williams, Faith, 72.
[4] Williams, Faith, 26-27.
[5] Williams, Faith, 27.
[6] Williams, Faith, 33.
[7] Williams, Faith, 58.
[8] Charles Taylor, “The Politics of
Recognition” in Philosophical Arguments
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard, 1995), 225-256.
[9] Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap
Press, 2007).
[10] Taylor, “The Politics of
Recognition”, 247.
[11] Williams, Faith, 27.
[12] Taylor, “Politics,” 248.
[13] Williams, Faith, 155.
[14] Taylor, “Politics,” 251.
[15] Williams, Faith, 18.
[16] Taylor, Secular, 551.
[17] Taylor, Secular, 558.
[18] Taylor, Secular, 570.
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