Bust Nak wrote:theopoesis wrote:(1) A belief in a self-created, self-actualized individual through self-will; a belief in scientific causal determinism and behaviorism that eliminate the free will which makes self-actualization possible.
To accept both of these ideas is indeed inconsistent, but secularists don't (I certainly don't) think both are true. Rather we are happy with either one being true. So what if feel will is an illusion, so what if nature isn't deterministic?
Everyone who has responded to these points has ignored the line where I say that I am speaking in generalities, and that any specific analysis would require looking at a specific thinker's works. Fine and well if you don't think both are true, but I dare say that many secularists buy into both scientism and self-actualization. I believe E.O. Wilson says as much, but I do not have his books at hand to address the situation. I do address specific thinkers below, so for now will have to leave this point as an "I say its true, you say its not" situation.
Bust Nak wrote:
(2) A belief in progress and the advancement of human kind; the elimination of objective standards of truth and morality with which to measure progress.
Seems to be an equivocation between "objective" as in absolute and "objective" as in fair. For example while there is no intrinsic value to "freedom" (it's value is assigned by us subjectively) we can still objectively say humanity have made some progress with respect to freedom.
Hardly the case. Equivocation as a logical fallacy is typically the use of one word several times in an argument, but switching its meaning. I fail to understand how my using the word a single time represents equivocation.
I claim that we believe in progress, that we are indisputably better off than our predecessors, but that we have no universally objective standard with which to judge whether we are better off. It is merely a subjective opinion, and progress the self-legitimizing myth by which we perpetuate this opinion.
To use your example, to objectively (fairly? or truthfully?) say that humanity has made some progress with respect to freedom, we must have a universal standard with which to measure our freedoms and the freedoms of the past. We must have some way of definitively saying one is better than the other. But we claim that there is no such objective standard, and therefore our opinion of our freedom today is just that: opinion.
I of course believe in progress, but I also have a worldview which allows for objective (absolute) measures of knowledge and goodness.
Bust Nak wrote:
(3) A belief in the inalienable rights of the political individual; the relegation of political truths to popular conventions, thereby guaranteeing that rights are always subject to alienation.
Surely if you are talking about the rights of political individual, political truths and conventions, you are talking about legal rights and not inalienable rights. To me inalienable rights sounds more religious than secular.
No, I intend to speak of inalienable rights, just like those spoken of in the United Nations'
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights for example. The preamble to this document claims: "recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and
inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world." It is with this clam in mind that the UN functions with respect to human rights, imposing itself as an outsider into situations of injustice, genocide, and political tyranny. The UN, the Geneva Convention, and other NGOs such as Human Rights Watch all are based on the idea of an inalienable right: humans have a right to life, to freedom, to economic opportunity, etc. Even if the legal situation of these countries changes, the UN claims to be able to legitimately intervene to secure the inalienable rights of local residents which are no longer legal rights, which local legal systems and governments have rescinded. (This is also in the UN Charter: "We the people of the United Nations [are] determined... to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights.")
However, though the UN claims inalienable rights as its rationale for intervention, it also is based on a legal theory of convention. The UN is legally binding as a legal convention through popular consent. But what if the populace no longer consents? Then, according to the legal basis of the UN, they UN treaties should no longer be binding. Yet, the UN proceeds as if the rights still are binding, and universally true. Either the rights are universally true, in which case we must ask where they came from, or they are by convention, in which case we must ask why the UN can intervene. You claim that the idea of "inalienable rights" sounds more religious, and I would agree because only religion can explain why they are inalienable: they are part of the intrinsic value of a human being created in the image of God, and they are part of the objective moral order of the universe created by God. But as long as secular legal theorists base rights on law and convention, rights can offer no security because laws and conventions both can change.
Pragmatically, international law seems to be based on a contradiction. You see that contradiction in the post-colonial, post-development, self-determination argument against the West imposing its "pseudo-universal" moral standards on the world, coupled with the clamor of oppressed peoples for international intervention.
Bust Nak wrote:
(4) A belief in the sufficiency of human reason to master its environment apart from supernatural revelation; the historicizing of knowledge systems as a product of culture, generation, language, gender, and race, thereby making human reason a captive of its environment instead of master over it.
I don't see what you mean here. Human reason is the product of our environment, we use human reason to change the environment for our needs, what's the problem?
I'll explain using Kant's explanation of Enlightenment (which is very linked with modernism) in his "What is Enlightenment?" In this essay, Kant claims "For this enlightenment, however, nothing is required but freedom, and indeed the most harmless among all the things to which this term can properly be applied. It is the freedom to make public use of one's reason at every point." This reason is to be "free from outside direction" which helps humans to be "more than machines." This is the ideal of reason for modernity and for the enlightenment.
Yet, postmodernism has indicated that this ideal is impossible to attain. Our reason is always directed from outside ourselves through the community (Stanley Fish), through history (Michel Foucault), and through our race, gender, and ethnicity (too many people here to list). We believe what we do because of outside factors. We claim to reach "truth" but this truth is conditioned by contingent historical conditions. Our knowledge is arbitrarily the result of our surroundings, and not the result of an encounter with an objective truth. But, if Lessing is correct, we cannot move from contingent historical data to necessary truth. If all of our thoughts are historical contingencies, none of them are necessary truths, and reason as modernism claims it collapses. We are left with Jean-Francois Lyotard's claim that Postmodernism is about process, not knowledge.
Indeed, there is a phenomenon in recent study to compare "machines" (as in industrial or computer technologies) with conceptual "machines" which are technologies in their own sense, the tools we have at hand to think, and which determine the outcome of our thought. I'm thinking of Michel Callon here, but I think from what I've heard Bruno Latour would also describe things in the same way.
The problem here is that we claim to know objective truths about the world autonomously, but the very "objective truths" we are developing says that we know nothing autonomously. And if we do not arrive at what we believe through autonomous reason, why believe it at all?
Bust Nak wrote:
(5) A belief in the individual autonomously shape his or her own identity; the elimination of a transcendent anchor for identity which relegates identity to temporal relationships, dialectics, or social networks whereby identity is completely determined by the other, and ever fragmented.
Can you clarify what you mean here? So what if how I see myself, and how I want others to see me (my own identity,) differs from how others see me (of the temporal relationships, dialectics etc you spoke of?) It's just a fact of life and not an inconsistency.
Countless secular thinkers would fall subject to this critique. I'll mention one, and briefly at that: Jean-Paul Sartre, in his
Existentialism is a Humanism. "Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself." This is the first half of my antinomy (and you'll notice similarities to point 1 above). We create our own identity, who we are, what we are to be, how we exist. We do this through freedom, claims Sartre. But then Sartre makes two moves. First, he claims, "When we say that man chooses himself, we do mean that every one of us must choose himself; but by that we also mean that in choosing for himself he chooses for all men." Our identity we choose for ourselves is implicitly (claims Sartre) the ideal that we would impose on all of humanity. So we are headed towards a contradiction: "man is
nothing else than what he makes of himself." Yet we are also something else: namely, what others make of us. Second, Sartre puts this more clearly later: "Thus the man who discovers himself directly in the
cogito also discovers all the others, and discovers them as the condition of his own existence. He recognises that he cannot be anything (in the sense in which one says one is spiritual, or that one is wicked or jealous) unless others recognise him as such." So here we reach the contradiction: I make my own identity, but my own identity is completely dependent upon others. It is a logical inconsistency in many secular thinkers, such as Sartre.
This is the basis of modern theories of identity. I am what I am as part of a dialectic (so Hegel's one cannot be a master without a slave, etc.). I am what I am relationally, through the encounter of the other (so Levinas). I am what I am as part of a particular group (so much of modern sociology). But the result is, and our modern anthropological and sociological studies show this, we are fully dependent on the other for our identity, and different others give us different identities: it fragments the self. Whereas once our identity was derived from a transcendent permanent relationship with God, now we are defined by a myriad of relationships with others, but we claim we are defined exclusively by our own self-will. This is fairly standard in the modern analysis of identity. See Charles Taylor's
Sources of the Self, Amin Maalouf's
In the Name of Identity, for two examples.
Bust Nak wrote:
(6) A belief in the liberation of sexuality from the constraints of previous moral systems to allow the best sex lives possible; the sexualization of everything through a virtual "plague of fantasies" (to use Zizek's term), whereby our own minds grow bored with the real sex we can actually get.
Surely getting bored is a problem with an individual. Besides, while it's commendable to be satisfy with what you have, it's not a good thing if the reason for being satisfied is simply because of ignorance of other things on offer.
Zizek's argument at least is that it is a cultural problem, a Western problem. He could well be incorrect, but if correct he challenges the secular metanarrative's sexual aspects, and this is a key point of contention between the secular and the "prudish" or "sexually repressed" religious alternative. It's a cultural/psychoanalytic challenge to the metanarrative of modernity. I recommend Zizek's
Plague of Fantasies if you want to get into more depth on this.
