{"id":3959,"date":"2016-03-07T13:09:45","date_gmt":"2016-03-07T20:09:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newcoolthang.com\/?p=3959"},"modified":"2020-01-09T04:07:29","modified_gmt":"2020-01-09T11:07:29","slug":"morality-religion-and-politics-pt-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newcoolthang.com\/index.php\/2016\/03\/morality-religion-and-politics-pt-2\/3959\/","title":{"rendered":"Morality, Religion and Politics: Pt. 2"},"content":{"rendered":"

The strange thing about the enlightenment was that the better policies and institutions worked, the more people took them for granted and criticized them for their imperfections.\u00a0 (This tendency is still very much with us<\/a>.) Koselleck thus argues, in Crisis and Critique<\/em>, that the Enlightenment was an inevitably hypocritical process in which various societies – both secret and formal as well as public and informal \u2013 attacked absolute monarchism by willfully ignoring the concrete historical problems to which it was a solution.\u00a0 Absolute monarchism had ended the civil and religious wars by placing a strong division between politics and morality\/religion, and it was only within such a context of relative peace that Enlightenment criticisms were able to maintain an air of plausibility.<\/p>\n

Thus, while Hobbes saw the authoritarian state as protecting our very lives<\/em> within a civil war of all against all, 38 years later, Locke would argue that the state was a mechanism for protecting property and happiness<\/em> within an otherwise peaceful environment populated by people who were both rational and tolerant.\u00a0 Locke had thus fallen into the traditionally British snare of taking the peace and tolerance which he then observed in his own society as timeless, natural and thus in little need of vigilant safe-guarding when it had actually been the historical product of authoritarian state control.\u00a0 The historical transition from a Hobbesian to a Lockean idea of the state thus lies at the heart of Koselleck\u2019s argument, it being the antidote to such timeless and quintessentially British thinking.<\/p>\n

The authoritarian state did not prohibit religious or moral discourse amongst its subjects.\u00a0 Rather, it prohibited 1) religious and moral violence and 2) religious and moral legislation over\u00a0the state.\u00a0 For this reason, the authoritarian state provided a common enemy for wildly differing religious creeds and social strata while at the same time preventing the violent intolerance that had previously divided such groups from each other. This provided the grounds necessary for the creation of \u201csocieties\u201d in which vice and virtue were measured by the non-violent approval and disapproval of its members through mutual criticism. Thus, while Hobbes had relegated all religion\/morality to each person\u2019s individual and non-binding opinion, this opinion was now organizing itself into\u00a0a public phenomenon with, at least some, accompanying legislative prerogatives.\u00a0 In this way, \u201csociety\u201d and it\u2019s \u201cpublic opinion\u201d came to be perceived, first, as a morality based in mutual and decentralized criticism that thus stood apart from religion and, subsequently, as standing in competition with the sovereign will of the monarch. As such, when these societies began seeking political influence, the monarch was quick to censor them – just as one might expect. There were, however, two (somewhat incompatible) ways in which such societies adapted to this\u00a0censorship: secrecy and neutrality.<\/p>\n

The first adaptive strategy was that of secrecy. Masonic lodges and other such secret societies arose and multiplied across Europe and\u00a0the American colonies. Such societies attempted to create a \u201claw of private censure\u201d in opposition to both the divine law of religion and the civil law of the state. (Note ambiguous tension between privacy and legislation.) There was, however, an increased sensitivity to \u201cbetrayal\u201d within these societies that contributed to a new gradation with a corresponding hierarchy of enlightened mysteries within the such lodges. The true and basic (political) purposes of these orders were not revealed to neophytes, but only gradually. In this way, \u201cfreedom in secret became the secret of freedom.\u201d (pg. 75) Indeed, this secret allocation of unequal political influence and influence became almost a mirror image of the public allocation of unequal political authority and decision-making. Finally, as their members came to silently occupy administrative positions within the absolute state, these secret societies found themselves very well organized and positioned as (what would become) political parties at the outbreak of the French Revolution.<\/p>\n

The second adaptive strategy in the face of political censorship was a pretense of neutrality and innocence.\u00a0 The clearest embodiment of this pretense is to be found within the Royal Society in which members consciously sidelined all religious and political aspirations and legislative relevance for the very survival of the society. \u00a0(It is from these very practical constraints that the neutral, objectivity to which modern science still pretends found its historical impetus.) \u00a0The strong separation of morality from politics within these organizations thus allowed them to maintain a semblance of innocence and universality that was tightly bound up with and contingent upon their political impotence. Indeed, such an image of innocence and universality is relatively easy to maintain when one is never forced to make a socially relevant decision.\u00a0 (It was this fear of having to make a decision for which one could be held responsible that liberal society, according to Carl Schmitt, \u201canswer[s] the question \u2018Christ or Barabbas?\u2019 with a proposal to adjourn or appoint a commission of investigation.\u201d)<\/p>\n

There thus emerged a kind of division of labor in which the political state concerned itself with particularistic decision-making and peace-keeping while moral societies, both secret and public, concerned themselves with \u00a0public opinion, virtue and vice. The Enlightenment is thus a process in which moral society increasingly sees, or at least claims the political\u00a0state\u00a0to be superfluous.\u00a0 Indeed, it was only a matter of time before the iterative process of mutual and de-centralized moral criticism would seek to stand in judgment of everything, including the political state.\u00a0 By positioning itself above politics, morality essentially eliminated politics, thus construing any amoral exercise of political power or any decision which does not submit itself to the dictates of \u201cmoral reason\u201d (note the symbiotic terminology!) as an affront to virtue itself:<\/p>\n

\u201cNot the King, but moral law was to rule him and through him. This moral view of the political duties of the King deprived sovereign power of its political freedom of decision, that is, its absolute sovereignty\u2026 Once law is taken out of the political sphere and defined in moral terms, all violations of law that do not conform to morality become acts of pure force\u2026 Nothing but \u2018the law\u2019 is supposed to rule\u2026 The prince\u2019s power is stripped of its representative and sovereign character\u2026 Being directly non-political, society nevertheless wants to rule indirectly through the moralization of politics\u2026 the King is to rule in the name of morality, that is, of society.\u201d (pg. 145-6)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In review and summary, absolute monarchy created the conditions necessary for and ideally suited to the emergence of \u201cpublic opinion\u201d. When this public opinion became a threat to the state, it was censored, thus compelling it to repress its political ambitions through various forms of secrecy and feigned neutrality. Pretenses to neutrality, secrecy and decentralization all contributed to the illusion that laws rather than person could and ought to rule. Thus, as the relative peace and tolerance created by the authoritarian state came to be taken for granted, moral society similarly came to see the sovereignty of the political state as superfluous and, by very definition, immoral. Such claims, however, clearly belied both the secrecy as well as the pretended neutrality of previous thinkers.<\/p>\n

Questions for Mormons:<\/p>\n

Whereas absolute monarchy had created a strong separation between private morality\/religion and public politics, the Enlightenment further divided public morality from private religion. Which, if any of these divisions do Mormons accept? Is claiming an organized religion to be private a contradiction in terms? Do Mormons see such divisions between morality and religion as historical or in some sense natural or eternal?<\/p>\n

In what ways has Mormonism embraced both secrecy and pretenses to neutrality throughout its history? In what ways have hierarchies of secrecy paralleled or supplemented the hierarchies of authority that structure church?<\/p>\n

\u201cMoral law\u201d was the guise under which \u201cpublic opinion\u201d (having distanced itself from \u201cprivate religion\u201d) sought to assert itself politically in opposition to and above the will of the political sovereign. What is the relationship between \u201cmoral law\u201d, \u201cpublic opinion\u201d and \u201csovereign will\u201d in Mormon doctrine, and what relevance does the morality\/religion distinction play in this relationship?<\/p>\n

The Enlightenment insisted that nothing but impersonal law ought to rule \u2013 a claim that was well adapted to both the secrecy and the supposed neutrality of its advocates.\u00a0 Do Mormons accept that principles of an unchanging moral law rather than the decisions of a sovereign will should govern the church? If so, does this constrain, if not stifle the kinds of authoritative revelation that we are willing to expect and accept?