Set 3
1997-2011
Set 3
1997-2011
The third set of writings represent the first years of the 21st century, a century marked by the event of 9/11 and its aftermath. By 2004 the U.S. was caught up in a paroxysm of mixed emotions, intense emotions of fear, outrage, and confusion.
The nation had already been whip-lashed by the “Culture Wars” and the “Science Wars,” just as the Cold War had promised peace. The Washington Establishment was still celebrating a new era of global peace brought about by the triumph of global capitalism. But this bright promise had been severely tarnished by the Enron scandal, not yet completely forgotten. Confusion was now rampant over why the administration had gone after al-Qaeda under Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan and then suddenly abandoned that mission to invade Iraq, promising a quick war against “terrorism,” by a new “axis of evil.” Confusion, fear, and outrage had by 2004 been intensified when Republican rhetoric suggested that the U.S. was caught up in a new religious war against internal enemies.
One of the few facts that had become certain by the spring of 2004 was that the administration had authorized the use of extreme and degrading torture in Abu Ghraib. But by the fall elections that fact seemed to have been forgotten. It was never mentioned by either party or by any of the moderators in any of the debates. The other fact that seemed certain was that “democracy” was under threat. But by whom was unclear.
In this context, “democracy” could no longer be taken for granted by anyone; neither the fact, nor the understanding. This is the context in which the writings of this third set were produced.
First Document, 2001
Danielle Allen’s “Aims of Education” Address, University of Chicago
I am not the author of the first item I want to include in this archive, but it captures the mood of the country at this moment. The author is Danielle Allen. a professor at the University of Chicago at the time of the 9/11 terrorist attack. Allen becomes a central figure later in my story, but she first came to my attention with a talk she gave on September 20, 2001, just eight days after the attack, welcoming new students to the University by giving the annual “Aims of Education” address. From first to last her welcome is a profound meditation on democracy as a resource for responding to such a moment of shock and paralysis. Here is how she concluded:
Finally, I charge you as you now undertake your own education, commit yourselves to warding off stasis. Commit yourselves to warding off the dangers that follow from intellectual paralysis among your fellow citizens. Develop methods of reasoning so that in moments of confusion you can, like my own teacher, lead yourself and others back into thinking. Do not let the current moment undermine your confidence in and commitment to democratic practices. No more allow confusion and disorientation to lead you to believe that democratic practices can be sacrificed without also sacrificing democracy. Restore your confidence in democratic forms of interaction—in openness and trust—by practicing them in the classroom. There, restore your confidence in friendliness as a source of intelligence and strength.
Second Document 2002
The next document in the archive is an explicitly autobiographical essay, “Navigating a Stone’s Flow,” written in 2002. As a transition piece into the 21st century, it was an effort to get my bearings personally, along with everyone else, in the stormy short years between 1997 and the initial post-9/11 shock. It opens with a poem, a call to “Be faithful to the earth,” a warning call which has become inseparable from the central importance of Bruno Latour in my life as a “guide,” a guide to thinking about democracy on a global scale.
Third Document 2006
Democracy as the central issue of this third set of writings is raised explicitly in the second essay I wrote in 2006, entitled “Fundamental Commitment to Democracy: Virtuous Certainty, Authority, and the Moral Passion of Skepticism,” published in 2006. It was, like “Stone’s Flow,” explicitly autobiographical.
By 2006, the central issues surrounding the idea of “democracy,” were front and center, raised by the Bush administration’s response to 9/11. These issues included the foundational question of government of, by, and for the people, versus authoritarianism or domination, questions of legitimacy, questions of who are “the people,” who belongs to the body politic, matters of equal citizenship, that is, in what sense all human beings can be considered equally citizens or agents together of their common life, issues of ongoing governance, that is and succession, and a host of others related to counterfeit versions of democracy, democracy “at the point of a gun.”
Fourth and Fifth Documents 2006, 2008
Issues surrounding democracy are central to each of the other writings in this set. Two of the writings are on Hannah Arendt, written in 2006 and 2008. The first is a guide to reading The Human Condition. The second is an essay on a book about Arendt by Peg Cunningham, entitled Hannah Arendt and Human Rights (2006). In the latter essay I introduce the term “fundamentalism,” to refer to what I see as the overnight passage of America from a postmodernist mania to extremist fundamentalist certainties.
Sixth Document 2011
The final item in this set is an article written in 2011, in which I returned to Jonathan Z. Smith, and paired his work with that of the noted Princeton scholar, Jeffrey Stout. I drew on Stout’s masterful book, Democracy and Tradition, published in 2004.
Abstract
From the outset Jonathan Z. Smith has regarded his study of religion as a matter of public concern, not something separate and apart. He makes this explicit in a number of ways, but does not offer a fully-developed political theory. To make what I argue is his implicit non-sovereign political theory more fully explicit I have drawn on three political theorists, Jeffrey Stout, Hannah Arendt as interpreted by Patchen Markell, and Bruno Latour.
I use Stout because his pragmatist notion of public reason assigns priority to the reasoning implicit in democratic norms and commitments that are themselves embedded in democratic practices, and considers explicit, discursive reasoning and its formal instruments and products dependent, partial, fallible – and also absolutely essential to his neo-pragmatist notion of getting things right, that is, to the responsible exercise of public reason. Smith’s approach to religion entails a comparable relationship of interdependence between religion and thinking.
Markell and Latour strengthen Stout’s case for the responsive stability of non-sovereign democratic politics over the brittle stability offered by sovereign political forms, Markell by making explicit the concept of responsive stability entailed in Hannah Arendt’s concept of non-sovereignty, and Latour by extending this concept to include the state and the sciences. Smith’s contribution is to make religion a resource for such a non-sovereign democratic politics.
I use Hannah Arendt’s notion of rule as interpreted by Patchen Markell to make explicit the kind of responsive stability entailed in the concept of non-sovereignty that I attribute to Smith and Stout. I use Latour because his adoption of Dewey’s notion of politics as defined by the trajectory of problems becoming public rather than around the state extends the non-sovereign notion of political out to include the state as well as “down” to include the natural sciences.