A Comportment for our Times Sankaran Krishna (bio) William E. Connolly, Why I Am Not A Secularist (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999, 210 pages.) In a recent series of seminal works, political theorist William E. Connolly has articulated a powerful case for a pluralist ethos that is respectful of the essential contestability of social reality and cultivates a generous and forbearing attitude towards political and philosophical differences among various collectivities. Connolly has reminded us that all too many of our discourses of rights and entitlements are premised on socially constructed and temporally contingent definitions of ‘human being’ — definitions that might prove one day to have been hopelessly inadequate, or may not travel too well even now across cultural and civilizational borders. He has argued for a democratic practice that maintains a constant tension between the desire for stable conventions with the need for periodic denaturalizations, and for a comportment towards political and social organization that is rhizomatic, decentered and modest rather than centripetal, transcendent and hubristic. Following on Identity\Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox (Cornell, 1991) and The Ethos of Pluralization (Minnesota, 1995), is his latest book under review here, Why I am not a Secularist. In this closely argued and elegant work, Connolly buttresses all the above lineaments and amplifies on many more. Beginning with an adjudication between secular (but often over-rational, abstract, dismissive, disenchanted) and theistic (but often parochial, intolerant) ways of being, he proceeds to engage issues such as justice, capital punishment, the culture wars, the religious right and its efforts to corner national meaning, the nation-state, and the right to terminate one’s own life. He makes a persuasive case for an ethos of the political that prizes humility, generosity, forbearance, and attached\detachment or a “non-theistic enchantment with the world” (p.16). His debts to (certain readings of) Nietzsche, Deleuze, Foucault and Arendt are explicit, while he whets his argument against the works of Kant, Habermas, Rawls and (moving some way down a register of philosophical acumen) that self-anointed preserver of American morality — God’s Own Quarterback himself- William Bennett. Connolly’s distaste for the frequently reductionist debate between secularists and those of theistic orientations is probably shared by many. A nuanced and complex field of encounter has come to be calibrated exclusively on a decibel scale and perhaps the two sides have long since stopped listening to each other, let alone allowing for the possibility of a conversion through debate. Like the piscine symbols metaled on to the backs of automobiles (“Darwin” / “Jesus”), secularist and theist have become badges of honor and pass each other with smug contempt. Connolly, notwithstanding his own preference for secularism over any form of theistic state, comes down hard on secular conceits. He finds the secularist position to be “insufficiently alert to the layered density of political thinking” and often embodying “unacknowledged elements of immodesty in itself” (p.4). In containing the genii of religious dogmatism and passion, secularists throw the baby out with the bath water. He notes that, “as they try to seal public life from religious doctrines they cast out a set of nontheistic orientations to reverence, ethics, and public life that deserve to be heard. These ... effects follow from the secular conceit to provide a single, authoritative basis of public reason and/or public ethics that governs all reasonable citizens regardless of “personal” or “private” faith. To invoke that principle against religious enthusiasts, secularists are also pressed to be pugnacious against asecular, nontheistic perspectives that call these very assumptions and prerogatives into question” (p. 5). The hubris of the post-enlightenment, modern, rational individual with his hard-nosed contempt for all matters religious and metaphysical makes the secularist both strident and often “constipated” (p.6), a person contemptuous of the very diversity that his liberal and democratic ethos ostensibly prizes. In making his case for a multidimensional pluralism that would not be so dismissive of non-secular conceptions of the good life, Connolly draws a distinction between what he calls the rational and the visceral registers of being. He argues that secularists have been dismissive of and too intent on confining the passions that underlie our attachments and politics...
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Sep 29, 2013
Bojan D Spaic 
Open Access