The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse

by Steven D. Smith

Prominent observers complain that public discourse in America is shallow and unedifying. This debased condition is often attributed to, among other things, the resurgence of religion in public life. Steven Smith argues that this diagnosis has the matter backwards: it is not primarily religion but rather the strictures of secular rationalism that have drained our modern discourse of force and authenticity.



Thus, Rawlsian "public reason" filters appeals to religion or other "comprehensive doctrines" out of public deliberation. But these restrictions have the effect of excluding our deepest normative commitments, virtually assuring that the discourse will be shallow. Furthermore, because we cannot defend our normative positions without resorting to convictions that secular discourse deems inadmissible, we are frequently forced to smuggle in those convictions under the guise of benign notions such as freedom or equality.

Smith suggests that this sort of smuggling is pervasive in modern secular discourse. He shows this by considering a series of controversial, contemporary issues, including the Supreme Court's assisted-suicide decisions, the "harm principle," separation of church and state, and freedom of conscience. He concludes by suggesting that it is possible and desirable to free public discourse of the constraints associated with secularism and "public reason."

Genres: Philosophy, Politics, Nonfiction, Religion, Academic, Law, Social Science

285 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 2010

About the author

Professor Steven D Smith is the Warren Distinguished Professor of Law at San Diego University, and is the Co-Executive Director for both the Institute of Law and Religion, and the Institute for Law and Philosophy. He teaches in the area of law and religion, including as visiting professor at the University of Michigan and the University of Virginia.

Areas of Expertise are Constitutional Interpretation, Torts, Jurisprudence and Legal Theory, Law and Religion, Religious Freedom/Separation of Church and State, Federal Courts, Constitutional Law.

www.sandiego.edu/law/about/directory/...

Reviews

[Mark Jr. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent analysis and critique; solution rather "bland," as the author himself admits. But the critique is so effective that I still must award the book 5 stars. (And I enjoyed his gentle humor and easygoing writing style.)

The real strength of this critique, in my mind, is that Smith bothered to search out what leading secularists in the liberal tradition (and here I speak of the kind of "liberal" that All Americans, both Republicans and Democrats, generally are) actually said at the highest levels of academic discourse and jurisprudence. As a law professor, his mining of court opinions on euthanasia was particularly valuable. That leg-work demonstrated his thesis that even the most ardent secularists "smuggle" metaphysical and/or theological assumptions into the "iron cage" of secular discourse (a concept similar to Charles Taylor's "immanent frame"). Smith also spent time critiquing renowned philosopher Martha Nussbaum's viciously circular—he says—justification for human rights. And he offered a valuable critique of scientism, drawing from Joseph Vining ( The Song Sparrow and the Child: Claims of Science and Humanity ), namely that while evolution may provide an explanation for morality, it doesn't seem to be one that scientists themselves personally believe with consistency. Scientists do not act as if we all live in a closed system of material causes. This brief summary demonstrates, I think, that Smith was not critiquing no-name lightweights or picking odd, extraneous issues.

I have written a much longer review article about this book that I hope to publish elsewhere, but I want to share one conclusion for the Goodreads community and both of the readers of my blog. Smith's biggest contribution to me was actually how he helped crystallize the message of After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre. MacIntyre looks at the same problem Smith did but at much greater length and in a somewhat more purposefully historical fashion. MacIntyre demonstrates that the major phases of philosophy since the dawn of the Enlightenment have all critiqued each other pretty decisively on the question of the basis of morality, and nobody in the broad tradition thought anybody else found a firm foundation for morality. MacIntyre spends a great deal more time than Smith did proffering a solution, and MacIntyre's solution is Aristotelian: the recovery of telos. Despite his conversion to Catholicism, MacIntyre's solution is not so much theological as metaphysical. What Smith crystallized for me was that theology and metaphysics are the only viable places from which to get true, substantive norms. Secularism cannot provide them.

That's because the rules of secularism allow for "ises," but not "oughts." If the material universe is all there is—or all we're allowed to appeal to in public debate, even if we believe in the supernatural—then there's no standard available by which to say that one state of affairs is morally better than another. Atheists and adherents of scientism hear this and howl that Smith et al. are saying atheists are all immoral. But Smith (and I, fwiw) are not saying that; we're only saying that they can't account for morality within the iron cage of their own worldview.

Unless we're prepared to go the nihilistic direction and say with Alexander Pope, "All that is is right," some facts of our experience are going to have to be judged "wrong" by some standard or other. And unless we're happy with purely local, cultural, conventional standards—and Stanley Fish has shown in this fantastic essay that we're not—we're going to have to look to metaphysics or theology. I believe the former is a subset of the latter, personally. Smith hints that direction, too (he went to BYU), but he never really shows his cards. The closest he comes is in the small, final chapter in which he calls for more "openness." This is very similar to what Michael Sandel of Harvard concluded in Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do? At the very least, it would be nice for people to be honest to others (and to themselves) about their value systems, rather than dressing them up in supposedly neutral terminology.

This is a great book I'd love to see more secularist liberals interact with. Judging by the quality of the comments on a review of this book at the New York Times, I don't hold out much hope that many secularists will pay the kind of attention to Smith necessary to have their blinders removed, to come to themselves and recognize their smuggling operations. They still think they're all objective, scientific, and neutral.

[Ben · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you are a well-educated, secular, liberal, city-dwelling person who believes that the healthiest way to participate in culture wars is through honest, good faith conversations (during which both parties are trying to reach the truth rather than trying one-up each other and "win"), then you need to read this book ASAP.

Often, when people ask me about the books I read and my "takeaways", I can sum them up in a few sentences and maybe offer up a topical example to drive the point home. If they were to press me and ask "how have you acted differently as a result of reading that book?" I would almost invariably respond that after I finish most non-fiction books I barely think about them again, nor do I act differently. Most books I read vaguely "expand my knowledge of the world."

I think about the Disenchantment of Secular Discourse all the time. I think about it every time I (currently a secular person) have a moral conversation (invokes words like "good" or "better" or "should" - anything normative) with a friend (often secular as well). Steven Smith astutely points out that when discussing controversial issues, we often jump to discussing conclusions without understanding each other's fundamental axioms (e.g. "I think life is intrinsically valuable even with suffering, which is inevitable" vs "Life is only valuable if it's going to be more pleasurable than painful") and this results in both sides talking through each other.

I don't want to do the book injustice through summarization. It is relatively short, but one of the biggest appeals of the book is how the author goes through legal case studies (making sure to present the best arguments from both sides) to make his point about why modern discourse is shallow and people rarely change their mind about anything anymore. Our conversations feature appeals to nice-sounding but ill-defined terms such as "utility," "harm," "dignity," "liberty," "freedom," "rights," none of which are UNQUALIFIEDLY good or bad but sound like they are. The devil is always in the details, the "except for"s, the "other than"s, the nuances that require patient thought to unearth and are impossible to discover if you take mental shortcuts (for example, Googling a topic and then using the first headline that pops up from a source you recognize as your default position on that topic).

This book is about discourse, the process of coming to conclusions, not the conclusions themselves. For me to give you "brief takeaways" in a short review is dangerous because, if you were to encounter something with which you disagree (e.g. maybe you think more freedom is always better), it might be very tempting to dismiss the rest of it as being similarly misguided.

Please don't! If you are someone who is interested in

- "reaching across the aisle" and connecting with people with whom you disagree
- piercing your own algorithmic filter bubble
- combating your own confirmation bias
- understanding how the other half of America thinks

then this book is a great place to start.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent Analysis of the Public Square The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse, by Steven D. Smith ****In the wake of last year's election, it appears that discourse in the public square is breaking down completely.  Invective and name calling have become the rules of the day I cannot imagine a more propitious time to read Steven Smith’s “The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse.” It is a brilliant look at the current state of discourse in the American public arena.By way of introduction, Mr. Smith lays out for us the problem as it is typically described by pundits of different stripes. We live in the “age of American unreason” they say, characterized by a “new species of anti-rationalism” where our “politics are now so debased that they threaten our standing as a genuine democracy”. He lists the usual suspects: an under-performing educational system, media outlets interested more in entertaining than informing, “the Internet, video games, text messaging”, and especially evangelical or fundamentalist religion, all of which contribute to a dumbed-down society of those “eager only to browse and skim, but without the patience actually to read and think”. Though he is deeply concerned about the appalling state of affairs, Mr. Smith finds these sacred cows to be less than satisfying, as the same symptoms can just as easily be found in the academy, and even on the Supreme Court, as on the street or on talk radio. If, then, these are merely symptoms, what is the true cause? The answer he suggests is surprising and can be paraphrased as follows. In a reaction against the failure of Reason to fulfill the promises of the age of enlightenment, we have evicted from the public arena our “deepest convictions about what is really true and consented to work only with a scaled-down set of beliefs or methods that claim the support of an ostensible ‘overlapping consensus’”, understanding that “no one’s truth is going to prevail over its rivals”. In other words, in order to “keep [public discourse] from drowning in the perilous depths of questions about ‘the nature of the universe,’” we have discarded our worldviews and created a public arena that can be nothing but shallow.The problem does not end there. The shallowness prescribed by the rules of public discourse cannot provide satisfactory answers to the most vexing problems that face society. Therefore, those who participate in the discussion have had to resort to the practice of “smuggling” their deepest convictions in to the discussion under cover of a number of disguises. We have become a society of well-meaning hypocrites, claiming to have abandoned our convictions about first principles, all the while smuggling them in the back door in the worst disguises. All of the above is laid out in painstaking detail in the first chapter. The balance of the book is spent providing evidence to support his formulation of the question of what is wrong with public discourse in America today. He examines the most common vehicles used for such smuggling, showing how they are used in the most contentious and divisive arguments that occupy contemporary society: among them right-to-life issues, church/state division, and a non-metaphysical source of first principles. All of this might be a laborious yawn-fest, but Mr. Smith writes with conviction and a wry sense of humor that occasionally borders on sarcasm. It is a winning combination that engages the reader and encourages him to hang in there even when the going gets a little rough. Having a good teacher can make learning even the most tedious subject enjoyable. Mr. Smith appears to have all the makings of a very good teacher. Given that his subject is one of vital importance to the life of our nation, we do well to listen to what he has to say and learn as much as we can.

[Angel · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was definitely worth the time and money.

The book is much smaller than it might appear, the 60 pages in the end that include references and an index, plus the small dimension of the book, make this book seem closer to 150 pages than 300.


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Discussions in the 'modern' political\legal\ethical systems, are insufficient and severely restricted to a secular mindset that has forced us to "smuggle" in our religious values hidden under "secular" non-religious terms. and this has caused our arguments to be shallow and unproductive.
In order to prove this, Steven D Smith dives into various historical and philosophical topics including: the enlightenment thought, secularism, the US constitution, the founding fathers, the basis of morality, liberalism, utilitarianism, the harm principle, the origins of separation between church and state, conscience, intuition, scientism, belief and more.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book, by a prolific professor of law, adds his voice to the exposure of one of the great intellectual frauds of our time: the proposal that we can somehow work up morality out of sheer reason and/or science.

Smith looks searchingly within his own domains of expertise at the so-called separation of church and state as well as the definition and grounds for religious freedom. He shows how neither idea is all that clear and coherent, but especially that neither can be justified, ironically enough, on non-religious (= secularist) grounds.

He also quite satisfyingly blows up Martha Nussbaum's glamorous-but-empty philosophical project of providing grounds for moral judgments outside of religious commitments. (Has anyone in our time been able to work dazzle without depth as successfully as she?) And he concludes with a look at the off-beat musings of legal scholar Joseph Vining who pounds believers in the cult of scientism with atrocity stories--not unlike the way Ivan pounds Alyosha in "The Brothers Karamazov"--to show that naturalism/materialism/scientism has nothing helpful to say against enormity. Nothing.

Alas, in this book, at least, Smith proves more adept at demolition than suggestion. He can offer only a slight, if sincere, recommendation of "openness" to the other, a willingness to let people be who they are and say what they want to say, and then see how the conversation goes. He says it briefly, but powerfully. (Martin Marty, among many others, has said similar things about welcoming such dangerous but also promising conversations at greater length.) And that's okay: the book is well worthwhile for its welcome work of critique, and others can pick up the constructive task.

[J. J.]

Penetrating and fair-minded. “Lifts the roof off” in Francis Schaeffer’s terminology in devastating ways. An important and necessary book exposing how the modern liberal project has left us with our feet firmly planted in mid-air.

[Frank Peters · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an excellent book that was well worth struggling through and reading. As the title “The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse” implies, the book was not designed for light reading. The genre (political philosophy?) of this book is outside my normal reading areas, so it is very possible that the book would be entertaining for those who are already initiated into the field. But, for me it was difficult and sometime dreary reading, albeit containing really useful content. The book therefore reminds me of many of the books written by one of my favourite theologians (a genre that I am more comfortable with) N.T. Wright. I love reading Wright, even as I find the process often difficult. This best describes Smith’s book: difficult, but worth the effort.

The content of the book was discussing the inability of the secular discourse to say virtually anything of value. By limiting itself to only the “secular” (defined in the modern sense as the absence of anything that is not based on materialistic naturalism), it finds itself unable to find meaning. Thus, Smith points out that the secular discourse engages in creative smuggling, where it uses alternate word to import moral or value based arguments, which are often taken from historic tradition that was based on religious premises. The whole premise of the book was well spelled out in the first chapter, while the remainder of the book provided concrete examples supporting the premise. All of the remaining chapters were eye opening, sometime pathetically humorous, and sometimes scary. While reading the book I happened upon a public lecture of a very good friend, who “smuggled” through her entire talk, using words like “ought”, “should”, “best” etc., without making any suggestion where her value judgements came from. Similarly, I have been reading “Crime and Punishment” by Dostoyevsky, and was struck by the similarities between the failed philosophy of the main character with the (equally failed) philosophy of the modern secular discourse as presented by the author – Smith.

[Brian Collins · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read the three essays: "The Way We Talk Now," "Living and Dying in the 'Course of Nature,'" and "Disoriented Discourse: The Secular Subversion of Religious Freedom."

The basic thrust of the first essay is that secularism has let public discourse to a place in which it does not have the tools to work through the moral problems that a society must face. As a result religious and moral assumptions must be smuggled into our public discourse, though secularism forbids the acknowledgement of them.

In the second essay Smith demonstrates that this smuggling is both necessary but also insufficient by looking at two Supreme Court cases concerning euthanasia.

The third essay noted Smith provides a history of the separation of church and state that argues this separation was seen as jurisdictional but that it has come to be seen in terms of secularization. He then makes the case the logic of a secular separation of church and state leads to rationalization as courts seek to preserve the status quo of religious freedom but without the basis that the old theory of jurisdictional separation provided. Next the courts revise the meaning of religious freedom. Finally comes the renunciation of religious freedom. Smith demonstrates that the courts are currently at the second stage but that some legal scholars have already embraced the third phase.

[D. Owen · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse – it is a very good though intellectually challenging book. I will need to read it again – perhaps several readings will be needed. Nevertheless I have derived real benefits from this book – I understand somewhat better how our social discourse has developed. And I find at the end of the book some hope for better things:
“…Eberle examines the familiar claim of Rawls and like-minded theorists that “respect” for our fellow citizens demands that we practice “restraint” in our public discourse – that we refrain in political decision making from relying on convictions, and in particular religious convictions, that do not satisfy all of the aspirations of “public” reason or justification. Eberle finds the claim unwarranted. On the contrary, he argues that an insistence on such restraint can itself be disrespectful: it is like allowing someone to be part of your social group as long as they agree not to talk about the things that matter most to them. Conversely, sharing what you most deeply believe, and submitting yourself to criticism and instruction by your fellow citizens on the basis of what they most deeply believe, can be a profound expression of respect.” Page 225

[Margreet · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dear readers,

I'm writing my Bachelor-thesis is a comparison between The disenchantment of secular discours and A secular age by Charles Taylor.
For a better understanding of the work of Smith, I hope you can help me with the following.

In the chapter 'From reason to reasonableness' Smith explains that people lost the faith in reason as the tool to find Ultimate truth. They get reasonable instead and acknowledge pluralism.
Why does the modern people still try to base their moral on reason? (for example Nussbaum?)

Is there something wrong with my understanding of Smith or am i missing something?

Thanks in advance,
Margreet

[Doug Peters · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is absolutely brilliant. The author is clever, insightful, witty, and modest -- and he essentially exposes the failure of modern secular discourse to honestly and logically reach conclusions from established premises. The result? A shoddy excuse for discourse in which folks typically arrive at conclusions that they were predisposed to support.

[David]

Would love to know if anyone else is reading this. I'm on p.70 and really enjoying it.

[Jeremy]

Mentioned positively by Tim Keller here.