Justice and Generality After Critique

The context for my paper is Wesley J. Wildman's understanding of the dispute between modernity and postmodernity; namely, that it is fundamentally a dispute about generality and justice. Where postmodern critique goes wrong, he argues, is in failing to appreciate how a tireless commitment to self-criticism can manage the risks of assertion. We need both consciousness-raising critique and orienting conceptual interpretations of the world—achieving such checks and balances is the promise of a pragmatic theory of inquiry. In contrast to postmodernist asceticism, Wildman invites us to build responsibly. I agree that constructive steps are needed after genealogical, post-colonial, feminist, and other such critical social theories. My concern, shared by several contributors to Religion in Multidisciplinary Perspective, is that these steps can be taken too soon, meaning before they have been sufficiently retooled by way of such theories’ concerns about the politics of discourse and inquiry and the conceptual tools with which we conceive comparative programs.I begin by detailing Wildman's position with respect to postmodern criticism. I then explore (and second) concerns voiced by LeRon Shults, Timothy Knepper, and Sarah Fredericks with respect to this position. I proceed to put them in constructive conversation with contemporary anthropologists striving for new conceptions of comparative inquiry in response to similar concerns. My purpose is to show how shame-induced asceticism about a certain type of assertion can create space, not just for greater readiness to revise, but for entirely new senses of assertion.Wildman regards the work of postmodernist critics as “far and away the most ascetic form of philosophy ever attempted.”1 The contributions of these “philosophical analysts of ideology in politics and discourse” including thinkers “from Freud and before to Derrida and beyond” have greatly improved our awareness and understanding of “the power of narratives and theories to structure imaginations.”2 But they have almost exclusively regarded this power in negative ways, as a subject of suspicion and enemy of an authentic life. Attempting to systematically avoid ideology, these thinkers have developed highly “ritualized form[s] of discourse” as a way of habitually divulging and eliminating frameworks of understanding.This expectation, according to Wildman, is “impossible” to satisfy and is as such “disabling,” not to mention “undesirable.”3 Ideology can be as helpful as it can be hurtful and, in any case, it is unavoidable: “[these] coded frameworks of interpretation and meaning . . . are invaluable in helping us to engage our social worlds constructively.” He continues, “Without partially hidden frameworks for orienting ourselves to the endless complexities of social life and politics, we have only painful exposure to the harsh light of more self-awareness than we can tolerate, producing paralysis and impotence. Thus, we need both partially submerged frameworks for social orientation and efficient mechanisms for correcting those frameworks when they produce undesirable or unjust effects.”4 Bracketing the discussion about how we judge effects to be “undesirable” or “unjust,” I wonder about what this statement implies regarding the placating function of frameworks against reality. What is it about which we become aware that produces paralysis? And what is the framework within which we can make such assessments?Wildman does not see any issue in answering such questions; he draws upon evolutionary biology to establish a positive valence for ideology to counterbalance postmodernist concerns.The ability to appeal to the natural sciences is central to Wildman's protest, since a one-sided account of the way power penetrates knowledge overestimates the arbitrariness and irrationality of that knowledge and invalidates any bid for authority on the part of the natural sciences. As I understand him, Wildman takes this postmodernist move to be symptomatic of a broader lack of self-awareness, which forgets that ideological criticism was itself a modern creation.5 He takes the very fact that ideological criticism has emerged to be a testament against postmodernist fatalism. A two-sided account of the way power penetrates knowledge would, presumably on his logic, admit partial arbitrariness and partial irrationality. (It is unclear to me what differentiates arbitrariness from irrationality here, and I'd be grateful for a lesson.)At least in this context (he works in many), Wildman employs the same metaphor for ideology which postmodernists do; namely, one which likens ideologies to frames, lenses, or other viewing devices. The key difference is that he thinks we can better these devices: “The dangers of assertion, of generality and theory, meet their match in, and only in, a tireless devotion to self-criticism and the search for correction.”6 A commitment to ceaseless correction, characteristic of a pragmatic theory of inquiry, is how we navigate disputes about justice and generality.7 In practice, such a commitment means “listen[ing] to the non-Western world closely enough” not only “to realize that we have a lot to learn from other cultures” but also to realize “that we actually strongly disagree with an enormous amount of what non-Western people do and believe—from worldviews to religion, from medical treatments to child-rearing practices, from politics to economics.”8 While I agree with Wildman's critique of the postmodernist forms of overemphasis or one-sidedness, I also think he runs the risk of underestimating what it might take to correct for it. Several contributors to RMP express similar suspicions.LeRon Shults, for instance, argues that Wildman “inadequately confronts and contests the religious biases that foster superstition and segregation in our contemporary global context” by continuing to not only tolerate but also employ “linguistic ‘icons’ of allegedly transcendental supernatural agents”—namely, “God.”9 According to Shults, Wildman does this for two reasons: first, he takes such anthropomorphic linguistic icons to be necessary for any and all attempts at “effing the ineffable” and second, but relatedly, he thinks the majority of people depend on this function to “live well and feel good”.10It isn't just that Wildman chooses pastoral care over intellectual rigor, but that he operates with a model of language-reality relations, according to which there is always a brink of the sayable, beyond which language must gesture. It is a model underwritten by evolutionary biology, he argues, and specifically the evolution of language. The language that gestures at the unsayable is sometimes what he defines as “religious” language.11 He won't relinquish the term “religion,” which Shults thinks he ought to, given the dispersive polytheticism among the senses Wildman permits it.12 A proper power analysis requires a more “aggressive iconoclasm” for Shults, presumably because anything less fails to achieve the wisest balance between generality and justice.13Timothy Knepper shares Shults's concern, framing it not in terms of iconoclasm but of the radicality of reform. Wildman's “religious philosophy” is not “radical enough” for Knepper insofar as it continues to work with “Kantianesque categories” to structure diverse religious phenomena.14 He worries, more specifically, about using categories like “physico-theological” versus “psycho-theological” to distinguish (and identify) religious traditions, because these categories remain “steeped in Western philosophy and [a] Christian [model of] religion.”15 Knepper's own effort to render philosophy of religion more global involves more radical critiques of the modern, liberal, European, Protestant categories—like “belief”—with which comparative studies of religion have operated and which have been thoroughly challenged by power theorists like Talal Asad, Tomoko Masuzawa, and Brent Nongbri.Like Shults, Knepper is unsatisfied with the extent to which Wildman allows power critiques to penetrate his most fundamental assumptions about the comparative project (including, for starters, what is being compared). Wildman is still quite comfortable with the language of multiple worldviews, or what he often calls our “mental models of reality.”16 But I share Knepper's concerns about premising the comparative enterprise on the idea that difference can be adequately structured in this way. It is not the monistic pluralism per se of such a structure that is the issue, but rather the extent to which one has allowed power critiques to challenge what one thinks remains the stable background of differences, so construed. To say that “views” are what differ presupposes a “world” that does not. But beyond a basic realist commitment to one world, what assumptions about that world do we embed from the start of the comparative project simply by means of our initial categories?Sarah Fredericks discusses such limits to Wildman's method and suggests that Ethics can help. When Wildman says that we need to listen more closely to those in the non-Western world, much depends on what one thinks listening entails. Fredericks points out “the need to invite more people to the comparative table” as a means of taking “responsibility for weak initial comparative categories” that can be too easily set aside.17 Recognizing the unattainability of “pure origins for any category” she nevertheless wishes Wildman would fret a bit more about the very real consequences limited comparative categories can have for those not engaged in the work.18 It isn't enough, in short, to say that we can always fix them later; waiting is not an equitable solution and does not amount to taking responsibility. She reminds us of how “early comparative categories of religion that prized text-based monotheistic [traditions] helped enable Americans to deny First Amendments rights to the free exercise of religion to many native Americans.”19Shults, Knepper, and Fredericks share Wildman's commitment to constructive and/as comparative work in concord with critique, but they differ from Wildman in what they count as doing so responsibly. Each of them wants awareness of the coarticulation of power and knowledge systems to motivate more structural reform to our modes and models of inquiry. None of them rejects a pragmatic theory of inquiry, whereby the dangers of assertion can be checked by commitment to self-correction, which for comparative projects involves the sort of close listening to underrepresented voices of which Wildman speaks. They do, however, caution against too comfortable a measure of what this listening entails; too comfortable a declaration of having achieved a wise balance between generality and justice.If the dispute is over generality, perhaps we should ask about its opposite. “[F]or me,” says Wildman, “it's always back to the concrete.”20 The context of this statement is a dispute with analytic philosophers, Nancy Frankenberry in particular, over the coherence of the notion of symbolic meaning. It is symbolic meaning, after all, that gestures at the brink of the sayable and that is central to Wildman's definition of religious language. He takes issue with the way analytic philosophers neglect the evolution of language in denying the possibility of symbolic meaning. By focusing only on first or literal meanings, he thinks, analytic philosophers betray a preference for “clarity over concreteness.”21 Literal meaning is clear, but it's also, according to Wildman, the least informative, “least important aspect of a speech act.”22 Analytic asceticism, like postmodern asceticism, lacks the “futile ambition” and “over-organized ways of engaging the mess of relevant data” characteristic of “the comparing inquirer” like himself; clarity comes at the cost of fully attending to this mess.23Wildman's constructive boldness, on my reading, pulls from his sense that a mistaken ideal guides excessive carefulness in theorizing reality—namely, that rational restraint yields coherence and adequacy, and that these are desirable traits because reality itself is rational. For Wildman, however, “reality is rationally farcical, cracked at its heart” so that such aspirations “are comically futile.”24 At the same time, he thinks, “reality is replete with surfeit of significance” that makes coherence impossible if pushed far enough.25 He prefers the moral risk of over-assertion to the moral risk of failing to speak of ultimacy in ways with which non-experts can engage. He takes the former approach to be unscaled to the problems facing us as a species; it is too abstract, too slow to meet the psychological needs of most human beings—or at least the ones serviced by his scholarship and care.26Keeping Westerners comfortable in their moral orientations may be constitutively at odds with a balance between generality and justice. But at least there is a general sense among the contributors and myself of how to provide more balance to Wildman's projects, which is to worry more about the power dynamics involved in inquiry. And this likely means complicating the process Wildman simply describes as listening closely to non-Western peoples: perhaps we shouldn't be so sure that our disagreement with their views is a sign that we have listened closely enough. In fact, it may be enough to call them “non-Western views” to know we can't agree with them.The word “multidisciplinary” appears in both the titles I have been quoting from here. In keeping with this aim, I would like to bring into this conversation certain anthropologists who have, on my assessment, taken the greatest pains to allow critique to radicalize methodology for comparative inquiry. I'll have to make this brief, however, given the constraints of this setting. So, I will limit this engagement to the idea of listening closely to non-Western views.In 1991, Richard Rorty declared: “We, Western liberal intellectuals, should accept the fact that we have to start from where we are and that this means that there are lots of view which we simply cannot take seriously.”27 Such a statement worries anthropologists of the ontological turn like Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, who think that we need to look more closely at the way in which calling them “views” already predetermines that we cannot take them seriously: “It is enough to call something ‘views’” writes Viveiros de Castro “so that the not-taking seriously is already justified.”28 Viveiros de Castro would agree with Rorty about the impossibility of believing everything anyone else believes. Where he takes Rorty to go wrong is in thinking that believing is the same as taking seriously. The problem should become a matter of building “a concept of taking seriously that is not confused with belief” such that the comparative project ceases to be about classifying worldviews.29 Translated into our current terms, we should build a concept of listening closely that is not confused with agreeing or disagreeing with views. What might it mean to do that?For some anthropologists, it means working with a “postplural” conception of comparison. Coined by Marilyn Strathern, postpluralism is what emerges from a muti-dimensional rather than strictly linear multiplication of human difference; from the recognition of difference's intensiveness as well as extensiveness. It is the consequence of seeing relations, so to speak, all the way down (and up), out (and in). Postpluralism is what becomes of pluralism once relations are seen to proliferate intensively as well as extensively. Strathern's “postplural perception of the world” consists of only one order of reality; there is no higher or lower order, no more specific or more general, nor more concrete or more abstract. Comparison thus takes place at the same level of concretion as the object of study.30What would happen if Wildman fretted a bit more about the limitations of the framework metaphor for difference and the language of “concreteness” underwriting it? What if that fretting moved him to construct something like a postplural model of comparative inquiry? Several notions fundamental to his current model of inquiry may need to change, not only the distinction between comparison and concretion, but interrelated distinctions between literal and symbolic meaning or data and its categorization. To what extent would he need to demonstrate the optionality of his current model of language in reworking such notions?Strathern's non-hierarchical model of comparative work is what she thinks balancing generality and justice looks like—namely, that the nature of generality ought to be radically reconceived beyond its opposition to the concrete. For this line of thinking, making more room at the comparative table means more than just creating more spots; it means remaking the table itself. Could Wildman take on this work of radically reconceiving what generalization achieves without feeling like he is exaggerating the arbitrariness and/as irrationality of knowledge production? Could he find a reason to? In one way or another, such reasons are what Shults, Knepper, Fredericks, and I have sought, in some modest measure, to supply

Economic Justice · Epistemology · Generality · Political science · Sociology · Law · Law in Society and Culture · Philosophy · Psychology