Discourse on Civility and Barbarity

At the heart of Discourse on Civility and Barbarity: A Critical History of Religion and Related Categories is Timothy Fitzgerald's striking claim that the distinction between “religion” and “nonreligion” has come to serve “as an ideological operator that destabilizes any practices that seem to challenge the interests of American power” (41). It is a study in the historical context and consequences of the redefinition of “religion” and stands in the tradition of Edward Said, David Chidester, Richard King, and many others. The claim is that the change in meaning has been politically motivated, with brutally material consequences. Fitzgerald's linguistic and historical theses go hand in hand, but it is important to keep them distinguished for analytical purposes. In one sense, the linguistic thesis is innocuous. Perhaps all of our words except the logical constants change their meaning over time. Sometimes the change is relatively slight, as, for example, in the usage of “television” in the United States over the last generation. For those who have never seen a cathode ray tube, “television” increasingly means “flat screen.” Sometimes the change is momentous. To take a stock example, school children are often taught that a long time ago people thought that the earth was flat. But did they? To be fair, do not we have to ask what they meant by the term “earth”? And if it turns out they meant roughly the area from Gibraltar to the west to Baghdad to the east, and from the British Isles to the north to Alexandria to the south, what then? By contrast, we mean—some of us, at least, some of the time—a medium-sized planet with seven seas orbiting a medium-sized very hot star, itself located on the periphery of a medium-sized galaxy, etc. Under the circumstances, what sense does it make to say they were wrong?

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Civility · Context (archaeology) · Epistemology · Ideology · Literature · Meaning (existential) · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Sociology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · History · Law · Philosophy · Religion and Society Interactions

• Religion,' 'the Secular' and the Critical Study of Religion

  Open Access•Steven Joseph Engler, Steven Engler•Studies in Religion/Sciences…•2011

  Add to list