Raymond Williams Lecture given at the Hay Festival 1st June 2002
There are two ways of asking the question about the 'failure' of secularism. You may want to lament a failure to win the human imagination: secularism has been a massive social and ideological project, which now appears in retreat before resurgent religious bigotry. We may not live in a theocratic state, but the global political agenda is being set by the concerns of religious communities, mostly Jewish, Muslim and Hindu. Secularism has not managed to confine these untamed passions in a private space. And it becomes all the more important to resist attempts in our own setting to reintroduce religious discourse to the public sphere. There is a clear connection - if this is your starting point - between September 11th and the controversies around 'faith schools': secularism must not be allowed to fail in this area if we are not to descend into the worst kind of social feuding, justified by the most (rationally) unanswerable grounds imaginable.
But there is another kind of concern, not by any means articulated only by people who have a vested interest in religious institutions, a concern that surfaces every time we (articulate contemporary North Atlantic citizens) witness what we regard as a disproportionate act of barbarity. It may be a specially repellent murder (of a child by a child or a child by a parent), or a narrative of genocide, or an outbreak of manic terrorist violence. Have we, we ask, an adequate vocabulary for speaking of evil? Does modernity allow for evil or only for a thinly conceived good and bad or, worse still, progressive and reactionary, useful and redundant? If that's the case, secularism, as the necessary companion of modernity, leaves us linguistically bereaved; we are vulnerable because we have no way of making sense of the most deeply threatening elements in our environment. 'Evil' becomes a trivially emotive way of referring to what we hate or fear or just disapprove of (in the style beloved of American presidents), rather than a reminder of - well, a reminder of what, exactly? Perhaps of the fact that there are aspects of human behaviour which we only make sense of when we say we can't make sense; or of an awareness that the roots of motivation aren't exhausted by the sum total of what we can call reasons.
Both sorts of question, as I've hinted, have come into focus in recent months. While it is lazy chatter to say that 'everything changed' on September 11th (meaning that quite a lot changed for that small portion of the human race not exposed to daily and intolerable violence), the events of that day concentrated a whole range of bewilderments about faith, morality and tragedy. It is, I think, just possible to connect the two questions in a way that might illuminate these bewilderments; but it will need some stepping back from a good many cliches about sacred and secular, and perhaps some hesitation in moving too rapidly to articulating our worries about theocracy. We need to look harder at the language of the 'secular', relating it to some of our fundamental concerns about both ethics and the arts. As a very brief and superficial summary of where this examination might lead, it's enough for now to say that it's precisely the sense of an imaginative bereavement expressed in the second question that helps us to see why the 'procedural' secularism of Western modernity has difficulty in establishing itself as definitive. But more of this later.
Defining secularism isn't easy (as the foregoing will already have suggested). A secularist set of protocols for public life would rest upon the assumption that our attitudes to one another in the public realm have to be determined by factors that do not include any reference to agencies or presences beyond the tangible. Thus, ideally, attitudes in such a context are a matter of what can be negotiated and successfully sustained between visible agents and groups of agents. Some of these groups will have commitments that can't be ruled 'admissible' in public discourse; if these commitments are to play any role, they must be translated into language accessible to those who don't share them. In its purest form, this would have two quite serious consequences. First, it suggests that the most substantive motivation of at least a lot of agents and groups will be ruled out of public discourse; it will have to dress in borrowed clothes. Second, it implies that the definitive 'currency' of the public realm is to do with calculation about functions: I or we begin with aims that we are out to realise; the other participants in the social or public process are understood in terms of how they further or obstruct those aims. As this becomes clearer, negotiation advances. The social equilibrium is a state in which all significant participants are adequately satisfied that others are serving or at least not obstructing their goals. Successful social performance is measured by this criterion.
I'm suggesting that secularism in its neat distillation is inseparable from functionalism; and if so it will generate a social practice that is dominated by instrumental or managerial considerations, since the perspectives that would allow you to evaluate outcomes in other terms are all confined to the private and particular sphere. In practice, of course, neat secularism is not to be found: evaluative discourse leaks out into the public sphere, sometimes in the moralising rhetoric of political leaders, sometimes in the improvised rituals (of celebration or mourning or solidarity) that sporadically take over some part of the public territory and establish a certain claim to be common speech. But to understand this more fully, we need to follow through the implication of treating secular modernity and functionalism as belonging together; which is that one of secularism's opposites is the resolve to regard the environment, human and non-human, as more than instrumental. And this is where I'd want to step back and reflect for a moment on what this means specifically in the life of the imagination and how it works in the foundation of a general ethic.
Two pertinent quotations. First Eliot, in Burnt Norton:
…the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses
Had the look of flowers that are looked at.
And R.S.Thomas' poem (from a 1972 collection), 'Via Negativa':
….We look at people
And places as though he had looked
At them too; but miss the reflection.
I want to suggest that the imaginative awareness evoked here is what secularism undermines; that the non-secular is, foundationally, a willingness to see things or persons as the objects of another sensibility than my own; perhaps also another sensibility than our own, whoever 'we' are, even if the 'we' is humanity itself. The point is that what I am aware of, I am aware of as in significant dimensions not defined by my awareness. The point may be reinforced in a particularly acute way if I also include my own subjectivity as one of those objects of awareness that elude my possession. Imaginative construction, verbal or visual, works to make present an aesthetic object that allows itself to be contemplated from a perspective or perspectives other than those of the artist's own subjectivity. Art makes possible a variety of seeings or readings; it presents something that invites a time of reception or perception, with the consciousness that there is always another possible seeing/reading. Imaginative construction begins in the sensing of the world in this way, a field of possible readings, therefore never reducible to an instrumental account related to one agenda, one process of negotiation at one time. Instead, there is an indefinite time opened up for reception and interpretation: the object is located outside the closures of specific conflicts and settlements of interest.
The non-secular character of art, in this context, is its affirmation of inaccessible perspectives. It would be too glib to say that this somehow constituted art as a religious enterprise; I have a strong recollection of an exchange with a British novelist some years ago, who, despite the fact that she wrote on matters to do with religious history, firmly declined to be labelled as 'religious' in her perspective; but, pressed on this, said that she believed she knew what 'blasphemy' was, and defined it in terms of an instrumentalist attitude to the physical and personal world. Perhaps we could propose that art is what resists blasphemy, defines blasphemy by refusing it. But in relation to the large social and political issues we began with, the point is that art is not in the business of negotiating interests and so cannot assume, with 'procedural' secularism that what is definitive is what a subject brings into the marketplace of competing interest. It is why art is politically unstable and unhelpful (or, of course, depending on your starting-point, essential).
This is also why the contribution of imaginative construction always brings with it the sense of the tragic - an appropriate element to note in any offering in honour of Raymond Williams. Whether Williams really managed to reconcile a tragic vision with the Marxist hope for social self-redemption is a moot point; Walter Stein, in a fine essay on 'Humanism and Tragic Redemption' (Criticism as Dialogue, Cambridge 1969, 183-246), has some sharp, if sympathetic, questions on this. 'One of the achievements of Williams's work', says Stein, 'is to bring this dilemma, inherent in any messianic secularism, to a sort of phenomenological test - beyond verbal logicalities: the evidences of the tragic imagination'(pp.199-200). The hope for a fullness of revolutionary justice within history, however remotely 'within', assumes a possible world beyond tragedy, a future in which redemption has so relocated the history of suffering, guilt and loss that there is a morally definitive story to be told. Stein wants to know if this is meant to be more than a metaphorically intense prescription for revolutionary action, and whether it implies that history exhausts tragedy. If it does, there will be in principle a historical setting in which every loss can be at some level retrospectively justified. Stein thinks that Williams is actually undecided between something very like this and a more nuanced account which would effectively treat the tragic as unavoidable and the redemptive possibility as a kind of regulative idea. But the way in which Stein sets up this discussion illustrates very clearly the basic argument I have been sketching so far. Is there an historical, intra-worldly perspective that exhausts what can be said about our transactions and perceptions and self-perceptions? Is there a 'seeing' of the world from some vantage point within it that leaves no room for any seeing from elsewhere? If so, on the basis of the discussion so far, that would be a condition without the possibility of art, an ultimate secularity of imagination.
If this is correct, secularism fails by bidding for an ultimately exclusive, even anti-humanist closure; it looks to a situation in which we are not able to see the world and each other as always and already 'seen', in the sense that we acknowledge our particular perspective to be shadowed by others that are inaccessible to us. This is a failure because it finally suggests that there is nothing beyond the processes of successful negotiation - or, in plainer terms, no substantive truth but a series of contests about sustainable control and the balances of power. Fundamental criticism - political, moral, credal - is thus rendered impossible. Those religious writers (John Milbank in particular) who have recently pressed the thesis that there is an innate 'violence' in secularism (a striking reversal of the received wisdom of modernity, for which religion is the inherently violent presence in culture) mean not that secularism is an aggressive ideology inviting conflict - it's meant to be precisely not that - but that in having no criteria other than functional ones it takes for granted contests of power as the basic form of social relation. And because history obstinately refuses to end and art continues to flourish, secularism in the sense I have been outlining does indeed seem a doomed enterprise, bound to fail in what I have called its 'pure' form.
However, while we might be relatively confident of the moral and imaginative failure in general terms of a programmatic secularity, putting the question about secularism in this way also invites us to think about the varieties of secularist success. The dominance in our culture of managerial standards is too obvious to need much comment; it has changed the face of education at every level, and is the key to understanding why politics has become a mode of marketing. But there is a further and disturbing dimension to this which needs mentioning, and that is the effective secularisation of a great deal of religious discourse. Secularism as I have been defining it - a functional, instrumentalist perspective, suspicious and uncomfortable about inaccessible dimensions - is the hidden mainspring of certain kinds of modern religiousness. When religious commitment is seen first as the acceptance of propositions which determine acceptable behaviour - the kind of religiousness we tend now to call fundamentalist - something has happened to religious identity. It has ceased to give priority to the sense that God's seeing of the world and the self is very strictly incommensurable with any specific human perspective and is in danger of evacuating religious language of the pressure to take time to learn its meanings. Wittgenstein's remark that religious language could only be learned in the context of certain kinds of protracted experience, particularly suffering is a very un-secular insight, since it assumes that to be able to make certain religious affirmations is bound up with how we construct a narrative of difficult or unmanageable times in our lives. There can be no decisive pre-empting of religious meanings by requiring instant assent to descriptions of reality offered by straightforward revelation. All the major historic faiths, even Islam, which is closest to the propositional model at first sight, assume in their classical forms an interaction between forms of self-imagining and self-interpreting, through prayer and action, and the formal language of belief; that language works not simply to describe an external reality but to modify over time the way self and world are sensed. To say that fundamentalism represents a secularising moment is to recognise that there has been a dissociation here between language and time, so that the primary task (function) of religious utterance is to describe authoritatively and to resolve problems. It is not easy to restore to this kind of religious ethos the awareness of subject and object alike 'being seen' which I have suggested as basic to the non-secular vision.
However the wheel comes full circle. Secularism fails to sustain the imaginative life and so can be said to fail; its failure may (does) produce a fascination with the 'spiritual'. But its very pervasiveness in the first place means that this spiritual dimension is likely to be conceived in consumerist terms - either in the individualised functionalism of much New Age spirituality or in the corporate problem-solving strategies of neo-conservative religion. Secularism and fundamentalism feed off each other; in reflecting on the first form of the question in my title, the implicit lament for the apparent weakness of the 'modern' project, it wouldn't do us any harm to note that the restriction of religion to the private sphere doesn't necessarily guarantee a moderate and compliant religiosity. The very insistence of the prevailing cultural instrumentalism is just as likely, or more likely, to reinforce elements in religious language and practice that are themselves impatient with inaccessibility, time and growth. A private inflexible faith confronts the managerial public sphere in a mixture of mutual incomprehension and mutual reflection.
This means of course that a religiousness that challenges the dominant instrumentalism will need to be better aware of how pervasive the dominant categories are and alert to all those aspects of cultural life that implicitly or explicitly resist those categories. Hence my interest here in defending the idea that art is necessarily un-secular. But it is not quite enough to assimilate aesthetic and religious discourses. The roses have the look of flowers that are looked at, and that gives us some sense of the interiority of artistic perception. But how are they looked at exactly? As soon as one can say that they are looked at consistently or patiently, we are on the road to saying, with a consciousness of metaphorical riskiness, that they are looked at lovingly. In his remarkable book, A Common Humanity. Thinking about Love and Truth and Justice (Melbourne 1999), Raimond Gaita observes that such anthropomorphism is nearer the heart of moral vision than principles about recognising others as rational creatures. Vital morality, he suggests, has more to do with seeing the other as a special sort of object for a subjectivity not your own than with acknowledging another subject: 'Often, we learn that something is precious only when we see it in the light of someone's love' (24); and, 'One of the quickest ways to make prisoners morally invisible to their guards is to deny them visits from their loved ones, thereby ensuring that the guards never see them through the eyes of those who love them' (26). The un-secular is not only an awareness of other possible viewpoints but of other possible moral relations, not circumscribed by what I as an individual find possible now. Do the roses look as if they were flowers that were loved? And what, specifically, does that mean?
There is a quite complex process going on in such a recognition. I recognise that what's before me, whether rose or person, can be seen from other perspectives than mine. I acknowledge the interiority and inaccessibility that this entails, and the necessary relation of time and understanding in such a light. What would a maximally comprehensive seeing/reading of the person or object be? One that had unrestricted time to look. But unrestricted time to look presupposes a constancy or commitment to looking, thus a self-investment, even self-dispossession, in respect of what is seen or read. If we put the taking of time at the centre of truthful understanding, a certain convergence of understanding and love begins to appear. My own willingness to stay in engagement with what I see is a mark of commitment and so of a certain kind of self-renunciation (I give up the freedom to walk away in search of something more obviously useful to my determinate plans). To entertain the possibility of other perspectives is to grant that more time than mine can be spent on this exercise; my seeing of someone or something as already and otherwise seen is shadowed, so to speak, by the possibility of an always more sustained and self-invested seeing - a greater love. The aesthetic sense of inaccessibility is on the edge of a particular kind of moral evaluation, seeing in the light of someone's (actual or possible) love; it is not the same thing, but it would be hard to make full sense of the one without the other. And the moral in turn borders on the religious, in the sense that the religious believer is committed to affirming the moralist's possible love as actual. There is a perspective that we can only speak of as representing unrestricted time, total self-investment: for the Buddhist, say, that is the perspective of the objectless compassion of enlightenment; for the Christian (or Jew or Muslim) it is the perspective of an active creator - a perspective which can only with some metaphorical license be called that, as it cannot simply be rendered as one viewpoint among others. It is not an historical perspective, though it may have a kind of historical presence as celebrated and anticipated; and it is thus not ever something that offers simple historical closure or exhaustion. It is what offers space for art, including tragedy.
One of the reasons for the incapacity of secularist modernity to ground or welcome imagination in the way I have been conceiving it is also of course the fact that religious discourse is itself morally unstable in just this area. The appeal to the unrestricted time and total self-investment of a divine knowing and loving can forget the caveats about how this is not the same as a perspective in the world. It can claim the possibility of historical closure and exhaustion. From early on in Christian history, there has been an urge to declare history over. The seeing and knowing of the world by God can be rendered as a maximal accumulating of information; and so, when the existence of God is challenged or made remote in Enlightenment thinking, largely because it was seen as endorsing oppressive forms of social and intellectual control, there is a temptation to translate the same sort of mythology into worldly terms. There may be no divine perspective, but there can be an aspiration towards an earthly 'panopticon', to pick up Foucault's argument, a human 'view from nowhere' that can claim finality. And here lies the rationale of that comprehensive instrumentalising of social relation with which we began; this is the essence of public (shared) language, the field within which other discourses must justify themselves. In other words, forgetful religion is itself one of the roots of secularity - just as secularity re-imports itself into religion in the form of fundamentalism. The last thing we should want to argue here is the moral innocence of traditional religion as a whole.
What I think emerges gradually from these considerations is a sense of twofold risk. Secularism fails and fails dangerously to allow room for the inaccessible in what we perceive; it can become the vehicle for the most monumentally uncritical political practices in human history to the degree that it reduces questions of justification to instrumental ones. 'Making the trains run on time: whether they are going to Eden or Auschwitz, and whether this is desirable or undesirable, just depends upon your point of view' (Wendy Wheeler, 'One-Dimensional Politics', Soundings 14, Spring 2000, p.110). Or, of course, nearer home and with a recent governmental consultation paper in mind, developing a vigorous and competitive defence industry in the United Kingdom. But secularism exists because of the ease with which religious discourses have slipped into an assimilation between faith or knowledge directed towards God and the knowledge exercised by God - and so have become agencies of control and of violence. If we thought that the opposite of secularism was theocracy, we would actually be admitting the victory of secularism in the political sphere; the exhaustion of reading would have been accepted as axiomatic, simply relocated to religious territory once more.
Equally though, as this already indicates, 'victorious' secularism ends up colluding with violent religiosity. If the conflict between secularism and religion is about social power, about secularism's right to legislate religious language and practice out of the public domain, it invites a counter-claim from that secularised religiousness I have tried to outline which seeks to replace secularist certainties with religiously controlled ones. This is probably most evident if we look at the agonised contortions of so many liberals on the subject of Islam; unable quite to grasp why Muslims are not content to be told that their faith is a legitimate private option, they fail to argue the question of the limits of private and public and the nature of moral motivation in the 'managed' society. Islam is thus defined by liberal rhetoric into a version of individualised Christianity, a set of personal options for leisure time. To be thus defined, in stark tension with the grammar of the faith itself, naturally prompts a political resistance. Neither globally nor nationally have we yet fully understood these issues; some current discussion of 'faith schools' suggests a radical tone-deafness about all this, assuming that partnership between public institutions and religious communities is simply a subsidising of bigotry.
Understand the risks, however, and you're some way forward. Religious language in all the historic traditions has built into it certain critical impulses, certain procedural challenges to the finality of its own formulations. This arises not from a 'liberal' sense that we can't really be sure and we'd better be politely vague, but from convictions about the strangeness of the divine and the dangers of claiming divine perspectives. Orthodoxy goes in tandem with the injunction to dispossession, and the language of theology and worship is supposed to enact that dispossession. How does secularism 'dispossess' itself? That is far too large a question to pretend to resolve here; but it may be that the recognition of what I have called the 'procedural' aspect of secular language is a beginning. Secularism, in other words, as a characteristic of the public domain, means that there is no legal privilege for any specific religious position; but not that such positions are regarded as simply private convictions. There may be various ways of securing the participation of religious communities in public business - education is only one such. And this entails not a bare endorsement of doctrine on the part of the secular administration but a willingness to promote argument about the foundations and legitimacy of various public policies in terms broader than those of instrumental reason. Coleridge, writing in the 1830's about the character of a national religious establishment, conceived the task of such an establishment as being that of a perpetual friendly opposition, 'the compensating counterforce to the inherent and inevitable evils and defects of the STATE, as a State, and without reference to its better or worse construction as a particular state; while whatever is beneficent and humanizing in the aims, tendencies, and proper objects of the state, the Christian Church collects in itself as in a focus, to radiate them back in a higher quality: or to change the metaphor, it completes and strengthens the edifice of the state without interference or commixture, in the mere act of laying and securing its own foundations' (On the Constitution of Church and State, London, Dent 1972, ed. John Barrell, pp. 98-9). The invitation to religious institutions to take such a share in the public conversation is precisely an invitation to debate about foundations - a debate never to be historically resolved, but equally not to be relegated to privacy.
For that to be a viable and fruitful model, there must be questions asked about how we separate public and private, personal and corporate, questions about how the dominance of a rights culture, however necessary in some respects, intensifies the weaknesses of secularism unless complemented by the cultural and intellectual nurture of imagination, the grasp of the other's perception and perceivedness; questions about what current obsessions with measurable objectives may conceal. But there must also be questions within religious discourse about what most deeply colludes with instrumentalism in its own speech and practice. It is at least worth asking why the most bitterly contested issues within some traditional religions at the moment, certainly in the Christian churches, are not doctrinal in the strict sense but matters on the dangerous frontiers of sexuality and power. I suspect that this is an area where secularism has indeed succeeded rather strikingly in its conscription of religious understanding.
That is not to argue for a distancing from religious tradition and institution in the name of a looser, more entrepreneurial postmodern religious sensibility. Such an argument is made, with great energy and subtlety, by Richard Roberts in a new collection on Religion, Theology and the Human Sciences (Cambridge 2002); but I have argued elsewhere that this leaves us with insufficient resources for challenging the consumerist assumption that haunts the world of new spiritualities. These hesitations are echoed in another recent book, Andrew Shanks' What is Truth? Towards a Theological Poetics (London, Routledge, 2001): '..poetic truth…requires the continued existence of coherent religious communities, in order, as far as possible, to preserve a stockpile of potentially resonant religious vocabulary for its use - a vocabulary still steeped in prayer, which thereby retains something of the accumulated power this sort of truth demands, for its raw material' (139). Shanks diagnoses with extraordinary perception the risks of religion's failure to be 'religious' enough, religion's poetic inadequacy (its secularism, in the terms of this lecture), but is fully alert to the seductions of various substitutes for traditional religion, as in the post-metaphysical schemes of Heidegger and Nietzsche. Most importantly of all, he identifies the essence of integral religious and artistic vision with what he calls a 'pathos of shakenness', a full exposure to the disruption which truth brings to power. The traditional religious institution and the vocabularies of doctrine may be freighted with much moral ambiguity, but they remain carriers of those practices of facing and absorbing disruption without panic that allow imagination to be nourished.
In short, then, the relation between secularism and the various languages of disruption, inaccessibility, de-centring, or however we put it, will remain radically and necessarily unsettled. Procedural secularism protests at a violence of the imagination which seeks to control all meanings in virtue of its comprehensiveness and intensity; but it must itself be challenged ceaselessly by the bids of imagination to resource and renew motivation within our common life. To turn to Raimond Gaita again (283-4), the aspiration to universal description must be challenged by the localisms of 'natural language' - which, for this purpose, includes the poetic and the religious.
Two concluding reflections. The success of secularism is not only a problem for modern religion; it is manifestly an issue for the arts. David Kennedy, in a scathing essay on 'How British Poetry Joined the Culture Club' (New Relations. The Refashioning of British Poetry 1980-94, Bridgend, Seren 1996, 236-52) sets out three lists of assumptions about poetry as reflected in reviews, publishers' blurbs and so on; the first works on the presupposition that poetry is meant to be difficult, that - in Brodsky's words - it is 'the only insurance against the vulgarity of the human heart', that it is a deeply un-secular area of language in which 'the moral, the technical, the musical, the erotic, the sexual and the philosophical may all interfuse' (247); the second is a sketch of current assumptions about current British poetry - that it is more 'democratic' than formerly, more accessible and relevant, an organic part of a wider cultural industry; the third catalogues what the 'industry' itself thinks about art in general- truth may be replaced by 'sincerity or, at least, authenticity', variety and plurality are inherently virtuous, the boundaries between art and entertainment are quite properly unclear and 'The identification of a definite audience dictates the suppression of difficulty and difference'(249). Enough said, perhaps. If we want to understand secularism, here are some very good working definitions, and I suspect we may learn more from them than from arguments about the statistical levels of belief in religious propositions or self-identification with religious institutions.
And then, invoking again the shade of the writer in whose honour these thoughts are gathered: Raymond Williams belonged in an intellectual world struggling to preserve a commitment to socialism as one of the professed enemies of secularism (as I have characterised it). Modern Tragedy and The Long Revolution are, as we've already noted, in part essays towards an unsecular socialism; they may be only intermittently successful as such, but they testify to what it is in the socialist tradition that remains passionately discontented with managerial resolutions to social loss or disorder. Answering the question in my title, in both the forms or registers identified, may require us to pay some attention to what has happened to the unsecular socialist voice in recent years. Has secularism failed? The combination of a robust poetics, a self-scrutinising theology and a politics resolved against one-dimensionality suggests at least some ways of answering without resort to Enlightenment placebos or restorationist religiosity. There is still some insurance against the heart's vulgarity.