Customer Reviews

The Secular Conscience: Why Belief Belongs in Public Life

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book has changed the way I talk to people about what was formerly lumped into "religion and politics". When we begin to talk about our individual values and how they might affect or effect the "common good", an intense conversation develops. And without the use of buzzwords, such as "god", "atheist", "democrat", "republican", we realize more clearly who we are personally and as a nation. For me, this is an important book for change at a basic level. By re-forming into today's terms, the great truths of yesteryear, Dacey has done us a real service. However, I gave it a 3 because Dacey's strangely arrogant and dismissive attitude toward those who do not accept GMO, American seed, or indeed, the premise that 'science' will feed the world, was so unlike the remainder of his book that it had to be written with an agenda in mind. The relentless push for control of the world's food supply with a monopoly on seed by Monsanto and others is well-documented so I can only conclude that Dacey is persuaded somehow (by his vegetarianism?) to be less than rigorous in his scholarship in this matter. With that caveat, I am recommending the book to everyone I know.

Austin Dacey is an American philosopher and a representative at the United Nations of the Center for Inquiry, which promotes the secular, scientific outlook. He is also on the editorial staff of Skeptical Inquirer and Free Inquiry.
In this brilliant and original book, Dacey advocates a public, objective and secular ethics. He argues that matters of conscience are fit subjects for public discussion guided by shared evaluative standards, evidence and experience.

Conscience must be free from coercion, but not free from judgement. Conscience is protected so that we can pursue the vital questions of meaning, truth and value in public dialogue and forums.

But the Roman Catholic Church has decreed, "Freedom of thought or expression ... cannot imply a right to offend the religious sentiments of believers." But this would end freedom of expression, because any criticism of religious doctrines could `offend the religious sentiments of believers'.

The assertion, `I'm right, you're wrong' is not intolerant; it is the nature of thought, as is then moving forward to saying, `and these are the reasons why you should change your mind'. This is not imposing one's opinion on others: persuasion is the opposite of coercion.

To defend one's point of view by saying, "I'm entitled to my opinion" is to refuse debate. The only opinions worth respect are those derived from investigation and debate.

The basis of ethics is independence of mind, with which we can evaluate all ideas and ideologies in the light of reason. Dacey argues that "the secular conscience stands prior to and independent of all religions." Religion is unnecessary to ethics: if God approves an act because it is good, then God is superfluous: if an act is good because God approves it, then there is no ethics, just assertion of authority.

As Dacey writes, "The real sceptics about ethics are those who think that human beings are incapable of fairness, responsibility, care, and compassion without divine enforcement." These sceptics privilege religion at the expense of ethics, faith at the expense of reason, and dogma at the expense of people.

It has long bothered me that some people refuse to categorically reject horrors like the Holocaust, because they believe everything is subjective, and all cultures and approaches have their virtues. Common sense indicates there should be some objective perspective that can help us to understand why Holocaust-like atrocities and tyrannical societies and governments are bad. Austin Dacey's powerful "Secular Conscience" explains how such objective standards can be formed. In a stroke of brilliant creativity, he uses the same types of ideas that have helped spearhead open source software approaches to operating systems.

I believe this to be one of the most important books that liberals--and anyone who cares about human rights--could possibly read. If you've wondered how to combat the ultimately pernicious ideas of cultural relativism that can be used to justify virtually any atrocity, this is the book.

Length:: 1:31 Mins

This is an excerpt from the interview Austin Dacey gave to Point of Inquiry. I purchased the book after listening to the program. I highly recommend "Secular Conscience" to everyone interested in the topic.

"The Secular Conscience" by Austin Dacey presents a sophisticated meditation on secularism and its importance to us today. Mr. Dacey seeks to shake secular liberalism from its complacency lest the Enlightenment project of an open society becomes run over by fundamentalist Christians and totalitarian Islam. Thanks to Mr. Dacey's elegant, mature and well-informed analysis, we gain the courage we need to assert our right to freedom of conscience and to challenge ideologies of belief in the public sphere.

Mr. Dacey recounts the historical process by which the West broke with the Church and separated religion from government. Today, faith has come to be marketed to believers as their own private property and seeks to avoid accountability in political debate even as it exerts considerable influence over policy. Mr. Dacey submits that secularists must drop their predisposition to moral relativism and demand that Christians justify their positions on issues such as stem cell research and evolution based on reasonable standards of evidence and scientific inquiry.

On the other hand, Mr. Dacey explains that Islam has not undergone a process of separation from the state; the Islamic state is more accurately defined as a political form of religion. Mr. Dacey brings attention to courageous individuals who are challenging the blasphemy laws that preclude the free expression of the individual in Islamic society. The author castigates the Western media, feminists and others for their tolerance of intolerance and failing to recognize the threat that Islamic totalitarianism poses to our values; he goes on to implore us to support the youth in Iran and other Islamic states who yearn for a free, secular future.

Throughout the book, Mr. Dacey explores related ethical and philosophical themes and ideas that bring a remarkable depth of meaning to the text. We come to appreciate that the secular conscience is a moral conscience that is based on collective inquiry, reflection and consensus; this kind of dialogue is needed now more than ever if we wish to achieve lasting peace and justice for humankind.

I thank William Podmore for bringing my attention to this outstanding book and highly recommend it to everyone.

If you have a good brain, and like to use it, this book is for you. There is intellectual interest on every page. This is a work that requires, and deserves, I believe, a measured and thoughtful read. Dacey has written a challenging and rewarding book with a unique point of view. Read properly, "The Secular Conscience" should stimulate those of us interested in social justice to apply its progressive ideas in as many fruitful ways as possible.

THE SECULAR CONSCIENCE: WHY BELIEF BELONGS IN PUBLIC LIFE comes from a philosopher who calls for a rethinking of the nature of conscience and its role in public life. Philosophers and secularism issues can be traced to Spinoza and early hallmarks of rigid thought patterns: this book creates a dialogue useful for college-level students of philosophy, ethics, spiritual studies and social issues alike.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch

In a time when ideas of public morality seem to be polarizing ever more to the extreme, Austin Dacey makes a poetic argument for inclusion and cooperation. Holding the tried and true arguments of Mills up as a path to social intellectual honesty The Secular Conscience challenges us to let objective standards of truth destroy those things that it can.

Many secularists think that belief is a private matter. Whatever anyone believes is his own concern. Consequently, when people of faith put their ideas forth in public they are to be left alone. Austin Dacey argues that this is a false conclusion. Why? Because there can be no real discussion when matters of conscience are left outside the public domain. You're left to `respect' the ideas of the other without being able to question any of them and thereby simultaneously giving up the possibility of defending your own. He calls this the Privacy Fallacy. A related misconception he defines as the Liberty Fallacy. This is the widely hold idea that freedom of belief means that it should be free of criticism. But if that were the case, no serious debate would be possible. How could you argue for or against abortion, stem cell research, the death penalty or euthanasia if your basic convictions get off scot-free? All the reasons why you hold certain views would be up in the air. It's the task of liberals and secularists to regain the right to public debate, including questioning matters of conscience like religion and faith, and to stand up for your own values - reason, tolerance, personal autonomy, the separation of church and state and so forth. Writing with wit and clarity, he offers an historical overview of this liberal tradition from Spinoza to Rawls.
The tone darkens considerably when in the penultimate chapter he discusses radical Islam. Dacey states that today Islamism has become the defining issue for liberals, just as Communism was for an earlier generation. Somehow, it's as if this chapter belongs to a different, and more pugnacious, book. Maybe it's because he, as he himself asserts, leans heavily on Bruce Bawer's "While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West from Within". This section of the book is more politically tinged than the rest, and I can imagine that not everyone will agree with his analysis here. For example, I don't think you necessarily have to be suspicious of Tariq Ramadan in his quest for a dialogue. Some liberals view him as a wolf in sheep's clothing, while others do not. And even if Theo van Gogh could perhaps be seen as someone seeking discussion (hardly `conversation', mind you), he could also use an extremely abusive language, not fit for quoting in this forum. Living in the Netherlands, I can assure you that by portraying Van Gogh as Mr. Nice Guy and stating that `the culture of conversation cannot survive the toleration of intolerance, intimidation, and violence' (p.187), the author paints too simplified a picture of the events leading to his brutal murder (see also Ian Buruma's `Murder in Amsterdam').
Nevertheless, Austin Dacey has written a clear-sighted book about how `secularism has lost its soul' and has made a weighty contribution to the defense of secular values. "The Secular Conscience" convincingly explains why, as its subtitle suggests, Belief Belongs in Public Life.

In the war against multiculturalism and what Pope Benedict XVI called "the dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one's own ego and one's own desires," it is refreshing to note the presence on the field of a new, young, and well armed ally in the person of Austin Dacey. In what has become, I fear, a rearguard battle against growing numbers of those who would trash the treasures of Western civilization, we need all the help we can get.
Make no mistake, the masks of multiculturalism and relativism are worn by a new breed of barbarians who have captured the battlements and are in ascendancy in the world of academia training our young. They have rank and tenure, man (woman?) the important committees, edit the scholarly periodicals, and make the important administrative decisions. The term "barbaric" may seem hyperbolic, since we have not witnessed widespread raping and pillaging (as of yet), but if we recall Ortega y Gasset's penetrating analysis of mass society in the 30s it will appear that the term is quite apt to describe today's culture.
Ortega showed us that barbarism essentially implies a loss of standards, restrictions, courtesy, justice, and reason. And clearly we have reached that plateau for all our technical wizardry. Barbarism above all implies a loss of the ability to speak, to use language. And we have most certainly reached that plateau as well, with masses of young people stuck in the vocabulary of four-letter ignorance, hand gestures, pantomime, and text messaging.
Indeed, as far back as 1968 John Wilkinson, then of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, summarized some of the research he collected while teaching for a number of years in six of the best colleges in this country: "more than ninety percent of the students proved, as freshmen, to have a usable, active vocabulary of about eight hundred words. They could passively understand a further five hundred words in something vaguely resembling their proper meanings. Another fifteen hundred or so words lay in such a penumbra of understanding or misunderstanding that more could hardly be averred than that they could remember having heard them before." These students are now the professors who teach our young. And those they teach are even more intellectually stunted than their teachers.
It has been estimated that the average college freshman today has only 72% of the vocabulary of freshmen in the 1950's - just prior to the period of Wilkinson's research. This phenomenon not only signals the fact that Shakespeare, for instance, wrote in what is for the bulk of these folks a foreign language; it signals that for a great many of these young people the daily paper is unintelligible as well. Of course, Shakespeare is no longer required reading even for English majors at the majority of our high-prestige colleges and universities. But one would hope college graduates could read the daily paper.
A loss of language skill implies a loss of the ability to think, since we think conceptually. It signals what Ortega called "intellectual indocility," the possession of a handful of ideas without the capacity to connect them in any systematic way. And that indocility has become endemic; we recently learned from research summarized by Jane Healy in her book Endangered Minds that today's youths are rapidly losing the function of the left hemisphere of their brains. Honesty compels us to admit that as a people we are regressing and becoming increasingly uncivilized. On this stage, relativism is widespread and very popular as it makes the opinion of the class clown equal to that of the author of the text; and one of the major actors is "multiculturalism," which has attracted scores of academics from various disciplines who are of one mind in their attacks on those values that have defined our civilization for centuries.
In the book under review, Austin Dacey, a professional philosopher who represents the Center for Inquiry in New York City at the United Nations, attacks both relativism and "the official ideology of multiculturalism" which, he says, "has become a pact for mass cultural suicide." He defends with great force, imagination, eloquence, and wide-ranging knowledge the values of the Enlightenment: reason, criticism, knowledge, appreciation of historical precedence, and openness of mind. He coins the term "secular" in his title and throughout the book to connote a conscience that is not tied down to religious belief, demanding that all beliefs should be open to critical scrutiny and held to the same standards as any other truth claim. He worries that we use the appeal to conscience as a dodge to avoid open discussion and honest dialogue, thus allowing it to become simply "personal, subjective and closed to the critical scrutiny of others."
Dacey's overall plea is for open discussion of all topics that impact on the human condition, no exceptions allowed. "There is no viable alternative to reasoning together," he wisely insists. Conscience should be "held to the same standards as other serious public proposals: honesty, consistency, rationality, evidential support, feasibility, legality, morality, and revisability." All issues, including religious issues, should be open to public debate and held to the same high standards of truth and objectivity. In attacking Enlightenment values, the zealots of multiculturalism and relativism have tossed overboard reasoned discourse on topics that really matter.
In this process cross-cultural value judgments have been ruled out of court: who are we to say that what the people in other cultures do is wrong - even if they embrace female circumcision, honor killing, forced vailing, forced marriage, and their government stones women to death if they are (presumably) caught having extramarital sex? For the multiculturalist who poses as Embodied Tolerance, it has become the official canon that other cultures are above criticism. The result is a blind eye turned to the evils that occur in other cultures around the world, even, and especially, among the intellectuals who are loud in their criticism of the evils within their own culture. Dacey rightly faults this sort of reverse ethnocentrism, so popular on college campuses these days, that regards the practices of other cultures as beyond criticism while insisting that our own culture is the source of all the world's ills. "It is a bizarre case of moral dysmorphia that blows the failings of one's own society out of all proportion while diminishing the failings of others. And this for the sake of respecting difference." As an example, the author singles out American feminism for its narrow focus on the complaints of American women while ignoring altogether the plight of women around the world who are much worse off.
Dacey insists that, like conscience, the practices of all cultures should be held to the same standards of truth and morality. He is especially concerned about the prevailing silence in this country surrounding the atrocities committed in Islamic cultures where the religion of Islam "remains unassailed in its dogmatic, fanatical, medieval fortress; ossified, totalitarian and intolerant." Those who remain silent in the face of these atrocities exhibit what the author calls "postcolonial guilt, dogmatic adherence to a blinkered multiculturalism, and sheer craven fear [that] will lead them into a cycle of self-blame and appeasement."
This is a wonderful book, well written, sharply focused, and full of sound common sense. It is a breath of fresh air at a time when professional philosophers are bogged down in the mud and mire of overspecialized trivia and seem to have little to contribute to serious human problems.