In the New York Times, of all places, Stanley Fish (a noted popular intellectual and, according to First Things, bellweather of hipster intellectuals) wrote an opinion piece on the latest pursuits of the leading Continental neo-Marxist champion of philosophical modernism Jurgen Habermas.
The contrast between the New York Times' ridiculously misinformed "reporting" on the Catholic scandals in Europe and the growing secular despair that haunts Habermas' most recent work cannot be more stark. The title of Fish's article is "Does Reason Know What It Is Missing?" It is quite apparent that Reason does not, and cannot.
At the root of Habermas' despair, as well as his declared preparations for a "post-secular" society, is the fact that secular reason on its own cannot provide any justification for its own conclusions beyond its own self-contained structures. For example, "human rights" can only be justified by reason if its own internal structure accepts as an axiom that "human rights" are a good thing. Only if "human rights" as a good is an accepted axiom can secular reason justify the good of human rights. In this case, the key for secular reason's justification of something the rest of humanity takes for granted as good is an idea that is an assumption from an external source rather than a logical conclusion reached within reason's own coherent structure and unity.
Fish relates a story Habermas uses to illustrate his point, which appears in his 2008 debate with Jesuit intellectuals, in which an atheist friend of his, after a full life in which faith played little part, declared his wish to have his funeral conducted in a church. Now, one may not find this a big deal, as there are secular places one can have funerals in nowadays. (Just look up your local funeral parlor.) But this atheist intellectual, far more conscious of the implications of his thought than most lazily agnostic seculars, recognized that in a fully secularized world dominated by reason there is no justification for the need of funerals. And yet, there it was, the desire for a ritual that would mitigate the horrors of death. A funeral cannot be anywhere but in a church, or at least on holy ground. Secular reason, detached from all trappings of faith, dies alone.
Habermas has been on this train of thought for a while. His most famous work, the two volume "Theory of Communicative Action" released in 1981, contains as a key idea the notion of "linguistification of the sacred" (Versprachlichung des Sakrals). By this idea he asserts that modern notions of equality and fairness derive from a secularization of sacred terms taken from a Judeo-Christian culture. On its own, reason cannot be used to derive "what ought to be" from "what is", which is all that reason and logic is designed to deal with.
As delighted as I am with Habermas' sober assessment of the future of our bland Western secularism, I find his solution to be terribly wanting.
“…the religious side must accept the authority of ‘natural’ reason as the fallible results of the institutionalized sciences and the basic principles of universalistic egalitarianism in law and morality. Conversely, secular reason may not set itself up as the judge concerning truths of faith, even though in the end it can accept as reasonable only what it can translate into its own, in principle universally accessible, discourses.”
This solution appears in his debate with the Jesuits, and the Jesuits rightly call him on it. In essence, his solution is that religion give way to the preeminence of natural reason, while reason graciously refuses to condescend into judgment on the irrationality of religion. This pact of cooperation, wherein religion's role is to be a mere gentle reminder to curb the excesses of the empires of Reason, will not work to stem the downward spiral of the secular society. How do I know? Because this solution has been tried, and has been found wanting. I suppose that Habermas, due to his being German, can be forgiven for not having extensively observed American "civil religion" (you know, "one nation under God" and all that jazz), that warm and fuzzy everyman's religion that served to undergird the brutally rational and pragmatic mindset of modern American governance. Despite civil religion, the United States' empire of reason has embraced such contradictory things as a right to life and a right to abortion, a concern for family and a concern for legitimizing perversity, or the embrace of free speech and the embrace of hate crime laws. Such contradictions indicate reason spilling out of control in all directions, attempting to accomodate contradictions in an attempt not to be wedded to any particular world view. The problem with religion as mere "reminder" is that human nature ignores "reminders".
The reason Habermas wants this uneven relationship between faith and reason is that he still wishes to hold on to the gains of the Enlightenment project. I believe this is the last great scale covering his eyes. He is so wedded to the "gains" of the Enlightenment that he cannot imagine a world without them. But if one is to see a true cooperation of faith and reason, one important key is to shed the Enlightenment that brutalized religion into the fringes in the first place. After all, everything good the Enlightenment accomplished, it only accomplished by scavenging on religion's body of thought. As Habermas himself admits, the Enlightenment's rational project is only possible because it stemmed from a Judeo-Christian culture.
These are radical times, and I believe the best way to deal with it is with the most radical step. We have to be prepared to part with the Enlightenment project, or at least, most of its assumptions, if we ever hope to anchor reason onto something reasonable again. To climb out of this grave, one must have to step on the bloated carcasses of Voltaire, Diderot, Comte, Hobbes, Locke, Kant, and the rest of that gaggle who thought they could perfect the imperfectible by reason alone.
If we continue uncritically down this path though, we all risk dying alone.
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