Religion and Politics

The following is a body paragraph and the conclusion of my midterm in Religion and Politics. The subject is "We are the Problem," and I reference a few books we've read for class. But even without having read those books, most of the points I make are about the state of American culture, something with which we're all familiar. I put this up because I hear too often people projecting the fault for America's problems on some "other" rather than our own prejudices, ignorance, and thoughtlessness. Any comments you may have are welcome (I think I now have it set so that anyone can comment).

At its core, the continued success of American constitutional democracy is dependent upon the level of public reason applied by normal citizens. Our ability to think rationally, pragmatically, and dispassionately about the issues is the factor that will determine America’s future. Of course, no one can perfectly go beyond John Rawls’ “veil of ignorance,” but he implies that a certain level of objectivity-- leaving one’s moral convictions at the door-- is necessary for a proper public conception of justice. The proper level of this objectivity is the divisive issue in the larger public conversation. Although Susan Jacoby’s objectivity is certainly more limited that Rawls’, the two views overlap considerably. Jacoby emphasizes throughout The Age of American Unreason that public reason can only come from individuals who read, engage in culture-sustaining conversations, and have open and rational minds that reject junk thought and embrace rational propositions (such as, presumably, Rawls’ “justice as fairness”). Perceiving “fundamentalists” as closed-minded and anti-rational-- a misperception of the nature of faith-- Jacoby errs by other-ing a large portion of Americans. Nevertheless, her jeremiad about the sad state of American intellectual life insightfully delineates the necessary characteristics of a true citizen—characteristics with which Rawls would agree.

We are the problem because we find more psychological reward in muddying the waters of justice as fairness with our identity. We dissent, yet view dissenters as others. We refuse to compromise our personal preference but regard other preferences as unholy or unpatriotic. We refuse to set aside our identities and work for the greater good. If the jeremiahs speak truly, these are signals of a society teetering on its last leg. We have become more narrow-minded, more gullible, less attentive, and less cultured. For example, we often don’t even notice when television commercials run for ten minutes straight, and those commercials are often the subject of much dialogue the next day. This is but one sign of America’s endangered political life. In politics as with television programming, we contentedly take the bad with the good, and sometimes leave out the good altogether. But is this any different than it’s ever been? James Morone tells us that these jeremiads are the expression of America’s ingrained Puritanical streak, implying that although everything may not be ok, at least we are treading on familiar ground. On the other hand, Susan Jacoby opines that plucking American culture from the rapacious jaws of ignorance and infotainment is a fool’s hope. In fifty or one hundred years, will cultural observers merely be chroniclers of cultural wreckage, or will American culture play the phoenix and rise from the ashes of its self-imposed privations? It is not an abstract question, and the answer depends on us.