Friends and Other Strangers

Studies in Religion, Ethics, and Culture

Richard Miller

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780231541558
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Etica e religione

Friends and Other Strangers argues for expanding the field of religious ethics to address the normative dimensions of culture, interpersonal desires, friendships and family, and institutional and political relationships. Richard B. Miller urges religious ethicists to turn to cultural studies to broaden the range of the issues they address and to examine matters of cultural practice and cultural difference in critical and self-reflexive ways.

Friends and Other Strangers critically discusses the ethics of ethnography; ethnocentrism, relativism, and moral criticism; empathy and the ethics of self-other attunement; indignation, empathy, and solidarity; the meaning of moral responsibility in relation to children and friends; civic virtue, war, and alterity; the normative and psychological dimensions of memory; and religion and democratic public life. Miller challenges distinctions between psyche and culture, self and other, and uses the concepts of intimacy and alterity as dialectical touchstones for examining the normative dimensions of self-other relationships. A wholly contemporary, global, and interdisciplinary work, Friends and Other Strangers illuminates aspects of moral life ethicists have otherwise overlooked.

PART I

RELIGION, ETHICS, AND THE HUMAN SCIENCES

1

WHAT IS RELIGIOUS ETHICS?

A NEW “REGIME OF TRUTH”

Religious ethics is a scholarly area that studies the many ways in which religion and ethics are interrelated. Scholars of religious ethics critically investigate religion’s efforts to shape the character and guide the behavior of individuals, groups, and institutions, and they often draw on religious sources to address contemporary or perennial moral problems. The field of religious ethics arose in North American departments of religious studies that took shape or expanded in the 1950s through the late-1960s in response to intellectual demands to study problems connected to religion and ethics by using sources and methods that were often distinct from those employed in church-related colleges and seminary settings. Scholars of religion and ethics thus carved out a place for themselves by identifying a range of issues at the intersections of religion and ethics and by drawing on intellectual developments in the humanities and social sciences to inform their work. Religious ethics thereby emerged as a new discursive formation with a fresh set of rules and practices for identifying what ought to count as important problems for scholars of religion and ethics to examine. Following Michel Foucault, the field created a system of truth understood as a set of “ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation, and operation of statements” according to which “the true and the false are separated and specific effects of power [are] attached to the true.” Where ordered procedures for examining religion and ethics were able to enlist systems of power that produce and sustain those procedures, religious ethics became what Foucault called a new “ ‘regime’ of truth.”¹

This new regime, however, is not widely or evenly in place within the broader field of religious studies. That is to say, its truths have not secured the special effects of power, leaving it precarious and, at times, uncertain about its proper aims, resources, and methods. In part that is because religious ethics appears “normative” and thus suspicious to scholars who work according to the imperatives of positivist, value-neutral epistemologies or materialist metaphysics. Equally important is the fact that religious ethics is a relatively new field, drawing in ad hoc, unsystematic, and experimental ways from theology, social theory, humanistic cultural criticism, literature, moral psychology, area studies, history, and philosophy. Religious ethics is very much in the process of development. That fact makes it difficult to identify basic or enduring characteristics of the field, and it may frustrate those who want more stability, predictability, and solidity from a research tradition than religious ethics can offer. Compared to more familiar specializations in religious studies—the history of religions, the philosophy of religion, the comparative study of religion, or forms of textual interpretation—religious ethics often requires special justification to other members of the religious studies guild. For reasons that I will explain below, the “regime” of religious ethics is anything but secure. Indeed, course offerings in religious ethics remain either absent from or underdeveloped in more than a few religious studies curricula in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Europe.

With these facts in mind, in this chapter I aim to do three things. First, I will offer conceptual terms for understanding religion, ethics, and their intellectual relationship such that we can understand the locution “religious ethics” and its ground rules for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation, and operation of statements. Without signing on to the relativism and radical historicism of Foucault’s work, I wish to draw on his notion of regimes of truth to advance a metadisciplinary understanding of religious ethics. Second, I will provide a brief sketch of the emergence of religious ethics to contextualize its institutional formation and patterns of activity. Finally, I will identify a new frontier for work in religious ethics on the premise that its research directions, rules, and subject matter need considerable expansion and a more ambitious understanding of its range of potential interlocutors and its future mission. One outcome will be to identify sources of truth that can help to empower religious ethics as a bona fide scholarly regime.

RELATING RELIGION AND ETHICS

The subject matter of religious ethics—that on which religious ethicists focus their scholarly attention—would presume, it might seem, working notions of “religion” and “ethics” along with an understanding of the relationship between these two concepts. Yet, strikingly, attention to these matters is generally lacking in religious ethics. Indeed, very little of the intellectual skirmishing that has animated metacritical scholarship in religious studies over the past several decades has had an impact on religious ethics. And with a few notable exceptions religious ethicists have shown little desire to contribute to theoretical and definitional debates in religious studies. Scholars of religious ethics generally view themselves as contributing to an understanding of ethics rather than to an understanding of religion. Clarifying that Islam is not essentially a fundamentalist religion, for example, is relatively uninteresting to religious ethicists unless that altered perception carries with it implications for understanding the moral life in the Muslim tradition. It is also the case that religious ethicists often allow the specific tradition on which they work to stand for religion as a general category, thus enabling a scholar to classify his or her work in Christian ethics or Buddhist ethics as religious ethics.² To be sure, the tendency to conflate species with genera is evident, indeed widespread, in the field of religious studies. But religious ethicists’ lack of engagement with definitional and, more generally, metadisciplinary matters often leaves them looking marginal to, or uninterested in, debates about theory, method, and purpose in the wider field of which they are a part and oblivious to the history in which they can play a formative role. More than a few scholars in religious ethics appear to be working in an intellectual cocoon.

With those thoughts in mind, and aiming to correct for this relative lack of engagement regarding matters of theory, method, and history, I offer the following proposal. It asks that we deploy a Wittgensteinian understanding of definitions as a starting point for thinking about definitions of religion and ethics as a step toward clarifying the locution “religious ethics.” That understanding has us seek not a basic essence but a cluster of traits according to which an item or object can be identified for the purposes of classifying it in a heuristic way.³ That is to say, it has us understand definitions as “provisional attempts to clarify one’s thought, not to capture the innate essence of things.”⁴ In contrast to the effort to identify an unchanging essential quality as the basis for assigning a clear, crisp nominalization, Wittgenstein’s approach requires that we view definitions in complex, pluralistic, and less bounded ways.

Wittgenstein would thus have us define religion and ethics on the premise that definitions work to classify objects, practices, events, and the like as “family resemblances.” Members in a family can be identified not because they all possess the same characteristics but because they all possess crisscrossing and overlapping characteristics that are sufficient for clustering those members together. We thus aim to identify similarities rather than uniformities. Some members of a family can be tall, blonde, and lean. Those who are not may nonetheless share freckles or blue eyes with some of their taller siblings but not with all of them. Some (but not all) in each group may be garrulous, competitive talkers. Noting such features in this way enables us to identify enough similarities to recognize a set of shared family traits. We can thereby see that all of the people in question are members of the same family. Wittgenstein illustrates his idea with the well-known example of how we assign the word games to various playful interactions:

I mean board-games, card-games, ball-games, Olympic games, and so on. What is common to them all?—Don’t say: “There must be something common, or they would not be called ‘games’ ”—but look and see whether there is anything common to all. . . . Look for example at board-games, with their multifarious relationships. Now pass to card-games; here you find many correspondences with the first group, but many common features drop out, and others appear. When we pass next to ball-games, much that is common is retained, but much is lost.—Are they all “amusing”? Compare chess with noughts and crosses. Or is there always winning and losing, or competition between players?…In ball games there is winning and losing, but when a child throws his ball at the wall and catches it again, this feature has disappeared.⁵

Wittgenstein’s image of definitions as family resemblances allows us to form ascriptions by finding overlapping characteristics, correspondences, and interrelationships that enable us to mark off one set of data from another. Summarizing his view on the matter, he writes: “We see a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail.”⁶

With that Wittgensteinian idea in place, consider the following definition of religion: a set of beliefs, practices, attitudes, and institutional arrangements that invokes the category of the sacred understood as that which

(a) has extraordinary qualities that entitle it to attitudes and related behaviors of reverence, fidelity, honor, and/or gratitude;

(b) has the capacity to bear importantly on human affairs independently of human volition;

(c) enables or aids persons in resolving or appreciably lessening anxieties about their place, limitations, and experience in the world;

(d) enables persons to experience wonder, joy, hope, awe, or kindred affections;

(e) is deep or far-reaching in effectuality and pertinence to human affairs;

(f) enables persons to communicate or interact by using dramatic ritual performances and other formalized symbolic practices;

(g) provides an institutional basis for social organization and disciplined activity, which may either stabilize or disrupt the status quo; and

(h) requires practices, symbolic forms, and idioms that are assigned noble if not transcendent status.⁷

In offering this account I do not mean to say the sacred designates a discrete ontological entity or transcendental domain that somehow stands apart from human life and social institutions. For scholars of religion the sacred is a social fact, amenable to research using the tools of the humanities and social sciences. The sacred can consist of ghosts, animals, ancestors, mountains, deities, forests, hierarchies, authoritative decrees, charismatic leaders, texts, oral traditions, material objects, or legal institutions and traditions, for example. Nor do I mean that religions each have only one sacred object around which to organize their adherents’ practices, attitudes, beliefs, or discourses. Religions routinely invoke numerous deities and paradeities, holy figures, institutional arrangements, texts, and physical objects as entitled to the behaviors and attitudes that I mentioned above. Moreover, and equally important, representations of the sacred can be symbolic in ways that defy any simple or unambiguous understanding; the sacred can be ambivalent about its meaning and implications for human life. Nor am I suggesting that religions all avow the same attitudes and behaviors, or even similar attitudes to the same degree, over their long or short histories. By “resolving or appreciably lessening anxieties” I do not mean that religions routinely aim to console their adherents. Religions can “resolve” anxieties by making plain that the resolution of some basic questions, or the satisfaction of some hopes or dreams, is not possible or perhaps even desirable. By noting that religions offer occasions for “persons to experience wonder, joy, hope, awe, or kindred affections,” I mean to note that religions often but not always provide ways of encouraging positive outlooks toward experience and motivational bases for human betterment.⁸ By “deep or far-reaching in effectuality and pertinence” I do not mean that religious beliefs or practices range across all aspects of experience. Religions can have importance or considerable impact on a relatively narrow sphere of human existence; what is important is not the scope of the impact but its palpability. By saying that religion “provides an institutional basis for social organization and disciplined activity, which may either stabilize or disrupt the status quo,” I mean to point out that there is, in principle, no one way in which religion relates to established clusters of power.⁹ More generally, I do not believe that motives that generate religious activity are untouched by human interest. There is no reason to think that religion is less vulnerable to being instrumentalized than is any other human practice. The sacred is not wholly autonomous; even though it is typically considered of incomparable value, it can be manipulated (and regularly is).

One key feature of my definition is the notion of entitlement. Sacred matters are understood to deserve a certain cluster of attitudes, practices, and institutional arrangements. Sacred objects may deserve their entitlements unconditionally or on the basis of some noteworthy quality, communication, or action. The point is that the sacred can be presumed to make certain demands on the basis of possessing a basic value.

Moreover, the entitlements assigned to sacred matters are typically not of the order of other objects of attachment, esteem, and the like. Sacred matters are qualitatively different from other types of value; they enable the establishment of moral hierarchies. Advocates for or representatives of the sacred create a frame of reference according to which particular attachments, concerns, attitudes, and practices are rendered appropriate or inappropriate. One of the key features of the sacred, then, is that it requires a form of acknowledgment in the Cavellian sense I described in my introduction. As I noted there, acknowledgment is a matter of responding to something you are exhibiting. But the kind of response is important. To acknowledge is not premised on having had certain epistemic criteria satisfied; it is not a matter of knowing. Indeed, acknowledging according to Cavell occurs prior to and independent of knowing. For Cavell, acknowledgment is not so much an occasion or an event as it is “a category in terms of which a given response is evaluated.”¹⁰ To acknowledge is to convey a certain set of attitudes and expectations that paradoxically generate from and create a relationship with an other. Acknowledgment designates not a specific emotive or reactive response but a willingness to account for oneself and, in the process, communicate a set of values and attitudes about oneself toward an other. For that reason Cavell describes the lack of acknowledgment not as an absence but as “the presence of something, a confusion, an indifference, a callousness, an exhaustion, a coldness.”¹¹

Religious acknowledgment modifies the Cavellian concept of acknowledgment in this way: it is a category in terms of which responses to the sacred’s normativity are evaluated—a category that provides the basis for assessing the responses to the entitlements that representatives of the sacred can presume. Persons who are not religious are not only “nonbelievers” or individuals who fail to abide by one of the sacred’s instructions or commands. Nonreligious persons include those who are indifferent to the demands of the sacred that they observe others as acknowledging as a matter of social fact.

Religion as I have characterized it is a complex ascription, not a simple one—an ascription that is premised on needing several—but not all—of the characteristics I have identified to allow us to classify certain beliefs, practices, texts, attitudes, or institutions as “religious” and not something else. Our purposes in invoking this ascription are simultaneously intellectual and practical. We deploy religion as a term of classification because thus far we have found this to be a productive way to develop thought, research, and public policy. We can likewise find it useful—again, echoing Wittgenstein—to extend this working definition of religion “as in spinning a thread we twist fibre on fibre” to new domains that can be instructively termed “religion” or “religious.” A Wittgensteinian definition is not only complex and plural; it is mobile and thus able to adapt to new phenomena. Matters that are classified as “religion” or “religious” are recognizable not because they all possess the same characteristics but because they all possess enough of the characteristics of sacrality and related symbolism, lore, practice, belief, attitudes, institutional power, anxiety-resolution, wonder, palpability, and ritualization to be usefully marked off, if only provisionally, as distinct from other domains of human activity.

In offering this complex definition, I do not mean to suggest that religion is static or independent of culture, power, or society or that religion is chiefly a matter of personal belief. Religions are historically dynamic, internally varied, socially constructed, situationally located, and culturally diverse. Thus we say that religions are social, temporal, psychological, and practical phenomena that draw their materials from a vast array of human practices and contexts and transmit them intergenerationally in the effort simultaneously to sacralize and naturalize the views they avow. If we wonder whether various human activities can count as “religious,” Wittgenstein urges us to “look and see whether there is anything common to all.”¹²

What, then, of the concept of ethics? Assume—thinking again in terms of family resemblances and for heuristic purposes—that by ethics I mean the critical analysis of ideas that prescribe, permit, or prohibit human behavior. Complexity resides here in the fact that providing prohibition, permission, and prescription can enlist different discourses, as does the work of evaluating individuals, groups, or institutions. Prophetic discourse regarding structural injustices, for example, differs from discourse about practices of moral formation, which differs from efforts to evaluate the impact of ne...