Iceland, circumcision, individualism, religion

You may have seen in the news this week that moves are afoot in Iceland to put an end to the circumcision of baby boys for religious reasons.  It's a move which has much popular backing, and would probably enjoy similar popularity in this country.

There are lots of dimensions to the arguments around this action.  There is the medical/psychological angle; there is the issue of religious freedom; there is the cultural question.  What really strikes me, though, is the radical, atomised individualism that stands behind many of the arguments I've seen advanced by those in favour of a ban.  The argument runs: how dare you religious people impose your religion on a child who hasn't chosen it, to the extent of not respecting the bodily integrity of the child?

The first key assumption behind this argument is that we are born completely neutral and entirely autonomous.  Our identity is defined from within ourselves, and has nothing to do with the family into which we are born.  This position is absolutely essential to modern Western secularism.  We resist any attempt to define us extrinsically, by our relationships or our circumstances.  But this is nonsense, and dangerous nonsense.  Every child is born into a family, and so much of their identity derives from those relationships which are (so to speak) thrust upon them.  You could say the same about being born into a nation, or, indeed, a religion.  To deny this is actually to be anti-culture.  Culture is all about that network of relationships, stories, and institutions which define us just by being there around us.  Atomised individualism means there can't be culture, which means there can't be human society.

The second key assumption is that religion is about my choices and beliefs.  I might decide to get circumcised later in life (personally I won't!), but that will be down to my own independently derived religious beliefs.  Actually, I pick up from some of the comment around Iceland that even this isn't quite right.  We're not very happy with the idea of circumcision because religion is meant to be a spiritual, private thing - something in which you can indulge if you want to, but which should leave no trace in the 'real world'.  But what if religion has much less to do with me and my choices and the way in which I choose to view the world, and is much more like being confronted by something real which one cannot deny and which has a transformative effect not only on the mind but on politics, ethics, and yes even the body?

A question for Christians like me surely is: given we're not going to be engaging in infant circumcision for religious reasons, are there nevertheless ways in which we ought to be resisting these assumptions of secularism and demonstrating the way in which identity is extrinsic (most fundamentally in Christ!) and religion is public?

Knowledge and People (3)

Apologies for the delay...

Why does all this matter?

I guess there are two effects that I see. One is relational, the other epistemological, but they're very closely intertwined.

Relationally, it becomes very hard to take other human beings seriously. Reductionism becomes the best approach. We think we can analyse the behaviour of another in much the same way that we would analyse the behaviour of an animal. You hear people say things like "love is just a combination of hormones" - meaning, I think, initially, other people's experience of love. Conversation becomes farcical on this view. The fact that we do actually have conversations, and do actually fall in love, betrays that the ratio-empiricist view does not capture all our experiencs: there is a Thou out there behind the face of this human being. Thank God for inconsistency in this regard!

There is an alarming possibility here. Most recently I have heard several people deconstruct their own experience of love in the way demanded by ratio-empiricism. What is happening? I suspect that we are seeing the loss of the primacy of the subject. People are applying their reductionist understanding of the Other to themselves. I cannot believe that this really reflects their experience of being themselves; it is a stifling interpretive grid. Unable to view others as truly human, they come to view themselves as less than human as well. We truly do need other people to know ourselves at all.

Epistemologically, acquiring knowledge becomes all take and no give, or perhaps no receive. In a world where I am the only subject, all learning is by analysis and systematisation of what I experience around me. This seems to lead into the loss of a concept of testimony. Although philosophers acknowledge that testimony is one of the most basic and common speech acts, and although in actual fact we would all have to admit that the overwhelming majority of what we know has been learned through testimony, ratio-empiricism tends to distrust it. In the absence of a genuine other, what can testimony be?

This then has an effect on the way we approach texts, for example (there is at least one person reading this who knows that I am now trespassing on his area of expertise. I'll try not to leave dirty footprints). Is it not inevitable that a text becomes an object to be manipulated in any direction we see fit on this worldview? After all, we cannot be assured of the existence or significance of the author (and this is as true for a living - even a present - author as it is for a dead or absent one), so why should we not take a text in whatever way we choose? I wonder whether ratio-empiricism makes knowing inherently violent...

To this whole worldview, Christianity asks three questions:

1. Given the fact that your worldview cannot account for central human experiences, why should we follow it?

2. Given that all your arguments against Christianity are based on this worldview, why should we take them seriously?

3. Have you considered that ultimate reality might be personal?

Knowledge and People (2)

So, what exactly is my problem with ratio-empiricism?

It's all to do with the way this epistemological viewpoint understands the relationships between me and the world. Ratio-empiricism inherits from its parent views the basic orientation of a thinking/experiencing subject confronted by a world of passive objects. I am the subject; everything else is an object. Now, in one sense this is a simple truism. As Kant so helpfully pointed out, it must be possible for me to attach the label "I think" to every one of my thoughts and perceptions - that is to say, I am the subject of all my thoughts and perceptions. If it were not so, they would not be my thoughts or experiences.

(As an aside - and feel free to skip this paragraph - this is actually not nearly so simple as it sounds. Kant himself ends up reducing the "I" which is subject to nothing more than a logical tag - quite literally, an ownership label which holds thoughts/perceptions together in one consciousness. The problem emerges most clearly when you consider introspection: me thinking about myself. It must be possible for me to say "I think" about these thoughts, or they are not mine. But the "I" in "I think" is the subject of the thought, whereas the thought itself is of me as an object. How "I" become an object to myself is quite difficult. Kant avoids the problem by maintaining that "I as subject" and "me as object" are completely different, the former being noumenal. Well, that's transcendental idealism for you.)

This orientation - a thinking/experiencing subject confronted by a world of objects - will get you a long way in the natural sciences. Any critique of this viewpoint cannot be absolute, but must be simply a qualification - if you like, a "yes, but..." Still, it is possible for a "but..." to raise such a fundamental question that one is forced to revisit the "yes" and reconsider it. This is, I think, one of those cases.

Because there is simply no room in this world of subject/objects for people. There is, presumably (although this concept is not without problems), one person - me - but there are no others. A person, I take it, is someone who can themselves be a subject in the same way that I can be a subject. Obviously, not a subject of my thoughts/perceptions, but a subject of their own thoughts/perceptions - another centre of consciousness.

Qualifications: obviously, there will be a sense in which another person is an object to me. And strictly speaking, ratio-empiricism does not of necessity deny that the object in front of me could be another centre of consciousness.

But ratio-empiricism does make this concept highly problematic (in both the common and Kantian sense). If knowledge really works the way the ratio-empiricist claims, or rather assumes, it does, then I am bound to treat the other person as a passive object. I am bound to approach them, epistemologically, as if they were not a person in the way that I am. The gap between my consciousness and theirs cannot be bridged in any way on this worldview. The idea of other conscious beings becomes something that is strictly beyond my ability to know: it can be thought, but not tested, and therefore lies outside knowledge.

There is no room for people in Kant's world.

If this isn't making sense, I promise it will start to come together tomorrow when I run through some of the implications as I see them...