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Pragmatic Naturalism and the Spiritual Life
by Henry Samuel Levinson

Summary, by Wade Hudson

In this meditation on the work of the philosopher George Santayana, Levinson offers an immensely practical direction for a well-balanced life. He insists that:

• spirituality is more than moral action;
• solitary peace of mind is as important as social solidarity;
• life is a laughing matter;
• acceptance of ultimate impotence is essential;
• philosophy enables people to “enjoy time out”;
• reweaving particular religious traditions is necessary;
• liberal democracy is not the only form of good government.

Levinson argues:

He rejects the perspective that the world is “sufficiently wretched to demand constant contention, movement, and decision.” And he accepts:

Levinson differs with those:

Many historians have argued that Santayana's The Life of Reason marked the inauguration of naturalism as a philosophical movement in the United States. Almost none, however, have noted that this book was acknowledged by even its sharpest contemporary critics, for example Arthur Kenyon Rogers, as the first comprehensive presentation of pragmatism in this country or anywhere else. In this set of books, Santayana characterized knowledge as nonfoundational inquiry, reason as nontranscendent or immanent criticism, every sort of language as expressive, imaginative, or poetic, every part of existence as contingent or historical, and philosophy itself as a reflection on problems of human finitude rather than a search for first principles or for the really real. What is more, Santayana never gave up any of these views, even when his critics stopped calling his philosophy pragmatic and he himself had criticized "the pragmatic school" and distanced himself from it.

So what did the pragmatic Santayana and "the pragmatists" disagree about, and do these disagreements matter? In a rough and ready way, I think the answer is this: Santayana's pragmatic naturalism was religious in ways that pragmatists like John Dewey, Joseph Ratner, and Sidney Hook could not abide, while their pragmatic naturalism too often boiled down to strenuous moralism to suit Santayana.

Caricature and overstatement lurk in the wings, because the pragmatists, especially Dewey, paid a lot of attention to esthetic experience along with morality and society, and even claimed that esthetic experience had a religious quality. But I still think, in the end, that the chief bone of contention between Santayana and other pragmatists lay in Santayana's attention to religious or spiritual life understood as something different from moral virtue and as something more full-blooded than some sense-qualifying esthetic experience.

There are six overlapping ways to think through this contention. First, by and large, the pragmatists, especially after William James, were preoccupied with social life. They acted as social critics or sometimes cultural critics. But one of the most remarkable characteristics of their cultural criticism lies in what it neglected: there was little or no reflection on the pleasures or problems of solitude. For Santayana, spiritual life was concerned both with life alone and with life together, with the question of solitary equanimity and personal well-being in the face of mortality as well as with the issue of social solidarity.

Santayana was criticized by pragmatists for his interest in human solitude. He was charged with being an old-fashioned individualist, an escapist, a romantic, a mystic. For his part, Santayana criticized the pragmatists for their inability to see that critical thought extended beyond the formulation of social policy to problems of personal well-being that no social policy or social relationship could solve. There were not only lots of lonesome valleys that people had to walk through, but also solitary disciplines that brought individuals profound satisfaction as well.

Second, in the pragmatists' view, life was no laughing matter, because it was beset by tragedy. Pragmatism, as Hook put it, was informed by a tragic sense of life, by the recognition and analysis of conflicts between good and good, good and right, and right and right, and by an overriding commitment to resolve these conflicts. Their social criticism waxed prophetic as it called readers to this duty, chiding them for their failure to live up to the social promise embodied in the symbol of "America," its democratic institutions, and its motto, e pluribus unum.

Santayana saw things somewhat differently, noting that "prophets are constitutionally incapable of a sense of humour" and advising his readers that "the young man who has not wept is a savage, but the old man who has not laughed is a fool." Human life had its compensations. In his view, people should turn to the task of resolving conflict as best they could. He said that tragedy was "not to be denied or explained away, as is sometimes attempted in cowardly or mincing philosophies." But, he suggested, there was no necessity demanding that people be consumed by it. People "not too much starved or thwarted by circumstances" and prepared to engage in spiritual disciplines could take joy just as seriously as meanness. Pragmatists criticized Santayana for fiddling while Rome burned. Santayana replied that if human life was no laughing matter, it was probably just deadly and not worth living.

Third, while the pragmatists undercut the Enlightenment's quest to find a way to ground knowledge in itself, they endorsed an Enlightenment commitment to the project of human self-assertion. Here is Dewey:

Santayana, to the contrary, pictured human self-assertion as both indispensable and as inevitably falling short of its aims; salvation as coming with "the love of life in the consciousness of impotence"; and philosophy as providing disciplines for such affection.

Fourth and following, the pragmatists tended to construe philosophy as socially and politically engaged, a kind of inquiry that prepared citizens or their leaders for concrete social action. Indeed, they identified philosophy as a (middle-class) profession offering politicians, technocrats, and other professionals synoptic blueprints on which to base their social planning.

Santayana, especially after writing the Life of Reason, inclined toward picturing philosophy as a suspension of such business, an interruption of normal social action, a disengagement from policy and politics, a disintoxication from the particular values that happened to shape up this or that society or polity, a holiday from statesmanship. Philosophy, he suggested, let people enjoy time out for intellectual festivity, celebration, worship, religious meditation, as well as cognitive or imaginative free play.

The pragmatists took this characterization of philosophy as unprofessional, irresponsible, and sanctimonious, a residue from an Old World theological distinction between this- and other-worldly concerns. Santayana, on the other hand, scolded pragmatists for their short-sightedness, for their fixation on what he called the political and economic "foreground." He asked what good political and economic systems could serve if they did not afford opportunities for (extrapolitical, oftentimes solitary) spiritual well-being.

Fifth, pragmatists found little good to say about distinctively religious narratives, practices, or institutions, which they pictured as draining energies away from "the problems of men" while fueling superstition and fanaticism. They followed Dewey's lead by distinguishing between "religion" and "the religious." Religion, Dewey said, amounted to fixed and differentiated creeds and cults that were indelibly supernatural in content and socially exclusive to boot. The religious, on the other hand, was an esthetic quality of "any activity pursued in behalf of an ideal end ["so inclusive that it unifies the self"] against obstacles and in spite of threats of personal loss because of conviction of its general and enduring value." Suspicious of differentiating religions from other parts of culture, Dewey tried to displace them by underscoring the religious quality of esthetic experience. He said it was in the creation and enjoyment of works of art, for example, that

From Santayana's vantage point, this talk of getting beyond ourselves to find ourselves by way of a "sense of an enveloping undefined whole" amounted to the last thin gasp of Hegelian idealism, truncating religious traditions to a point that was laughable. He attempted, rather, to make cultural space for religion and ridiculed the idea of some generically religious quality that could inform any activity. He argued that "the attempt to speak without speaking any particular language is not more hopeless than the attempt to have a religion that shall be no religion in particular." And he prized particular religions for providing "another world to live in."

In his view, "otherworldliness" did indeed have a function, but it was strictly cultural, not transcendent or postmortem. In religious institutions, people practiced disciplines that let them suspend the order of their normal social world, particularly the differentiations and hierarchies of social, economic, and political life. There, people practiced religious virtues like piety or devotion to the sources of their lives, spirituality or devotion to their ultimate concerns, and charity or appreciation of what was good for others as they understood themselves. Religions gave people these disciplines both to let them imagine things that bonded human beings together no matter what their social, political, or economic roles or circumstances happened to be and to devise practices that facilitated personal equanimity.

Santayana argued that these disciplines, the religious narratives in which they were presented in exemplary ways, and the religious institutions responsible for crafting and transmitting those narratives, were not inevitably to blame for superstition and fanaticism. Rather, supernaturalism, or the confusion of ideals and powers, was accountable for these things. But the narratives and disciplines that constituted religious traditions could be reconstructed or explicated in naturalistic ways without destroying either their particularity or the differences they made for people's lives.

Finally, pragmatists pictured democracy American-style as the divine way of doing things. They urged people to pour all the fervor and enthusiasm they may once have had for religious traditions into a devotion to political and social democracy. Santayana demurred, unwilling to call any one form of political life divine, and willing to note all the ways in which modern democracies, whether socialist or consumer capitalist, had ended up pitting equity (and equities!), homogeneity, and mass life against excellence. A good government, "government for the people," he claimed, "turns the forces of nature, as far as possible, from enemies into servants and the pressure of society into friendly cooperation and an opportune stimulus to each man's latent powers." Universal suffrage was one, but by no stretch of the imagination the sole, means to that end. In principle if not in fact, Santayana argued, timocracy was probably a better arrangement, demanding equal opportunity but permitting unequal achievement, along with government by people who merited their assigned offices by the breadth and depth of their accomplishments in economic and political arts.

Now these six conflicts that I have rehearsed are not news from nowhere. They have a history, textually inspired most immediately by themes in Emerson. These were not conflicts between Emerson and his critics but rather between Emerson and himself. Society and solitude; the tragic and the comic; impotence and assertion or fate and freedom; prophetic reform and spiritual contemplation; the grace of communion and the cant of religion; American democracy as divine life lived at first hand and as the land of "the dead alive" condemned to life at second hand—all these conflicts are Emersonian. But they themselves are grounded in older dialectics that shaped the thought and practice of Emerson's Protestant forbearers, whether republican or theocratic. The tensions I am thinking about descend from Reformed Christian preoccupations with grace and law, with the view that moral practices, while indispensable, do not circumscribe personal life in its most divine moments; that personal equanimity, in some sense, requires letting go of moral propriety; that it calls for some sort of solitary new birth or re-creation that reveals simultaneously the limitations and genuine advantages of the social conventions we inherit, on the one hand, and the lovely and lovable character of mortal life on the other; that doing well neither causes, nor secures, being well; that personal well-being can occur, but that it cannot be achieved, because its happening is gratuitous.

These views, drawn with great precision by traditional Reformed Christian thinkers like Jonathan Edwards, outlasted their original supernatural and Christological context. They remained central when Edwards himself dropped supernatural and Christian language for esthetic discourse in his battles with British Benevolists over the nature of true virtue. They were still the crux of the matter for Emerson's post-Christian Protestant efforts, as William Clebsch put it, "to respiritualize a natural outlook that had become despirited." They remained at the heart of William James's quest to satisfy what he called "the religious demand" by searching for supernatural powers at work in the world. More to the point, they shaped Santayana's utterly naturalistic understanding of the stresses and strains between moral and spiritual practices. For that matter they also haunted Dewey's equally naturalistic vision of the ways in which esthetic experience outstrips, as he put it, moral "consecrations of the status quo."

But now I want to ask who cares about these tensions anymore? Or, to put it more personally and assertively, why do I care about the prospects for a religious naturalism like Santayana's, and is my concern simply self-indulgent and atavistic? I care because I share these views with Santayana: if we are concerned with the problems and promise of human finitude, we had best attend to society and solitude, because it is impossible to reflect on human joy and the things that impede it without coming to grips with both. If by "the promise of human finitude" we mean the realization of such joy, we had better make room for comedy as well as tragedy in our sense of life, because it is comedy, not tragedy, that takes joy as seriously as it does meanness.

The comic sense requires us to accept finitude and ultimate impotence along with our commitment to disclosing the pretensions of self-assertion. Along with a devotion to human solidarity, and often in its service, philosophers in the West have traditionally broken away from recommending social policy to meditate on such conditions, and our culture would be better off if they continued to do this. Stripped of false explanatory accounts that turn ideals into powers—accounts that let people pretend that the universe works "for truth and right forever," or that empower "us," whoever we are, so that we can dominate "them," whoever they are—traditional religious institutions, narratives, and disciplines may continue to serve their properly moral and festive cultural functions. Democracy American-style is not the divine way of doing things, and the spiritual exceptionalism that suggests that it is, by collapsing eschatology and nationalism into one another, has fostered more than a modicum of cruelty. American democracy is a handy way— in my view, if not Santayana's, probably the handiest— to structure life politically. But this is so in great part because democracy has secured a culture that is eclectic, thriving on a diversity of moral and religious traditions; a culture endangered by homogeneity, whether unbearably light or weighty. Indeed, democracy's worth as a political system is to be measured, not simply by its commitment to self-determination or by its economic facility, but also, and more, by its ability to sustain this diversity of traditions that discipline imaginations in ways that give point to human life. To my mind, these six areas of inquiry constitute a program of study for religious naturalists to pursue. So let me tip my own hand, all too briefly, regarding each of them.

Bourgeois liberals like me are committed to human solidarity. But we know that there are lines, some fine, some coarse, separating concord, cooperation, and fellowship from the sort of mass or bulk or uniformed life where, as Milan Kundera has put it, "unity of mankind means: No escape for anyone anywhere." We accept harmony as a superordinate goal to keep in mind when shaping up social attitudes, but we reject oneness, unanimity, and the deterioration of private life. Why is this so? Why do the stories of, say, Kafka and Kundera that explore "the violation of solitude" strike home to us with such force? Is it because we are socially dysfunctional or politically naive, misanthropes, incurable romantics, or mystic dilettantes? No. It is because we think that human wellbeing or joy depends as much on what goes on in people when they are by themselves as on what happens in their interactions with other people, as much on private transformations and associations as on social justice.

I say "goes on in people" because, more than anything else, what is at stake is the imaginative life. It is important, however, not to read old epistemological or metaphysical presumptions into this phrase. As I turn it, at least, there is nothing epistemologically private or asocial about imaginative life; nothing metaphysical about it.

I am, for example, writing this piece not only for myself but for anyone willing to see or hear it; and my capacity to do so is the outcome of a lot of socialization and training. My effort, like all effort, is experienced and observable as plainly physical. But I have also turned aside from normal social activities, asked people not to disturb me, so that I might work out this way of thinking, work on myself, play with variations on old themes concerning human joy and the things impeding it. In so doing, I am, as James would say, experiencing the practice of imagination as solitary. Cultural arrangements and disciplines make this possible, disciplines that involve letting go of old conventions so as to propose new ones, and my performance plays a cultural role. Moreover, I am given leave to do so by way of political and economic legitimation. But it is the performance, my solitary attention to an interest, my practical competence, not social relationships or policy per se, that is at risk and is the site of whatever agony and joy or sense of beauty goes on. The performance may or may not be good for anything else in particular. It may or may not contribute to human solidarity. Nonetheless, it may bring me, or somebody else, some sense of well-being.

There is something right, then, about Richard Rorty's suggestion that "the old tension between the private and the public remains"; there are no necessary connections between private hopes and social justice, but only contingent, practical ones; and, thus, it is right to abandon a quest for some theory revealing an essential human core, safe beyond time and change, linking up such things. Personal well-being may occur no matter how societies are composed, decomposed, or recomposed. The realization of well-oiled democratic practices and institutions, predictably, will leave individuals still yearning for solitude and having to manage the personal difficulties accompanying loss and change, suffering, absurdity, evil, and death.

There is no escaping these things, and so pragmatic naturalists would do well, as Comel West suggests, to retain a "sense of the tragic [that] highlights the irreducible predicament of unique individuals who undergo dread, despair, disillusionment, disease, and death and the institutional forms of oppression that dehumanize people." But the problem still remains how to display the meanness of suffering and then transcend it by celebrating "passing joys and victories in the world" —which is a problem that comic vision seeks to resolve.

When essentialism still saturated thinking in the West, critics explicated comic episodes as events in which conventional social distinctions or pretensions separating people from one another got undercut, disclosing a "core" of humanity or community in which everybody could take some joy. Viewed this way, the inversions of carnival where kings and paupers exchange clothes, the subversions of jokes where, say, the well-dressed lady slips on a banana peel, and the reversions from self-conscious and constrained adulthood to playful or spontaneous childhood that are prominent in texts like Alice in Wonderland let us abandon, imaginatively at any rate, conventional social differences for participation in delightfully "real" human unions or communions that are acultural and ahistorical in nature.

For pragmatists, this explication of comedy cannot work because nature is historical and human history is cultural and because, as Santayana put it, "in this world we must either institute conventional forms of expression or else pretend that we have nothing to express. The choice lies between a mask and a fig-leaf. . . . and the fig-leaf is only a more ignominious mask." But comedy surely survives essentialism. Abandoning such language does not disrupt our capacity to explore things that let us laugh, both at the absurdity of our own pretensions and at the fortuitous bonds that are forged with others who are really different (including, I suggest, our own old personalities). Embracing pragmatic naturalism does not spoil happy endings. Comedy is contingent on incongruity and affinity, not appearance and reality. But both incongruity and affinity depend on the occurrence of variation, change, continuity, and coherence—all of which characterize finite beings living in a world that is historical all the way along.

Thank goodness that, after years of nearly unexceptional blindness to comedy, pragmatists like Giles Gunn and Cornel West are once again exploring its critical and imaginative functions. Gunn, building on the works of Kenneth Burke and Mikhail Bakhtin, reaches for a cultural criticism that reflects bonds strong enough to include, in Burke's words, "our own fundamental kinship with the enemy." This sort of criticism, Gunn argues,

West is developing a "prophetic pragmatism" out of the fundamentally tragic idioms found in such precursors as Hook, Lionel Trilling, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Raymond Williams. But speaking as an Afro-American Christian, he has begun to celebrate "the radically comic character of Afro-American life—the pervasive sense of play, laughter, and ingenious humor of blacks" which, on his reading, emerges out of the Gospel as blacks read and act themselves into it.

That sense of play, laughter, and ingenious humor, I suggest, is misread if it is construed exclusively as an expression of power (which is how West reads it). To be sure, humor can imaginatively disarm the dominant and empower the oppressed. But radical comedy is not simply a contest of wills. Rather, it involves an admission that, in no small part, what links us up is the powerlessness and mortality that we all share; it is an acceptance of things that resist or defeat self-assertion. Radical comedy occurs, as Santayana put it, when "everybody acknowledges himself beaten and deceived, yet is the happier for the unexpected posture of affairs." It is a performance, he suggested, that leads to forgiveness, acceptance, and understanding, showing us "the innocence of the things we hated and the clearness of the things we frowned on or denied."

But if this sort of radical comedy cuts ice, then Rorty's recent emphasis on private self-assertion truncates extrapolitical life. On Rorty's counsel, the old Christian idea of Law gets naturalized when responsibility to God becomes responsibility to one another. Democracy, as he puts it (after Nietzsche, but without his sneer), is Christianity made natural. Similarly—though Rorty doesn't say this —the old Christian idea of Grace gets romanticized when new personal creation through divine encounter becomes self-creation through strong poetry. Emerson's life at second hand becomes Harold Bloom's "horror of finding himself to be only a copy or a replica"; and his life at first hand becomes the authoring of some difference that makes "his I different from all the other I's."

This, certainly, is one way to naturalize the life of the spirit. But Rorty dismisses the Western tradition that pictures tension between self-assertion and spirituality, the tradition of self-surrender still prominent in James's religious demand for a sort of well-being that well-doing obstructed, in Santayana's advice that spirituality is constituted by the "willingness not to will" that is ingredient in radical comedy, and, more recently, in Richard Poirier's reflections on "writing off the self." This is so because, in Rorty's view, agonistic self-assertion is the only route to personal well-being worth recommending in a world without any supernatural powers in it. He argues that the tradition of self-surrender requires a metaphysics of transcendence unavailable to naturalists. Moreover, he cannot imagine a creative individual finding self-assertion "hardly satisfying."

But this tells us more about the limits of Rorty's imagination and temperament than it does about the varieties of personal wellbeing. Even if the point of self-surrender once seemed woven into the need to worship a deity that escaped natural constraints, something new can be made of it that permits equanimity in light of natural contingencies rather than despite them. We don't require any essential or transcendent "otherness" to appreciate the wonder and beauty of other things and people, or to find well-being not in an "I different from all the other I's" that seems sure to be defeated, but instead, where our personal dissolution is accepted. Rather, we require a particular temperament.

We may require a temperament, as Poirier puts it, "in favor of relaxation rather than self-assertion, of drift rather than aggressive deployments," of "contemplative receptivity" rather than active projection. But it is not clear to me why we need to exhibit one temper rather than the other. They are contrary, not contradictory. Can't both be present, sometimes even together? Aren't the tensions between assertion and reception, action and contemplation, judgment and understanding, better to live with than to resolve one way rather than the other?

To my mind they are. It seems to me, however, that most pragmatic naturalists still suspect that diversion, meditation, and discernment are decadent in a world sufficiently wretched to demand constant contention, movement, and decision. They write to mandate action, and they picture contemplation and understanding as gestures that delay. But delayed reaction is the better part of wisdom when people rush to judgment, or, even worse, when trained functionaries react according to convention without understanding the role they are playing. Then there is no difference that makes a difference, as Hans Blumenberg has put it, between "delayed reaction [and] 'conscious' action."

Kundera has written that the modern era dawned twice over, once with Descartes, who launched the quest for certain truth, and again with Cervantes, who introduced the art of the novel, an art that presumed the loss of such certainty. The novel became the "territory where no one possesses the truth . . . but where everyone has the right to be understood." The novel's wisdom, he says,

Interestingly enough, this characterization comes very close to the line that Santayana drew between moralistic life, based on ideological certitude, and spiritual life, where people learned to suspend judgment and "identify themselves not with themselves" in order to understand and appreciate others who were different. For Santayana, spirituality was "a second insight . . . detaching us from each thing with humility and humour, and attaching us to all things with justice, charity, and joy."

The risk moralism runs is fanaticism; the peril in spirituality is quietism. Santayana knew this. That is why, meditating on the idea of Christ in the Gospels, he commended a passage between such extremes—a way to maintain both commitment and spiritual openness, judgment and understanding, assertion and reception, assurance and doubt, attachment and detachment.

Suppose some of us pragmatic naturalists aim to embrace disciplines and attitudes like these. Is this reason enough to engage in traditional religious practices and to meditate on canonical religious books? Surely, as Jeffrey Stout has recently argued to great effect, these practices don't depend upon avowing any traditional theological view. We need not, as he puts it, "postulate divine purposes, let alone divine intentions" in order to engage in "wonder, awe, and even gratitude—a kind of piety in short, for the powers that bear down upon us, for the majestic setting of our planet and its cosmos, and for the often marvelous company we keep here." We can, Stout notes, "keep our confidence, loyalty, hope, and love proportioned to their objects" and never "make the merely finite our ultimate concern" without invoking some "Ultimate Other who deserves our ultimate concern" instead.

I accept all of this. But the religious virtues—piety, confidence, loyalty, hope, and love—that Stout avows have a history. They have been articulated by particular religious traditions, taught and learned in particular religious communities, exemplified in the books that give shape to them, and sustained as disciplines by particular religious institutions. If we want to maintain the practice of particular virtues, we need to maintain traditions, communities, books, and institutions that shape lives that way. At least, it is not clear what other alternatives we have.

Does it matter that the central narratives that render these particular religious virtues intelligible and practically formative are legends, as religious naturalists suggest, rather than revelations of the "really real"? Yes. It matters because it shows the profound role transparent fictions play for us, whether for good or ill, by giving us codes or ciphers that must be learned in order to practice distinctive ways of life.

Can the practices we learn, say, as Christians, Jews, Zunis, Confucians, or Moslems survive this switch? We'll have to see; but of course we'll fail if we don't try. We know that we need not take the stuffing out of tradition by doing so. We have seen the successes, for example, of Reconstructionist Judaism, thick with liturgy, rituals that emphasize the willingness not to will, training in moral virtues, and Torah and Talmud study. We have seen practitioners in this movement not only keep commandments, but experience the wonder and joy of self-surrender.

Pragmatic naturalists like me no longer have any interest in questions like "what is the meaning of the whole of history?" or "what happened before anything else happened?" or "what will happen after everything else has happened?" or "how do we make direct contact with the really real?" We do not confuse ideals with powers. So the shape of our traditions changes. But we can still learn, practice, and give witness to them in ways that maintain continuity and coherence with our predecessors. Our Christianity or Judaism, for example, may remain culturally thick, though varied, without any semblance of supernaturalism.

One of the things pragmatic naturalists cannot reasonably claim, to be sure, is any incontrovertible warrant for their own beliefs or practices. But if their understanding of belief is adequate, nobody can. This frightens some people, who look for One Right Way to glue everything and everybody together and who are repelled by cultural plurality and eclecticism. People like this hold on, as Kundera has put it, to the Western "dream of paradise—the age-old dream of a world where everybody would live in harmony, united by a single common faith and will, without secrets from one another." But others have recognized for centuries that this dream has wreaked a lot of havoc. The historical record seems fairly clear. As Kundera notes, "Once the dream of paradise starts to turn into reality, here and there people begin to crop up who stand in its way, and so the rulers of paradise must build a little gulag on the side of Eden. In the course of time this gulag grows ever bigger and more perfect, while the adjoining paradise gets ever smaller and poorer."

To my mind, Stout is right to argue that the liberal tradition and modern democratic institutions emerged, in great part, in order to circumvent this scenario or, as he puts it, "because people recognized putting an end to religious warfare and intolerance [was] morally good—[was] rationally preferable to continued attempts at imposing a nearly complete vision of the good by force." He is right to suggest that this is why we school our children "not to press too hard or too far for agreement on all details in a given vision of the good."

People who fault liberal democracies for permitting plural intellectual, religious, and moral traditions claim that this drains us of concerted moral purpose and spiritual vitality; they say that something close to complete agreement about moral or religious truth is just the elixir we need to cure the social diseases that all us. That's silly. Moral and religious pluralism aren't responsible for poisoning the earth and its atmosphere, gutting education, colonizing the urban poor, permitting rampant illiteracy, or letting the marketplace ration health care. These problems stem from amorality and immorality, not plural traditions—from stuff like greed, thoughtlessness, and apathy. We simply don't have to agree on grand designs to consent to functionally adequate moral details; we don't even need to agree to every detail to be genuine friends and compatriots. Indeed our very eclecticism is a marvelous check on the pretensions of grand designs, which brings me to my final reflection.

Listen to William of Baskerville, the learned Franciscan hero of Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose:

It is a good thing the Abramic traditions have their Baskervilles, Heschels, and Sanais, because they also have their Guis, Kahanes, and Khomeinis. If the first three made the truth of their traditions laugh, bringing joy to the world, the latter made it insane, prepared to make others die. All too often election theologies in the West have spelled privilege rather than responsibility, and have meant joy for us and terror for them.

The good news is that, being human, we can always make something new out of something old. Our traditions have had their dark sides. But they have also done a great deal to shape our lives at their best. We see ourselves as part of their stories, which have left us with unforgettable visions of good and evil and have instructed us in how to make life a little more divine. Whether we admit it or not, we are always reweaving these stories. Let's try to do so in ways that make the truth laugh so that we don't drive the world insane.

Published by the Raritan: A Quarterly Review, V10, No.2, pp. 70-86.

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