The Dialectics of Secularization: On Reason and Religion by Pope Benedict XVI
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This was less a debate than, as the introduction says, an short summation by two thinkers of their thoughts. One secular neo-Kantian, Jurgen Habermas, and one Roman Catholic (to be Pope) Joseph Ratzinger about the necessity of society’s two halves, secular and religious to learn from one another.
Both recognize that the organization of society is in some sense what religion excels at; the mapping of human organization and understanding to solidarity and justification of a statehood. They both also recognize that religion in some sense goes too far in organization; that there are pathologies that religion can force because it is mobilized too far in a particular way.
This gets at the heart of human eusociality. We want to belong. We are made to calibrate with one another. This touches on areas that reason (qua secularization) cannot reach. Societies do need to account for the non-reasoning part of people. People need to have calibrating experiences to be at the same level with one another. Instead, we have ultra-rationalism in the form of markets engineering approaches that do not calibrate people, but instead, allow people dominance and agency over one another. Having a point outside of reason, one that signals for people direction is the function of religion that both thinkers believe secular society can benefit from.
What’s interesting is that historically, religion and culture were the same. It is only through the split offered by reason as a different mode of organization that splits religion and culture apart. A secularized religion, seems to be the synthesis with which both thinkers offer, although the book merely ends with Pope Benedict (Joseph Ratzinger)’s essay.
Short book, but interesting. A quick read.
