{"id":1927,"date":"2009-11-10T13:40:31","date_gmt":"2009-11-10T18:40:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/?p=1927"},"modified":"2009-11-10T14:52:24","modified_gmt":"2009-11-10T19:52:24","slug":"science-as-polemic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/2009\/11\/10\/science-as-polemic\/","title":{"rendered":"Science as Polemic"},"content":{"rendered":"

Charles Kurzman\u2019s recent essay in the Chronicle Review<\/em>, \u201cSocial Science on Trial: Reading Weber in Tehran\u201d (http:\/\/chronicle.com\/article\/Social-Science-on-Trial-in\/48949\/<\/a>), seems to confirm much of what we already suspect about non-Western fundamentalist regimes. Namely, that religious government and civil society are incompatible. Saeed Hajjarian, political scientist and \u201cleading strategist in the Iranian reform movement,\u201d was coerced in a recent show trial to \u201cadmit\u201d that key principles of Max Weber\u2019s theory of government were not applicable to modern Iran. Kurzman links this recent episode to a longer history of Iranian \u201ccrackdowns\u201d on social science for its influence on the reform movement and for its role in secularizing government and social life in Iran, where social science is increasingly the study of choice among university students: \u201cIn 1976 there were about 27,000 social-science students in Iran; now there are more than half a million.\u201d<\/p>\n

This episode re-stages the contest between religion and social science, especially in non-Western contexts where \u201csocial science,\u201d the language of reformist anti-fundamentalists and proponents of a free public sphere, stands in stark contrast to \u201creligion.\u201d Social science and \u201cthe West\u201d are intimately linked. Studying Weber\u2014studying society\u2014as Iranian authorities correctly point out, plugs one into the secular equation that recalculates \u201creligion-as-faith\u201d (non-rational, metaphysical) to \u201creligion-as-ideology\u201d (false consciousness, discourse). It\u2019s this recalculation that is widely accepted as the hallmark of secularization, and justification for the relegation of faith to the private sphere, where it is decreasingly a part of public life and politics (a phenomenon well underway in Iran, according to Kurzman: \u201cprivate expressions of religiosity have begun to replace official events like state-run Friday prayers, where attendance has declined by a third since the 1979 revolution\u201d).<\/p>\n

Kurzman, a sociologist, concludes that \u201cThe Iranian government’s goal, it seems, is to undermine not only the institutions of civil society, but the very idea of it.\u201d Of course this is true, but there\u2019s a larger issue here than simply the persecution of science by religion. Even from Iranian social scientists and reformers, there is dissent from the necessary equation of civil society with the principles of social scientific rationality. Kurzman notes that upon Jurgen Habermas\u2019s visit to Iran, students took a critical view, asking: \u201cMust a society rid itself of religiosity\u2026in order to develop a \u2018rational\u2019 public discourse? Are Western notions of religious tolerance unique to Christianity? Can traditional Islamic institutions, such as study circles and charitable foundations, contribute to the formation of a robust public sphere?\u201d These are deeply felt concerns about the compatibility of religion with Enlightenment democratic values. They express the worry that the study of society in a conceptual language not native undermines religion with a theory of the \u201cpublic sphere\u201d bound to conception of \u201creason\u201d that cannot brook faith or other \u201cnon-rational\u201d modes of being in the world. For non-fundamentalist critics, this conception of reason (and thus of civil society) is highly historically contextual to the West.<\/p>\n

As the Indian social theorist Ashis Nandy has written in his essay \u201cThe Politics of Secularization and the Recovery of Religious Tolerance\u201d (Alternatives 13: 2 [1988]: 177-94), that very idea of secularism is tied to a European genealogy of social science. Western secularism\u2019s credo:<\/p>\n

\u201cOne can have religion in one\u2019s private life; one can be a good Hindu or a good Muslim within one\u2019s home or at one\u2019s place of worship. But when one enters public life, one is expected to leave one\u2019s faith behind. \u2026 Implicit in this ideology is the belief that managing the public realm is a science which is essentially universal and that religion, to the extent it is opposed to the Baconian world-image, is an open or potential threat to any modern polity\u201d (180).<\/p>\n

Nandy, a fierce critic of both this Western concept of secularism and of religious zealotry, sees secularism as a hegemonic language, one also responsible for an \u201cimperialisation\u201d of scientific categories that have come to define, describe, and proscribe our lives (e.g., \u201cIQ\u201d for something like intelligence, \u201cproletariat\u201d for an oppressed people, \u201cprimitive\u201d for oral culture, \u201cdevelopment\u201d for something like social change, and the like). This is a history of scientific language and classification that Ian Hacking describes as \u201cmaking up people\u201d (http:\/\/www.generation-online.org\/c\/fcbiopolitics2.htm<\/a>) and that Michel Foucault has described as the roots of \u201cbiopolitics.\u201d<\/p>\n

One of secularism\u2019s chief \u201cconceits,\u201d argues William Connolly in Why I Am not a Secularist <\/em>(U Minnesota P, 1999), is that of a \u201csingle, authoritative basis of public reason and\/or public ethics that governs all reasonable citizens regardless of \u2018personal\u2019 or \u2018private\u2019 faith.\u201d It is a \u201cconceit\u201d because it is not a reality but a fiction that (supposedly) allows for the negotiation of competing understandings the world. But as critics of secularism point out, it can be a poor fiction: the idea that secularism allows for faith even in the private realm assumes that faith can be shed as we leave for the office or the market or the library, and that faith has nothing to offer public life other than bigotry and zealotry.<\/p>\n

But as Connolly and Nandy both point out, \u201cdogma\u201d and zealotry result from attempts to occupy the center: they are the result of<\/em> being relegated to the margins. For both critics, there are other ways of thinking about civic life than through the language of social science. Nandy, for instance, locates two meanings of secularism\u2014the European one with which we\u2019re all familiar, and another one, native to the Southeast Asian societies he studies, which contains an implicit notion of the necessity of accommodation<\/em>, in public life, of diverse metaphysical understandings. In this view, science and religion co-exist because they both offer viable interpretations of the world (because science itself is a kind of metaphysics). For Connolly, this means \u201crefashioning secularism\u201d to \u201ctemper or disperse religious intolerance while honoring the desire of a variety of believers and nonbelievers to represent their faiths in public life.\u201d<\/p>\n

We see this competition for the center in Iran, and its \u201cconstipating\u201d (Connolly) effects\u2014that is, its tendency to force people and their passions into rigidly defined domains that disallow vital experience and expression. Moreover, we might rethink this particular contest in Iran not through the eyes of the secularist, but rather as expressing some other, deeper contest. The tempting secular conclusion to \u201csocial science on trial\u201d would confirm that that civil society (and therefore the study of it) can\u2019t function where religion is present, and vice versa. In this view, the popularity of social science in Iranian universities is a validation of the secular principles of scientific rationalism. It is a question of either\/or\u2014either secularism or religion. The same can be said about the government\u2019s persecution of social scientists. Can we instead read the Iranian interest in social science as a reaction against religious fundamentalism? In other words, might the turn to social science in the context of Iran be understood as a polemic, an expression of discontent, rather than a de facto<\/em> affirmation of Western secular values? If so, we might preserve the possibility that science and religion, far from having exclusive claims to a positive reality, are the languages by which we have come to understand the contest for the center of public life.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Charles Kurzman\u2019s recent essay in the Chronicle Review, \u201cSocial Science on Trial: Reading Weber in Tehran\u201d (http:\/\/chronicle.com\/article\/Social-Science-on-Trial-in\/48949\/), seems to confirm much of what we already suspect about non-Western fundamentalist regimes. Namely, that religious government and civil society are incompatible. Saeed Hajjarian, political scientist and \u201cleading strategist in the Iranian reform movement,\u201d was coerced in a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":472,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2040,2045,2044,556,1882,2043,2041,2042,1214,2039],"class_list":["post-1927","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-ashis-nandy","tag-bryan-b-rasmussen","tag-charles-kurzman","tag-iran","tag-max-weber","tag-public-sphere","tag-secular","tag-secularism","tag-social-science","tag-william-connolly"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1927","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/472"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1927"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1927\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1939,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1927\/revisions\/1939"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1927"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1927"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1927"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}