“Is absolute secularity conceivable? The question arises from the paradoxical intuition that the secularization thesis is simultaneously both right and muddled. Perhaps the most fundamental problem with the broader secularization thesis (which I take to claim that, over the past half-millennium or so, Western society has undergone a systemic diminution of religious practice) is that it isn’t clear what the non-secular is. After all, it can be extended from those beliefs and practices that avowedly depend on religious revelation to those that affirm some form of transcendentalism, though they may make no room for God as such. But for a long time both radical atheists and Christian apologists have argued that what looks as if it is secular through and through may not, in fact, be secular at all. From this point of view, important elements of enlightened secularity in particular can be understood, not as Christianity’s overcoming, but as its displacement. Thus, for instance, in his Scholasticism and Politics (1938), Jacques Maritain, following Nietzsche, speaks of the “Christian leaven fermenting in the bosom of human history” as the source of democratic modernity. Here the secular, political concept of human equality is seen to have a Christian origin and to bear a continuing Christian charge, even though its purposes and contexts have changed.”

“Schmitt begins by sketching a stadial version of the secularization thesis: “There are four great, simple, secular stages corresponding to the four centuries and proceeding from the theological to the metaphysical domain, from there to the humanitarian-moral, and finally to the economic domain.” This statement puns on the two senses of the word “secular”—of the ages and not religious—and so draws attention to the way in which the secularization thesis combines the two. From the very beginning, this stadial progression can be understood as a “striving for neutralization,” i.e., as an effort to overcome a long procession of violent disputes, originally religious in nature, then cultural-national, and finally (with the Russian Revolution) economic. But now the economic era has ended too, and—so Schmitt—we have entered the age of technology.

Schmitt treats this succession as an intellectual historian. For him, the passage out of theology and into metaphysics occurs with Suarez, Descartes, Newton, and their peers; the passage out of metaphysics and ontology, with Kant; and the passage out of Enlightenment humanism, with Marx and the liberal economists. The passage out of the age of economy and into the age of technology, however, has no intellectual-historical component. Further, it would appear to constitute a new establishment of neutrality, since technique is not as such a form of thought. But the abandonment of intellectual and spiritual projects for merely technical ones is not quite an entryway into substantive secularity or neutrality, since, perhaps surprisingly, it turns out that the dominance of technology, in practice and effect, actually denies neutrality. According to Schmitt, rather, it possesses its own “activist metaphysics—the belief in unlimited power and the domination of man over nature, even over human nature.” A metaphysics without intellectual content, then, but a metaphysics nonetheless. As such, it “can be called fantastic and satanic, but not simply dead, spiritless or mechanized soullessness.”

This is where Schmitt’s politics take wing, just because the struggle against technology, with its siren call of absolute instrumentality, now involves a battle against evil (i.e., if one reads between the lines, against Bolshevism and Anglophone liberal capitalism). So, Schmitt’s image of a wholly secularized society ends up by appealing to the very opposite of the secular—to the figure of the religious warrior. His version of the incomplete secularization thesis is, in effect, a call to Catholic arms. And yet, Schmitt’s essay also implicitly acknowledges that this religious crusade might fail, in which case “dead, spiritless or mechanized soullessness” will indeed reign. So, in Schmitt, absolute secularity is possible—only, ironically, not for human beings, because once it has at last been reached the species will have forsaken its essential human qualities.”

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http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2013/07/01/is-absolute-secularity-conceivable/

Posted By F. Sheikh