Can Only Religion Save Us?

Abstract

This paper will examine the loss of confidence in secular bases for the normative understanding of, and response to, the fundamental social and political problems. The recent arguments of Richard Falk in favour of a religious foundation for a humane globalization will be taken as paradigmatic. While the paper agrees that the normative core of major world religions supports Falk's particular conclusion that religion can provide the content for a universal critique of inhumane global governance, it will conclude that the universal claim that global human solidarity today can only be built on the basis of religious faith does not follow. The paper will contend that the required normative foundation for the positive project of constructing global human solidarity is neither religious nor secular, but synthetic, embracing both—in what I will call, following the work of John McMurtry—the “life-ground of value.”

Notes

NOTES

1. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: The Free Press, 2006).

2. Alex Callinicos, The Revenge of History: Marxism and the East European Revolutions (Cambridge: Polity Press), 1991.

3. St Augustine, City of God (London: Everyman, 1945).

4. On problems of global poverty and dispossession, see Charles Jones, Global Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Robert Hunter Wade, “The Disturbing Rise in Inequality: Is It All A Big Lie,” in David Held and Mathias Koenig-Archibugi, Taming Globalization (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003); on problems of democracy, see James Bohman, Democracy Across Borders (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), 2007.

5. Chalmers Johnson, “Going Bankrupt: Why the Debt Crisis Is Now the Greatest Threat to the American Republic, at www.antiwar.com (accessed 10 October 2008).

6. See, for example, Richard C. Leone and Greg Anrig Jr., eds., The War on Our Freedoms (New York: Public Affairs, 2003).

7. Richard Falk, The Declining World Order (New York: Routledge, 2004).

8. John McMurtry, Unequal Freedoms (Toronto: Garamond, 1998), 23, 298, 368–75.

9. Falk, Declining World Order, 160.

10. The Book of Isaiah, in James Moffat, The Bible: A New Translation (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1935), 753 (c. 5, v. 8–10).

11. The Gospel According to Matthew, Ibid., 36 (c. 25, v. 35–37).

12. Quoted in Tariq Ali, The Clash of Fundamentalisms (London: Verso, 2002), 56.

13. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and Chalres A. Moore, A Sourcebook in Indian Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 28, 277.

14. David Hollenbach, The Global Face of Public Faith (Washington: Georgetown University Press, 2003), 61.

15. Falk, Declining World Order, 155.

16. John McMurtry, “Philosophy Theme 6.25.5: What Is Good, What Is Bad: The Value of All Values across Times, Places, and Theories,” Encyclopaedia of Life-Support Systems (Oxford: EOLSS Publishers and UNESCO, 2009 [forthcoming]), 72; (www.eolss.net).

17. Steven Lukes, Liberals and Cannibals (London: Verso, 2003), 67–71.

18. McMurtry, “The Value of All Values,” 72.

19. G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 110.

20. R. Scott Appleby, The Ambivalence of the Sacred (Lanham, MA: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), 86. See also Gabriel A. Almond, R. Scott Appleby, and Emmanuel Sivan, Strong Religion (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 32, 90–91, 120.

21. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 252.

22. Falk, Declining World Order, 140–41.

23. John Locke, A Letter on Toleration (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1985).

24. Falk, Declining World Order, 159.

25. Ian Doyal and Len Gough, A Theory of Human Needs (New York: Guilford, 1991); David Braybrooke, Meeting Human Needs (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987); Lawrence Hamilton, A Philosophy of Human Needs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Peter Singer, One World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002); David Held, Global Covenant (Cambridge: Polity, 2004); David Beetham, Democracy and Human Rights (Cambridge: Polity, 2003); Martha Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 200); Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (New York: Knopf, 1999); Thomas Pogge, ed., Global Justice (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2001).

26. John McMurtry, The Cancer Stage of Capitalism (London: Pluto, 1999), 214.

27. Falk, Declining World Order, 153.

28. Ibid., 145.

29. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1976), 304–5.

30. Falk, Declining World Order, 156.

31. Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 59–60.