The Woodlouse
Gudding, Gabriel
The Woodlouse Few of us have heard his crinkling integument, his fuss and jog at the grease and riddled-wood that shim, as always, the axle of the world. Yet things drop back into its dusty...
...His is the comedy of litter, as always...
...He makes his case drawing from John Paul II's Centesimus annus (1991), which recognizes the "transcendent dignity of the person," and refers also to Redemptoris missio (1990), where "the pope says, 'The church imposes nothing, she only proposes.'" Comments Neuhaus: "She would not impose if she could...
...Commonweal | 1 September25,1998...
...9 RAWLS: All right...
...In this essay, Neuhaus criticizes the growing list of "Christian critics of liberalism and modernity": the "theocons" with whom he is ordinarily enlisted...
...It is in this regard that Rawls's thinking is innovative...
...Is there still a common good...
...Rawls's answer to my question about why he is now interested in religion appears to show this same slant, and he again invokes the sixteenth century...
...Helpful in clarifying what's at stake is an essay by Richard John Neuhaus, "The Liberalism of John Paul II," published in First Things in May 1997...
...9 PRUSAK: So the common good would be the good that is common to each citizen, each citizen's good, rather than an overarching good...
...I try to show that this form of regime, under certain circumstances, is possible and has its own public form of discourse...
...As for what is in his breast: no psychomachy, no dark night, only a thin and labored breath-but spiritus nonetheless...
...There are various ways you might define the common good, but that would be one way you could do it...
...On his view, the moral worth of treating one another as free and equal cannot be broken down into the good of isolated, self-interested individuals, but must be considered as a whole...
...9 RAWLS: Liberal constitutional democracy is supposed to ensure that each citizen is free and equal and protected by basic rights and liberties...
...Like all kinds of friendship, civic friendship can only be had in common and cannot be forced on anybody...
...According to these critics, liberal constitutional democracy is no more than an institutionalized form of Hobbes's "state of nature" and as such has no intrinsic moral worth...
...Rawls is not pretending, then, to solve our political problems...
...I'll turn it back: it almost sounds like, in another way, a religious argument...
...I am really explaining what I think should be the public philosophy in a reasonably just constitutional regime...
...The rain goes up and down in his alleys in blue, forgotten strings...
...9 PRUSAK: But at the same time you don't want to argue for this on any traditional basis...
...This, though, is merely a pragmatic, not a moral argument for valuing constitutional democracy...
...Where Rawls differs from Neuhaus is this: Rawls does not think that reestablishing a consensus about religious or philosophical truths is a realistic project...
...Like many of Rawls's critics, Neuhaus sees what I call (in a final, leading question to Rawls) the "functioning of liberal constitutional democracy" as hopelessly too abstract an idea to protect the dignity of the individual...
...According to Neuhaus, the problem with liberalism arises when, "in the name of democracy, transcendent truth is excluded from the public square...
...What the idea of public reason can do for us, he argues more modestly, is give us an insight into the meaning of citizenship and the resolve to endure these problems...
...Now that's not the only interest they all have, but it's the single thing they're all trying to do...
...The question is, we have a particular problem...
...Rawls's attitude toward what he calls "the fact of reasonable pluralism," however, is more positive than Murray's was...
...in Religion, Ethics, & the Common Good [Twenty-Third Publications, 1996...
...On September's humid bricks I saw his legs upended...
...Of course not...
...How would we speak of it in a liberal constitutional democracy where pluralism is a fact...
...It is what Rawls's thinking is always aspiring to foster...
...Instead, your argument for respecting the dignity of the individual follows from the functioning of liberal constitutional democracy...
...You see, I don't use other arguments since for my purposes I don't really need them and it would cause division from the start...
...I make a point in Political Liberalism of really not discussing anything, as far as I can help it, that will put me at odds with any theologian, or any philosopher...
...For Rawls, trying to come to terms with one another is the virtue of democratic citizens...
...For Rawls, respecting reasonable pluralism is morally valuable itself and provides liberal constitutional democracy its moral justification...
...If you want to say that comes down from the sacredness of the individual in the Bible, fine, I don't have to deny that...
...9 RAWLS: Yes--I hope it's compelling...
...He is the bursar of things...
...What's morally worthwhile about democracy is that it makes possible what Rawls calls "civic friendship...
...Commonweal | 6 September 25, 1998 A few final observations may prove helpful...
...In more downto-earth terms: throw out respect, let civility go to the winds, and order also will soon be scattered...
...Maybe this is what Augustine meant: "Cleave fast, my soul, unto Him, for He has freed thee...
...9 RAWLS: The point I would stress is this: You hear that liberalism lacks an idea of the common good, but I think that's a mistake...
...9 PRUSAK: What you're trying to do is bring together the practice of constitutional democracy and present it in a way that's compelling...
...To this extent, he agrees with John Courtney Murray's thinking about the erosion of that historical consensus...
...9 RAWLS: Different political views, even if they're all liberal, in the sense of supporting liberal constitutional democracy, undoubtedly have some notion of the common good in the form of the means provided to assure that people can make use of their liberties, and the like...
...So considered, this way of treating one another can be seen as what the philosopher Charles Taylor has called an "irreducibly social good": a good that binds us together and makes living together in a democracy at once possible and worthwhile...
...His shadow, a near yet winnowed guest sewn to him with legs, shares with him the same demure signs of want and saga...
...Citizens can have their own grounding in their comprehensive doctrines, whatever they happen to be...
...Why should I deny that...
...In 'The Idea of Public Reason Revisited," Rawls suggests, much like Neuhaus, that the religions and other "comprehensive doctrines" that support a liberal constitutional democracy can be seen as its "vital social basis": in other words, as part of what makes democracy viable...
...So his exclamation to me: "No, you're not being asked to renounce [truth...
...Yet things drop back into its dusty rims through his neighborhood, routed by his umber moods...
...Rawls does not argue that truth is out of place in politics, but that the way it is argued for is crucial...
...But Neuhaus counters that this judgment is a "distortion," and he affirms that the truth of liberalism is fully consistent with recent Catholic teaching...
...This doesn't answer any particular question, but only says how political questions should be discussed...
...This is its good...
...In my language, they've striving toward one single end, the end of justice for all citizens...
...For example, you might say that, if citizens are acting for the right reasons in a constitutional regime, then regardless of their comprehensive doctrines they want every other citizen to have justice...
...but rather, "How can persons of good faith be wholehearted participants in a liberal constitutional democracy...
...But there's another way of understanding Rawls: as not so much worried by Jews, Christians, and Muslims, but concerned for liberal constitutional democracy's moral wellbeing...
...The theologian David Hollenbach has observed that Rawls tends to invoke the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century wars of religion in Europe as (in Hollenbach's words) "the relevant historical memory" for discussion of the public role of religion today (see, "The Common Good in the Postmodern Epoch: What Role for Theology Today...
...For such participation to be possible, it must be shown that living together in this form of regime is no mere modus vivendi, but has moral worth...
...the silence of a tiny orchestra was waving bows and batons at the sun --his shadow like a coward under him, freed, yet clinging to his back...
...Against this background, religion is seen as a threat not only to individual freedom, but also to social stability...
...For Neuhaus, individual dignity requires a foundation in an underlying public consensus about religious or philosophical truths...
...Gabriel Gudding many Protestants, Jews, and Muslims...
...Is it thrown out, or is it reconceived...
...So you might say they're all working together to do one thing, namely to make sure every citizen has justice...
...9 PRUSAK: It sounds as if you're really arguing for the dignity of the individual...
...A ponderous thimble, far now from the spiders' bobbins, Crusoe of patience: his penance is not to have one, his work to have no faith...
...Authentic faith is of necessity an act of freedom"--which is, he concludes, the truth at the heart of liberalism...
...9 PRUSAK: How do you think, in your work, the idea of the common good is revised...
...These critics, Neuhaus observes, charge that American liberalism "is premised upon the fiction of a 'social contract' that is, in turn, premised exclusively upon self-interest...
...such is the lesson he draws from the controversy over A Theory of Justice...
...From this angle, his question is not, "How can religious believers be appeased...
Vol. 125 • September 1998 • No. 16
