cooterhein
Account Disabled
- Messages
- 378
- Reaction score
- 11
- Gender
- Male
- Religion
- Christianity
A question, if I may. You personally, do you support secular liberalism? And in your estimation, does mainstream Islam generally support secular liberalism? If not, then would you be willing to self-identify (or to identify mainstream Islam as) illiberal?
Here is what I mean by liberalism, and this works especially well for those of you who are in the UK. First, there's this on John Stuart Mill, the father of modern secular liberalism and the most influential person in its modern application.
http://www.liberal-international.org/editorial.asp?ia_id=685
Lifted from this source are a couple of things that I will note. He was kept out of public education and raised in a rigorous, restrictive, utilitarian type of mindset that was exactly the opposite of what he would later come to support. As a very young man, this was the cause of a sort of mental break, and he emerged from this with an appetite for diversity, dissent, originality, spontaneity- everything that had been excluded from his formative experience. Additionally, he was in favor of democracy but extremely wary of potential pitfalls like the "tyranny of the majority" and so forth. In general, he did not much like what was happening in Victorian England, he felt that individuality was threatened, he was an early feminist and this was not a characteristic of his own society and culture, and he had much occasion to seek the end of various types of censorship. And he was pretty successful in most of what he tried to do; he was incredibly influential in changing British society and his influence is still felt everywhere in the West most particularly in the English speaking world.
Here is another source, less biographical and more scholarly. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/liberalism/#LibEth
There's kind of a lot going on here, dig in all the way if you really like. Liberalism in general and even secular liberalism in particular has a lot to it, and only select aspects of it can be solidly pinned down and defined with precision. For the purpose of what I seek to emphasize though, this is the part that I am focusing on.
"This is not just a theory about politics: it is a substantive, perfectionist, moral theory about the good. And, on this view, the right thing to do is to promote development or perfection, and only a regime securing extensive liberty for each person can accomplish this (Wall, 1998). This moral ideal of human perfection and development dominated liberal thinking in the latter part of the nineteenth, and for most of the twentieth, century: not only Mill, but T.H. Green, L.T. Hobhouse, Bernard Bosanquet, John Dewey and even Rawls show allegiance to variants of this perfectionist ethic and the claim that it provides a foundation for endorsing a regime of liberal rights (Gaus, 1983a). And it is fundamental to the proponents of liberal autonomy discussed above, as well as ‘liberal virtue’ theorists such as William Galston (1980). That the good life is necessarily a freely chosen one in which a person develops his unique capacities as part of a plan of life is probably the dominant liberal ethic of the past century."
So my question to you is this. Setting the general principles of secular liberalism against any other kind of illiberalism (which is not a precisely defined movement unto itself, it is quite simply a tendency to oppose and disagree with liberalism), would you consider yourself to personally be a proponent of liberalism or illiberalism?
And, as a separate question, do you believe mainstream Islam (as far as you're able to say) is liberal or illiberal? Of course there is plenty of diversity to Islam in the UK and everywhere else, but in the main- where Muslims are not Muslim in name only, where Muslims are properly connected to a religious community, and where that religious community amasses large crowds of people that can legitimately call themselves the mainstream of Islam- as you're aware, does this mainstream of Islam tend to be supportive of secular liberalism a la John Stuart Mill, or does the mainstream of Islam typically oppose such principles in favor of a more illiberal approach?
Here is what I mean by liberalism, and this works especially well for those of you who are in the UK. First, there's this on John Stuart Mill, the father of modern secular liberalism and the most influential person in its modern application.
http://www.liberal-international.org/editorial.asp?ia_id=685
Lifted from this source are a couple of things that I will note. He was kept out of public education and raised in a rigorous, restrictive, utilitarian type of mindset that was exactly the opposite of what he would later come to support. As a very young man, this was the cause of a sort of mental break, and he emerged from this with an appetite for diversity, dissent, originality, spontaneity- everything that had been excluded from his formative experience. Additionally, he was in favor of democracy but extremely wary of potential pitfalls like the "tyranny of the majority" and so forth. In general, he did not much like what was happening in Victorian England, he felt that individuality was threatened, he was an early feminist and this was not a characteristic of his own society and culture, and he had much occasion to seek the end of various types of censorship. And he was pretty successful in most of what he tried to do; he was incredibly influential in changing British society and his influence is still felt everywhere in the West most particularly in the English speaking world.
Here is another source, less biographical and more scholarly. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/liberalism/#LibEth
There's kind of a lot going on here, dig in all the way if you really like. Liberalism in general and even secular liberalism in particular has a lot to it, and only select aspects of it can be solidly pinned down and defined with precision. For the purpose of what I seek to emphasize though, this is the part that I am focusing on.
"This is not just a theory about politics: it is a substantive, perfectionist, moral theory about the good. And, on this view, the right thing to do is to promote development or perfection, and only a regime securing extensive liberty for each person can accomplish this (Wall, 1998). This moral ideal of human perfection and development dominated liberal thinking in the latter part of the nineteenth, and for most of the twentieth, century: not only Mill, but T.H. Green, L.T. Hobhouse, Bernard Bosanquet, John Dewey and even Rawls show allegiance to variants of this perfectionist ethic and the claim that it provides a foundation for endorsing a regime of liberal rights (Gaus, 1983a). And it is fundamental to the proponents of liberal autonomy discussed above, as well as ‘liberal virtue’ theorists such as William Galston (1980). That the good life is necessarily a freely chosen one in which a person develops his unique capacities as part of a plan of life is probably the dominant liberal ethic of the past century."
So my question to you is this. Setting the general principles of secular liberalism against any other kind of illiberalism (which is not a precisely defined movement unto itself, it is quite simply a tendency to oppose and disagree with liberalism), would you consider yourself to personally be a proponent of liberalism or illiberalism?
And, as a separate question, do you believe mainstream Islam (as far as you're able to say) is liberal or illiberal? Of course there is plenty of diversity to Islam in the UK and everywhere else, but in the main- where Muslims are not Muslim in name only, where Muslims are properly connected to a religious community, and where that religious community amasses large crowds of people that can legitimately call themselves the mainstream of Islam- as you're aware, does this mainstream of Islam tend to be supportive of secular liberalism a la John Stuart Mill, or does the mainstream of Islam typically oppose such principles in favor of a more illiberal approach?
Last edited: