I’ll close my discussion of Seth Zuihō Segall’s The House We Live In by noting how its radical pragmatism undermines itself in practice – which, for pragmatists, is the place that matters. Seth wants to listen to political foes and reach political understanding, but his prgamatism reaches so deep that it doesn’t allow him to do that – given how many such foes would be conservative Christians and Muslims.
At the heart of most monotheistic thought is the idea that God is the true source of all value, the proper end and meaning of our lives. That view is directly antithetical to the one Seth advocates, in which “whenever we ask ‘what’s the meaning of “X?”‘, we are really asking, ‘what is the significance of “X” for maintaining and enhancing our lives.'” (107) When faced with 2500 years’ worth of monotheistic thought that asserts the contrary, he doubles down by tossing it all aside in this surprisingly flippant quip:
Things do not have meanings in themselves but are only meaningful in terms of their relevance to living beings. Since, so far as we know, there is nothing outside of life for life to be relevant to, the question is largely meaningless. If one believes in God, one can ask God what life means for him but until one gets to ask Him directly one would only be guessing. (108)
The next paragraph turns back to his preferred pragmatism, and we hear no more about God as an alternative source of meaning beyond living beings. The Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, the Qur’an, the Bhagavad Gīta, the theologies of Maimonides and Teresa of Ávila and ibn ‘Arabī and Rāmānuja: all their god-centred worldviews can be batted aside with a single sentence as “only guessing”, and therefore – one can assume since the book says nothing further about them – not worthy of any additional consideration, except perhaps as “resources” to be extracted.
This approach is not going to get you anywhere near mutual understanding. Even Martin Luther King Jr. – who would likely agree with much of Seth’s substantive political vision – would look askance at the view expressed here. So would John Kerry, whose 2004 presidential nomination speech beautifully proclaimed: “I don’t want to claim that God is on our side. As Abraham Lincoln told us, I want to pray humbly that we are on God’s side.” The goal is not to be on God’s side to promote our own well-being, but for its own sake.
Seth does return in the following pages to the role of “religion” in providing meaning – but it is meaning only in the limited sense he has already predetermined, of “maintaining and enhancing our lives”. Such an approach is sufficient in a therapeutic context; it’s the therapist’s job to address questions of meaning only in the context of a client’s life, not in the context of a larger vision of the world and reality. But it’s not sufficient for the political approach he elsewhere rightly advocates, where “I can listen to your beliefs” in the name of “mutual understanding”.
After all, even Confucius, whom Seth claims as one of his three main inspirations alongside Aristotle and the Buddha, takes tiān 天, usually translated “heaven”, as a source of meaning and value beyond himself. In his autobiographical account, when he came to know how to live correctly at age fifty, he referred to doing so as tiān ming 天命, the decree or mandate of heaven. In proclaiming the virtue of the great king Yao, he proclaims “How majestic was he! It is only Heaven that is grand, and only Yao corresponded to it.” (Analects VIII.19) For Confucius too, the best way to live starts not with maintaining or enhancing our own lives, but with something as “outside of life” as any god.
All those annoying metaphysical questions that you wish people would just shut up about and get on with being practical – the answers to those questions make a difference. It’s very easy to dismiss God’s role in meaning with “one would only be guessing” if one doesn’t believe God exists, but if one does, then the those “guesses” mean everything. As MacIntyre on ibn Sīnā rightly notes, at least from a theist’s perspective the difference between theists and atheists does not merely concern the existence of one entity separate from the world, it concerns the nature of the entire world. The question of God only seems irrelevant when one has already taken a side on it.
This all gives the lie to Seth’s claim that “A pragmatic flourishing-based ethics bases its provisional conclusions on the best empirical evidence available, not on dogma and theology.” (160) To discard the idea of God as source of value is a theological claim, not an empirical one. To proclaim “there is nothing outside of life for life to be relevant to” is to admit that you recognize the question of God’s existence or nonexistence does matter: you just think the answer is obvious and can’t understand why anyone would disagree with you. The point helpfully demonstrates the limits of what Seth previously called a “minimalist model”, which supposedly “makes no claims or disclaimers about God”. No, actually, Seth is making claims about God: the claims he makes in this section depend on the nonexistence of at least a certain conception of God, they are false if that God is actually real. In practice, models are rarely as minimalist as they claim to be.
If Seth were willing to take theists’ deep disagreement about the meaning of life seriously rather than with flip dismissal, it would go along way to helping him respect them in their political differences. He may not want to talk about ultimate truth, but if he’s going to fulfill the promise of “listening to your beliefs” with “empathetic understanding”, then he’s got to listen to others who do – and waving their entire worldview away with a single sentence does not count as listening.
To the criticism that these are guesses, the key is that they are educated guesses – just like our guesses about how to prevent and treat cancer, still an all-too-inexact science. The theologians of natural and positive law both took their respective cracks at deducing how God must want us to live, through the examination of nature and of scripture respectively. Others found God speaking to them in visions. They could all be wrong, sure; I happen to believe that they are. But I am not so confident in their wrongness that I’m willing to throw all their views out with a single sentence that describes them as “only guessing” – because in the end, I’m only guessing too, and so is Seth. Among the many reasons pluralism is important is just that we don’t know for certain who is right – even though the answer to the question of who is right matters, and matters deeply. Maybe there is a God, and maybe there’s a way for us to find out what life means for him: a lot of smart and revered people thought so, including people Seth quotes, and we should listen to them even if we disagree.
Thus I want to close this series of posts by returning to Seth’s admirable vision of a pluralistic society where “I may not be able to change your mind, but I can listen to your beliefs and explain why I believe mine.” It’s not that we should never try to change others’ minds, but that we need to recognize that most of the time we won’t be able to – and that we need to find ways of living in mutual respect despite that, which involve listening to and attempting to understand others’ very different beliefs. What such an ideal requires, though, is that even if we ourselves happen to be pragmatists, we must understand the reasons that others aren’t. We must see their very different worldviews as more than just “resources”. We must genuinely listen to those differences and take them seriously, rather than papering the differences over or quickly assimilating them to our own view, pragmatic or otherwise. Doing so itself helps foster the very pragmatic goal of getting along with each other.