Secularism

I was fortunate to attend yesterday a Lee Lecture in Examination Schools by Wendy Brown, entitled
'Civilizational Delusions: Equality, Secularism, Tolerance'.

I can summarise this talk as suggesting that secularism views itself as separate from cultures, but that actually it's just another culture. Professor Brown didn't go so far as to invoke cultural relativism (she specifically stated that she wasn't going for the 'bogeyman of moral [sic] relativism'), leaving possible solutions to her 'analysis' unaddressed.
She identified five assumptions of secularism that she disproved.
1. Secularism generates a religiously neutral state
2. Secularism is equally available to all religions
3. Tolerance is a practice of mutual respect
4. Secular regimes are culturally neutral
5. Secularism leads to women's freedom and equality

Her derivation of western secularism, that requires a personal and private religion, and personal relationship with God, from Protestantism, was interesting and believable. But just because secularism and protestantism are compatible, and the former grew from the latter, does not mean that secularism is necessarily based on protestantism. This point is crucial.
That secularism is not religiously neutral because some religions are more compatible with secularism than others is not necessarily true: it takes a consequentialist understanding of neutrality to get to that conclusion. My opinions on consequentialism can be found elsewhere; I find it ridiculous and unjustifiable to make moral judgements on the basis of consequences. Secularism can be called neutral, despite being more compatible with some religions than others, because its precepts can be derived without needing to adjust them to give bias towards or against certain cultural or religious attitudes. That, once derived, secular precepts might be more compatible with some beliefs than with others, does not mean that secularism is somehow not neutral after all.

In describing her second point, she mentioned that secularism is purported not to transform religions, but defines public and collective expressions of religion as zealotry: improperly tamed, excessive and pre-modern. I agree with her that secularism is not equally available to all religions: I disagree that this is a common assumption about secularism, or a necessary one. It is verging on a straw man argument, as any attempt to describe a broad and vaguely defined ideal (or deliberately undefined, in her case) will be.

She had some interesting things to say about tolerance: how it manages but naturalizes inequalities, normalizing the tolerators and their opinions and maintaining the excluded and different nature of the tolerated. She suggested that no definition of what to tolerate can be justified a priori (which says a lot about her opinion of secularism, which does just that), but is instead defined by government, culture and hegemonic institutions. It's mostly quite decent stuff, except for that little part giving the game away about not knowing what to tolerate.
I'll quickly insert assumption four here, but hold that last paragraph in your mind. Assumption four was that secular regimes are culturally neutral. This one is very much like number two, which in turn was rather like assumption one. She argues that secularism assumes rationality in the west and that we have no intrinsic culture, but that forcing immigrants to internalize what might have been a very external culture, whilst enjoying our own external culture which we call cultureless, is hypocrisy.
If we cannot justify anything except solely within our culture, and if any attempt to extract ourselves from cultural bias simply gives rise to another culture (a culture of not having culture?) then there is indeed no way to judge cultural demands, and despite her avowal that she didn't think we needed to resort to the spectre of relativism, and that we could find other solutions, she has, through her other arguments, given no option but to accept cultural relativism.
If we accept cultural relativism, that no culture can be objectively better than another, and we accept her basic idea that objective justifications for cultural institutions is itself a culture, then we might as well overtly promote our culture anyway; we find it the most pleasant, and so we should protect it, rather than going through the whole rigmarole of pretending to judge objectively things which apparently cannot be judged objectively. Although she refused to examine the consequences of her argument, it does therefore lead to the sort of culture wars and intolerance that I guess she'd find actually quite objectionable.

Let me now return to that accusation of hypocrisy on the part of secularists. Certainly there are some people who regard Western culture as decidedly Christian, and conflate the two (mostly self-aggrandizing or deluded western Christians). However, these people are not the same secularists who believe that we are cultureless, or objective in our culture. The secularists who wish immigrants to accept secularism because of its objectivity are not simultaneously allowing Christianity: they typically bemoan all insidious religious influence in their countries. The Christians, on the other hand, make exactly the same claims to objectivity that other religions do, and are not secretive about defending their religious culture.
So there is no hypocrisy, bur two rival attitudes that are not part of the same system of belief.
But beyond this, her analysis offers no change in behaviour as a solution. She has not argued that defending one's culture, or promoting it within one's own region, is wrong. Promoting secularism, even if it is merely another culture like all the rest, is no worse than publicly espousing and promoting any of the rest, even if she can justify suggesting that it is no better.

Her last point is separate from these arguments, and is about women's rights. Her sympathies pretty clearly lay with either second wave feminism, or else inaccurate understanding of women's current position in society. She pointed out that the secular French revolution made women worse off. She also points out that the nuclear family, with its relationships of need and female inferiority, was and is supported by western 'secularists'.
At this point my brain melted with the effort of remembering all the errors she was making in reasoning. Let's start by saying that just because secularism is not sufficient for women's equality does not mean that it is not necessary. Next, I've had a few snipes at the nuclear family myself (e.g http://whirlingsilently.blogspot.com/2010/05/marriage.html), so secularism does not necessarily support it. Finally and similarly, those 'secularists' who support the nuclear family most are actually religious zealots of the sort she says shouldn't be called zealots! These are mostly religious people who are imposing cultural attitudes that we (including professor Brown) find unpleasant. Secularism explicitly fights such discrimination (or, at the very least explicitly allows the absence or it, and allows people to fight it, unlike many other systems). To conflate secularism with the discrimination it aims to fight simply because of the historical growth of secularism from Christianity is either very confused, or a very cunning attack on it. Either way I'm not convinced that secularism is simply a label we use to conceal cultural imperialism rather than being an ideal in its own right. Maybe some people find their aims allied with secularists at times and co-opt the secularist's arguments, but that does not make secularism hypocritical.

There are some interesting questions that she did raise, but only right at the end!
Questions of whether wearing burkas involve more coercion than wearing high heels, about whether sex separation in sports is justifiable, and whether the nuclear family is intrinsically discriminatory (I'd tend for yes).
The point about secularism is that you might find yourself persuaded to wear high heels, but there is no means of redress for those who wish you to do so except through personal relationships. This is not true for burkas, hijabs and nikabs: these are mandated by doctrine, and punishments are specified for unchaste or blasphemous women. Children should not be governed by doctrine; adults we must assume have the ability to choose. These garments are far more problematic for society than high heels because they cover the face, which we need for recognition, and therefore accountability.
It's harder to justify the current system of sports teams, but given that humanity does divide quite clearly into a roughly binary system of potential athletic ability it seems plausible to split adults up.
As for the nuclear family... well, it's better than orphaned children or single adult families.